by Roy Scranton
“Here is your Saydiya,” Ahmed said, as I snapped some pictures with my phone. A teenager on the corner, one foot on a soccer ball, glared as we went by.
It didn’t take us long to find a polling center. Ahmed parked on the street, while Aziz and I went through the outer checkpoint. While the police were checking our IDs, a six-truck convoy of machine-gun-mounted pickups roared by, each one filled with black-masked ISOF. They didn’t give us any trouble at the checkpoint, nor at the entrance to the school, where, as a security precaution, they collected voters’ cell phones.
One of the guards brought us into the school and took us to the principal’s office to meet the security detachment commander. He was coolly friendly and completely professional, asking me a few questions in superb English. He looked at my ID and passport, writing my name into a log book. “Is this your first time to Baghdad?” he asked me.
“Yes.” I lied.
“And how do you find it?”
“Complicated. The people are very friendly. Of course it depends on the neighborhood.”
He smiled. “Yes. And you are with a newspaper?”
“A magazine, Rolling Stone.”
“And what kind of magazine is this Rolling Stone?”
“It mainly covers music and popular culture, but it also does long stories on politics, international events, different things.”
“Yes. Well, you are most welcome to Iraq. You will not take any pictures here.”
I thanked him, then went out to meet the IHEC representative. He was a short, stern man, with a closed face. With exceedingly efficient movements and remarks, he guided us through the entire center, showing us each polling station and giving us the most up-to-date numbers for voter turnout. His answers to my questions were polite but curt. They’d had a few minor problems with the machines, which they’d resolved. They’d found forty-four duplicate cards in their district, which had been withdrawn. Security was good. Voter turnout was good. When I asked him if any other media had visited this polling station, he told me that the media were prohibited from coming here, but they’d made an exception for me. I asked him if we could talk to some people, and he considered it for a moment, then agreed.
He stationed us in the main hall, near the exit. Traffic in the poll center was light—few voters were coming in, and those who did looked distracted and glum. They avoided looking at me, and avoided the IHEC rep as well, keeping their eyes down and scuttling through the hall as if they wanted to disappear. The reek of fear in the polling center was so thick you could taste it: an acrid tang in the back of your throat, bitter as myrrh. Aziz watched his feet. The few people that the IHEC rep approached shook their heads vigorously no, then sped away.
At last, the IHEC rep stopped a middle-aged man walking by who agreed to talk to me, though his eyes bulged in fear. His name was Ahmed Abdul-Rajid. He was a sixty-one-year-old professor of English, and although he spoke to me in that language, he communicated only terror. His answers pinched out of his mouth as if he hoped each one would end the interview; each word he spoke made it clear he wanted nothing to do with me and wished I would leave him alone. He grinned as he talked, but it was a rictus of desperation. The IHEC rep stood beside us, staring into the distance but noting every word that was said.
When I asked Dr. Abdul-Rajid what his hopes were for the election, his answer was “For the good.” When I asked him what he meant by “good,” he told me “Security, safety, and stability,” the same mantra I’d been hearing all day. I asked him if there were any other issues that were important to him in the election, and he said “No, mostly security, safety, and stability.” Did he have any worries about the election? “No, none.” Did he think Maliki was going to win a third term? “Nobody knows. It depends on the results.” What did he think would happen if Maliki won a third term? “I hope for the good.” What did he mean by that? “Mostly security, safety, and stability.” Was he positive about Iraq’s future? “Definitely.”
When I thanked him, Dr. Abdul-Rajid nodded with obvious relief, glanced at the IHEC rep, then fled. The interview left me with a bad taste in my mouth, but I pushed on, trying to talk to more people as the IHEC rep shepherded us toward the exit. Nobody else would speak with me. On the way out, though, the IHEC rep introduced me to a soldier manning the exit. Jasim Mohammed Alwan, a sergeant major in the Federal Police with ten years in service, looked capable, intelligent, and young for his responsibilities. He stood at parade rest, with his hands clasped behind his back, and answered my questions crisply, directly. The IHEC rep stood at his elbow, but the young sergeant major ignored him.
