Imperial Life in the Emerald City

by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

  By then, however, it was too late. In a land of honor and tradition, the viceroy had disrespected the old soldiers. I never ran into Omri again, but months later, I did see another former soldier who had been at the protest.

  “What happened to everyone there?” I asked. “Did they join the new army?”

  He laughed.

  “They’re all insurgents now,” he said. “Bremer lost his chance.”

  A few days before he issued the order dissolving the army, Bremer summoned the exiles for a meeting in the palace. The six whom Garner had met with were there: Ahmed Chalabi and Ayad Allawi, Shiite politicians Ibrahim al-Jafari and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and Kurdish chiefs Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. They were joined by a seventh, Adnan Pachachi, a stately Sunni octogenarian who had been foreign minister before the Baathists took power in the late 1960s. The Iraqis were expecting Bremer to talk about plans to hold another national conference, one that would select an interim government. They also expected to be asked to play a lead role.

  Since the fall of Saddam, the seven men had acted with the swagger of a government in waiting. Chalabi had returned from London and ensconced himself, with the help of his own militia, in a private club in Baghdad’s poshest neighborhood, where he received a procession of visitors who treated him with the deference due an incoming president. Talabani and Barzani, surrounded by dozens of heavily armed guards, came down from Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq to hold court in large hotels. Allawi set himself up in a large Baath Party office near the Green Zone.

  After an opening round of pleasantries, Bremer got right to the point. There would be no interim government. The United States was not going to be ending its occupation anytime soon. He was the viceroy, and he was in charge. When one of the exiles interrupted him to say that Iraqis wanted Iraqis in charge, not Americans, he bristled. “You don’t represent the country,” he said.

  It was a breathtaking volte-face in American policy. Bremer and his aides tried to fob the responsibility off on the White House, but it was the viceroy’s decision. Before he left Washington, everyone had sought to influence his political plan. Doug Feith had urged him to form an exile-led interim government. Paul Wolfowitz had urged him to hold elections as soon as possible. State had urged him to convene caucuses aimed at promising internal candidates. Bush, however, had urged Bremer to take stock of the situation and make his own judgments. The president told Bremer to slow it down if he needed to. The goal, Bush said, was to create an interim administration that represented the Iraqi people.

  Bremer quickly realized that the exiles were too disorganized and too unpopular—signs denouncing Chalabi appeared on walls near the club where he was living—to get the keys to the country. The exiles had promised Garner they would broaden the ranks of their leadership council with women, internals, and Sunni Arabs, but they had failed to do so.

  “The idea that some in Washington had—that we would come in there, set up the ministries, turn it all over to the seven, and get out of Dodge in a few months—was unrealistic,” one of Bremer’s advisers told me. “We gave them a chance. We bankrolled some of them. But they just couldn’t get their act together. It was amateur hour.”

  Bremer’s plan, which he outlined to the exiles, was to form a council of twenty-five Iraqis strictly to advise him on policy matters. The members would be a combination of exiles and internals, Arabs and Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, men and women, and they would be handpicked by the viceroy. He’d have the final say on all matters.

  A council made sense—if it was to be a stopgap measure until elections could be held to select a legitimate government. But ambition got the better of Bremer. He told the exiles that he planned to stay in Iraq until a new constitution was authored, national elections were held, and a new government was installed. Although he never articulated a time line, his aides suggested that it could take two years or more.

  The exiles huffed and puffed and threatened to boycott the council. In the end, they all participated. On July 13, two months after Bremer arrived, the twenty-five-member Governing Council was unveiled. There were thirteen Shiites, eleven Sunnis, and one Christian, a carefully calibrated acknowledgment that Shiites in the country outnumbered Sunnis. Among the Sunnis, five were ethnic Kurds, five were Arab, and one was an ethnic Turkmen. Three of the members were women, and only nine were former exiles.

