The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  The sheikh spent seven and a half years in a special internal ward, sharing a cell the size of his sitting room with fifty other men. It was so crowded that they took shifts lying down, sitting, and standing; those lying down had to sleep on their sides. There were no visitors. “For seven and a half years I didn’t see anyone. We didn’t see the sun. We didn’t see the moon.” The guards themselves were punished if they failed to show sufficient cruelty. Pen, paper, books were all forbidden.

  “Why do you forbid these?” Dr. Baghdadi, the sheikh’s cellmate, once asked a prison guard.

  “We want you to go outside after years here,” the guard replied, “and you’ll forget not only your sciences, but even your own name.”

  “But we have many prisoners here who are depressed. This would help.”

  “We want them to be depressed. This is our purpose.”

  Yet the sheikh described his prison years with an unmistakable nostalgia, and listening to his tales I began to understand why the religious Shia were the first Iraqis to seize the new opportunity with purposefulness. In prison the sheikh became a leader. He settled differences that arose over food, sleeping space, and the inevitability that a sleeping prisoner would embrace the man beside him, believing him to be his wife. When the guards distributed oranges on Baath Party holidays, the sheikh saved the rinds to treat his own and others’ stomach troubles, and distributed the seeds as a psychological panacea for insomnia. He composed a book of theology on nylon sacks using the broken edges of tubes of distilled water. And when the known Baathist spies were asleep, he preached to his clandestine group. By chance, I met a man named Abdul-Jabbar Doweich, who had shared the sheikh’s cell through the 1980s. At forty-one, Doweich was a rare Iraqi with almost no gray hair. “In prison I was happy,” he explained, “because I lived under Islam.” It was the sheikh who taught him and the other prisoners about wilayat al-faqih, the rule of the jurisprudent under Islamic law.

  International pressure after the first Gulf War forced Saddam to release thousands of political prisoners, among them the sheikh. He spent the next decade under house arrest, with another year in prison for refusing an offer of money in exchange for supporting the regime. Just days before the most recent war, some of his followers from prison warned him that the government had plans to kill him. He took refuge in his sister’s house until the fall of Baghdad.

  The sheikh was utterly realistic about the Americans. He regarded them as neither liberators nor occupiers, but as a fact of life that could be turned to good or ill. He wanted them to leave fairly soon: “There’s a saying that when you visit somebody once a month you’ll be as lovely as the moon.” Meanwhile, he had established good relations with the Army captain responsible for security in his area and gotten what he could out of him—a faulty generator.

  The sheikh had an agenda: He wanted me to introduce him to important Americans. At our first meeting, he asked, “Did they come here to pay a visit, or did they come to put their hands on the country?” My answer didn’t satisfy him. “You’re running away from the question.” Later, when he described a pornographic videotape of a Sudanese diplomat lured into a love nest by a Baathist agent, I asked how he’d gotten a copy of it. “We have our ways.” I pointed out that he was now the one running away from the question. The sheikh smiled through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “You taught me how.”

  At our second meeting, he welcomed me with a kiss on both cheeks and said, “I like you. I feel that I’ve known you for years.” At our third, during a relative’s funeral under a tent in a Shiite slum, he gave me a silver ring with a black stone inscribed with a verse from the Qur’an. “There are hidden bodies swimming in the sky,” the sheikh said. “Maybe our hidden bodies met in the sky before we met each other, and that’s why we get along so well.”

  I had an agenda, too. The sheikh’s work illuminated the shadow of the past that lay so heavily on Iraqis. But it also made him a man to whom they brought their problems and requests. Though he denied having any political ambitions, I wanted to know what he wanted, what idea he had for Iraq’s future. The sheikh was careful not to let me know. His way of sizing me up with a sidelong look, eyebrows arched, amusement playing on his mouth, suggested from the start that our relationship would be marked by seduction and manipulation.

  * * *

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOONS, I often stopped by a hotel called the Hamra in southern Baghdad. Like other hotels, it was staffed by the same habitually surly Mukhabarat employees who had kept an eye on clients before the war and who were now trying to adjust and function as normal waiters and desk clerks. The Hamra was a hangout for Western journalists, Iraqi businessmen, and off-duty Australian soldiers from the embassy next door. For me, the whole point of the Hamra was its swimming pool. The sensation of plunging headfirst from the heat and noise of the city into the silence of that chlorinated submarine world was the closest I came in Iraq to ecstasy.

  One afternoon, I saw a familiar balding head moving behind the deck chairs on the far side of the pool. It was Kanan Makiya.

  He had driven up from Kuwait in April. He was staying at the hotel while waiting for a civil affairs battalion to vacate the modernist house that his father had built on the Tigris, in what was now the Green Zone, and that had been seized by the regime in 1972. Makiya and I made plans to get together. It was strange to see him again and be reminded of our lofty conversations in Cambridge and London—years ago, it seemed.