His responsibilities included managing two ballot centers in Saydiya, and he told me that everything was going fine. There hadn’t been any security problems all day. Asked about his hopes for the election, he told me he was hoping for change—I heard the word tahrir again—along with an increase in security and stability. “What kind of change?” I asked, and he told me that he wanted to see a change in government. “People are looking for something better. Somebody needs to fix what has been destroyed, take care of the people who just suffer now.”
The IHEC rep stepped between us, ending the interview. He said something to Aziz and then something else to the sergeant major, who turned on his heel and walked off. The IHEC rep turned a grim smile toward me. Aziz said mildly, “We should go now.”
4.
Back in the war, I’d dreamed of Mutanabbi Street. I’d heard it was a place they sold books, a famous street market where intellectuals gathered and talked about ideas. I fantasized sometimes about going there on my own, sneaking off the FOB somehow, hiring an orange-and-white Iraqi cab to take me. I could switch into the one set of civilian clothes I’d brought with me, leave my rifle, leave my boots. I’d still look unmistakably American, of course, and I couldn’t read or speak any Arabic, but at least I’d be able to feel what it was like, be able to see and hear real Iraqis and authentic Baghdad culture. Not the pidgin we talked with Iraqi soldiers on gate guard, not the guarded, pro-American talk we got from our terps, but the real literary, philosophical, and political pulse of a city with traditions going back thousands of years. Civilization had been invented here. They’d invented writing and math. Iraq was the birthplace and motherland of Western culture, older than the Romans, older than the Greeks, as old as the Egyptians and even more important, and in my dream you could brush up against that living history on the street, there on Mutanabbi.
I had naively supposed that, after the US won the war in 2003, things would settle down and we’d start rebuilding. Combat missions would transition to stability-and-support operations, and we would move out into the communities. The US occupations in Germany, Japan, and Korea were the most prominent examples I had of how it might have worked, but the more recent American military intervention in the Balkans seemed a plausible model as well. These operations were all within living memory and continued to have material, concrete historical existence. My unit, First Armored Division, was stationed in Germany, as American units had been since 1945. American units trained with German units. American bases hired German workers. American soldiers dated German girls. The Balkans were different, but when we deployed, to Iraq a few of our Humvees still had KFOR (Kosovo Force) painted on the side, and old sergeants liked to tell us stories of their misadventures there. I imagined something like that would happen in Baghdad. We would meet people. We would mingle.
In the very early days, I even fantasized about going to Ur or Babylon to see ziggurats and ruins; visiting a mosque; eating kebab, mezze, and flatbread with locals; maybe going to the National Museum. Of course none of that ever happened. Stability-and-support operations were sidelined in favor of force protection, which meant pulling security on isolated American bases and letting looters plunder the country’s infrastructure and heritage.
Our life settled into a strange, sequestered version of garrison existence, on bases initially p
rimitive but increasingly Americanized. Burger King was the first franchise to arrive at BIAP, and American fast food soon became a staple of our diet. There were some efforts at integration: vendors were allowed to open shops selling knickknacks and rugs, and some FOBs contracted with Iraqis to run laundromats, shawarma restaurants, and cafés instead of the American companies and third-country nationals de rigueur on the larger bases. Despite these minor efforts, the basic conditions of the occupation were segregation and mutual distrust.
For my unit, as for most Americans in Iraq, you only ever went off post on mission, with at least two trucks and eight soldiers, loaded for bear and ready to fight. Until Petraeus took over in 2007 and implemented his counterinsurgency doctrine, pushing units out into small neighborhood posts, American policy was defensive, centralized, and isolationist. According to General John Abizaid’s “antibody theory,” which guided policy before 2007, the more our soldiers interacted with Iraqis, the more we’d be attacked. That may have been true, in a crude statistical sense, but it created a situation that allowed racism and suspicion to flourish, making it easy for Iraqis to see Americans as distant, alien occupiers, and for Americans to view Iraqis as backward, hostile primitives.