  While Bremer had been busy choosing council members, Iraq’s most influential Shiite leader was looking ahead. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was concerned that Americans would seek to influence the drafting of the constitution. His worry may have been piqued by a New York Times article about Noah Feldman, a New York University Law School professor who had been hired by the CPA to advise Iraqi constitution writers. Arab satellite television stations picked up the story and added one more detail: Feldman is a Jew.

  Al-Sistani was a frail man with a black turban and a snowy beard. Born in Iran but schooled in Iraq, he lived in the holy city of Najaf, about ninety miles south of Baghdad. Although he worked out of a modest office on a decrepit alley, he had enormous authority in Iraq to interpret Islamic law in everyday life.

  It took months for Bremer and his aides to grasp al-Sistani’s clout. Because the ayatollah didn’t want to meet with Americans, the CPA was forced to rely on Iraqi interlocutors. The viceroy’s first emissary was an Iraqi American from Florida who had been part of the team of Iraqi exiles recruited by Wolfowitz to assist in reconstruction. He was neither a diplomat nor a politician, but a wealthy urologist who had developed and patented a penile implant for impotent men. After receiving reports that the urologist was exaggerating his ties to the White House, the CPA replaced him with a pharmaceutical executive from Michigan. Neither man, Shiite politicians told me later, projected the requisite gravitas.

  “If you were occupying Italy, would you send a doctor to visit the Pope?” one of the politicians asked.

  Two weeks before Bremer announced the formation of the Governing Council, al-Sistani made an announcement of his own. He issued a fatwa, a religious decree, stating that Iraq’s constitution had to be written by elected representatives. An American-selected drafting committee was “unacceptable,” he said, because there was “no guarantee that such a committee will draft a constitution upholding the Iraqi people’s interests and expressing their national identity and lofty social values.”

  Al-Sistani’s fatwa was all but ignored by the CPA. “It didn’t register,” one of Bremer’s senior aides said later. “The view was, ‘We’ll just get someone to write another fatwa.’”

  THE GREEN ZONE, SCENE III

  Bumper stickers and mouse pads praising President Bush were standard desk decorations in the Republican Palace. Other than military uniforms, “Bush-Cheney 2004” T-shirts were the most common piece of clothing. (Dan Senor, Bremer’s spokesman, wore one for a Thanksgiving Day “Turkey Trot” road race in the Green Zone.) CPA staffers weren’t worried about employment prospects after Baghdad. “Oh, I’ll just work on the campaign”—the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign—several told me.

  “I’m not here for the Iraqis,” one staffer said. “I’m here for George Bush.”

  When Gordon Robison, a staffer in the Strategic Communications office, opened a care package from his mother to find a book by Paul Krugman, a liberal New York Times columnist, people around him stared. “It was like I had just unwrapped a radioactive brick,” he recalled.

  The CPA did have a small contingent of Democrats. Most were soldiers and diplomats who, by law, could not be queried about their political leanings. Several of them, led by a young Foreign Service officer, formed a support group called Donkeys in the Desert. They gathered by the pool on Monday evenings to eat pizza and vent about life in the Republican Party Palace. Occasionally, they met in the palace theater to watch movies. Their best-attended screening was of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

  The group faced regular harassment from hardcore Republicans, whom the Donkeys dubbed Palace Pachyderms. T
heir posters were either ripped from the bulletin board or defaced with pro-Republican graffiti. Most Donkeys in the Desert kept their membership a secret, afraid it would turn them into pariahs in the Emerald City. Members of the group received T-shirts emblazoned with the words “A Democratic Iraq,” depicting a donkey between two palm trees. But most of them just stuffed the shirts into their duffel bags. One Donkey compared being a Democrat in the Green Zone to being gay in a small town. “If you know what’s good for you, you stay in the closet,” he said.

