“He’s the only one,” said an American in a blue suit, hovering around the conversation. He was David L. Phillips, an official from the Council on Foreign Relations, who had consulted with the State Department on the Future of Iraq Project. “The report is not a political document—it’s not a blueprint. If it becomes one, it will be divisive.” Phillips sharply criticized Makiya for hijacking the writing of the report and then lobbying so hard for its provisions. The ideas were too lofty, too far ahead of their time, to stand a chance of being realized soon. “Iraqis aren’t quite ready for the new politics. The tribal structures, the ethnic groupings—they matter to Iraqis. They’re important. This isn’t a Brandeis laboratory.”
The London conference ended with expressions of unity and support for that vague thing called democracy in Iraq. But no provisional government was formed, and the report of the Democratic Principles Working Group, printed and distributed, with hundreds of pages of appendixes and dissents, was never officially discussed. Back in Washington, officials thanked the group for its advice and shelved the report that the State Department had solicited. Makiya had called their bluff, and now they were calling his.
The movement toward war kept rolling forward, with or without democratic principles. Makiya had antagonized a sizable part of the Iraqi opposition, but he still had strong backers in Washington. On January 10, 2003, Makiya, Rend Rahim, and a doctor from a prominent Sunni family in Tikrit named Hatem Mukhlis were ushered into the Oval Office for a meeting with the president, Cheney, Rice, and Khalilzad. Bush asked them for their personal stories, but the exiles also spent a good portion of the time explaining to Bush that there were two kinds of Arabs in Iraq, Sunnis and Shia. The very notion of an Iraqi opposition appeared to be new to him. Bush struck Mukhlis as unfocused on the key policy questions of the future of the Iraqi army, debaathification, and an interim government. “But we saw in his eyes that we were going to war.” Cheney kept his thoughts to himself; he seemed on edge. It was clear that the administration still hadn’t settled on a postwar plan.
Makiya tried to push one into existence. With Rahim, he urged the president to announce a provisional government of Iraqi exiles before the war. “The Iraqis on the inside have been brainwashed,” he said, “and a government in exile would be prepared to take over when there’s change.” Makiya told the president that his actions would transform the image of America in the Arab world, that war could be a force for progress, for democracy. “People will greet the troops with sweets and flowers,” he said.
Mukhlis agreed, but he added, “If you don’t win their hearts at the start, if they don’t get benefits, after two months you could see Mogadishu in Baghdad.” Mukhlis gave the president other warnings: A government of exiles would not be accepted by Iraqis inside the country, and dissolving the Iraqi army would change the complexion of American forces there, from the liberators Bush said he intended them to be into occupiers. Bush asked whether Iraqis hated Israelis, and again Makiya and Mukhlis, who had been schoolmates at Baghdad’s elite Jesuit high school in the mid-1960s, gave contradictory views: Makiya said that Iraqis were too focused on their own oppression; Mukhlis insisted that they were brought up and educated in school to be anti-Zionists. Makiya and Mukhlis also disagreed about the nature of Iraqi society. It was still strongly tribal, Mukhlis said; Makiya argued that over the past fifty or seventy-five years Iraqis had become engineers, doctors, capable citizens of a modern state. No one in the room pursued the obvious contradiction between this optimism and Makiya’s vision of a nation of the brainwashed.
Both Iraqis left the meeting convinced that Bush saw things as they did. “I thought Bush understood where I was coming from,” Mukhlis later said. “At that time I was absolutely certain Iraq was going to be paradise.”
Makiya emerged from the White House and declared himself “deeply reassured” by the president’s dedication to Iraqi democracy.
Two months later, in mid-March, Vice President Cheney appeared on Meet the Press and told the country that American troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq.
“If your analysis is not correct,” Tim Russert pressed him, “and we’re not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?”
Cheney wasn’t worried. “Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim,” the vice president said in his low-key, soothing way, “because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya, who’s a professor at Brandeis but an Iraqi, he’s written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.”
Upon hearing these words, Feisal Istrabadi, the Chicago lawyer, felt his heart sink. “I knew nobody who spent four decades in exile knew what was going on in Iraq. I didn’t and Kanan didn’t. The only difference was I was a hell of a lot more cautious. He always made promises he knew he could not keep.” Makiya knew that “sweets and flowers” were unlikely to be the response, Istrabadi said. “But he also knew Bush didn’t know any better. He wanted Bush to go in. We all did.”
About one thing Cheney was right: Makiya had written great books on the subject. In Republic of Fear and Cruelty and Silence he had stared unflinchingly at totalitarian Iraq and the consequences of Baathist terror, the human wreckage it produced, the sight and smell of it. After the Gulf War, when he and other dissidents drafted Charter 91 outlining principles of tolerance for a new Iraq, Makiya received a severe letter from an old friend that he was honest and brave enough to reprint in Cruelty and Silence: “I think—and please allow me to tell you this—that the ideas of the Charter issue from an ivory tower which has elevated itself so high up into the sky that we who are standing down below can hardly see or hear where they are coming from. You see, our society today has become like 1984. There is no one who remembers or who even dares to remember the meaning of words like ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘brotherhood,’ or ‘humanity.’ They no longer know what ‘human rights’ are. I mean, what does this have to do with them!… Their only preoccupation is to survive and to live, like sheep.”
