by Roy Scranton
I was left to wonder, over the rest of the afternoon, whether the problem of perception I’d seen at the embassy was intentional or circumstantial. Sometimes we see things a certain way because we don’t know better; other times we assert a specific vision of the world because it serves us. I was impressed and fascinated by the lack of official interest in what Jane, Ned, and Prashant had been saying. As I was to discover myself, many people in Iraq saw their lives as being worse today than they had been under Saddam, less stable, more threatened, less free. You would think the US Embassy would want to hear about that perspective. That the ambassador seemed not only uninterested in the truth but outright hostile to it was striking. The situation brought to mind a quote attributed to Karl Rove, which seemed, looking back, as prescient as it was arrogant: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Ten years ago, I’d been among history’s actors, a bit role but nonetheless on the stage, a minor piece in a great game. And I’d spent the decade since then studying, trying to make sense of what I’d seen and done. Making sense meant more than just understanding, though; making sense also meant explaining what had happened in a way that fit with the kind of life I wanted to lead and the kinds of people I wanted to be around.
Over time, three main narratives had developed in American culture through which most veterans explained their experience of war in Iraq and Afghanistan: pride, trauma, or “it’s complicated.” All three were undergirded by an ideology of professionalism, in which the defining feature of military service was having “done your job,” which, as an article of faith, was detached from any serious political consideration by others of what that job was or what it meant in a wider context. In a way, this was a positive turn away from the Vietnam era, when draftees were sometimes identified with a war they’d been forced to fight and held responsible for political and strategic decisions made in Washington or Saigon. On the other hand, the focus on professionalism that divided the war from the warrior suggested a political compartmentalization by which Americans could disavow democratic responsibility for the actions of our government overseas. If the American army is seen as a citizen army, then even an all-volunteer force represents, symbolically, the American public. To detach military service from the ends to which it is put, to “hate the war but love the warrior,” as some would have it, is to disconnect the American people, represented by the citizen army, from the government that acts in its name.
One of the reasons I joined the army in the first place was to bridge that disconnect, to put myself physically at the service of the United States government, and to see what the “global war on terror” and the “new American century” actually meant in concrete terms. And something similar had driven me back to Baghdad now, as a journalist, to observe but also to participate—to insert myself back into history. Perhaps I wasn’t so different from the ambassador, in a certain way, in shaping reality to match my perception; since I was part of reality, and part of history now, as a veteran, putting myself out in front meant changing the very situation I was trying to understand. I attracted stares, attention, interest. I was, in fact, despite what I’d first thought, a target. People could die because they talked to me.
I thought about those possibilities as I sat over sweet tea that afternoon talking with Naseer Hassan, a fifty-two-year-old Iraqi poet, about life under Saddam, which topic included Hassan’s 1979 arrest by the government and the state executions of his Communist uncles—and also the books of poetry he’d written, Hamlet, existentialist philosophy, and the virtue of hopelessness. Naseer was a translator of Arthur Schopenhauer, Emily Dickinson, and Jorge Luis Borges, a radio host at Radio Free Iraq, and a loyal Maliki supporter. He was a lively, egotistical soul, a convivial conversationalist, and something of a Shiite chauvinist. For Naseer, nothing could match the brutal repression of the Saddam years, and if the present-day security situation was untenable, what Iraq needed was a strong leader like Maliki to clamp down.
Naseer sat rumpled and twisted in his chair, in constant back pain, leaning and swooping over his tea to emphasize a point or suggest a philosophical mise en abyme. He saw the American occupation as a “necessary surgery, but a very bad, bloody surgery. The patient has been left bleeding for years . . . ” He jabbed at the table. “But that doesn’t change the essential fact that America replaced a dictatorship with a democracy . . . Of course, there are those peace activists who think every anti-American thing is right and every pro-American thing is wrong. They look for anti-American sentiment wherever they can, decrying the human cost, smooth killers decrying the occupation, this detail or that detail, like Abu Ghraib. But you know what I call them? Peace statues, not peace activists: stiff, ideal, lifeless, glorious. They’re happy when a car bomb goes off in the market and kills a dozen people, because it makes a point that America’s bad.”
