The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  The conversation lasted forty-five minutes, with Cheney and Rice sitting in for the second half, and yet the president did not take the chance to ask Garner what it was really like in Iraq, to find out what problems lay ahead in the weeks and months to come. When Garner had come back from northern Iraq in 1991, after Operation Provide Comfort, he had answered questions for four or five days. This time, no one—neither Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, nor Rice—seemed to give a damn what he had to say.

  “You want to do Iran for the next one?” the president joshed as the meeting came to an end.

  “No, sir, me and the boys are holding out for Cuba.”

  Bush laughed and promised Garner and the boys Cuba. And that was it: Garner shook hands with the president, then with the vice president, who had said nothing the whole time, and he caught Cheney’s wicked little smile on his way out. Garner left with the impression that Bush knew only what Cheney let into his office. It was early June 2003, and anyone listening to the conversation between the officials who had greatest responsibility for Iraq could only conclude that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a triumph.

  In Baghdad, ORHA was dissolved into the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Bremer, with the status of a presidential envoy, the legal imprimatur of a UN Security Council resolution, and the command authority that Garner never had, let it be known that he was in control. The Iraqi army was promptly abolished, all members of the top four levels of the Baath Party were expelled from government service, Chalabi’s militia was disarmed, and the formation of an interim government was stopped cold. There was even talk of shooting looters, though it didn’t happen. The Pentagon extended indefinitely the deployment of battle-weary divisions. What had been conceived as a swift liberation became a prolonged occupation.

  * * *

  LOOKING BACK, Drew Erdmann was impatient with any facile condemnation of the planning. Citing his hero Marc Bloch, he insisted on the actual circumstances in which the planners had to work. When I mentioned a four-hundred-page manual that the U.S. military produced for the occupation of Germany, he shot back that, given the available lead time, a fairer comparison with Iraq would be the wartime occupation of French North Africa, which was so beset with problems that it nearly cost General Eisenhower his job. In the case of Iraq, any planning at all was a delicate matter: The administration had to prepare for the effects of a war it was still claiming it wanted to avoid. “How much diplomacy would there have been at the UN if people had said, ‘The president is pulling people out of the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce to take over the whole Iraqi state’? That’s the political logic that works against advance planning.”

  But the administration’s failures in the weeks following the fall of Baghdad, which set Iraq’s course after Saddam and continue to haunt the American effort today, were not entirely the result of constraints and mistakes. In a sense they were deliberate. If there was never a coherent postwar plan, it was because the people in Washington who mattered never intended to stay in Iraq. “Rummy and Wolfowitz and Feith did not believe the U.S. would need to run postconflict Iraq,” said a Defense Department official. “Their plan was to turn it over to these exiles very quickly and let them deal with the messes that came up. Garner was a fall guy for a bad strategy. He was doing exactly what Rummy wanted him to do. It was the strategy that failed.”

  The chief beneficiaries of the failed strategy were those Iraqis who had no interest in allowing a new society, under American guidance, to emerge from the ruins of Saddam’s Iraq. Seemingly defeated, they were already beginning to regroup. An Army major named Isaiah Wilson III, a historian of Operation Iraqi Freedom in a study group formed by General Shinseki, later wrote in an unpublished paper that when Army commanders realized in late May that they would have to stay on in Iraq and looked around for a postwar plan, the response “was silence. There was no Phase-IV plan.” General Franks, the man responsible for this failure, went on leave in May and retired over the summer to go on the lecture circuit, write his memoirs, and collect a Presidential Medal of Freedom, leaving behind the tens of thousands of soldiers he had led into Iraq to continue fighting a war that was far from won. Major Wilson’s paper went on, “In the two-to-three months of ambiguous transition, U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative they had gained over an off-balanced enemy. During this calm before the next storm, the U.S. Army had had its eyes turned toward the ports, while Former Regime Loyalists (FRL) and budding insurgents had their eyes turned toward the people. The United States, its Army, and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since.”

