We're Doomed. Now What?

by Roy Scranton

  It took about a year before other feelings started filtering in, other memories. As time went on, my memories grew richer and more ambivalent. I remembered standing on the roof of a building at Camp Dragoon in Baladiyat, watching the sun go down a purple sky over Sadr City. I remembered watching people go to ice shops on the street as though there wasn’t a war on, envying their vulnerable freedom. I remembered my first Rani peach drink, ice cold, bought at a stand by the side of the road after I’d convinced my commander it was safe to stop. I remembered the water buffalo we passed every day on the way from Baghdad Ammo Depot West to the airport. I remembered the Iraqi who ran the coffee shop at FOB Falcon, who brought his daughters in and let them talk to us. I remembered the local girls who did our laundry there, and how I heard they were murdered just after we left. I remembered two Iraqi boys I took a picture of in Dora, both of them in ridiculous pink pants, and I remembered wondering what their lives would be like. I remembered Waleed, the Facility Protection Services cop who pulled gate guard with us, who taught me and RonRon how to curse in Arabic. I remembered the thrill of danger and how it made me feel alive. I remembered something sweet in the evening air over the Tigris, as the muezzin called out across the city.

  And as Duraid downshifted and cut past an SUV back onto Jadriya Street, slamming my body against the door, I remembered hitting a hundred and twenty on the highway back to Austin from New Orleans, feeling something shudder and crack inside as one cycle came around to its end and another began, and I remembered swerving through traffic at the head of a convoy, ten years before, feeling my Humvee slide and grind under my fingers, my foot slipping gas-brake-gas.

  6.

  Leaving, it turned out, wasn’t as simple as all that. The past doesn’t fall away but lives on in your flesh, in your habits, in the synaptic weave that makes consciousness out of electrical pulses and meat. I left Iraq in 2004 and the army in 2006, but I found over time that neither one had left me. My year in Iraq made me who I became after, as did my four years in the army, no matter how I felt about it. In the same way, America’s eight-year-long occupation there has shaped what America is, whether we want to remember those years or not. Shock and Awe, WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, abandoned soccer fields, Fallujah, Tal Afar, Karbala, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the Jaish al-Mahdi, the Green Zone, Sadr City, Sahwah, the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, the Samarra mosque, al Qaeda in Iraq, and the millions of lives we uprooted, left unguarded, destroyed, and abandoned are all a part of us now. We made them part of America, American identity and American history—Iraq has become flesh of our flesh, Baghdad blood of our blood. We can pretend to forget, try to rub out the image in the mirror, but we can’t change what we’ve done.

  When I was in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004, most of the students I talked to in 2014 would have been teenagers. I was an American soldier then, distant and wary, separated from the world I lived in by armor, power, ignorance, and fear. They were hadji kids, worried about school and clothes and the future. Worried about getting enough to eat, not getting blown up, not getting shot by nervous Americans.

  I left, they stayed. Over the next ten years, I finished my time in the army, went back to college, then went on to Princeton. I got married and got divorced. I wrote and published and thought a lot about what it means to be a veteran. I went hiking in western Ireland, the south of France, and New Hampshire. Meanwhile, those kids in Baghdad struggled to finish high school in the midst of a civil war. They saw friends and family members murdered and blown up. Some just disappeared. The American surge came and went, stabilizing things for a couple of years, and then the Americans left, taking that stability with them. Meanwhile, Rania, Huda, Osama, Maysoun, and their classmates hid from militias, bandaged wounds, took pleasure where they could, and tried to imagine a life that might be livable.

  They stayed, I left. But while I may have left Iraq, Iraq hadn’t left me. Baghdad might have been hell, and it might still be hell today, but it wasn’t a hell I’d visited and escaped. It was a hell I had helped create.