He had been ecstatic in 2003, he’d wanted to dance naked in the streets, but ever since that day in Firdos Square when Saddam’s statue fell, he had watched his hopes wither. “I’d had hope for a new era, but now, I see it’s just the same battle from birth to death. After 2003, Saddam was gone, but his remnants and orphans ruined everything after. Now there’s ISIS, these terrorists—it’s the same battle, with no triumph. The happiness of freedom and democracy was stolen from us. I wondered sometimes, can history be that cruel? But history has no conscience. If you’re still alive, that’s just because its foot hasn’t stepped on you yet.”
I asked him if he still had any hope at all for Iraq, and he leaned in, as if to explain a great secret: “Hopelessness is the limit and beginning of a new kind of hope. You have to keep going: not to achieve dreams of beautiful mountaintop forests, but because life is more powerful than death. Hopelessness makes possible a new hope that is more modest, a faith in the basic tissue of life that is stronger than any disaster. This is how humanity survives. This is the strength that keeps us going.”
As Naseer talked about hopelessness, I thought about my upcoming meeting with Meethaq and Ali at the Mansour Mall, which I was putting off, letting my talk with Naseer go long. My surety that I was going to die, coming at the level of gut fatalism, was stronger than any skepticism, stronger than any faith in the basic tissue of life, but weaker than my shame: when Aziz, my translator, came in to remind me a third time that we needed to go, I couldn’t put it off any longer. I shook Naseer’s hand, telling him with rather more force than I intended that I hoped I would see him again.
As we headed for the mall, I asked Aziz and Ahmed to stay alert. I hadn’t been able to properly explain my fear to them, but I thought maybe they would spot something before I did. There was always a chance. I tried to feel sharp, ready, like a survivor, but instead felt fated and numb. The image of the Asaib Ahl al-Haq campaign rally explosion kept cycling through my mind—a blast of orange light, dust, and blood. My dread deepened, minute by minute, as we passed through the crowded streets of Mansour.
3.
Three days later, the streets were empty and silent. The vibrant crowds of shoppers that thronged Mansour were gone. Stores and restaurants stood shuttered. You could almost hear the heat baking off the concrete and reflecting back into the clear blue sky. Somewhere a voice shouted, “Hey, Ameriki!” I didn’t look back.
I followed Aziz across the road, headed for a gaggle of soldiers and police who were, that day, the public face of Baghdad. I showed them my IHEC badge, they patted us down, and then one of them led us toward the school that was being used as a polling center. More soldiers stopped us at the entrance. A police captain came out to greet us. He began asking some questions, then a tense exchange broke out. On the one side stood the tall captain in his black fatigues, pistol on his
hip, Iraqi Federal Police eagle on his chest, backed by a half dozen surly men in blue and gray camouflage, with armored vests and Kalashnikovs, while on the other stood Aziz, my translator, a fifty-four year-old former diplomat who had worked as an interpreter for Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich, commander of 2-16 Infantry, during the surge. Aziz was my slouching Virgil, in a purple-and-mauve-striped polo shirt tucked fastidiously into stonewash jeans, with thinning hair and a chronic smoker’s cough. He stood facing the soldiers like a bent stick planted in the sand against the tide. I heard Aziz say “Rolling Stone” and “sahafi Ameriki”—American journalist—and saw the captain get a funny look on his face. A quick back-and-forth broke out, capped by Aziz saying “La. La. La.”—No. No. No.