  And yet the faith of the authors in their own strategy remained unshakable. In the fall of 2003, Dick Cheney approached his longtime colleague Colin Powell, stuck a finger in his chest, and said, “If you hadn’t opposed the INC and Chalabi, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” But Cheney didn’t believe that the postwar planning would matter in the end, anyway. Like the president, Cheney maintained an almost mystical confidence in American military power and an utter incuriosity about the details of its human consequences. “He thought Bush had figured out how to focus on what was essential and important, where to spend his time,” Bob Woodward wrote in his book Plan of Attack. “The president didn’t waste time on trivia. Over the nearly 16 months leading up to war, he had zeroed in on the military plan.”

  As for the postwar plan, there was no need to worry. The president had already been told what he wanted to hear—by his vice president and national security adviser, by his secretary of defense and his secretary’s deputies, by Kanan Makiya and other exiles, by his ardent supporters in the think tanks and the press, by his own faith in the universal human desire for freedom. And so the American people never had a chance to consider the real difficulties and costs of regime change in Iraq.

  5

  PSYCHOLOGICAL DEMOLITION

  AMONG THE LOOTERS who followed on the heels of the Americans, some broke open the locked gates of the al-Rashad long-term psychiatric hospital on the eastern edge of Baghdad. Besides stealing the antidepressants and antipsychotics of some previous generation, the antique electroshock boxes, and the sewing machines from occupational therapy, the looters liberated about six hundred of the hospital’s one thousand chronic schizophrenics and other hard-core, burnt-out cases. Wandering out into the terrifying freedom of chaotic Baghdad, some of the patients were raped and a few were killed. Two hundred or so eventually found their way back or were returned by family members, American soldiers, and the remnants of the Iraqi police. The hospital stood across the road from the barbed wire and perimeter wall of an American military camp, next to a man-made lake in a bleak, half-empty stretch of the city. On the day I visited, the landscape looked grainy and ominous, with windblown dust clouds blocking out the sun.

  Dr. Baher Butti, the hospital’s chief psychiatrist, was a small, balding, nebbishy man of forty-three, with a pinched face and an insignificant mustache. He gave me a tour of the facility and grounds, which had the penal aspect of an insane asylum from a 1940s B movie. The patients swarmed and drew close: gaunt, half-naked men with shaved heads, tapping me on the shoulder, calling in English, “Mister, good morning, how are you, I love you, good-bye”; unveiled women shouting hellos with wild smiles, or sitting immodestly on the floor and smoking, staring into space. The fall of the regime had induced a kind of posttraumatic stress disorder, Dr. Butti said—not just here, but all over the country. It was not a new syndrome for Iraqis. They had been suffering from it for twenty or thirty years. “My own condition has deteriorated,” Dr. Butti confided. “Before, you knew where the danger was and you went in the other direction. Now the danger is all around you.”

  Under the old regime, Dr. Butti had sometimes worked for two or three dollars a month, not unusual for the downwardly mobile middle class in the years of sanctions. He had a wife and two children; he was a Christian by origin but the son of a communist and thoroughly secular. He feared the rising danger of Islamic fundamentalism. Until the arriv
al of the Americans, he had been a Baathist. “No, I did not commit crimes,” he said when I started to tiptoe up to the subject.

  Dr. Butti keenly felt his professional isolation from the modern world and had made it his goal to practice what he knew of the talking cure and group therapy in a country where psychological care wasn’t always distinguishable from the methods of the security police. He felt that, in order to understand the mental situation of Iraqis after decades of tyranny, war, and now occupation, I needed to meet his patients. Several days a week he treated people in crisis at the Ibn Rushd Teaching Psychiatric Hospital, a clean and austere oasis on the east side of the Tigris, in central Baghdad.

  Dr. Butti drove me across the city in his little 1982 Nissan, a battered metal box with leprous rust patches and a cracked windshield. Baghdad was teeming with abused cars and minibuses and orange-and-white taxis years past their expiration date, driven by underweight, fatigued, prematurely gray men who hung out their windows to escape the intolerable heat of the car for the exhaust and noise and barely more tolerable heat of the street.