  The layers write over each other without erasing what came before but changing it, changing me. All the places I’d been in Baghdad, the psychogeography of FOBs and patrols that had loomed so large for me for so long, diminished in the symbolic scale of my past but took on an existential weight they’d never had before. I went back to FOB Falcon and Camp Dragoon, now Federal Police bases, and found a strange continuity in the up-armored American Humvees guarding the entrances, although they bore the Iraqi flag. I had Ahmed and Aziz take me through the streets of Dora where I’d once driven patrols, which then had been open and full of people. Today, the neighborhoods were a maze of concrete barriers, segregated from the rest of the city by fifteen-foot-high blast walls and military checkpoints. The streets were in better repair; there wasn’t as much raw sewage spilling out over the curbs, and the shops seemed renovated, with shiny new signs. Bollards lined the sidewalks of the main commercial avenue, to protect against car bombs. But the streets were almost empty. It felt like a ghost town.

  Finally, I went looking for Baghdad Ammo Depot West, “Camp Shithole,” the munitions cache between the airport and Abu Ghraib where my unit spent the first six weeks of our tour. We were really “in the field” then, with no running water, no electricity, burning our shit in giant metal tubs, showering with canteens, and eating T-rats (tray rations) delivered twice a day from BIAP. I slept in the open, wrapped in a mosquito net on a cot next to my Humvee, and several mornings woke to wild dogs licking the sweat off my toes. Camp Shithole seemed like the absolute boonies, though in fact we were just a few miles from the city.

  Ahmed drove us down the highway to Fallujah, off which a road led that would, I hoped, bring us to the remains of Camp Shithole. As we passed the outskirts of Baghdad, the checkpoints got bigger, more serious, and more frequent. To our south, what had been Camp Victory, the largest US installation in Iraq, now an Iraqi army base, sprawled behind massive concrete barriers. Traffic congestion worsened at the checkpoints, and the farther we got from Baghdad, the more the road filled with beat-up old vans and rattling junkers. When we got into Abu Ghraib, traffic stopped.

  This was familiar territory, even ten years later: streams of poor, rural Iraqis with Dorothea Lange dustbowl faces, women in full black abayas, squat stucco buildings with rusty signs. Broiling heat and stalled traffic. Men in vans staring at me in wonder and hostility. The difference was that I didn’t have a rifle, a helmet, a machine gunner on overwatch, or three trucks behind me full of bros. It was me and Aziz and Ahmed in a Kia. I didn’t even have a hat.

  “Do you have a hat?” I asked Ahmed.

  “Yeah, sure, I have everything.” He opened the center compartment and pulled out a baseball cap and some Wiley X shades. I put the ballcap on, thinking it might hide my hair and face.

  “Does this make me look less American?”

  “More.”

  I took off the hat, and Ahmed offered me a cigarette. “Here. Have a cigarette. Smoke and think. Maybe it will be your last.”

  “Is it dangerous here?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” Aziz said. “Very dangerous. There is a lot of fighting out here between Daesh and the army.”

  I accepted Ahmed’s cigarette, and then another, and another, as we slowly rolled through the traffic jam, then made a U-turn to get on the south side of the highway. We came back through more traffic and eventually turned off into the town of Abu Ghraib, rolling down a dirt road past hovels and shacks. We were stopped at a small checkpoint, where Aziz told the soldiers that I was a journalist and we were looking for flooding. The soldiers told us there wasn’t any flooding around here and the road went nowhere, but they let us go see for ourselves.

  It turned out they were right. What had been Baghdad Ammo Depot West was now nothing but hills of garbage. The road that once would have taken us right into the heart of the camp dead-ended in a mound of trash and dirt. This was probably a good thing, all told
, given the likelihood of unexploded munitions lying around, but nonetheless I couldn’t help feeling that the place’s fate was too ironic. What we had called Camp Shithole was now, literally, a shithole. As a symbol for the American occupation, it was stupidly perfect. I got out and took some pictures. A wild dog lay panting in the sun. Then I got in Ahmed’s Kia, and we drove back into the city.

