A Glimmer of Hope
Despite the difficulties and missteps, we made progress on the political front. Jerry Bremer helped the many Iraqi factions to agree on a set of laws for ruling the country. The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) formed the basis for democratic governance and laid out the principles that would later be enshrined in the constitution. The TAL guaranteed fundamental political rights for Iraqi citizens, including freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, and outlined the process by which power would be transferred to a three-branch transitional government, which would then be responsible for drafting a permanent constitution for approval by referendum.
I was at a seder at the home of the Israeli ambassador, Danny Ayalon, when I got a call from the Situation Room. Jerry Bremer was on the phone. “We got it,” he said. “Everyone has signed off and there will be a ceremony on Friday morning after prayers. The leaders will all be there with their wives and children. Some of them with several of their wives,” he joked.
I felt a deep surge of emotion. There weren’t many times in 2003 when things had gone right in Iraq. This was one of them. I congratulated Jerry, who had taken so many slings and arrows. Then I called the president even though it was pretty late. He too was kind of emotional. “It is their first baby step,” he said. I silently filled in the rest of the sentence—toward democracy.
On Friday morning, I waited for television coverage of the ceremony, but something was wrong—the start of the event was well overdue. Just as I was about to call him, Jerry called me. “What’s going on?” I asked before he could say anything. “Well,” he said, “the Shia aren’t here. The children’s choir has already performed all of the songs they know—twice.” It turned out that there had been a last-minute disagreement about some of the language. Everyone returned the following Monday morning; the children’s choir sang; and the TAL went into effect.
Still, the successful experiment in governance led the Iraqis to desire more: They wanted sovereignty. We had long discussions in Washington about whether they were ready. The security forces were in their infancy and completely dependent on coalition forces to keep a semblance of peace. The terrorists practically owned Anbar, and Sadr’s forces were a constant threat to destabilize the south of the country. Efforts to rebuild the infrastructure were slow, often held hostage to the security situation. The unreliable electrical grid had become a focal point for our reconstruction efforts and a source of tension with the population. This was due to another unpleasant surprise about how Saddam had run the country. Most of the generating power had gone to Baghdad, leaving the rest of the country with long periods without service, or with partial service. When the CPA tried to even out distribution, we learned that there was not remotely enough power to light the whole country. Baghdad residents lost their privileged position and complained loudly about the deterioration of their services.
In other words, the Iraqis were not really ready to run their own affairs. But their leaders believed that ending the occupation could help stabilize the country. We believed that they would not tolerate the occupation much longer. Together, we set in motion a plan to make Iraq sovereign on July 1, 2004—a little more than sixteen months after the war had begun.
The blueprint from Jerry Bremer and the CPA entailed a handoff to an interim government that would write a new constitution. There would then be elections for a permanent government based on the new document. This seven-point plan appeared in the Washington Post on September 8, 2003. The first three steps had already been taken: The Iraqi Governing Council had been established earlier in the summer; it had formed a committee to determine how to draft a new constitution; and it had appointed Iraqis to head all twenty-five public ministries. The next three steps were still to come: drafting a new constitution, ratifying it by popular vote, and electing a new permanent government. The final step, to be taken after the election, was to disband the coalition authority.
Jerry’s plan broke in the press before we could fully debate it in Washington. But frankly, it didn’t seem like a bad road map for the way ahead. At least to us.
Ayatollah Sistani did not agree. He issued a blistering statement saying that it was unthinkable to have the Iraqi constitution written by people who had not been democratically elected. There would have to be elections first, and then the drafting of the founding document.
The president called the National Security Council together to talk about the situation. One by one everyone extolled the virtues of writing the constitution before the elections. I no longer remember why except it seemed to make sense to have electoral rules before you had an election. The president interrupted: “How did I get on the wrong side of people wanting to elect their leaders?” he asked. That quieted the debate. The Ayatollah Sistani had an important ally—the president of the United States. The Iraqis would have their elections and then write their constitution.
“Iraq Is Sovereign”
On June 28, I was attending a NATO meeting in Istanbul with the president. Only a few Americans, Brits, and Iraqis knew that Iraq was about to become sovereign. The official date of the handover was to be July 1, but we had secretly moved it up to wrong-foot terrorists who might want to launch an attack. I was called out of the chamber and told that Jerry Bremer was on the phone. He had handed the letter abolishing the occupation to Allawi, who was president of the IGC. I returned to the meeting and gave President Bush a note. “Iraq is sovereign. The note was passed from Bremer at 10:26 Iraqi time,” it said. He wrote on the bottom of it, “Let freedom reign!” and handed it to British prime minister Tony Blair. The men were sitting next to each other simply by virtue of alphabetical order. They shook hands firmly and turned back to the affairs of NATO.
