Suddenly, the commotion on the screen got my attention. The huge statue of Saddam Hussein was crashing to the ground, pulled down by angry young Iraqi men. What a moment! I thought to myself. This feels like 1991 when statues of Josef Stalin were tumbling across Eastern Europe. The Iraqis have been liberated from a monster.
In Iraq, though, that moment would turn out to be a bit of a mirage. Apparently the first attempt to bring down the likeness of the dictator had failed, leading someone—possibly an American soldier—to suggest that a rope might do the trick. And there was the awful moment when U.S. troops climbed up on the toppled statue to plant an American flag. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed and the Iraqi banner suddenly appeared.
Maybe it was a kind of metaphor for the paradox of supporting a transition to democracy under occupation. American military power provided the opening. But the work of building a new state needed to be done by the Iraqis themselves.
Over the next decade and beyond, Iraqi leaders have struggled to make their people secure and to provide essential services. To their credit, they have tried to do the work through their new democratic institutions—contesting budget allocations and ministerial positions in the parliament and in the very free press. Several leaders have stepped down peacefully and the Iraqis have gone to the polls three times to replace them. Citizens have protested openly and sought to hold their government accountable. The country has been dogged by an existential question: What does it mean to be a federal Iraq? The Kurds have had one answer, the Shia another, and the Sunnis still another. And through it all, Iraqi leaders have had to learn to work together and trust each other. That has been hard.
In the pages that follow, we trace the Iraqi struggle to build and sustain democratic institutions under the hardest of circumstances. I do not intend to revisit the decision to invade Iraq, having done that thoroughly and as honestly as I know how in an earlier work.5 It is important, though, to reiterate one point: We did not overthrow Saddam to try to bring democracy to Iraq at gunpoint. To do so would have been a misuse of American military power and I would never have advised the president to do pursue that idea.
In brief, the president and his national security principals believed that Saddam was a security threat. It was our belief—supported by the intelligence of multiple countries—that he had reconstituted his biological and chemical weapons programs and was well on the way to doing so on the nuclear side.6
That it was Saddam mattered. He had a history of aggression against his neighbors and a long record of seeking, building, and using weapons of mass destruction. He supported terrorists—not al-Qaeda, but numerous other groups. And, yes, we feared that he might transfer weapons of mass destruction or the technology to make them to some of them. Commercial airliners were used as missiles in the attack of 9/11—we ruled out no scenario in trying to protect the country. We had failed to connect the dots before that catastrophe, and we were not going to do it again.
After signing an armistice to end the first Gulf War in 1991, Saddam repeatedly ignored it. He tried to assassinate President George H. W. Bush. He claimed to destroy his prohibited weapons but refused to show proof—and was repeatedly caught lying. UN inspectors were kicked out of the country in 1998, unable to do their jobs as he played cat-and-mouse with them. His violations included shooting at our combat aircraft as they enforced a no-fly zone meant to protect his people from him. At one point in 2001, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was told to develop plans should Iraqi air defenses succeed in bringing down an American plane. We were in a perpetual state of limited war with the Iraqi dictator.
The United States and thirty-two coalition countries decided that it was time for the international community to act. UNSCR 1441, passed in November 2002, had threatened “serious consequences” if Iraq did not comply with its terms. Those facts—or rather facts as we knew them at the time—were the sole reason for the invasion of Iraq.
The decision to give the Iraqis a chance at a democratic future was a separate one—and driven by a different logic. Some within the administration, including Don Rumsfeld, argued that we might be better off to install another strongman once Saddam was gone. Just find a general who wasn’t implicated in his war crimes and let the Iraqis sort it out. It was a reasonable idea, but the president believed that America had done enough of that in the Middle East, with unacceptable outcomes. The freedom gap was in part to blame for terrorism and instability in the region. We knew the complexity of Iraq’s ethnic and religious mix. It was precisely the complexity that demanded democratic institutions so that people could coexist while contending with their differences peacefully. The other option—someone oppresses someone else—was no longer a formula for stability.
The closest historical parallel to this view is American policy toward Germany and Japan after World War II. The United States did not enter those wars to bring democracy—it overthrew Imperial Japan and Adolf Hitler because they were security threats. But when the regimes were defeated, the Americans avowedly focused on building democratic successor states. There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—that as the war neared conclusion, Churchill was asked what he wanted to do about the vanquished Germany. “I like Germany so much that I want as many of them as possible,” he is said to have remarked. In other words, break it up and keep it weak. It was classic balance-of-power thinking.
The United States, on the other hand, empowered men like Konrad Adenauer to rebuild the western part of Germany on the basis of democratic principles. Together they championed the inclusion of the Federal Republic of Germany in a political organization of democracies—the European Union and, in a collective defense treaty, NATO, with an American guarantee. Similarly, the basic tenets of the “Peace Constitution of Japan” bear a striking resemblance to those of the American one. And, once again, the United States provided for the defense of the country so that it would not need to fully rearm. In an early version of what political scientists call the “democratic peace,” these leaders believed that democracies would not fight each other. France and Germany would never go to war again, and they believed that a democratic Japan would live in harmony with its neighbors. Let me be clear—we did not think that Iraq was Germany or Japan in terms of its readiness for democracy. But we did believe that a peaceful and democratic Iraq was better than an authoritarian alternative. That was the spirit that motivated the drive to give the Iraqis a chance at a democratic future.