Makiya knew all this, and when, in late January, he crossed the snowy mountains along the border between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan with a small group that included Ahmad Chalabi, and met old comrades in the Kurdish town of Salahuddin, and a man he didn’t know threatened his life one night over a perceived slight, Makiya sent an e-mail to a few friends describing the incident. “This is the human raw material that you want to build democracy for,” he wrote. “Every day in the last five weeks of my travels I have come across such damaged and wounded people, people who breathe nationalism, sectarianism, without knowing that they are doing so, and people who are deeply chauvinistic and suspicious toward their fellow Iraqis. These are the facts of life for the next generation in this poor, unhappy and ravaged land. Don’t even think of coming back to it after liberation if you are not prepared to deal with such facts.”
Reading these words, I was reminded of the voice that I first heard before I ever met Makiya—the fearless voice of his books. As a writer, Makiya knew what Iraq had become. But now he was also playing a central part in a great historical drama, an event on such a vast and audacious scale that no one could imagine the full extent of the consequences. He had become a politician, and he wrote in his e-mail from Kurdistan, “Politics is the harshest judge in the world that there is, infinitely harsher than the God of the Old Testament or the Allah of the
Quran.” What he had been able only to dream about throughout his life was suddenly within reach. There would be no second chance, and his own future was uncertain, for Makiya had been diagnosed with the same form of leukemia that killed Edward Said. So he made himself forget what he knew long enough to say a few words to the president of the United States that will some day feature prominently in his obituary.
The sound of the first bombs falling on Baghdad was, to Makiya, a joyful noise. Three weeks later, on April 9, he sat with the president in the White House and watched the statue of Saddam Hussein fall to the ground in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, and he wept.
And after that, the trouble began.
4
SPECIAL PLANS
IN THE SUMMER of 2003, a young American from Rochester, New York, named Andrew P. N. Erdmann was working for the Coalition Provisional Authority in an office on the second floor of the Republican Palace, on the west bank of the Tigris River in central Baghdad. The sign on the office door said “Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.” Erdmann, a thirty-six-year-old State Department employee with a doctorate in history from Harvard, was the Iraqi ministry’s senior adviser—in effect, the acting minister.
Drew Erdmann was a rangy, broad-shouldered former rower with a strong chin, short sandy hair, and a bushy mustache, which (until it disappeared at some point over the summer) turned his face into a British colonial official’s circa 1925. He was getting just a few hours of sleep a night, in a cramped shared trailer on the grounds behind the palace. When he woke up every morning before six, without an alarm, Erdmann’s first thought was: Saigon—shit. His roommate, an Englishman named Philip, would say, “How are you doing this morning, Dr. Erdmann?” And Erdmann would reply, “Another day in paradise.” The anxiety of all that needed to be done in the day ahead was already racing through him.
When I met him in mid-July, Erdmann was still seething from a meeting earlier that day in which he had tried not to humiliate a university president who asked what “operating budget” meant in the middle of the fifth or sixth discussion of the subject. Two weeks before, a twenty-two-year-old soldier from Erdmann’s security detail, Specialist Jeffrey Wershow, had been shot in the head at point-blank range on the campus of Baghdad University while waiting for him to come out of another meeting. Erdmann had helped evacuate the dying soldier.
Erdmann’s features and oarsman’s physique, together with the double-barreled middle initials, prepared me for a terse, anglophilic bureaucrat. Instead, lying on his cot in the trailer and fiddling with a Swiss army knife, feet propped on an army duffel bag, his desk littered with water bottles and empty packets of Meals Ready to Eat and unread books on the Middle East, Erdmann brooded. He spoke in long reflective sentences that were frequently interrupted by second thoughts and qualifications, then settled into a faster, more explosive rhythm when recounting something that angered or amused him. By his own account he was short-tempered and close to nervous exhaustion.
The ministry that was his responsibility, like almost every other government building, had been looted down to the wiring and pipes; even the urinals had been unbolted from the bathroom walls. The top ministry officials, along with the presidents of Iraq’s universities, were all prominent Baath Party members and had been sacked; one of them, the notorious president of Baghdad University and a doctor, was soon afterward shot dead in his office while writing a prescription. University classrooms and libraries across the city and across the country were trashed and plundered, thousands of books and computers stolen, windows lifted from window frames, desks left lying in twisted heaps amid the dust and broken glass. Erdmann was trying to see the interrupted academic year to its close, and students were sitting for exams in ovenlike classrooms without air conditioners, fans, or steady electric light.
The Iraqi state had collapsed, and there was nothing to take its place.
I wanted to know how the study of history had prepared Drew Erdmann for the job that he was trying to do in Baghdad. What were the historical analogies that he was carrying in his head? The British in colonial Iraq? The Americans in occupied Germany? Erdmann flashed a self-mocking grin. “I’m a historical cipher. I can’t think historically,” he said. “There’ve been times when I don’t even know what I did forty-eight hours before. I try—it’s like a test for myself. Can I remember what I did the day before? I eventually can, but it takes effort. But I think that’s not a good situation. You should be able to remember what you did in the last twenty-four hours.”