  He had thrown himself headlong into a new project. It was called the Memory Foundation, and it was to be a kind of Yad Vashem, a Holocaust memorial, as well as a museum and archive of the thirty-five years of Baath Party rule. With the help of a civil affairs captain, Makiya had uncovered enormous troves of party files, along with the private library of the party’s founder, Michel Aflaq, beneath his tomb, which had been slated for demolition. As enterprising as the sheikh, but with different ideas, Makiya ultimately carted seven million pieces of paper over to his father’s house, including the binders of rumors, meticulous records of the political orientation of every high school student in Iraq, and a top-secret archive labeled “Jews.” He was desperately trying to keep the occupation authority from tearing down and destroying the thousands of grandiose tributes to Saddam and the Baath all over Baghdad and Iraq. His own grand ambition—he was busy negotiating with the occupation authority—was for his museum to be housed at the Victory Monument itself, the crossed swords of the parade ground, about which he had written an entire book more than a decade before.

  On an infernally hot day, Makiya took me on a tour of the monument along with Mustafa al-Kadhimi, his friend from London, and two other returned exiles involved in the memory project. The parade ground itself was a road about a quarter mile long, and at the midpoint, from the reviewing stand, the pair of saber-wielding arms rising out of the pavement in the distance at either end simply looked like arches. Up close, the forearms cast from models of Saddam’s own on a scale of forty-to-one were so massive that every vein and hair follicle was visible. Nets made of steel cables hung from the hilts of the swords, which had been forged from melted-down weapons and crossed at a point a hundred feet overhead against the staring sun. From the nets down below poured dozens of helmets of dead Iranian soldiers, all welded together like a cluster of grapes. The helmets had been carefully selected, many of them perforated with bullet holes. At the base of the monument, this text, from Saddam’s speech announcing the project in 1985: “One of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to pass under a sword that is not his, and to be in a situation beyond his control. Using their swords, the Iraqis have written in history a record of heroism defending their land. I have slain the invaders and severed their heads, and I made out of their severed heads an arc of triumph, and here we are passing under the eye of God, who will protect the Iraqis from harm and who will not show any mercy to the evil ones.” American soldiers had scrawled graffiti across some of the Iranian helmets embedded in the ground: “PV2 Evans KIA 25 May 03 We
will rember 977 MP Co.”

  “I had seen pictures, I knew it was obscene,” Makiya said, “but frankly I didn’t know how obscene it is. The worst thing is the helmets of the dead that you step on. That is taking obscenity to new heights, if you would allow the contradiction.”

  “Saddam is claiming divine status,” Hassan Mneimneh, a Lebanese friend of Makiya’s from Cambridge, said. “The hand on the sword, it’s a masturbation image.” The rigid symmetry of the monument oppressed Mneimneh; the form was fascist, he said, and he hoped that one of the swords could be taken down or replaced with something else to destroy the majestic effect.

  “It’s the perfect place to remember the misery, in the same place where he felt his greatest power,” said Ammar al-Shahbander, a young exile I’d met in London along with Mustafa. “To make one of the most sacred and prohibited places in Baghdad a public museum. You can’t imagine how good it feels to stand on the same place he used to sit and watch the troops.”

  Makiya wanted to leave the monument as it was. In a white short-sleeve shirt and dark trousers, he was walking and talking at an excitable clip in the heat as the rest of us trailed behind. There could be a park for children here, a restaurant, school field trips. Turning the vast marbled rooms of the palace behind the viewing grandstand into a museum and library would cost thirty to fifty million dollars. One room could have Baath-era paintings and statuary, another the regime’s instruments of torture. “They’ve got the mincing machine,” he said. “Bremer told me. It’s not an urban myth.”

  The project would create a different vision of Iraqi history: not a tribute to the great achievements of the Babylonian, Arab, and Islamic past, but a humbler reckoning with the recent decades in which Iraqis had done such terrible things to one another. “Ultimately and in the very long run,” he said, “it’s about reshaping Iraqis’ perceptions of themselves in such a way as to create the basis for a tolerant civil society that is capable of adjusting to liberal democratic culture. The premise is that forgetting the past, or trying to sort of work with half-cobbled versions of the past, is actually only likely in the long run to engender variations of a repeat of it. We need to deal with it, face up to it frankly, so future generations can in a sense exorcise it from their system.”

  In addition to his memory project and his plans to take over the family house in the Green Zone, Makiya was hoping to receive a position on the preparatory committee for the new constitution. His return to Baghdad after thirty-five years had put him in the grip of new ideas, and he was literally breathless with nervous energy. An odd condition had set in somewhere inside his chest, a chronic spasm that forced hiccups upward in the middle of a sentence. I wondered if the tic might be part of a struggle, an unconscious one, to fend off a realization that he didn’t want to confront. Makiya was consumed with thoughts about the past and the future; I wanted him to acknowledge that the present was a disaster. Phrases like “tolerant civil society” and “liberal democratic culture” did not inspire me in Baghdad in the summer of 2003. They sounded abstract and glib amid the daily grinding chaos of the city, and they made me angry at him and myself—for I had had my own illusions.