Officially, Iraqis were “local nationals.” Mostly we called them hadjis. The word is a term of respect in the Muslim world; it’s a title signifying that its bearer has completed the hadj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. We didn’t mean it like that. We meant it more like Hadji from the 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon Johnny Quest, Johnny’s turbaned brown Hindi sidekick. It wasn’t quite as derogatory as some of the things soldiers called Iraqis. At its very best, it was merely patronizing.
Over and over during my tour, I dreamed of crossing the wire. I hated seeing myself reduce human beings to caricatures and threat assessments, as I did every day, and I wanted to have a human encounter with the people whose nation we’d invaded, occupied, and upended. I was also driven by curiosity, a sense of adventure, and a desire for a richer cultural palette than FOB life offered.
Mutanabbi Street came to represent for me not just the storied Iraqi culture with which we weren’t engaging and of which we were almost entirely ignorant, but literary and intellectual culture itself: the resilience of humanistic inquiry and debate in even the most inhospitable conditions. I imagined seeing it, feeling it around me, connecting in even some small way with this manifestation of the human spirit. I carried that dream for years, out of time and out of place, always thinking of it as a symbol of a history that should have been.
Two days after the election, security was still tight, but everyone was in a festive mood. There was a certain giddiness in the air, too, connected to a sense of having escaped a baleful fate: everyone had thought that the election would be wracked with violence, and while there had been a few minor attacks outside the city and in the north, Baghdad had been serene. Now Mutanabbi Street was packed with readers, book buyers, kids, and journalists, out as if on holiday.
Aziz guided me down the street, pointing out the spot where a car bomb had gone off in 2007 and killed twenty-six people. The physical scars of the bombing were barely visible; among the milling shoppers, you could almost believe that someday even the memory would fade. Today the street thrived. Old books and new books, hardbound and paperback, books in Arabic and English and French and Chinese, romance novels and Korans and Mein Kampf and programming manuals and dusty issues of National Geographic lay in mosaics on the sidewalks and stacked the shelves of tiny shops back off the street. The Abbasid poet Abu at-Tayyib Ahmad bin al-Husayn al-Mutanabbi, whose majestic bronze figure overlooks the Tigris at the end of street, once bragged that his poetry was so beautiful that it was heard even by the deaf and read even by the blind; just so, the street that bore his name would have broken through any resistance with its cheerful vitality. Juice sellers stalked the crowd in yellow bibs, ringing brass saucers to attract attention. Old friends, tufts of white hair ringing bald heads, stood drinking at tea carts, smoking and arguing about the election. Oud and lute music wove through the chatter, and a singer’s voice keened over our heads like a scarlet ribbon. In a courtyard off the street, poets versified, their voices thrown by Pignose amps. And although the crowds in the street were overwhelmingly male, some women browsed too, some in hijab, some not. Aziz ran into a friend of his, an Iraqi newspaperman. I ran into the Colombian TV crew who were staying at my hotel. And while I took everything in, I kept an eye out for some of the people I’d talked to earlier whom I expected to see there, like Soheil Najm, a poet and translator, and Hanaa Edwar, head of the leading Iraqi NGO for human rights and women’s issues, Iraqi Al-Amal.
I had spoken with Hanaa Edwar in her home office the morning after the election. Her living room was warm and welcoming, decorated by her many awards for humanitarian activism, and her three white dogs barked and nipped and cowered like fluffy courtiers. With her steely, short-cut hair and forthright gaze, Edwar sat on her sofa like a baroness, regal and determined. She had been fighting for a better world since her student days in the 1960s, when she joined the General Students Union, the Communist Party, and the Iraqi Women’s League. After earning a law degree at Baghdad University, she had been nominated in 1972 to represent the Iraqi Women’s League at the Secretariat of Women International Democratic Federation in East Berlin, and lived there for ten years before returning to Iraq—not to Baghdad, however, or to her native Basra, but to Kurdistan, where she joined the Communist partisan resistance against Saddam. She lived there for three years, until Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988 forced her to flee to Damascus, where she founded Iraqi Al-Amal (Iraqi Hope). In 1996 she returned to Kurdistan, and finally came home to Baghdad after the American invasion in 2003.
