We're Doomed. Now What?

by Roy Scranton

  “We’re a new generation,” he told me. “We can make the change. Iraq has suffered for thirty years, and that has closed people off from one another. As a new generation, we can make the reforms our country needs. We want to say to the world that Iraq is a new country. It has a new government. Iraq is a free country. Iraq is peaceful . . . The media has created this false perception of Iraq and of Arab countries. We’re not extremists. We welcome everybody, from any nation. We’re open to others. We don’t want to be apart from other countries. We want to change this reality . . . I remember, Mr. Obama said, ‘We can do it.’ So we can do it. Why not? This is our message to the world.”

  It was hard, listening to Meethaq roll off numbers for oil revenue, describe strategy points for positive change, and articulate the need for sectarian and regional cooperation, to not be swept along in his progressive dream. I could imagine a coalition government defeating incumbent Prime Minister Maliki’s State of Law party in the elections on April 30, bringing peace to Anbar, investing oil money in public infrastructure and education, and opening Iraq to intercultural exchange. As I looked around at the gathering crowds at the Mansour Mall, in a food court that could be anywhere in the capitalist world, Meethaq’s hopes seemed not only possible, but plausible.

  This was a very different Iraq from the one I’d known as a private in the US Army ten years before, although I remembered a lot of hope then, too. But the closest thing I saw to the Mansour Mall in 2004 had been an open-air market in the Green Zone where vendors sold watches bearing Saddam’s face and little kids hawked ficky-ficky DVDs. Back then, I never talked to anyone like Meethaq, although odds were good we stopped people like him at checkpoints and forced cars full of people like him out of the way of our convoy. The only Iraqis I talked to back in 2003 and 2004 were day laborers who helped us recover abandoned munitions, a few terps we worked with, and a handful of soldiers and police who pulled gate guard with my unit at FOB Falcon.

  I had gotten Meethaq’s email address secondhand, from a sociologist who did research on interpreters. I had written Meethaq describing my project, asking if we could talk, and also asking if he knew any Iraqis in Baghdad who’d worked as terps for the US during the war. He was among some dozen or so Iraqis I reached out to before arriving, most of whom seemed cagey at first, unwilling to put their trust too easily in an American journalist. Meethaq, however, was enthusiastic to meet me; he was my first appointment, on my first full day in country. It seemed like a good omen that the first place I’d go in Baghdad would be the mall.

  My pitch for the story had been straightforward: Send me back to Iraq. The fall of Fallujah to ISIS in January 2014 had shocked a lot of American veterans and provoked a lot of soul-searching. As Iraq slid into a new civil war, it became harder and harder to make sense of our sacrifices there. For most Americans, that sacrifice had been something distant and abstract: po-faced ceremonies, jingoistic action films, sentimental commercials for real estate and insurance. For myself and my fellow veterans, though, that sacrifice was personal, gut-deep, concrete. Many of us had lost friends, brothers, sisters, parts of ourselves, and parts of our souls in the eight-year-long mess called Operation Iraqi Freedom. The names in the news that winter—Fallujah, Ramadi, Abu Ghraib, Mosul—resonated deeply with American soldiers and marines, triggering memories of fear, violence, and loss, calling up complex feelings of pride and sorrow. To see an al Qaeda splinter group take over a third of Iraq, with daily life there wracked once again by terrorist violence, while the central government fell increasingly under the control of a corrupt and brutal ruler, was to see the props holding up one’s sense of honorable service fall away. It meant having to give up the fragile illusion that we might have done some good in Iraq. It meant having to let go of the tenuous belief that we had left the country stable, democratic, and better off. Most troubling of all, it meant having to confront the possibility that we didn’t just leave Iraq, we lost Iraq.

  Of course, that depends on what you mean by lost. And with the enfeebled state of the American news media today, especially when it comes to international coverage, it was all but impossible to get a sense of what was actually happening on the ground. It seemed that Iraq was nothing but explosions and death, but was it really that bad? Surely there was another side to the story. And what about the upcoming election, Iraq’s first real independent parliamentary vote since the 1950s, when the country had been a constitutional monarchy untangling itself from the grip of British colonial rule? Was it free? Was it fair? What would happen? What would it mean?