His face was grim, but then, Aziz rarely smiled. Like almost every Iraqi I met, his life story was a transcript of disaster, suffering, and crushed hopes. He had worked for Saddam’s regime for decades, through the Iran-Iraq War, the Persian Gulf War, and the embargo years, but in 2000, fearing for his life, he’d fled to Lebanon. When he returned to Iraq three years later, after the American invasion, his daughter asked her mother, “Who is this man?” During the occupation, he had a successful career as an interpreter, first with a private security firm, then with the US Army, and then worked as a stringer for the Washington Post. After his daughters were injured in a car-bomb attack near his apartment in the Karrada, he decided to apply to come to the US, through the International Organization for Migration Iraq mission. Iraqis who worked with Americans during the occupation have two main routes to the US, the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program through the US Embassy, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an NGO that works to resettle Iraqi refugees internationally. Aziz chose IOM, because it made more sense for his family, and applied in 2010, but his IOM application was rejected only months later. “They gave me no reason, no justification,” he told me. “Just rejected.” When I asked him if he’d appealed the rejection, he told me that David Finkel, who knew him from his time with 2-16, had hired a lawyer to work the case but that now, three years later, he wasn’t optimistic.
The captain said something, almost grinning, and the conversation went back and forth again between him and Aziz before seeming to founder. The soldiers watched me expectantly. The captain stepped back and gestured into the school. “You are American?” he asked. “Nam,” I said, “Aana sahafa Ameriki.”
“You are welcome,” he said, waving toward the door, eyes flashing. A soldier inside smiled.
I looked to Aziz, whose eyes were watching his feet. He moved slightly away from the door, into the shade, and nodded at the space next to him. “Come wait over here,” he said.
It’s one thing to be traveling in a country where you don’t understand the language, customs, and culture. To be a stranger in a strange land can be as exciting as it is exhausting, as ecstatic as it is alienating. It’s something else entirely to be somewhere that can turn evil in a heartbeat—where a clear path can grow suddenly precipitous, overshadowed by cryptic threats, unstable in its footing.
I had to trust Aziz. I didn’t have any choice. I stood with him by the wall. The captain said something sharp, he and Aziz had another back and forth, then Aziz said, “C’mon, let’s go.”
“What happened there?” I asked him as we walked quickly back toward Ahmed’s white Kia. “What was that?”
He lit a cigarette. “Those guys are a bunch of fucking assholes.”
It wasn’t the first time we’d gotten static at a polling center. Election day had begun for us in Sadr City, the Shiite ghetto on the north side of Baghdad that had been a dangerous, restive neighborhood even under Saddam. For the entire eight years of the American occupation, the neighborhood had remained beyond the military’s control. At the height of the surge, in 2007 and 2008, JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) commandos and Iraqi special forces made almost nightly raids there, but General Petraeus’s “clear, hold, build” counterinsurgency never got more than a couple blocks in. As the name Sadr City suggests, the neighborhood was a stronghold for the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Jaish al-Mahdi—a fact in evidence as soon as we turned off the Canal Expressway (Omar bin Al Khattab Street) and were greeted by giant orange banners emblazoned with al-Sadr’s face.
Security at the edges of Sadr City would turn out to be some of the most intense we would see all day. There was a vehicle ban in place throughout Baghdad, except for government vehicles and registered observers like ourselves, and the usual gauntlet of checkpoints had been reinforced by military hardware and extra troops. Sadr City was something else entirely. In addition to the standard tan Humvees and blue-and-white APCs (armored personnel carriers) belonging to the Federal Police, black-masked Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) storm troopers manned the checkpoints, supported by giant black SWAT MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles).
