Finally, in February, Cheney, with a cutting remark over Powell possessing credibility to spare, compelled him to present the United States’ specious intelligence case to the United Nations. Tenet provided it, though the intelligence displayed Cheney’s influence. Powell; his chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson; and his deputy, Richard Armitage, all Vietnam veterans, stripped out some obviously absurd claims. Yet Powell presented as certainty a collection of flimsy, misconstrued, or manufactured evidence, such as a claim that Iraq had trained al-Qaeda in chemical warfare. That was the work of CIA torture on a captive named Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, who, the Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed in 2006, later recanted the claim as an attempt to avoid further torture or rendition. Powell also presented an al-Qaeda ally named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was active in the part of Iraq Saddam didn’t control, as bin Laden’s Baghdad liaison. Powell’s unimpeachable reputation ensured that wavering elite opinion made its peace with the war.
The month of Powell’s speech, another Vietnam veteran, army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki, warned Congress that “several hundred thousand” troops were necessary to stabilize a post-Saddam Iraq. Such a protracted, ugly pacification mission, with significant cost, was the opposite of the message that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wished to send. Wolfowitz dismissed Shinseki as “wildly off the mark.” But Shinseki, who had clashed with Rumsfeld, was already on his way to retirement, and Powell, who had himself urged a far larger force than Rumsfeld wanted, kept silent at Wolfowitz’s rebukes.
Having offered no obstacle to a war that reminded him of the Vietnam disaster that forged him, Powell would by 2004 describe himself as a “patsy” for the hawks. More often, he blamed George Tenet and the CIA for feeding him false and fabricated information. Later, after forty-five hundred Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died needless deaths, Powell presented himself as having his hands tied. “What choice did I have? He’s the president,” Powell told author Robert Draper.
By March 2003 a CIA analyst named Nada Bakos watched Zarqawi materialize in northern Iraq with a jihadist group called Ansar al-Islam, which appeared to be operating a highly crude bioweapons lab. Her colleague Sam Faddis, part of a CIA advance team, recommended an immediate air strike on Ansar’s camp, reasoning that the group would disband once the United States invaded. They learned later that the administration rejected the strike. Bakos, who had dealt with Cheney’s insistence on an al-Qaeda–Saddam connection, reasoned that Bush decided to spare Zarqawi to preserve an argument for war. “If they killed him prior to the invasion,” she later told Frontline, “part of their justification is gone.”
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WHEN U.S. TROOPS CAPTURED Baghdad on April 10, neoconservatives celebrated the dawn of a new era of American power. Writing in The Weekly Standard, David Brooks asked readers to see the new world through the eyes of an imaginary college student he called Joey Tabula-Rasa. Glued to CNN, Brooks’s twenty-year old “sees a ruling establishment that can conduct wars with incredible competence and skill. He sees a federal government that can perform its primary task—protecting the American people—magnificently.” Surveying the intellectual landscape, Brooks noted with delight, “Now that the war in Iraq is over, we’ll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts.”
Weeks later, as a patrol from the First Armored Division maneuvered through the Baghdad neighborhood Yarmouk, an Arabic-speaking reporter, Anthony Shadid, loitered behind it to assess the local reaction. “They’re walking over my heart. I feel like they’re crushing my heart,” remarked thirty-four-year-old Mohammed Ibraham. Outside a school for autistic children the Americans had declared under their protection, twenty-three-year-old Saif Din extended no credit to those who claimed to be his liberators: “We’re not against the presence of the school, we’re against the presence of the Americans.” A seventy-year-old, Ahmed Abdullah, promised to fight soldiers young enough to be his grandchildren. “Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture, and they want to wipe out our culture, absolutely,” he said.
Yarmouk was the sort of neighborhood that the Pentagon, which ran the occupation, assumed would embrace the new status quo the United States imposed. Located west of the Tigris River, it was a young, planned community, built first for officers in the Iraqi military and later became a redoubt for professionals. There was substantial Baath Party membership in Yarmouk, but party membership was a requirement for the lifestyle that Yarmouk residents lived. Here resided the sort of people that an occupation predicated on establishing a bourgeois republic, governing from the center outward and pro-American in outlook, desperately needed.
