The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  The floodlit facade of my hotel came into view. I felt myself relax.

  “I’m saying a sentence over and over to my wife,” Ammar murmured in the backseat. “‘Never afraid of Saddam—beaten by the mentality of the Iraqi people.’”

  6

  THE PALACE

  THE COALITION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY was headquartered about a mile beyond the Assassins’ Gate, down a road of eucalyptus trees and bombed state buildings and concrete barriers. The Republican Palace, protected by a high iron gate and sandbagged machine-gun positions, was a sprawling two-story office building done in the Babylonian-fascist style favored by Saddam, with Art Deco eagles spanning the doorways. Evenly spaced along the top of the facade were four identical twenty-foot gray busts of Saddam himself, staring straight ahead, his eyes framed by an imperial helmet. Beneath these Ozymandian tributes to the deposed leader, twelve hundred officials of the CPA went about the business of running the country.

  Getting in to see one of them, a senior adviser to Bremer acknowledged, was “like a jailbreak in reverse.” That was in the first months of the occupation, when it was still possible for my driver to clear security at the Assassins’ Gate after searches of the two of us and the car, navigate the barriers on the road down to the palace, obey the signs warning him not to drive too fast or too slow or under any circumstances to stop, then park in the big dirt lot full of gleaming white SUVs that bore no relation to the vehicular character of Baghdad. I crossed the road and presented myself for another search and ID check to the soldiers under the massive hedge that grew beside the iron gate. But I wasn’t in yet: I still had to locate my contact in the palace. My satellite phone could be relied on to work pretty well outdoors, but the cellular network that MCI had set up for the occupation in Baghdad was spotty, and I usually got a recorded voice telling me that the number was not in service at this time. Because appointments were so hard to make and hard to get, I dialed the number over and over; in the end, more often than not, I got through. After ten or fifteen minutes—which I spent watching dozens of people with more privileged status walk or drive into the palace complex with just the flash of an ID—my escort emerged from one of the doorways under the Art Deco eagle and walked past the desiccated fountain and the garden of eucalyptus and date palms to greet me and usher me into the mysteries of the occupation.

  This was the drill at the beginning; it now seems shockingly porous. Over the next year the rules kept tightening, until I couldn’t get within a mile of the palace without an escort who had the highest security clearance.

  The jailbreak analogy worked both ways: For officials to leave the Green Zone required a two-vehicle military escort, which had to be arranged forty-eight hours in advance, assuming the soldiers and Humvees were available. In order to get their jobs done, some officials broke the rules and went in ordinary cars with no security out into the “Red Zone,” that is to say, Iraq. Others—and over time their numbers increased—hardly ever ventured out. I met a British coalition official working on human rights who had left the Green Zone three times in five weeks. Though it was in the geographical heart of Baghdad, the CPA sat in deep isolation.

  Hume Horan, an Arabist and retired ambassador whom Bremer had brought back into service “to be my pet bedouin” at the CPA, described what it was like to leave the Green Zone after long confinement. “It’s an epistemological problem: What’s going on out there?” he said. “You sniff, and then once you’re out you overanalyze everything. It’s like being in one of those sensory deprivation suits, one of those black suits, and then you’re dropped in the water to see what you can feel.”

  Horan and I were sitting, literally, in a hall of mirrors, on gilt-trimmed green sofas, in a marbled alcove off the main rotunda of the palace. (A brigade commander once told me that one of the worst things about the Baathists was their taste in interior decorating. The Republican Palace, one of the dozens of presidential palaces that Saddam seldom used, was furnished like the others in the incredibly vulgar manner of an ersatz Versailles.) While Horan and I spoke, the little MCI cell phone on the sofa beside him kept ringing. On the other end was an Iraqi who had an appointment with Horan and was having trouble finding his way into the palace. In a series of increasingly agitated calls, Horan tried to determine the man’s location and direct him to the main gate. Finally, Horan’s secretary came over to report that the man’s current position was next to a high black wall somewhere with no soldiers around. “I think he should stand down for today,” Horan told his secretary. I had gotten in, but this resident of Baghdad and citizen of Iraq, who had probably gone to great lengths to secure the appointment, lacked the wherewithal—the language skills, or the confidence to approach heavily armed Americans for directions. Perhaps he returned another day and succeeded, or perhaps this became one of those failed connections in the early days of the occupation, when many Iraqis were still trying to meet the foreigners who were now governing their country, for which there would not be a second chance. I watched Horan’s face—he was an elderly blue-eyed man with liver spots and a shock of gray hair, wearing sandals and short blue socks that revealed a pale stripe of ankle below his slightly tattered khaki cuffs—when he declared that the visitor should go home. His expression closed up with a sort of grim disappointment. I remember thinking that it seemed a bad omen.