While the Iraqi Army was a bit of a joke, these guys were something else. The Iraqi military had ballooned during the occupation—the army Paul Bremer disbanded in 2004 comprised a mere four hundred thousand men, while Maliki’s present-day security force, including the army, federal police, and other units, numbered somewhere between eight hundred thousand and a million. Many of these were paper soldiers, no more than names on forms, and most of the rest were the hypertrophied bloat of a militarized oil state: poorly trained schmucks pulling perpetual guard duty at government offices, public parks, mosques, political party offices, and the hundreds of traffic checkpoints around Baghdad, in what was one of the most reliable forms of gainful employment, while their less well-connected peers were out in Diyala and Anbar, defending the approaches to Baghdad against ISIS, getting ambushed and blown up by IEDs. Within the Federal Police and the regular army, though, and also set off outside, was another group of operators: well-trained, well-supplied elite fighters. The most notorious of these groups were the SWAT teams and the Counter-Terrorism Bureau’s various ISOF units, which reported directly to Maliki. On the street, they cut fearsome figures: uniformed in black armor and fatigues, festooned with weaponry and tech, their helmets decorated with Punisher skulls, their faces hidden by Wiley-X ballistic goggles and fang-embossed black masks, they moved with the assurance of easy violence. As a former soldier, someone who got used to being surrounded by burly dudes with assault rifles, who was himself for a time one of those dudes, I can tell you: these were some serious motherfuckers.
They had bigger prey to track than an American journalist, though, so after giving us the stinkeye, they let us through. We drove deep into Sadr City, rolling down side streets looking for a polling center, finally leaving Ahmed and the Kia behind to walk alleys, searching for the Sector 13 polling station.
Throughout my entire tour in Baghdad, I’d driven through Sadr City one time. There was a period of two weeks in the summer of 2003 when my unit was clearing an ammo cache to the northwest of the neighborhood, and our route from Camp Dragoon in Baladiyat to the cache took us along the edges of the neighborhood twice a day. We took the route fast, blasting through traffic at fifty miles an hour, practically daring Iraqi cars to get in our way. It was on this route that we’d had an accident between two of our trucks that gave Corporal Fisher whiplash. It was also on this route that one of our lieutenants started shooting into a crowd because he thought he saw someone with a gun. One day, we drove through the neighborhood on recon, looking for an ammo cache. We didn’t find the cache, and we didn’t linger.
I never went on a foot patrol. My unit was field artillery and we did everything mounted: I drove Humvees all over Baghdad, and outside the wire, I was never more than twenty feet from my truck. Now, walking through an alley in Sadr City with no more armament than a camera and a notebook, with no more backup than a middle-aged Iraqi in a polo shirt, seemed like a surreal inversion of reality—my own private Bizarro Baghdad. Every vestigial sense of wartime boundaries from ten years ago flashed red, screaming “You shouldn’t be here.”
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Aziz led me down a dirt alley, past poor Iraqis whose stares flickered between gawkery and bitterness, and as we rounded a corner, a young Iraqi came up to me grabbing at my hand and saying “Sabah hel hyeer,” pulling me toward him into the usual greeting between friendly Iraqi men, kissing each other on the cheek, which I did. Then he asked me for my ID.
I reached for my passport and IHEC card, but Aziz told me not to, then the guy said something else and grabbed my head, pulling me toward him again. “Come here,” Aziz said, heading back to the last checkpoint. I pushed Grabby back and broke away, following Aziz, and once we got back past the checkpoint our new friend fell behind, held up by the police. Aziz explained that the guy was just mental.
The hostility came later, from the IHEC staff. The soldiers at the gate checked our IDs and let us in, then brought us through a courtyard to the local commander, a major in the Federal Police. He was sitting in a small room with his shoes off, watching TV while on the phone to his girlfriend. When our escort handed him our IDs, he took them with barely a glance and held them for the several minutes he took to finish his phone call. When he finally turned his attention to us, he didn’t get up or put his shoes on, but sat contemplating us with bored irritation.
He asked us what we were doing here and who had told us we were authorized to come here. When Aziz explained that we were journalists authorized by the Independent High Electoral Commission to cover the elections, including interviewing people at polling centers, the major cut him off. “I don’t give a shit what IHEC says. I’ll decide whether or not you talk to anybody here.” Then he asked Aziz what outlet I was with and what kind of story was I doing. Aziz explained that I was an American journalist doing a feature story about life in Baghdad today, and especially about the election. They talked back and forth a bit; then the major decided to escort us in. “No photos,” he said.