What it got, at most, was the reluctant support of those whose interests at the moment coincided with those of the occupation. More often the occupation was accepted with the forbearance of those desperately seeking to survive. It was also met regularly with resistance—violence that the occupying forces recognized, as well as subtler forms that they didn’t. Engineers, in pursuit of goodwill, transformed a garbage-strewn lot into a soccer pitch. They soon found that the goalposts and even the dirt off the field had been stolen. “What kind of people loot dirt?” an army captain wondered.
Convinced the war was over, Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to infamously declare mission accomplished on May 1. By July he installed a powerless Iraqi advisory council mostly consisting of Saddam-era exiles enthusiastic about or acquiescent to the American project. Real power resided with the Pentagon’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), run by an autocratic protégé of Henry Kissinger named L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer. In keeping with the Pentagon’s fantastical assurances of a transformed Iraq, they disbanded the Iraqi military and banned the Baath Party. These blithe decisions materially disenfranchised millions of Iraqis, removed a military institution through which the U.S. military hoped to operate, and underscored the humiliating reality that the Iraqis were a conquered people. Such indifference to the lives of Iraqis was characteristic of the occupation. Pentagon planning neither anticipated nor prioritized such infrastructural measures as fixing the damaged power grid, collecting trash, maintaining the sewers and the water system, repairing the roads, enforcing the traffic rules, providing for all the aspects of daily life that support normalcy and convince people that their needs matter to those who rule them. They permitted the looting of antiquities from the Iraqi National Museum, resulting in the theft of priceless artifacts of early human civilization, something Rumsfeld shrugged off as the spoils of freedom.
Permissive attitudes toward looting were symptomatic of the grift the CPA oversaw. By the time Administrator Bremer departed, $8.8 billion in reconstruction funds—taxpayer money harvested during a recession while Bush tilted more of the tax burden onto the middle and working classes—had simply disappeared without leaving a paper trail, while American contractors selling the occupation everything from laundry detergent to private security reaped windfalls. One of them, KBR, a subsidiary of the company Dick Cheney had run until the 2000 presidential campaign, provided the 101st Airborne with mobile barracks that cost twice what the division would have paid for building its own lodgings.
Bremer’s organization was less interested in hiring professional administrators than bringing aboard twenty-somethings with Republican Party connections. It hired individuals who had submitted their résumés to the conservative Heritage Foundation while denying that such employment arrangements represented cronyism. An experienced diplomat on the CPA staff called it “amateur hour . . . we could not run a country we didn’t understand.” Iraq could indeed not be understood from within the Green Zone, the four-square-mile fortress in the heart of Baghdad from which the CPA operated. Described in 2004 as home to perhaps five thousand Westerners but “quite simply empty” thanks to its luxurious open spaces, it was a playpen for Americans looking to drink at its seven bars, find sex, enjoy cigars by elegant pools once patronized by Saddam’s coterie, and eat a bount
y of pork dishes. CPA buildings, protected by seventeen-foot-high concrete walls ringing the Green Zone, were kept at a comfortable sixty-eight degrees, unlike the rest of the sweltering, electricity-starved Baghdad, in what was by default the Red Zone. In the Red Zone, Iraqis looking at the army vehicles that patrolled their streets saw a warning that they could be shot if they came within a hundred meters.
The war allowed a retired Navy SEAL, a scion of Michigan Republican aristocracy, to parlay the law-enforcement “training” services he offered on his North Carolina shooting range into a billion-dollar business. Not a decade into its existence, Erik Prince’s Blackwater won a piece of the State Department’s contract to protect its diplomats, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Blackwater’s guards, many of whom were former service members, liked to party. Howard Lowry, a Texas businessman who came to Iraq to make money, later said in a deposition that he would supply Blackwater personnel with steroids “by the case.” Their behavior reflected it. “Company personnel had large amounts of cocaine and blocks of hashish and would run around naked,” Lowry recalled. Coked-up naked gym rats on heavy steroidal doses would run onto Green Zone balconies and, screaming, fire AK-47 rounds into the Iraqi night sky. Before sunrise Blackwater staff would load American diplomats into their armored SUVs and drive them through Red Zone Baghdad roads strewn with improvised explosive devices, the cheap homemade bombs that represented the insurgents’ signature technological innovation.