  They wanted to expand their ranks by reaching out to Rhinos—Republicans in Name Only—in the military, particularly reservists frustrated with Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to deploy them for a year or longer. But approaching the Rhinos was risky business. When one Donkey whom I knew poked fun at Bush in mixed company over lunch, his table fell silent. “It was like I had let out a loud fart,” he told me later. “They stared for a moment and then looked away.”

  5

  Who Are These People?

  BEFORE THE WAR, shops in Baghdad didn’t close for the night until ten o’clock. The city’s finest restaurants stayed open past midnight. Dinner parties carried on even later. Nobody worried about driving home in the wee hours. If you weren’t a dissident, Iraq’s capital was one of the world’s safest cities.

  Few police officers patrolled the streets. Everyone knew that unless you were one of Saddam’s relatives or cronies, you could be locked up in Abu Ghraib for even the smallest offense—if you were lucky. Others had their hands chopped off or were sent straight to the gallows.

  Most Iraqi police officers, as I would later learn, often spent all day in their stations. They went out on the rare occasion that someone reported a crime. If investigative work or an interrogation was needed, one of Saddam’s intelligence services took over.

  As the war approached, the National Security Council asked the Justice Department to draw up a plan for the Iraqi police. The job fell to Richard Mayer, then the deputy director of the department’s international training program, who had helped rebuild police forces after conflicts in the Balkans and Haiti. He started with a basic assumption: you couldn’t be sure if Iraqi police would stay on the job, or if they were any good. Working with international policing specialists at the State Department, Mayer crafted a proposal that called for five thousand international law enforcement advisers who would help to train Iraq’s police force. If it became necessary, the advisers would be able to carry out police duties themselves, as international police officers did in Kosovo.

  Mayer’s plan was presented to the Deputies Committee, an interagency decision-making group chaired by Steve Hadley. The deputies shot it down, based in part on a CIA report that claimed that Iraq’s police already had extensive professional training and a Pentagon prediction that the police would keep working after the war. Concern about popular Iraqi perception also played a big role in the plan’s downfall. “The view was, ‘We can’t send this many police officers. It’ll look like we’re taking over the country,’” one of the participants said. The National Security Council came up with a new plan: the Justice Department would send a small team of law enforcement experts to Iraq immediately after the war to conduct an assessment.

  When the experts arrived in mid-May, it was too dangerous for them to drive after sundown. During the day, they traveled in two-vehicle convoys. Everyone was armed. Back then, in the days before the insurgency, the Americans had to be careful, but not as careful as Iraqis. Every Iraqi I knew either had been a victim of a violent crime or knew someone who was. Thugs armed with AK-47s carjacked vehicles at busy intersections. Businessmen were snatched off the street and held hostage until their families paid exorbitant ransoms.

  The Iraqi police were almost nonexistent. They had fled their stations as American troops converged on Baghdad. Most were at home. Some had even joined the orgy of looting. The few who had reported back to work were too scared to enforce the law. They had pistols. The criminals had AK-47s.

  It didn’t take long for the experts to conclude that more than 6,600 foreign police advisers should be sent to Iraq immediately.

  The White House dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik.

  Bernard Kerik had more star power than Bremer and everyone else in the CPA combined. Soldiers stopped him in the halls of the Republican Palace to ask for his autograph or, if they had a camera, a picture. Reporters were more interested in interviewing him than they were the viceroy.

  Kerik had been New York City’s police commissioner when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. His courage (he shouted evacuation orders from a block away as the South Tower collapsed), his stamina (he worked around the clock and catnapped in his office for weeks), and his charisma (he was a master of the television interview) had turned him into a national hero. When White House officials were casting about for a prominent individual to take charge of Iraq’s Interior Ministry and assume the challenge of rebuilding the Iraqi police, Kerik’s name came up. President Bush pronounced it an excellent idea.

