A former military officer from Baghdad, Baha’a was one of those experienced Sunni army officers whom L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer III, America’s viceroy in Iraq, had sent home after having officially disbanded the Iraqi army in 2003. Many in Iraq and Washington considered this among Bush’s worst early mistakes in a war that was littered with them.
Focused now on completing his training mission in Anbar, shutting down operations here, and getting his soldiers home without death or further injury, Ryan Cutchin was working around such stupidity, corruption, and the waste of war. He did not complain that roughly one of every four dollars spent on contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan—roughly $60 billion over the decade—had been misspent, and mostly by Americans.20 He dodged my questions about whether the United States had really “succeeded” in Iraq. Would Prime Minister Maliki, paranoid and dictatorial, try to cut the Sunnis and Kurds out of power, as so many Iraqis and American experts had predicted? Would long-standing sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shia, Kurds and Arabs, Christians and Muslims explode once American soldiers were gone? Ryan changed the subject.
On the last day of my last embed, I pressed him again: Had this war been worth the cost? Had the losses throughout his three deployments—the death and wounding of friends, the far more widespread suffering of Iraqis, the interminable separations from his wife and children—been worth toppling Saddam and giving Iraq a shot at democracy?
“Am I talking to Judy Miller, my old friend,” Ryan asked me, “or Judith Miller, the reporter?”
My heart sank at his implicit verdict. We hugged and said good-bye.
* * *
Polls in the summer of 2010 showed that 80 percent of Iraqis wanted American forces to leave. But many Iraqi activists who were struggling to save their country from sectarian and ideological extremism complained bitterly about what they saw as America’s abandonment.
“What’s your rush?” Mowaffak al-Rubaie asked when I visited him that summer in Baghdad’s Green Zone, the American-guarded Iraqi Government Center. A former adviser to Maliki who had fallen out with him, as had so many other former counselors, Rubaie feared for Iraq when America was no longer there to help Iraqis navigate their treacherous new political terrain. “America still has forces in Italy, Germany, and South Korea, and those conflicts ended decades ago,” he told me. I suppressed an impulse to remind him that American forces were not being targeted, maimed, and killed in Naples, Frankfurt, or Seoul.
Like so many Iraqis, Rubaie argued that only the presence of American forces, however unpopular with the average Iraqi, would prevent a coup d’état, the outbreak of another civil war, or the “Lebanonization” of Iraq—a splitting again along sectarian lines. Iraqis had “failed miserably” so far to build new state institutions, he said. Corruption was endemic. Few among the elite trusted Maliki, who cared only about perpetuating his own power and was overly influenced by Iran, they complained. His repressive Interior Ministry employed five times as many Iraqis as the Ministry of Education, yet even Baghdad was still far from secure.
The only truly secure, thriving place in Iraq was one hundred miles north of Baghdad: the Kurdish region—the “other Iraq,” as Kurds relished calling their three prosperous, liberated provinces. With their own flag, their prime minister, their 175,000-man army, or Peshmerga—in Kurdish, “those who face death”—and even their own immigration stamp, the region’s four million Kurds seemed to be living in a different country. This infuriated Baghdad, of course.
Kurdistan was possibly the most pro-American place on the planet in 2010. Kurds loved thanking American visitors for having liberated them from Saddam’s murderous regime—something, understandably, I didn’t hear often from Iraqi Sunnis. The Kurds knew that the United States was responsible for their relative success. They had been essentially running their own affairs since 1991, when President George H. W. Bush created the no-fly zone north of the 36th parallel after Saddam had crushed their US-encouraged uprising. The Kurds, at long last, were governing themselves with a determination born of vengeance.
Kurdish per capita gross domestic product had skyrocketed since Saddam’s fall; illiteracy had been reduced from 56 percent to 16 percent; foreign investment was pouring into the Kurdish Regional Government—an estimated $35 billion from neighboring Turkey alone since 2003, and $5 billion from Iran. Since the KRG had ratified a liberal new foreign investment law in 2006, a half-dozen international airline carriers had begun operating direct flights to Erbil, often bypassing Baghdad. The regional government had built more than two thousand schools; there were now seven universities in Kurdistan; many schools offered English, rather than Arabic, as their second language. Though the world’s thirty-million-strong Kurds considered themselves the largest nation without its own independent state, Iraqi Kurds enjoyed success that their brethren in neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Syria could envy.