An Institutional Landscape Like the Dark Side of the Moon
A few days after the statue fell, we turned to getting the country back on its feet and functioning again. We had engaged in multiple planning efforts for postwar Iraq, involving scores of U.S. government agencies. There was even a full-scale, all-agency dress rehearsal before the invasion. But the assumptions about the institutional infrastructure in Iraq were in large part wrong. The very opacity of Saddam’s dictatorship meant that we could not know the likely unknowable: How precisely did he rule the country? And what would be left of those levers when he was gone? When a totalitarian regime is decapitated, the institutional landscape is barren. Iraq’s resembled a moonscape.
We counted on institutions—like the civil service—that didn’t have firm footing. And we trusted the returning diaspora—those who had lived in exile—too much. We undervalued some groups that did have standing—the Sunni tribes; Shia religious authorities led by the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani; and the Kurds, who were competent and organized but ambivalent about a unified Iraqi state. All of these actors would play an increasing role as events unfolded. But misreading the institutional landscape early certainly cost valuable time at the beginning.
Under America’s Flag
The chaos of the first weeks led the administration to tighten the reins on the occupation of Iraq rather quickly. As Americans with a more limited history of colonization than our European allies, we found the very idea of occupation distasteful. When commanding general Tommy Franks sent a draft of the decree he would issue once Saddam was
defeated, I was horrified. “It sounds like Caesar,” I told my communications director, Anna Perez. We revised it to sound more collaborative. We even asked our lawyers whether we had to call ourselves the “occupying power.” The British were not so squeamish. They insisted that legally we had no choice. And I remember my British counterpart David Manning’s warning: “You will be viewed as an occupying power anyway. The only question is will you be seen as competent.”
In fact, we had envisioned a kinder, gentler approach through the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), led by retired general Jay Garner, who had led Operation Provide Comfort to protect the Kurds in 1991. Jay was to go in with a small team, find the civil servants who could run the country once high-ranking Ba’athists were fired, and coordinate the Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA)—composed of the Kurds and returning exiled Sunni and Shia leaders—in taking control of the country. There were a few potential leaders—very few—who had survived living inside Iraq. President Bush wanted to be sure that they too were included in the IIA.
The plan never got off the ground. The security situation began to deteriorate almost immediately. Criminal gangs looted the museum and the library, destroying antiquities; the oil fields were not functioning to provide revenue; basic services like electricity were dilapidated and breaking down. An insurgent group called Fedayeen Saddam suddenly appeared, engaging in hit-and-run skirmishes throughout the country. I cornered George Tenet, the CIA director, at the president’s morning briefing. “What in blazes is Fedayeen Saddam and where did they come from?” I asked in a voice clearly signaling my alarm and displeasure. The intelligence agencies had significantly underestimated the strength of groups like this. George admitted that little was known about Fedayeen Saddam. They were clearly the dictator’s supporters, but to this day, we don’t really know much about them. In any case, despite the presence of two hundred thousand coalition troops, the Pentagon said that the security situation was too dangerous for ORHA to enter Iraq. Garner sat in Kuwait.
The military had defeated Saddam’s forces decisively, but we needed a civilian presence on the ground to get the country functioning. Almost two weeks after Saddam fell, Garner finally arrived in Baghdad and was instantly overwhelmed. His organization was too small to sort out the tasks of bringing order to the country, let alone actually govern.
I called Margaret Tutwiler, our ambassador in Morocco. We had been friends since the George H. W. Bush administration when she worked for James Baker at the State Department. She was simply capable, and that’s what we needed—someone who was capable. “Margaret,” I said, “I know it is asking a lot, but can you go and help Garner? He’s hopeless.” She confirmed what we all knew: The Garner mission was not going to work. The Pentagon, which had created ORHA, abandoned it. Rumsfeld recommended a new approach to the president: a fully empowered presidential envoy, reporting through the secretary of defense, to run the country. L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer took over as head of the new Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) on May 13. The president’s orders gave him all executive, legislative, and judicial functions in Iraq. Iraq was now controlled by a two-headed hydra: the military commander for matters of security and the CPA for civilian reconstruction.
The CPA was twice as large as ORHA, and its mandate far more sweeping. On one hand, this gave Jerry Bremer the authority to do what Garner had been unable to—bring a semblance of order. On the other hand, it meant that the Iraqi institutions, both new and old, sometimes felt stymied in finding a role in the affairs of the country. This was especially true as the CPA set up the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), comprising Kurdish, Shia, and Sunni parties. Each group brought its own strengths and considerable weaknesses to the endeavor.