Elections to a National Assembly were held six months later. The United Nations did splendid work with the Iraqis to help them through the process. The country seemed to have a sense of common purpose, at least for a brief time. In January 2005, the front pages of newspapers and television screens throughout Iraq, the Middle East, and the world showed proud Iraqis voting for the first time. The finger dipped into purple ink used to certify that one had voted became an instant symbol of the new democracy. People turned out in significant numbers—58 percent overall, though Sunnis less so. The security situation made voting difficult and terrorist threats did keep some people away. We worried too that there were some Sunnis who were signaling that this was not their election.
And the voting broke down roughly—though not completely—along sectarian lines, both geographically and in terms of vote totals. This was, I suppose, to be expected in a first election. The main Shia coalition dominated in the south and came in first overall, with 47 percent of the vote; the Kurdish coalition dominated in the north and came in second with more than 25 percent of the total; and a smattering of smaller parties, representing secular and Sunni factions, took the remainder.
The new transitional leadership of Iraq reflected the rough makeup of the country: Talabani the jovial Kurd became president. His vice presidents were al-Mahdi and Hashemi, a Shia and a Sunni, and the speaker of the parliament was a Sunni, the former prisoner Mashhadani. By virtue of their numbers, the Shia parties would select the new prime minister. The competition was fierce and in the end a consensus candidate, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, won—more because he was not hated than because he was admired. To be fair, everyone thought he was honest.
He was also really odd. In my first meeting with him, he took me on a verbal tour of his encyclopedic—and quite wrong—knowledge of American history. Mixing up presidents along the way—Abraham Lincoln was apparently a Founding Father—he was trying to make the point that democracy required selflessness. I sensed that he lacked focus and a program for governing. But his job was to do one thing and one thing only: shepherd the writing of the constitution and the referendum afterward to get it approved.
He and the other leaders managed to do that, but not without considerable difficulty. With the help of constitutional experts assemb
led by the UN, the Iraqis produced a document. The initial draft bore the mark of compromises between Islamic law and liberal tenets. For instance, one provision stated that no law could contradict Islamic principles; another that Iraq’s Supreme Court would include a number of experts on sharia law. This sent Sunni Arabs into the streets to demonstrate against the draft. Moderate Sunni parties were mollified when the transitional assembly agreed to consider changes once a general election was held.
The document created the structure of the new government as a mixed system with a president who was more than ceremonial but without a well-defined portfolio. The parliament was to be bicameral, with a quarter of the seats in the lower house held for women. The prime minister would hold most of the authority, including command of the armed forces, but would be subject to recall by a majority vote in parliament. Like the TAL, the constitution enumerated the rights of citizens and limited the power of the government. Freedom of the press, assembly, and religious conscience were enshrined. The independence of the judiciary was to be respected.
And the country was established as a unified and federal Iraq with broad powers flowing to the provinces. Many of the laws that would make this system function were to be drafted later by the parliament. A national army was created and was to take its members from all parts of the country. The police were to be recruited locally. The peshmerga were grandfathered in.
Private property rights were enshrined too and a budget law (essentially an appropriations bill) had to be passed each year. The parliament was charged with writing and passing a law on sharing oil revenue. This was a litmus test for just how much power would reside in the provinces. For the Kurds in particular, this was the sine qua non for participation in a federal and unified Iraq.
The referendum passed in October 2005 with support from 78 percent of voters. The provinces dominated by Kurds and Shia—twelve of the sixteen—voted overwhelmingly in favor. The Ayatollah Sistani had issued a statement of support: “His highness favors the participation of citizens in the referendum and their voting ‘yes’ for the constitution, despite the failure to eliminate some of its weaknesses.” Americans tend to be made nervous by the involvement of religious figures. But I was really happy to see the statement, even if the ayatollah’s followers considered it a fatwa and therefore compulsory.
Sunni support was far weaker. A veto provision designed to protect minority interests meant the constitution would fail if two-thirds of voters in any three provinces voted against it. “No” votes exceeded two-thirds in two Sunni provinces, with 82 percent voting against in Salaheddin and 97 percent in Anbar. Fortunately, Nineveh, a mixed Kurdish and Sunni Arab province, voted 56 percent “no”—below the two-thirds threshold. The referendum passed and the constitution was adopted. There was obviously a lot of work to do with the Sunni Arabs.
I was visiting Tony Blair at Chequers (the prime minister’s equivalent of Camp David) the morning after the voting. We sat in his lovely garden eating a mostly British breakfast (I skipped the kippers), waiting in suspense until the outcome was assured. When word came that the referendum had indeed passed all the requisite tests, we both felt that Iraq had turned a corner. In some sense it had. The structure that Iraqis affirmed is the one that has largely held since 2005.
National elections for a permanent government were held six weeks later, in December 2005. This time, Sunni leaders implored their constituents to participate in the process.