Ill-equipped to govern the country they occupied, the American forces expressed irritation at the high expectations foisted upon them by the subjects of their conquest. “You Americans can put a man on the moon, why can’t you give me a job with a salary right now? Why can’t you snap your fingers and produce twenty-four-hour power?” summarized the division commander in Mosul, the two-star general David Petraeus. Petraeus’s approach was to functionally disregard the direction Bremer imposed and seek to work with the extant Mosul power structure, which the de-Baathification order had criminalized.
It was the exception. Restive villages typically faced crackdowns. The former West Point champion quarterback Nate Sassaman ringed the town of Abu Hishma in concertina wire. He issued cards to Abu Hishma’s men, written in English only, informing them they would be shot if they entered or left the town without American permission. Mothers warned their misbehaving children to go to bed before Colonel Sassaman came for them. Sassaman later covered up his soldiers’ murder-for-sport of twenty-four-year-old Zaydoon Fadhil, whom they made jump off a bridge into a river; Sassaman lost his army career but not his freedom. In Taji the commander of an artillery battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Allen West, had four of his men beat a restrained Iraqi policeman, Yahya Jhrodi Hamoody, whom he suspected of having knowledge of a supposed assassination plot against him. West placed the bound Hamoody by a nearby weapons-clearance barrel before firing his nine-millimeter service pistol into it. He then ordered his men to put Hamoody’s head in the barrel. A policeman who had earlier worked with West stated later that Hamoody spouted names of random people in the hope of staying alive. Major General Ray Odierno, West’s division commander (who was also Sassaman’s), declined to order a court-martial.
Fallujah, a city of three hundred thousand people in the western Sunni province of Anbar, had a blood debt to pay America. On April 28, 2003, beside the Baath Party headquarters next to its city hall, Iraqis demonstrating against the newly established occupation came under fire from American soldiers, who killed fifteen people. “I am sure that if we had had weapons we would have killed them,” demonstrator Ahmad Hatim Karim told Human Rights Watch investigators. Then into the city arrived Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. While Zarqawi, a Jordanian, had spent time in Afghanistan’s Arab-jihadi circles, al-Qaeda considered him beneath them. They were men with advanced degrees who believed themselves to be waging an aristocratic jihad aimed at pernicious America. Zarqawi was a tattooed former gangbanger and rumored ex-pimp, a criminal, who wanted to kill “Safavids,” or Shiites, to provoke bloody retaliation against Iraqi Sunnis, who would unite under the banner of what he, in a tacit challenge to bin Laden, called al-Qaeda in Iraq. “Our combat against the Americans is something easy,” Zarqawi wrote in 2004. “The enemy is apparent, his back is exposed, and he does not know the land or the current situation of the mujahidin because his intelligence information is weak.” Even bin Laden considered Zarqawi nihilistic, but the chaos the Americans had unleashed in Iraq only marginalized bin Laden and empowered Zarqawi.