The Kurds were by far the most competent and coherent group in post-Saddam Iraq. They were an ethnically distinct minority population that lived dispersed within the boundaries of the constructed states of the post-Ottoman Middle East. Turkey was about 18 percent Kurdish, Syria about 10 percent, and Iraq about 15–20 percent. The worldwide Kurdish population is about thirty-two million. As a people they had long suffered discrimination and persecution at the hands of Arabs and Turks and dreamed of creating an independent Kurdish state. They were closest to realizing that desire in Iraq, where they had existed as a state within the state since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, protected by the United States and Britain under UN mandate.
From 1991 to 2003, the Kurds used their status effectively. They built a relatively well-functioning system in the rough mountainous territory of northern Iraq. The region is oil-rich and the economy was relatively strong compared to that of the rest of the country. There was considerable corruption, but the Kurdish lands functioned efficiently. The infrastructure was far superior to much of Iraq’s, with good roads and even a fairly modern airport.
Kurdistan, as it was called, had another problem, however—the animosity between its two dominant political forces. Masoud Barzani led the KDP and Jalal Talabani the PUK. The conflict was sometimes violent since both maintained militias. And neither controlled the PKK (the Kurdish Workers’ Party), a third group that carried out terrorist attacks across the Turkish border. The tensions between the two clans grew so great that the United States finally stepped in and brokered a governing agreement in 1998. They kept their rivalry under control and even jointly commanded a security force, the peshmerga. The “pesh” were fierce fighters—male and female—who took their orders from the two in a relatively harmonious fashion, though divided loyalty was certainly evident from time to time.
When Iraq was liberated from Saddam, Barzani and Talabani were asked to join the IGC. The two men could not have been more different, and their responses to the call showed it. Jalal came down from Kurdistan to take up residence in Baghdad. You had to like this man who was as wide as he was tall. He was jovial and always joked in heavily accented but very good English. When one was invited to dinner at Jalal’s house, as I often was as secretary of state, you had to eat—and eat—and eat. Jalal for his part would dine with both hands, shoving food into his mouth with one hand and onto your plate with the other. From the very start he warmed to the role of “founding father of a new Iraq.” He was smart and effective and largely trusted by the other members of the IGC. Jalal Talabani was by far the shrewdest politician in the country and, ironically, this Kurd would become a unifying figure in Iraq.
Barzani, on the other hand, refused to live in Baghdad. On my first trip to Iraq, I therefore went to see him. When I arrived, Barzani’s aides greeted me at the helicopter. They were tough-looking men who I assume doubled as bodyguards. The Kurd was waiting for me on a red carpet with the Kurdish national flag behind him. We stood at attention while the Kurdish anthem was played. There was no sign of the flag of the united Iraq.
Barzani’s remote mountain home was at once palatial and rough-hewn. We ate a lot too, but Masoud was an active man, riding horses and herding his own farm animals. He appeared fit and looked as if he would have been right at home on America’s western frontier in the nineteenth century.
It should now be clear that the Kurdish region had good raw material for a transition. They were wildly enthusiastic about the overthrow of Saddam (who had murdered legions of their kin) and grateful to the United States for having done it. Yet their very competence made the politics of the country more complicated. The international community was united in its view that Iraq had to be a single, unified state. Anything else would have destabilized the delicate geopolitics of the region, particularly with Turkey, whose own Kurdish population also harbored ambitions for self-determination. The Kurds waxed and waned in their enthusiasm for a unified Iraq, and not just because of national aspirations. There was money at stake too. The Kurds wanted control of their own oil wealth, and so did Baghdad.
The Shia also had effective leaders and organized political parties. They were Arab, but as subjects of the Sunni-led states, they experienced deprivation and persecution. In Iraq they were about
60 percent of the population, with large concentrations of them living in the south of the country. Saddam had been especially brutal toward them, using chemical weapons to wipe out rebels near the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf in 1991. It was estimated that up to 180,000 Iraqi Shia died in the crushed rebellion. After the war, mass graves holding more than 300,000 souls were discovered in the country, the great majority of them Shia.
Not surprisingly, the Shia were also buoyed by the overthrow of the dictator. But relations were complicated with them by two factors: splits within the Shia community and the role of Iran. In post-Saddam Iraq, two secular figures vied for power: Iyad Allawi and the late Ahmad Chalabi. Both had lived in exile in London, spoke perfect English, and were partial to Savile Row suits. And though they looked like modern politicians, they played an insider’s game, rarely seeming to connect with the concerns of ordinary Iraqis. We found Allawi to be relatively reliable. We would eventually learn that Chalabi was both cunning and dishonest.
The other heavyweight in Iraqi politics was a Shia religious coalition. Its leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, wore the white robes of a cleric and an ayatollah’s black turban. He was polite and pious, did not speak much English, and maintained close ties to Tehran. Still, there was much to like about him, and he could be surprisingly sentimental. I will never forget one really difficult meeting after which he asked, “Will you do me a favor?”
A favor? I thought, not knowing what to expect.
“My thirteen-year-old granddaughter loves you. She watches you on television. Will you meet her and her mother when they come to Washington next month?”
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