  Thus I found myself, ten years after flying out of Baghdad International Airport on a US Air Force C-130, flying back in on a Royal Jordanian A320, sleep-deprived, jet-lagged, nervous, and feeling trapped.

  I had seriously considered bolting during my layover in Amman, just not getting on the plane, giving up the whole trip. Why was I risking my life again? For what? And what the fuck did I think I was doing? I didn’t know anybody in Baghdad, just the translator and driver I’d hired; I didn’t have any idea of how to be a “foreign correspondent”; I didn’t speak any Arabic; I had no insurance, no security team, no backup, and no idea what would happen if I got kidnapped or injured. Meanwhile, Iraq was being torn apart by the most intense violence it had seen in years. Nearly three thousand people had died since January 1, 2014, on top of almost nine thousand killed in 2013, in a rising tide of political murders and suicide attacks. Residents of Baghdad were enduring several car-bomb attacks a week, and the Karrada neighborhood—where I’d gotten my hotel—was a special target, since it happened to be home to many of Iraq’s new Shiite elite.

  The good news was that most of the violence was limited to just such car bombs, or to fighting between the Iraqi Army and ISIS, outside the city in Anbar and Diyala provinces. Getting killed in Baghdad these days was largely a matter of bad luck. This was a far better situation than the worst years of the civil war, between 2005 and 2008, when on top of IEDs and VBIEDs going off regularly, kidnappings and street assassinations were common occurrences, gun battles between militias and the US Army were an everyday affair, and Westerners were targeted specifically. As I forced myself to line up for my flight from Amman to Baghdad, I kept reminding myself that I would be safer there today than I had been in 2003 and 2004, when the US Army fought sporadic battles with Baathist holdouts, disgruntled locals, and foreign insurgents. Although being a soldier had meant I had armor, a rifle, and twenty heavy dudes backing me up, it also meant I was a target. This time, I wouldn’t have the firepower or the backup, but at the same time I wouldn’t be a walking symbol of colonialist oppression. Or not as blatantly, anyway. I was still the only palefaced motherfucker on the flight.

  We landed a few hours later. The familiar scent of Baghdad hit me as soon as I stepped off the plane: Oil, diesel smog, and a whiff of sulfur. Late at night and early in the morning, when the air is cleanest, this is what Baghdad smells like. As the day goes on, the odor thickens and turns metallic, until darkness falls and the fires start, filling the air with a pungent mélange of kebab and melted plastic. When I was here ten years ago, the smell was mixed with the stench of corpses.

  A week before, I’d been in a seminar room at Princeton, talking with my students about the Cold War, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Whitney Houston’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The campus outside softly exhaled magnolia.

  My driver, Ahmed, was to meet me at the parking lot at the edge of the airport. The cabbie at the terminal told me it’d cost $35 to get out there, then $40, then $45, then $50, the fare changing in as much time as it took him to figure out I was an easy mark. Rolling out to the parking lot on the road we used to call Talladega, I saw the cluster of dull, squat buildings that once marked the American command center at BIAP (Baghdad International Airport): the mayor’s cell, Hotel California, the PX. Once upon a time, for me, these unremarkable administrative offices and warehouses had been my closest connection to home. Now th
ey were just random airport infrastructure. Bob Hope DFAC (dining facility) was gone, and so were the hundreds of tents that had housed transient units. We passed the backside of the warehouse where I’d lived with three hundred other men, then our motor pool, the small mosque that had always been off limits, and the area where I used to go jogging when I needed some time alone, a verdant maze of palms and ponds where the Rangers kept their hooches.

  In the parking lot, I met Ahmed. I had worried, before coming, about who this guy was, since I would be trusting him with my life, and it had been impossible to tell anything about him from his brief and cryptic emails. When I saw him rise up out of his white Kia, though, a barrel-bellied, patient man with a canny smile, I knew I’d be in good hands.

  As we left the airport, it seemed beyond believable that we were driving out into hostile territory, at night, with no protection. We passed the winged statue marking the airport entrance, which in 2003–4 had represented the edge of friendly territory and the beginning of the “red zone,” Indian Country. We would lock and load as we passed beneath the statue’s wings. I came to think of it as the angel Jehovah had sent to guard, with a fiery sword, the gates of Eden.