Cranes vastly outnumbered minarets in this predominantly Sunni region. Majidi Mall Shopping and Entertaining Centre was mobbed, and Dream City, a new apartment complex, was selling some units for over $1 million each. Israelis were rumored to have bought several units. Unlike Iraqi Arabs, Kurds had been doing business informally with Israel for years and had few hang-ups about the “Zionist entity,” as Israel was sometimes denigrated in Baghdad.
Kurdistan was safer than Turkey, its murder rate lower than Chicago’s. Not a single American soldier had been killed in the region.
But Kurdistan had problems, Fuad Hussein, a key adviser to the Kurdish Regional Government, acknowledged when we met for lunch at the newly refurbished Erbil International Hotel. Corruption was still rampant: some called it worse than Baghdad’s. But Kurdish officials didn’t just pocket proceeds and leave their people without basic services, like their kleptocratic Arab counterparts.
Yes, Kurdish president Massoud Barzani was far too thin-skinned, given the political and economic clout he was accumulating. Although a secular opposition party called Gorran, or “Change,” was taking hold, journalists and other critics who displeased the Kurdish establishment sometimes wound up in jail on trumped-up charges—or, in the case of a few critics, including a journalist, dead. Violent intimidation and honor crimes remained challenging, given the Kurds’ powerful clan structure. But enlightened Kurdish officials understood that such repression was bad for business, antithetical to the “Other Iraq” brand they were striving to nurture. The Kurds were the winners in America’s invasion to overthrow Saddam.
Still, Fuad worried. Why was the United States leaving Iraq “empty-handed,” having invested so much “blood and treasure?” he asked me.
Americans were tired of the two wars since 9/11 that had consumed and exhausted us, I told him. With almost 4,500 American soldiers dead and 30,000 more wounded, and with the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis, the exile or displacement of over 2 million Iraqi civilians, and over a trillion US dollars spent, America’s patience was gone. Most Americans no longer cared what happened in Iraq.
“Iraq is too important and dangerous to be left to others,” he warned. “How will you protect your interests here and your friends?” I had no answer. Washington would offer no guarantees. We both knew that America had betrayed them before and might do so again. Though Kurdish officials had repeatedly invited the US military to open a base in their region, Washington demurred, given the opposition of Baghdad, Turkey, and Iran, all of which feared that the Kurds might try to turn their semiautonomous region into an independent state.
Though the geopolitical cards were stacked against them, Barham Salih, then the region’s president, told me the night before I left that he hoped Kurdistan would become a “model” for what all of Iraq might be—if Iraqis could overcome their religious and sectarian differences and autocratic traditions. That was a big “if.”
* * *
When I left Iraq in mid-2010, many Iraqis and American analysts were still optimistic about Iraq’s future. The success of the surge in stabilizing the country, Kurdistan’s dynamism, the rise of
the historically oppressed Shiites, and the largely untapped potential of oil-rich Iraq—already the region’s second-largest oil producer—led many Middle East analysts to defend America’s war. No matter how grave the mistakes, Saddam was gone. Neither he nor his even more brutal, psychotic sons would torment Iraqis or the region again. While Iraq had destroyed its stocks of chemical and biological weapons and agents and ended its nuclear weapons program before the US invasion, chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer said that debriefings of Saddam in prison and thousands of hours of taped conversations with his top aides showed that he had remained determined to acquire nuclear weapons and to re-create his chemical and germ weapons capabilities once sanctions were lifted. In 2008 Duelfer disclosed that, in 1998, after President Clinton had bombed Iraq’s weapons facilities, Saddam had signed a top-secret order (only three copies were made) declaring that Iraq would no longer be bound by or comply with UN resolutions. After his arrest, Saddam told his FBI debriefer that restoring his country’s WMD arsenals was the only way to “reassert Iraq’s place in the region” and “match the military capabilities of others.”21
American security had been strengthened by Saddam’s ouster, said optimists such as Francis “Bing” West, a former marine who had made sixteen trips to Iraq and written an influential book endorsing the war. Despite such “anomalies” as the humiliation and abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, West argued, no nation had ever fought “a more restrained and honorable war.” Former ambassador Peter Galbraith, a long-standing champion of and adviser to the Kurds, whom I had met in 1979 when he was a staff aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that life for 80 percent of Iraqis—not just the Kurds, but also the majority Shiites—was immeasurably better than it had been under Saddam.22 Violence was abating. Oil exports were slowly recovering. Eager for a second term as prime minister, Maliki had secured American support in American-brokered talks by promising to share power with his rivals and abide by Iraq’s new constitution. That promise would soon prove hollow, but supporters of the war took him at his word.