  In the first room at Ibn Rushd, an old man was lying on his side, moaning to someone named Ahmad that looters were trying to get in. He had been an employee of the Ministry of Agriculture. In the next room—nearly bare, painted green, and badly in need of cleaning, like the first room—a young man was sitting cross-legged on the bed as if waiting for our arrival. He was bearded and handsome, with dilated blue eyes and a polite smile. His name was Ibrahim, and he believed himself to be the prophet of the same name. He had been admitted two days ago after trying to stab his cousin. “My cousin said something that made me feel there was hot water pouring over me,” Ibrahim told me calmly, tracing his finger on the bedsheet. What his cousin had said was that Ibrahim should defend Muslim honor and land by killing Americans. “I should have answered that the Americans won’t take our land, but I didn’t. It’s a false challenge—it’s not only Muslims who know about honor and land, everyone does. The whole world is my land. Not just Iraq. The whole world.”

  Ibrahim’s father, standing next to the bed, said that his son’s deterioration had begun as a teenager during the first Gulf War, when he was left alone at home during allied bombing. In 1996, Ibrahim tried to run against Saddam for president; he made it halfway to the palace before his father caught up with him and saved his life by dragging him home. Ibrahim’s condition had worn out the whole family. Four days before the start of the recent war, his delusions had flared up again and he’d been hospitalized until the fall of Baghdad. Ibrahim believed in one world government, led by the Americans. They had demonstrated their fairness by protecting the Jews, he said, seeming happier the more he talked. They had earned the right to be the world’s policeman and rule with justice. This was a minority view in Iraq; I never heard it outside the Ibn Rushd Teaching Psychiatric Hospital.

  In the general ward, a wary-looking middle-aged man with rotten teeth sat smoking on a bed. He was Nabil Rahim, a Shiite follower of the martyred Ayatollah Mohamed Baqr al-Sadr, the uncle of Moqtada al-Sadr and founder of the Islamist Dawa Party. In 1980, after being forced to watch his sister gang-raped and killed by interrogators, Sadr had nails hammered into his skull. “It’s no use now,” Rahim said, “Mohamed al-Sadr is gone, his knowledge is gone. I want to live, that’s all. I want to live.”

  Wherever he went, Rahim saw people whispering about him—the security police, he believed. “It’s a common delusion here,” Dr. Butti remarked. To make his point, the patient showed me a cigarette burn on his right shoulder. The Americans were less dangerous for him than Saddam’s police, he said, but in the end they were no better, because they had come to steal the oil.

  The line between justifiable paranoia and outright delusion wasn’t easy to draw in Iraq. Dr. Butti himself was having trouble making up his mind about the Americans. In the turbulent weeks following the fall of the regime he didn’t know which way to turn, fearing for his own safety and distrusting equally Iraq’s new political groups and the Americans’ ability to create a decent society. The looting had been a terrible blow to their natural allies in the middle class. Now, people like him were hesitant to stick their necks out. “Is it that we are paralyzed,” he asked, “or that the American administration is paralyzing the situation so they can come up with their own ideas?” Dr. Butti once attended a meeting with occupation officials on the subject of forming local NGOs and concluded that, to get funding, he needed to be a fundamentalist. “I felt miserable, because those people are leading us, are ruling us, but they are just bureaucrats,” he said as we sat in his spartan office at Ibn Rushd. “Bremer sees it as a job, not making history.” Nonetheless, Dr. Butti had sent letters to Bremer and other American officials with ideas about the development of social science in the new Iraq and a vague request to be absolved of his onetime membership in the Baath Party (his rank was too low for him to be officially debaathified). He had received no response.

  With a few old classmates from Baghdad’s Jesuit high school, Dr. Butti was setting up an NGO called the Baghdad Rehabilitation and Development Group. One of its proposals was the construction of the Gilgamesh Center for Creative Thinking. In the prospectus, Dr. Butti wrote with perhaps a bit of self-criticism:

  A great number of Iraqi people are suffering a great deal because of the severed communication with the civilized world, they suffer from lacking the ability to communicate with the others, they have lost the hope in the future, they suspect anything foreign, they are not sufficient in their professional performance, they don’t feel enough responsibility towards the society, they lack the power to experience freedom, they don’t comprehend the correct performance of democracy, they cannot deal with group working … etc. Rebuilding what the war has destroyed is a simple effort if compared with the task of rebuilding the distorted human person.