  To see a place that has become mythical to you changed is to see it diminished. Yet at the same time as the myth diminished in scale, it became human again, and mine. It was just a place, my memories just memories. The stories I’d turned the place into, the impressions that had escaped the realm of self and come back at me like fables from a distant land, fell to earth. They were only mine, and nothing more. The place, BIAP, Baghdad . . . it had gone on without me, and my memories hadn’t touched it. Everything was coming loose.

  It wasn’t hostile territory anymore, it wasn’t Indian Country. It was just a city. But while I knew that in my head, my body remembered the bad old days. The smells, sights, and feel of Baghdad activated all my old alert mechanisms, the danger focus, the threat assessment matrix. Not knowing what the threats were, or where they came from, I skipped status yellow and went straight to full-on freak-out. Everything was a potential threat. Would the hotel clerk sell me out to ISIS? Would somebody launch an RPG at my room? Was I being followed?

  When I met Meethaq at the mall the next day for my first interview in country, after a restless, jet-lagged night, he was vague about which floor to meet on, then late, and, when he finally arrived, sweating and nervous. I found his earnestness difficult to credit and his assertions of goodwill excessive. He was working very hard to get me to trust him, which didn’t make any sense. What did he want from me? Who was he? What was I doing here? I couldn’t shake the sense that Meethaq was hiding something, and I was puzzled by his idealism. Nevertheless, I had a story to report, so we made plans to meet at the mall again the next evening, when he would bring his friend Ali with him. Ali had been an interpreter for the US Army, and I wanted to ask him about his memories of those days and what he thought now about the legacy of the American occupation in Iraq.

  When I woke in the middle of the night, I knew he wanted to kill me. That’s why he wanted to meet back at the mall, at six, when the food court would be packed. That’s why he took my picture, so the bomber could identify me. It explained him asking me if I’d told the American embassy I was there. It explained a thousand inexplicable details, things he’d said or not said, his strange manner, his self-contradictions, the way he refused to talk about what he’d been doing in Amiriya in 2006 and 2007. The way he’d assured me the mall was totally secure, I wouldn’t be targeted there, it was completely safe.

  Nowhere was safe. The day I’d arrived, ISIS extremists had hit a campaign rally in northern Baghdad with three separate bombs, killing thirty people and wounding many more. Thaier Al-Sudani, a photographer for Reuters, captured incredible photos of the bombing: giant balls of orange light, dust, and shrapnel. These images seized my mind in the dark of my hotel room, as I came to see the danger I had put myself in. I remembered I’d told Meethaq the name of my hotel—of course I’d have to move, now. I also needed to email Rolling Stone and have them advance me some expense money. If things went sideways, I would need to get out quick, and that would take cash.

  While I’d been talking with Meethaq and then driving around Baladiyat, a car bomb had gone off in al-Nasir and there’d been a drive-by in al-Amil. Nine bodies, riddled with bullets, had been found in the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya. Meanwhile, the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had called upon his followers to kidnap Western journalists. The campaign-rally bombing was obviously just the beginning. I knew with absolute certainty that if I went to Mansour Mall again, it would be the last thing I ever did.

  2.

  At the American Embassy the next morning, over coffee and cookies, one of the first questions Jane Arraf asked the US ambassador was about the rise of Asaib Ahl al-Haq. Jane was an old Baghdad hand, having covered the region since 1991. Utterly charming, sparky, petite, funny, and brimming with sympathetic curiosity, she’d been covering the Asaib Ahl al-Haq rally in Baladiyat for Al Jazeera English on Friday when the three massive bombs had gone off. When she started snapping photos, an armed guard grabbed her camera and smashed it, screaming at her, “Why are you taking pictures?”

  “Because we’re journalists,” she’d shouted back.