Despite her lifelong resistance to Saddam’s tyranny and her tireless efforts to bring modern, cosmopolitan values to Iraq, Edwar saw the American invasion as a disaster for the Iraqi people. In Edwar’s view, the United States’ interest in toppling Saddam was political, military, and economic, and had nothing to do with avowed commitments to human rights or democracy. From the beginning, United States policy worked to divide Iraq, founding the national government on a sectarian-ethnic quota system from the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) onward.
“This was the wrong basis. No democracy can be built on religious or sectarian difference. And as we have seen, the system in Iraq is very weak because of this. It has produced crisis after crisis without any solution, and increased conflicts between the Iraqi people. It’s not just elements from outside, like al Qaeda, but it’s spread through the whole of Iraqi society . . .” Edwar frowned and shook her head. “It was a big mistake for Americans to support religious parties, like Maliki’s Dawa. There was an opportunity to break this kind of rule in 2003, but I believe there was always an intention to keep Iraq weak, make Iraq a weak state, so there’s no chance for solid change for development, no chance for real democracy. I can say now, after ten years, that we are not living in a state. We are living in a non-state. There is no rule of law, no real institutions, impunity for the militias, rule of tribes and religions over the rule of law, and pervasive corruption. This was another thing the Americans did—the American money lost in Iraq, still missing, and where did it go?”
What I’d seen myself seemed to bear out her judgment. Things were better now in Baghdad than they had been in 2004, economically, but the lack of political stability was heartbreaking. In 2004, Iraq was nearly at its nadir. It had suffered under ten years of American sanctions and sporadic bombing that had crippled its economy, caused the deaths of tens of thousands of infants, led to starvation and malnutrition for millions of children, and given birth to a violent criminal underclass of gangsters and black-market smugglers. Then Iraq had been hit by a “shock and awe” bombing campaign designed to demolish critical dual-use infrastructure like the electrical grid, water treatment systems, and communications networks. The invasion that followed the bombing was relative
ly restrained, compared to what it could have been, but the peace that followed the invasion was more destructive and violent than anyone could have imagined. Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army, sending four hundred thousand armed men out onto the streets, while General Tommy Franks ordered American soldiers to stay on their bases and ignore the looting and chaos that swept the country like wildfire.
My first weeks in Iraq were spent at an old ammo depot tucked away on farmland between the airport and the village of Abu Ghraib. Every night the skies sang with fire and the stars were laced with gleaming streaks of magnesium scarlet and barium green. Explosions lit the horizon in dull mahogany flashes. We huddled behind the wire, protecting the thousands of Iraqi Army artillery rounds, rockets, and grenades cached in the bunkers at our depot, watching for thieves, shooting wild dogs, and staging gladiatorial battles between scorpions and camel spiders. I had thought then that the storm of violence blowing around our tiny, beleaguered island was the natural aftereffect of war. In fact, as I learned later, the catastrophe that destroyed Iraqi civil society was an effect of American policy, a policy consonant with American practices in the Middle East and elsewhere: a political and cultural adaptation of radical economic liberalization (Milton Friedman’s “shock policy”).
When I left Iraq in 2004, things had calmed slightly from the postinvasion chaos, but it would have been difficult to say things had improved. Fallujah had become a battleground, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi was in open revolt, and the electricity was still on for only a few hours a day. The streets were lined with garbage and flooded with raw sewage. The American military controlled its bases and its transportation routes, but little else. Meanwhile, as Iraqis turned to neighborhood religious authorities for security and gangs took to the streets, the sectarian conflict that would explode into civil war with the Samarra mosque bombing of 2006 was already simmering. I was happy to get out. I never expected to go back.