  Makiya was clinging to the idea that if only the Americans had brought a few thousand armed Iraqi exiles in with them, as he, Chalabi, and others had advised, everything would have gone all right. Given how bitterly most Iraqi “internals,” as they were called, spoke about the exiles who had ridden in on the back of American tanks and appropriated properties and jockeyed for political power, I found the argument unconvincing. It sounded like an excuse for all that he’d gotten wrong. Iraqis, it turned out, were not who he had thought they were. They were not Kanan Makiya.

  The returned exiles in Baghdad lived in a world apart. They went to one another’s dinner parties, they traveled easily in and out of the Green Zone, they had contacts in the occupation authority, they hatched political plans and business schemes and visionary ideas for transforming Iraqi society. The event that had crashed like a bomb in the lives of other Iraqis, shattering the state and leaving them stunned in the smoke and debris, was to the exiles the opportunity of a lifetime and the fulfillment of a dream.

  A few of them took in the reality of Baghdad. One evening, I had dinner at an outdoor restaurant near the river in southern Baghdad with Mustafa al-Kadhimi and Ammar al-Shahbander, the two exiles I’d met at the London opposition conference in December. Mustafa was working on the new television and radio network that the occupation authority had set up; Ammar, a young freelance journalist who had come down through northern Iraq with Kurdish peshmerga forces during the war, was running the Baghdad office of a foundation whose projects included the restoration of the southern marshes that had been drained by Saddam. Both of them were also helping Makiya with the Memory Foundation. They had left safety and comfort and their wives in London and come back to Iraq with high hopes. But as soon as we sat down and ordered masghouf—fish from the Tigris grilled on a spit—they began to tell me what was on their minds.

  “We were living in a dream,” Ammar said. “Our idea of Iraq was the opposite of reality. We always thought Iraqis lack knowledge but they have the will—so if we provide them with the knowledge and expertise, they will catch up basically, because they have the will. But what we discovered actually was the other way around. The Iraqis have the knowledge. They know what is right, they know what is wrong. But you know what? They don’t care. They are too tired, they are too occupied with putting themselves together. They don’t have the will to do what is right. They know that they should park the car this way”—in an orderly fashion when they lined up for gas—“but who cares? They don’t have a good enough reason to try.”

  Mustafa described the murders going on every night that no one talked about, most of them revenge killings of Baathists. He knew a popular Shiite cleric who was approached every day with requests for religious sanction to kill. Criminal gangs had begun to kidnap professional or wealthy Iraqis and hold them for ransom. “The thinking of the people really surprised me,” Mustafa said. “I know it’s bad, but I never never never thought it was this bad.”

  Ammar said, “They are so normalized to the Baath and the fear and the death and the terror that they can’t see the advantages now. When you tell them they have such a great opportunity to express their opinion, they don’t give a damn. It means nothing to them, they don’t have anything to express, they have no opinion.” A slightly malicious smile appeared on his face. “Have you seen The Truman Show? The Iraqis believe they are this guy and everything around them is a conspiracy. The only difference is they think they have discovered the conspiracy.”

  The fish was served, but I was the only one who began to eat.

  The problem wasn’t only the Iraqis here, Mustafa said—far from it. “When Bremer arrived,” he said, “the electricity was eighteen hours a day. Then it started going down.” The American contractors working on the media network were grossly overpaid and incompetent. The programming was a disaster and no one watched it; al-Jazeera and the Iranian antenna network al-Alam had already won the war of the airwaves. The Americans were afraid of failure, and as a result they had failed to achieve anything; many potential supporters had already turned against them. And then there was the behavior of the returning exiles. Mustafa once saw a man he’d known in London kicking a low-ranking official of the former regime. A woman friend of Mustafa’s remarked, “I’ve now seen Uday again, this time in a democracy project.” As for Chalabi, whom they both considered the likeliest man to lead Iraq in a democratic direction, Ammar said, “Back in London he thought because the Pentagon supported him he’d be brought in and put in power. We told him over and over, ‘Don’t count on it.’ But he did. And this is the second mistake: He is surrounded either by idiots or by opportunists.”

  The conversation came around to Makiya. I mentioned that he had told me 95 percent of Iraqis were glad to have the Americans here.

  “Kanan is living on another planet,” Ammar sai
d. “He doesn’t have a clue. He drives to the Green Zone and back to the hotel.” Ammar had tried to open Makiya’s eyes by telling him that Baghdad’s garbage collectors sang songs while riding inside the back of the garbage trucks. They loved garbage. Makiya didn’t believe him.

  We got in Mustafa’s four-wheel drive and sped through the streets toward my hotel. There was a ten o’clock curfew and we didn’t have much time; Mustafa was staying at his sister’s house in a dangerous pro-Saddam neighborhood all the way out in western Baghdad. The streets were dark and nearly empty, with no police anywhere. Cars approached at top speed, as suspicious of us as we were of them. Mustafa’s brother’s BMW had been shot up a few nights before—targeted, he believed. “George, did you know Fedayeen Saddam yesterday said they would kill people who work with Americans?” Mustafa said. These were the paramilitary terrorists trained under the old regime. “I think about death every day.”