In the waning days of March 2004, Iraqi militants in Fallujah, whose tactics indicated that professional soldiers were among them, ambushed and overwhelmed a convoy of SUVs driven by four Blackwater contractors. Cheering crowds, young boys among them, gathered as the Fallujans set the vehicles aflame and lynched the contractors, hanging two of their charred corpses from atop a bridge. Footage of the carnage, the lead story on American news programs, featured a banner held by a member of the crowd proclaiming fallujah is the cemetery for americans. The First Marine Division commander, James Mattis, argued that the insurgents wanted to draw the marines into a brutal street fight in their home neighborhood. Overruled, Mattis had his marines advance into a nightmare known as the First Battle of Fallujah. Insurgents fought the marines, using IEDs, rocket-propelled grenades, skillful indirect fire, and maneuvering that weaponized their far greater understanding of the geography of the city. They drew the marines deep into its confines and attacked the roads behind to prevent resupply or escape. Their resistance swelled a wave of Iraqi pride. Baghdad’s Shiites in Sadr City and Adhamiya organized blood drives for the Sunnis in Fallujah. “We are with them, in death and killing,” said Daoud al-Akoub of Sadr City. When the Iraqis on the occupation council threatened to quit, Mattis had to withdraw from an unfinished weeklong mission that had taken the lives of thirty-nine marines and supporting soldiers. According to a memo that two British Labour Party members of Parliament violated the Official Secrets Act to leak, Al Jazeera’s coverage of Fallujah was so intolerable to Bush—who had already bombed its Baghdad bureau during the invasion, as he had the Kabul bureau in 2001—that he mused to Prime Minister Tony Blair about bombing the station’s headquarters in Qatar. The marines returned to the city after the U.S. presidential election for a grueling house-to-house battle, Second Fallujah, that took the lives of eighty-two of them and wounded another six hundred. While Fallujah passed into Marine Corps legend, the city launched attacks on the occupiers for years to come.
Holding such territory was a job for conventional U.S. forces who had never been trained for the task, despite how often the military had performed such imperial work during the conquest of the American West, the Philippines, Haiti, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Whatever civic deference military service was supposed to yield stateside, troops quickly learned how little they mattered to the institutional military once deployed. Their bases hosted massive open-air incinerators, “burn pits” that set alight everything from random trash to human waste, meaning that proximate troops would breathe in the acrid, dangerous particulates. When they left the bases for patrols, their lightly armored vehicles, built for the speed of an invasion rather than for the survivability of an occupation, were little defense against insurgent weaponry. They would fish through scrap heaps for metal to weld on, so-called hillbilly armor of last resort. When they complained about it to a visiting Rumsfeld, the defense secretary shrugged. “You go to war with the army you have,” he said.
Hunting forces like Zarqawi’s was assigned to a Joint Special Operations Command task force led by the three-star general Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal’s raids involved dispatching Americans in intimidating body armor and night vision goggles to kick in doors, round people up, and tear houses apart in pursuit of terrorists, weapons, or information. McChrystal climbed the stairs in one dwelling to encounter a family standing on their second-floor landing to watch the invaders. “I’ll never forget their stare,” McChrystal would write. “It was controlled, but I sensed pure a
nger, radiating like heat. . . . We were big men, made bigger with body armor, it was one o’clock in the morning, and our searching of their home was as humiliating to them as if we had stripped their bodies.” McChrystal’s task force would kill Zarqawi two years later, after innumerable house raids, but would never vanquish his organization. The durability of al-Qaeda in Iraq convinced McChrystal that the bloodshed was futile unless the United States could address the root causes of the violence.
But the Americans, unwilling to leave Iraq, preferred a carceral approach. In the summer of 2003 Rumsfeld’s intelligence chief dispatched the Guantanamo commander to Iraq with instructions on “Gitmo-izing” detentions and interrogations. The regimen, modified and implemented by Iraq commander Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez by October, was a version of what the CIA had implemented at the black sites. The prison where this would unfold, Abu Ghraib, was staffed with 380 military police to guard 8,000 prisoners; by contrast, 800 MPs guarded Guantanamo’s 600 detainees. Interrogators flooded into Abu Ghraib alongside guards who answered to a different chain of command.
Abu Ghraib soon became the site of widespread sexual assault—most of which, a 2004 investigation found, “did not focus on persons held for intelligence purposes.” An exception, a detainee assessed to have significant intelligence value, was sodomized with a police baton and photographed nude by two women guards while they threw a ball at his penis. Soldiers took a photograph of a detainee with a banana inserted into his anus. Guards positioned naked detainees into groups and compelled them to masturbate before what an investigator called riding them “like animals.” A particularly brutal MP, Corporal Charles Graner, beat a man into unconsciousness and shoved a different detainee into a wall with sufficient force to require thirteen stitches on the man’s chin. Graner photographed his assaults for souvenirs.
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