  Jane’s question to the ambassador about Asaib Ahl al-Haq seemed important. During the last few years of the US occupation, General Ray Odierno had considered Asaib Ahl al-Haq the most dangerous Shiite militia in Baghdad. Its name means “League of the Righteous,” and the group was known for its brutal history of kidnappings, assassinations, and torture, as well as for its strong ties to Iran’s elite Quds Force. But Asaib Ahl al-Haq didn’t just have ties with Iran. When the group’s leader, Qais al-Khazali, was captured after staging a raid on a US military base in Karbala that killed five soldiers, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki protested his detainment and later negotiated his release as part of a cease-fire deal. In exchange, Asaib Ahl al-Haq turned over a British contractor it had held since May 2007, along with the corpses of four of his co-workers. Nearly as soon as Qais was released, however, al-Haq broke the cease-fire and kidnapped an Iraqi-American contractor working for the US Department of Defense, whom it exchanged for four more al-Haq prisoners held by the Iraqi government. Since 2011, Asaib Ahl al-Haq had gone legit, adding a political arm to its militia, which over the last few years had begun fighting alongside the Iraqi army in Anbar and Diyala and sending men to the civil war in Syria. Its campaign posters, plastered all over Baghdad, were readily identifiable by the faces of the armed martyrs who looked down from them.

  The group represented the militant wing of Baghdad’s energetic Shiite political majority, which comprised several rival factions. The main parties competing in the election were Prime Minister Maliki’s State of Law coalition, centered around the Shiite nationalist Dawa Party; the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, or ISCI, joining very conservative Islamist cultural politics with a technocratic appeal to middle-class stability, backed up by its bloody-handed Badr Brigades; and Muqtada al-Sadr’s populist Al-Ahrar bloc, appealing most explicitly to poor Shiia in Baghdad’s slums and the rural south.

  These were only the most prominent of the 107 “political entities” and coalitions representing 9,964 candidates competing for 328 seats in the national election. Most of them I’d never heard of, and it was difficult keeping track of even the two dozen most important. Iraqi national politics was a bewildering congeries of politicians, coalitions, outsiders, proxies, and allegiances: in addition to the thousands of candidates, every major regional player had interests and influences, especially Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey; there were five major Shiia clerics involved, whose fatwas could send voters running from one candidate to another; Russian and Chinese oil companies had a stake in securing their investments in the south; Kurdistan, as a semi-autonomous state, had its own politics, and would act as a powerful arbiter of national leadership; the government itself, alm
ost entirely under Maliki’s control, functioned nearly as its own political party; and the country was in the midst of a civil war that was its own hornet’s nest of allegiances and proxies, involving Sunni tribal leaders, the Sahwa militias that had worked with the US in 2008, al Qaeda, ISIS, and factions from the Syrian civil war, which wasn’t, in truth, a completely distinct conflict. Finally, and not least, Uncle Sam was involved—although merely, of course, as a disinterested observer.

  When I’d heard that the US Ambassador to Iraq would be giving a “deep backgrounder” to Western journalists on Sunday morning, I jumped at the chance. Not only would it make it possible for me to go into the Green Zone and see the US Embassy, otherwise a challenging prospect, but it would give me the opportunity to hear the official US position on the election, see the Baghdad press corps in action, and maybe come to understand the complexities of Iraqi politics a little better. That I’d never talked with a US ambassador before or been to “a deep backgrounder” didn’t really concern me. I was more worried about managing the nagging certainty that I was going to die at the Mansour Mall later that evening. My fear gave the day a buzzsaw edge and turned everything a little desperate, even the imperial bonhomie at the US Embassy and the relaxed intensity of the four journalists who showed up for the briefing.

  I’d expected a crowd and had planned on being to be able to fade into it. Instead, I found myself cozily seated across the table from US Ambassador Robert S. Beecroft. On my left was Tim Arango, from the New York Times, who with his scruffy beard, disheveled hair, and sleepy manner wouldn’t have been out of place at a hipster party in Brooklyn. Prashant Rao, AFP bureau chief, was on my right. Jane, sitting next to him, complimented him on his new jacket, and everyone wanted to know about his fancy recording pen. On Jane’s far side sat newly appointed Reuters bureau chief Ned Parker, wearing a baseball cap. Beyond Ned were the embassy press attaché and the head of Public Affairs.