  Kerik wasn’t one of those highfalutin criminal-justice theoreticians. His mother, a prostitute, died when he was four. He was a high school dropout. After a stint as a jail warden in New Jersey, he joined the NYPD as a street cop before becoming an undercover narcotics detective and, eventually, the city’s corrections chief. He first worked for Rudy Giuliani as his bodyguard. His language was coarse. He shaved the hair on the sides and back of his balding head, and he maintained the thick-necked, don’t-mess-with-me physique of a bouncer. Years earlier, when he was appointed to a senior job in the city’s Corrections Department, one official told the department’s then-commissioner, “Congratulations. You’ve just hired Rambo.”

  Kerik had worked in the Middle East before, as the security director for a government hospital in Saudi Arabia, but he was expelled from the country amid a government investigation into his surveillance of the medical staff. He lacked policing experience in post-conflict situations, but the White House viewed that as an asset. Veteran Middle East hands were regarded as insufficiently committed to the goal of democratizing the region. Post-conflict experts, many of whom worked for the State Department, the United Nations, or nongovernmental organizations, were deemed too liberal. Men such as Kerik—committed Republicans with an accomplished career in business or government—were thought to be ideal. They were loyal and they shared the Bush administration’s goal of rebuilding Iraq in an American image. With Kerik, there was a bonus: the media loved him, and the American public trusted him.

  Robert Gifford, a State Department expert in international law enforcement, was one of the first CPA staffers to meet Kerik when he arrived in Baghdad. Gifford was the senior adviser to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which oversaw the police. Kerik was to take over Gifford’s job.

  “I understand you are going to be the man, and we are here to support you,” Gifford told Kerik.

  “I’m here to bring more media attention to the good work on police because the situation is probably not as bad as people think it is,” Kerik replied.

  This is a guy who’s just walked in, Gifford thought to himself.

  “I’m not here to get into your shit,” Kerik told Gifford. He said he didn’t plan to stay more than six months. He was a partner in Giuliani’s consulting firm, and he told Gifford he made $10,000 a pop from speaking engagements. “I can’t afford to be here,” he said. But Giuliani and his wife had told him he couldn’t say no to the president.

  As they entered the Interior Ministry office in the palace, Gifford offered to brief Kerik. “‘I’ll sit with you and describe where we are, who the players are, and the process.’ And it was during that period I realized he wasn’t with me,” Gifford recalled. “He didn’t listen to anything. He hadn’t read anything except his e-mails. I don’t think he read a single one of our proposals.”

  Kerik wasn’t a details guy. He was content to let Gifford figure out how to train Iraqi cops to work in a democratic society. Kerik would take care of b
riefing the viceroy and the media. And he’d be going out on a few missions himself.

  Kerik’s first order of business, less than a week after he arrived, was to give a slew of interviews saying that the situation was improving. He told the Associated Press that security in Baghdad “is not as bad as I thought. Are bad things going on? Yes. But is it out of control? No. Is it getting better? Yes.” He went on NBC’s Today show to pronounce the situation “better than I expected.” To Time magazine, he maintained that “people are starting to feel more confident. They’re coming back out. Markets and shops that I saw closed one week ago have opened.”

  When it came to his own safety, Kerik took no chances. He hired a team of South African bodyguards who had worked for Garner, and he packed a nine-millimeter handgun under his safari vest.

  The first months after liberation were a critical period for Iraq’s police. Officers needed to be called back to work and screened for any Baath Party connections. They’d have to learn about due process, how to interrogate without torture, how to simply walk the beat. They required new weapons. New chiefs had to be selected. Tens of thousands more officers would have to be hired to put the genie of anarchy back in the bottle.

  Kerik held only two staff meetings while in Iraq, one when he arrived and the other when he was being shadowed by a New York Times reporter, according to Gerald Burke, a former Massachusetts State Police commander who participated in the initial Justice Department assessment mission. Despite his White House connections, Kerik did not secure funding for the desperately needed police advisers. With no help on the way, the task of organizing and training Iraqi officers fell to American military-police soldiers, many of whom had no experience in civilian law enforcement.