  The Gilgamesh Center for Creative Thinking would be a place where Iraqis could learn such skills as “logical and rational thinking,” “how to dialogue and discuss with others,” and “secrets of the successful negotiation.” It was hard to think of a better idea for the reconstruction of Iraq, but Dr. Butti was having trouble finding money.

  From Ibn Rushd he drove me to his private club, the once-exclusive and now rather shabby Alwiyah, where we could still get a beer (fundamentalists were firebombing the liquor shops on Saadoon Street), and then on to the home of a classmate from the Jesuit high school. On the way, our conversation kept turning to the past. Dr. Butti had joined the Baath Party, like at least a million other Iraqis, for professional advancement. Yet he believed that its ideology wasn’t wholly mistaken. Dr. Butti was astonished I didn’t know that the two blue lines on the Israeli flag represent the Nile and the Euphrates, the borders of Greater Israel, or that the pyramid and eye on the back of an American dollar bill were Zionist symbols, or that a photograph of an American tank positioned next to the ancient Babylon gate indicated Zionist revenge for the Babylonian captivity. His view was basically that of a communist who quit the party only after Khrushchev denounced Stalin: Until around 1980, he thought, the Baathists had been a force for progress, with some good ideas about the Arab nation. The revolution had simply gone wrong, he said. “Like Animal Farm.”

  I asked about the seventeen Iraqis, thirteen of them Jewish, who had been hanged before hundreds of thousands of people in Liberation Square in 1969, after the Baathist takeover. Wasn’t the revolution rotten from the start?

  “They were spies,” Dr. Butti said, the way he said everything, with a sort of verbal shrug and a pained smile, as if it was an unhappy fact that he could do nothing about. “Any patriotic system would have done the same.”

  The hanging incident filled several pages near the beginning of Republic of Fear. In Makiya’s account, it was as chilling an omen as Kristallnacht. I’d taken it as an article of faith that any Iraqi who welcomed change would agree: This was one of the fixed ideas I had brought with me to Iraq. Yet here was Dr. Baher Butti, an educated professional, fro
m Iraq’s most pro-Western minority, well aware of the psychic damage done by Saddam, hungry for contact with the Americans—still insisting that those thirteen Jews had been spies. We were stopped in traffic, and I glanced over at him. He met my look and the smile flickered under his mustache. I was about to argue, then thought better of it. That Makiya’s version was true didn’t matter. I had been in Iraq about three weeks and had already begun to realize that most of my ideas about the place were going to be of no use.

  * * *

  IRAQ WAS RESTLESS and convulsive, as if liberation had introduced a virus into the organism and a fever was burning through the country. Day and night the background noise was gunfire, and it grew especially intense after the ten o’clock curfew, when no one who cared about his safety went outside. Now and then the walls shook with a grenade or mortar round. The only force of order was the American military, but convoys of Humvees rattled through the city streets at speeds that had more to do with force protection than policing. Guerrilla attacks on soldiers were already occurring at a rate of twenty per day in Baghdad alone.

  When I arrived in mid-July, summer was going full blast. The temperature usually passed 120° by midafternoon, and on some days it reached 130°. Sticking your head out the window of a moving car felt like turning a blow-dryer directly on your own face, or standing behind a jet engine at takeoff. If there was no shade to be found, simply being outside for more than ten minutes in the blinding yellow light made you start to weaken, and if you tried to keep going through the day, a moment came around three o’clock when a wave of woozy inebriation swept over you and you felt that you might faint. Relief came only hours after dark, but even at night the heat was oppressive enough that Iraqi families slept out on their roofs, unless gunfire and helicopter patrols made it too loud or too dangerous. A soldier once said that his deployment in the Iraqi desert was like being in the middle of a loaf of baking bread, thrown this way and that as the dough rose, with no idea what was happening or where he was. To me, the Iraqi heat had the quality of a malevolent and inescapable tyranny, turning everyone stupid and passive.