One of Erdmann’s favorite books, which he was trying to find time to reread in Baghdad, was the French historian Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, a firsthand account of the French collapse before the Nazi blitzkrieg in the spring of 1940. Bloch served in the French army in both world wars and then joined the resistance before his capture, torture, and execution by the Nazis. In talking about his own work in Iraq, more than once Erdmann cited a passage from Strange Defeat that was marked in his old paperback copy. “The ABC of our profession,” Bloch wrote, “is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings.”
The deadly chaos that followed the American invasion of Iraq is a story of abstract terms and concrete realities. Between them lies a distance even greater than the eight thousand miles from Washington to Baghdad, yet the ideas of the war’s architects produced consequences as tangible as gutted offices and homemade bombs. Those consequences must be understood above all in the lives of human beings, Iraqis and Americans, thrown together by the fierce history of a war.
* * *
BEFORE GOING TO IRAQ, Drew Erdmann had done a lot of relevant historical thinking. The quotation from Strange Defeat served as the epigraph of his Harvard dissertation, which was titled “Americans’ Search for ‘Victory’ in the Twentieth Century.” It examined the way the concept of securing political ends by military means changed over the course of the century in the minds of Americans. The gap between military and political in the transition from war to peace was a recurring problem throughout the century, and bridging it became the object of increasingly self-conscious effort. The creation of institutions like the Army War College, the National Security Council, and the State Department’s policy planning staff showed that, at high levels of government and the military, there was a growing realization that the aftermath of war is a complex process and just as crucial to ultimate victory as battlefield success. “The language that we live with today of ‘exit strategy,’” Erdmann said, “which is already cliché, the focus on the ‘end game,’ another cliché—that’s recent, and that’s part of this historical evolution.”
His thesis ended with the reaction against Vietnam and the rise of the Powell Doctrine of “decisive force.” But this latest concept, Erdmann wrote, is not a once-and-for-all solution to the problem of achieving victory any more than the twentieth century’s earlier concepts had been (as interventions in the Balkans showed even as he was writing). The learning process throughout the century was fitful and halting. He wrote, “Americans—leaders and citizens alike—have thus been usually ill-equipped to conceive of the ramifications of the use of force when the next crisis arrives, as it surely does in this tragic world.”
The thesis was exploratory and inconclusive; it showed a keen interest in the models and values that shaped Americans’ thinking about war and peace. It was not the kind of dissertation written to land a job. Erdmann always called it “a failure.”
He received his PhD in 2000 and promptly abandoned an academic career. His interests were out of favor in the field. And there was something self-punishing and obsessive in his character. A life spent analyzing military history would be insufficient; he was the sort of academic who had to know how he would do under fire. In his copy of Strange Defeat there was another marked passage to which he drew my attention: “The real trouble with us professors was that we were absorbed in our day-to-day tasks. Most of us can say with some justice that we we
re good workmen. Is it equally true to say that we were good citizens?”
In early 2001, Erdmann was about to fly to Kosovo and take the first job he could find—“Anything. Load bags of grain. That’s how far away I wanted to get from academia”—when a call came from Richard N. Haass, who had just been named director of policy planning at the State Department by Colin Powell. Haass had once taught with Erdmann’s thesis adviser, Ernest May, and Erdmann’s name had been passed along by Philip Zelikow, the University of Virginia professor who had been Rice’s colleague in the first Bush presidency. By June, Erdmann was in Washington, working in an office he had already researched extensively for his thesis. At Harvard he had been an Eisenhower specialist, and he entered government in the old-fashioned spirit of a political independent. “This is a little too grandiose,” he said, “but there is a previous tradition in foreign-policy circles of being more nonpartisan, serving the national interest.”
On September 11, 2001, Erdmann was in his office at the State Department writing a draft of a policy document on America’s role in the world, and in fact was in the middle of a sentence on the threat of terrorism, when the phone rang: It was his wife, with the news of the World Trade Center attacks. The effect on Erdmann’s life was dramatic—not just in the greatly raised stakes and intensity of doing government work (he was assigned the counterterrorism portfolio at policy planning), but in his sense that what he was doing could make a difference. “It confirmed the wisdom of my decision to leave the world of academia.”
In the summer of 2002, when war with Iraq became the administration’s unannounced policy, Haass directed Erdmann to write an analysis of postwar reconstructions in the twentieth century. In fifteen single-spaced, classified pages—epic length for a State Department memo—Erdmann applied the ideas in his dissertation to a series of case studies from the two world wars through more recent conflicts such as Bosnia and Kosovo. One of his fundamental conclusions was that long-term success depended on international support. In the short run, he explained when we met in Baghdad, “the foundation of everything is security,” which partly depended on having sufficient numbers of troops. “That was the concern of the project, and my concern—were we prepared to do what it took in the postwar phase? Not exactly rocket science.”
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