  I’d seen what I’d come to see, now I was leaving. Duraid whipped the Charger around a corner and drove back behind the Coral Boutique Hotel, dropping us off at the Internews House. The night was buzzy and smooth. Ayman said goodbye to his friends, and we headed in for more vodka. Somehow, Borzou and I got into an argument about America’s role in fomenting the sectarian violence in Iraq. “You have to remember, these are old problems,” he told me. “The US didn’t create the Shia-Sunni split. But it’s not even that. It’s all these countries that had once been part of the Ottoman Empire, and then when that comes apart, people fight. Think about it: of all the countries that came out of the Ottoman Empire, did any one of them not have some kind of awful violence?”

  I tried Turkey, but Borzou brought up the Armenian genocide. I couldn’t remember whether the Armenian genocide had happened before or after 1920 (it happened in 1915, it turns out—one of the last acts of the Ottoman Empire, though the Republic of Turkey has persistently denied that it ever occurred), but I could see his point, for which Yugoslavia was the prime contemporary example, that pre-existing ethnic or sectarian differences were, historically, inflamed and exacerbated by political instability. “Okay,” I said, “that’s true, but the US could have done things differently. It should have done things differently. If you invade a country and change the rulers, that’s your responsibility.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “You break it, you buy it. But they were totally ignorant of what they were getting into. And anyway, what could they have done differently?”

  “They could have not started the government on a quota system. They could have not backed sectarian leaders like Maliki. They could have not dumped money into the militias. But more basically, they could have not disbanded the army and de-Baathified the government. They basically destroyed what civil institutions there were and left a vacuum that all but invited sectarian violence, which they then fostered by supporting a Shiite government.”

  “I was here then and I don’t remember any quota system.”

  “No, you know, they divided it up so many seats to Shiites and so many seats to Sunnis, a seat for the Christians, and so on.”

  “Well, sure, but what are they supposed to do? Not give minorities representation?”

  “No. But don’t found the political process on sectarian identity. Let people form parties around issues and groups that aren’t based in religious or ethnic identity. Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, whatever. Don’t start with racial or sectarian politics.”

  “I’m looking at the people on the IGC, and there were some secular Sunnis, and a religious Sunni, and a couple secular Shia, there’s Chalabi, and, sure, yeah, some religious Shia. But look, the people you’re talking about had helped the US in the invasion. Some of those Shia fought alongside the US army and helped win the war. What were they supposed to do? You have to take care of the people that helped you.”

  “They could have been bracketed. I just don’t think putting people with a grudge in power is the best way to form a stable postwar government.”

  “That’s true, but I’m saying you should be careful about claiming that the US started the sectarianism.”

  “No, you’re right. It was already there. But our policies and our attitudes fed it and helped it grow. And I can’t help but think it was intentional.”

  “That’s conspiracy talk. Look, the US just didn’t know what it was doing, especially at first. They didn’t have any real Middle East experts on the ground; the military didn’t know what it was doing, and they didn’t have a plan.”

  “Yeah, I don’t buy that anymore. I think ‘no plan’ was the plan. The US had experts, knowledgeable people on the Middle East, and they got sidelined. What’s more, we came in deciding that the Sunnis were the enemy and the Shia were the good guys. We came in with a sectarian agenda.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “Man, I remember when we got here in May 2003. We knew fuck-all about Iraq, except ‘Kif, oguf,’ and that the Sunnis were the bad guys and the Shia were the oppressed underdogs. You look at Fallujah, we killed seventeen people there in May that year, protestors, for nothing. All up until the surge, even during the worst insurgency, Sunni tribal leaders kept reaching out to the Americans to work with them, trying to get into the political process, and every time General Casey was like, ‘Fuck those guys.’”

  “Casey was an asshole. So was Abizaid.”

  “Yeah, sure, but the point is, we had decided, going in, that Iraq was divided into Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds, and that the Sunnis and Shias hated each other, and that we were going to support the Shia. Then that’s what we did. We knew that the Shiite militias were working with the Iraqi police and government as early as 2005, sending out death squads and torturing people, and the policy was to not do a damn thing about it. We trained them, even. And then we put Maliki in power. And that was all by accident?”

  “What do you mean we?”