Still, President Obama did not claim “victory” in his speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when he welcomed the last American forces home from Iraq in December 2011. Thanking the soldiers for their “sacrifice,” he spoke about being proud to have left a “stable, sovereign, and self-reliant Iraq” that could take charge of its own future. Even then, given all the danger signs I had seen and concerns I had heard on my latest trip, his assessment seemed wildly optimistic. Worse, the war had strengthened Iran, a far more tenacious regional foe.
In a foreword to the US Marines’ volumes on the surge and counterinsurgency, Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly steered far clear of glory. “Words like ‘won’ or ‘victory,’ ” he wrote in 2009, didn’t apply in counterinsurgency operations. Insurgencies grew from problems and discontents within a given society. “Solve the problems and the insurgency goes away.” But, he warned presciently, it wasn’t necessarily “defeated.”23
America had only itself to blame for the insurgency that had nearly defeated US forces in Iraq, he wrote. Whether the “humiliation” of disbanding the Iraqi army in 2003, or America’s “overreaction” to “small acts of resistance or violence” by Iraqis, the “heavy-handed approach” of both US soldiers and civilians had played into Al Qaeda’s and the militant Shiite militia’s ugly narratives. Yes, the belated shift in 2007 to a counterinsurgency strategy, including the surge of US forces coupled with the Iraqi Awakening, had staved off defeat and enabled the United States to stabilize Iraq, curtail much of the violence in most of the country, and leave. But progress had come too late, at far too high a cost. As I left Iraq, I feared that stability would require a sustained US military presence for several more years. That, I knew, was impossible given America’s exhaustion and the growing belief at home that despite the surge’s success, the war had been a terrible mistake.
Negotiations in Baghdad over America’s presence in Iraq soon bogged down. At Iran’s behest in late 2011, Prime Minister Maliki stalled efforts to renew the so-called Security Agreement required to permit US combat forces to remain in Iraq.24
President Obama, eager to claim credit for having ended America’s “stupid” war and withdraw all American combat forces from Iraq, rejected his military’s advice that twenty-six thousand US soldiers would be needed to ensure stability and continued political progress there. His negotiators offered to leave fewer than ten thousand soldiers in place. “Maliki knew then that the US offer was not serious,” said Gen. Jack Keane, a retired four-star widely regarded as a key promoter of the “surge.”
Soon after the US troop withdrawal, Maliki ordered the arrest of his longtime rival, Sunni vice president Tariq al-Hashimi, forcing him to flee Iraq and eventually sentencing him to death in absentia for allegedly running assassination squads. Breaking his pledges to rival Iraqis and Washington, Maliki made himself interior minister, defense minister, and chief of intelligence, and repressed his critics, especially Sunnis.