“I’m Tired of Doing Their Dirty Work”
In the early days, the most common response when Iraqi leaders fell out of favor with one another was to call the American ambassador—or if the situation was really intolerable, the American secretary of state. I felt at times as if I were keeping the peace among teenagers hurling insults at one another and periodically threatening to quit. In part, they had trouble telling each other the truth face-to-face: all smiles when they were together and ripping each other apart behind each other’s backs.
This behavior reached its height when, after the 2006 national election, Jaafari’s party nominated him to be prime minister. The process of forming a government had dragged on and on. Iraqis were losing patience with their new leaders and the levels of violence were not abating, though there had been some hope that they might after the elections. In February, the country experienced a devastating attack—Sunni terrorists bombed the Golden Mosque of Samarra, one of the holiest shrines of the Shia. To their credit, leaders from all confessional groups condemned the attack, and some traveled to the shrine in a show of solidarity. It was one of those moments when the Iraqis seemed to be maturing and understanding the demands of leadership.
But the renewed sense of purpose didn’t help them break the logjam on government formation. Zal explained that no one really wanted Jaafari to be prime minister.
“Then why did they nominate him?” I asked.
“Well, no one else has the votes either, so they just left it with the status quo. But he’ll never get the support of the parliament,” he added.
“Have you told him that?”
“About a thousand times,” he said.
So Prime Minister Blair and President Bush decided to send Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and me to tell Jaafari to step down. I told the president that I didn’t like having to do the Iraqis’ dirty work. But Jack and I boarded a plane for Baghdad and upon landing went directly to see Jaafari. We sat down and he immediately launched into a long monologue on his plans as Iraq’s first freely elected prime minister.
Jack tried, politician to politician, to explain that it was unlikely he would actually be able to take up the post. “Sometimes it’s time to step down and do the best thing for the country,” he said. Jaafari was having no part of it, noting correctly that the democratic process had produced him. “Who am I to step aside when my fellow citizens want me to serve?” he asked plaintively.
We weren’t getting anywhere, and thirty minutes or so into the conversation, I decided to try a different tack. “You aren’t going to be prime minister,” I blurted out. “You have to step down. This isn’t because the United States wants it this way. The Iraqis don’t want you, and that’s what matters.” Jack was a bit shocked, I think, by my tone. As the translation rolled forward, Jaafari looked a bit hurt. But he kept insisting that he would be prime minister.
We then went to see other Iraqi leaders. “Did you convince him?” they asked. Can’t you people see that democracy is hard work? Sometimes you have to do unpleasant things, I thought to myself. We shuttled back to Jaafari and delivered the message again. This time there was no one in the room except the three of us and an interpreter. He finally seemed to get it. After our trip he began to suggest publicly that he might withdraw, and then, three weeks later, he did. The Iraqis took it from there and resumed their search for a new prime minister.
Zal called a few days after Jaafari stepped down to say that the process was still dragging on. “They just can’t agree. It looks like al-Mahdi might win, but it will be close.” That was music to my ears because we all liked the affable and competent man—even if he was essentially Hakim’s lieutenant.
A few hours later Zal called to say that Mahdi had lost by one vote. “Great. So what now?” I asked in exasperation.
“Some people are talking about Nouri al-Maliki,” he responded.
“Who?” I asked.
Zal laughed. “We don’t know much about him, but he might be the last man standing.”
Maliki was a compromise candidate and came not from one of the major parties but from Dawa, a group that had been forced to operate in a secretive, cell-like fashion during Saddam’s reign. Maliki had fled the country in Saddam’s day, seeking refuge first in Tehran and then in Damascus. We were told that he hated the Iranians. That, of course, endeared us to him. He turned out to be a good fit for the country at that moment.
I traveled to Baghdad with Don Rumsfeld to meet the new prime minister. We both liked him, principally because he seemed to know what he want
ed to do. Iraq was descending into chaos after the bombing of the Golden Mosque. Shia militias were engaging in revenge killings against Sunnis—and Sunnis were returning the favor. The country had been deprived of leadership during the long process of government formation. It was a relief to finally have a prime minister.
Later that evening, Maliki and I met alone in Zal’s living room in Baghdad. As he entered, he impressed me as so different from many of those who had returned from exile. For one thing, he was wearing a really bad brown suit. No designer suits for this man, I thought. I don’t know why, but I found that reassuring.
Maliki spoke almost no English, but he was animated in conversation. He talked about gaining the confidence of all groups. We talked about the problems with the police, who were overwhelmingly Shia and were often complicit in violence against the Sunnis. I told the prime minister that I knew what it was like to be at the mercy of police whom you did not trust. Telling him about growing up in Birmingham, I recalled what it was like to live in a neighborhood when Bull Connor’s henchmen came through. “Seeing the police in your neighborhood if you were black was not a reassuring sight,” I said. Maliki didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t even want to see some of them in my neighborhood,” he said, chuckling. Then he turned serious. “A lot of them are just thugs.”
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