  “I mean commanding generals and policy makers in Iraq. And now, that policy has resulted in a weakened, divided Iraq that can’t build an effective, independent national politics, but is still pumping out oil. That seems to fit the needs of the US government very well. I have a hard time believing it wasn’t intentional.”

  “I’m telling you, I was here then. I was talking to generals and to people at the CPA. Nobody knew what the hell they were doing. It was just a complete mess.”

  “I know. I was here too, for part of it, and what I saw was a total goatfuck. But I can’t believe the ‘innocent American’ story anymore. The US has too much involved, too much power, too much money, and too deep a history in the Middle East to not have a very good idea, at the upper levels, of precisely what the fuck it’s doing. I just can’t believe in the fairy tale of innocent, fumbling Americans anymore. If we made a mess, it’s because we wanted a mess.”

  In January, when I agreed to the assignment from Rolling Stone to go back to Iraq, I took it upon myself to try to understand why we’d lost the war. Beginning from the premise that mistakes were made, I found mistakes: trying to completely reinvent an entire society, ruling by sectarian division, a shallow commitment to nation building, no coherent or well-articulated plan, a high turnover rate for both units and commanders, a consistent inability to adapt to changing circumstances, persistent support for Maliki from 2006 onward, and the general incompetence of the US Army and its leadership all seemed like persuasive reasons for American failure. As I read more deeply in US policy in the Middle East and Iraq, though, it became increasingly difficult to accept my initial premise that American actions in Iraq should be understood as a series of mistakes. Instead, it became impossible not to see the Iraq War as part of a consistent pattern of imperialist manipulation aimed at preventing national independence, populist self-determination, and regional stability. That pattern included our intimate involvement with repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran, CIA support for Iraq’s Baathist coup in 1963, our work fomenting and sustaining al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s, our backing Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran (including tacit support for his use of chemical weapons), our unscrupulous history of selling arms to competing and sometimes warring nations (including, from the 1950s to the present, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, and Syrian rebels), and our long-term collusion, going back to the early years of the twentieth century, with the efforts of oil companies to weaken nationalist democracies, foster ethnic, sectarian, and religious conflict, and undermine labor organizing
and social reform.

  To what end? Most simply, to keep Iraq from becoming a powerful, independent regional player. Since Iraq sits on the world’s fifth-largest proven reserves of oil, including the second-largest single known oil field on the planet, and sits uncomfortably between the American-supported fundamentalist Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the independent, American-resistant Shiia Republic of Iran, the US simply can’t afford to let Iraq go its own way. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, though, the US lacks the regional and cultural power to ensure the allegiance of an independent Iraq, and it lacks popular support for the kind of long-term occupation and reconstruction that would be needed to create a stable, Americanized ally, such as what happened with Germany and South Korea. I say “unfortunately” because, with US interests in the region at stake but US options for exercising its power limited, the most sensible choice is to keep Iraq weak and bleeding. The best ways to do that are by promoting sectarian and ethnic conflict, supporting Sunni extremists through Saudi Arabia and the UAE, supporting Shia extremists through the Iraqi military, obstructing any efforts toward stability and peace, and flooding the region with weapons.

  Just because this happens to perfectly describe American policy in the region since 2003, however, doesn’t prove that’s what the US intended. There’s much to be said for the narrative that describes a fumbling but well-intentioned America. It’s a familiar story, after all: We meant to do well. We really meant to spread democracy and peace and freedom. We just fucked up because we’re so ignorant of other cultures and so committed to American exceptionalism. It was just imperial overstretch. Sorry! Our bad! While US diplomats and oil company agents had been working intimately with locals in the Middle East for more than a century, it was good old arrogant stupidity, personified by Donald Rumsfeld, that sidelined all that institutional knowledge and just made a big doody-poo. Who could have known? If it so happens that the bloody conflict and immense human suffering we “accidentally” caused when we opened the lid on “ancient sectarian quarrels” serves American political and corporate interests, well, gee whiz, that doesn’t mean we meant things to go that way.