Outraged by Maliki’s crackdown, the Sunnis of Anbar and other minority strongholds rebelled again. Weekly security incidents throughout Iraq, which had dropped from an average of 1,600 in 2007 to fewer than 100 by March 2012, began rising less than three months after US combat forces were withdrawn. By the end of 2013, the UN reported that 8,868 Iraqis had been killed that year, the highest death toll since the worst of the sectarian bloodletting in 2006. Ba’athist generals and other disenfranchised Sunnis allied themselves once more with Al Qaeda’s lineal successor, the new jihadis of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, an even more extreme, better financed, and more dangerous group that had emigrated from Iraq and planted roots in civil war–torn Syria. Stripped of competent, nonsectarian officers by Maliki, the American-equipped and -trained Iraqi army folded. Its officers, Maliki’s Shiite cronies, fled their posts. In August 2014, ISIS overran the western towns of Sinjar and Makhmour, reaching Gwer, only fifteen miles from Erbil, the Kurdish capital. Kurdistan’s famed Peshmerga, ill equipped and poorly trained, had also crumbled, suffering a humiliating defeat. Too many of its officers had bought the Kurdish dream and traded in their military fatigues for real estate licenses. Desperate, both Iraq’s prime minister and the Kurdish region’s president appealed once more to Washington for weapons with which to fight, intelligence support, and air cover. By late 2014, ISIS had seized territory in Iraq and Syria equal to that of Great Britain. In Fallujah and Ramadi, where Ryan Cutchin’s soldiers had made such progress, militant Islam’s black flag flew once more.
— CHAPTER 2 —
NIGHTCLUB ROYALTY IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB
I was lucky. Being in the right place at the right time for a journalist has always been important.
My good fortune began at birth: I am American. Each time I return from a reporting trip to the Middle East or the Soviet Union, or Africa, I am relieved that I live in a secular country whose leaders are chosen—and can be gotten rid of—in authentic elections, and where people generally obey laws that are approved by citizens, not dictated by God or an autocrat. Though I am aware of my country’s many failings, I have never doubted that the United States is a miracle.
My husband, Jason Epstein, a publisher, editor, and an intimidating intellectual, winces when I say this. His patriotism is more nuanced than mine. He believes that to be an American is, as Henry James said, a “complex fate”—more complex, in fact, than James himself could have imagined. Jason knows America’s history far better than most and deeply regrets President George Bush and what his election twice reveals about the electorate.
Where does it come from, my unshakeable faith in America’s basic decency? Partly from my exposure as a journalist to cruelty and corruption elsewhere. But it also comes from the other most important man in my life.
One journalist attributed what he called my “dramatic way of looking at the world” to my father’s career in show business.1 Though the writer got much about me wrong, that observatio
n was on the mark. My father’s life was nothing if not dramatic.
Bill Miller, Jewish and Russian-born, was one of those larger-than-life, self-made Americans. A vaudeville “hoofer” turned talent agent, he became a successful nightclub owner and influential entertainment impresario. If you grew up in New York during World War II, you have probably heard of, and perhaps visited, the Riviera, his Jersey nightclub on the Englewood Cliffs in Fort Lee adjacent to the George Washington Bridge, just across the Hudson from Manhattan. If you went to Las Vegas after we moved there in 1953, when New Jersey condemned the Riv to build a highway, you may have seen one of his shows in the sixties or seventies.
Nightclubs, Vegas, and show business were Mob territory. And though he insisted that he was not connected—a lengthy FBI investigation reached a similar conclusion—my father shared the reflexive anticommunism pervasive in such circles. He was conservative and a patriot. His hero was Ronald Reagan, whom he knew and considered America’s greatest president.
America meant salvation. Had my grandfather not dragged him and his five siblings out of their Russian village near Pinsk, he never tired of reminding us, the Millers would have died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, like so many of his relatives, or lived in the prison of “Communist Russia,” as the Soviet Union was known in my home.
His childhood was an immigrant cliché. He came to America in 1905, a year old, and helped his poor father at the pushcart twelve hours a day, six days a week. My grandfather would rather die than work on the Sabbath, my father told me proudly. Americanized “Bill” had no such compunctions. He worked every day, but never finished high school.
My mother, Mary Theresa Connolly, was my father’s polar opposite. The Connollys, my mother’s Irish-Catholic family, had immigrated to America illegally. Though my mother was born in Chicago, her entire family was deported to Canada when she was a toddler. Three years later, my grandfather got a visa to return.
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