  The size of the rooms matched the palace’s original purpose of leader worship rather than serious administration. Off the rotunda there was a room with a soaring octagonal dome depicting horses rising upward into a trompe l’oeil sky, and on opposite walls murals in the shape of altarpieces, one showing Scud missiles taking off into the sky, the other the al-Aqsa mosque in a Jerusalem without Jews; the room had been turned into a chapel. Around the corner there was an even vaster hall, on the proportions of a basketball arena, where the coalition’s hundreds of officials took their meals cafeteria-style, with replicas of the Ashurbanipal friezes over the dining tables. The offices of Governance and Strategic Communications, or Stratcomm, were located in grand high-ceilinged meeting rooms, with officials seated at desks half hidden by partitions spread out across an immense floor space. As the CPA grew, the palace’s broad hallways were divided by makeshift walls to create more offices.

  There were a number of British officials in the palace, a few from other countries in the coalition, the Iraqi-Americans organized by the Pentagon just before the war, a security detail of Nepalese Gurkhas, and for a while a unit of Italian carabinieri around the main gate, looking far more chic than their counterparts from other countries in tight black T-shirts, sunglasses, and leather gloves. But no visitor to the palace could have any doubt about which country was in charge of Iraq. The composition was overwhelmingly American: half civilian, half military, with men and women from the Departments of State, Treasury, Defense, and other agencies, wearing casual office clothes—khaki pants and blue shirts, it always seemed—mixed with young soldiers in desert camouflage, emptied M-16s slung over their shoulders. There were bomb shelters hard by workout rooms. The intimate mingling of bureaucracy and war made for a strange sight. One CPA official described the palace as being full of “people who were typical pasty-faced bureaucrats, overweight middle-aged people, midlevel paper pushers, but all wearing body armor, helmets. It’s like a play: There’s this weird alter-world that you’re in, where if they go out on a routine visit they’ve got to don body armor and face the prospect of being wiped off the face of the earth.”

  Amid the grotesque faux-baroque furnishings, the palace was a hive of purposeful activity. The scale of the place so dwarfed its human inhabitants that it was impossible not to think in insect metaphors. The atmosphere, in Horan’s words, was “very heavily operational.” Americans were constantly typing away at computers or hurrying to and fro across marble floors or taking quick breaks under the great granite columns, working late into the night seven days a week with a kind of fresh optimistic energy that could not have been in sharper contrast to the exhausted country outsid
e the security perimeter into which they’d been air-dropped. Most of them seemed to be Republicans, and more than a few were party loyalists who had come to Iraq as political appointees on ninety-day tours. They were astonishingly young. Many had never worked abroad, few knew anything about the Middle East, and that first summer only three or four of the Americans spoke Arabic. Some were simply unqualified for their responsibilities. A twenty-five-year-old oversaw the creation of the Baghdad stock market, and another twenty-five-year-old, from the Office of Special Plans, helped write the interim constitution while filling out his law school application.

  But they believed in what they were trying to do, which was rebuild Iraq as a democracy. They were trying to do it under fire, in a badly fractured country, with a governing authority that more and more Iraqis saw as illegitimate. A senior administration official said, “We sent an inexperienced, youthful, full-of-zest, full-of-courage team to do what seasoned professionals would have found extremely challenging, if not impossible. Instead we sent a third team, or a fourth team, or a fifth team.” One of the few “seasoned professionals” in the CPA admitted, “None of us knew what we were doing at some level. We didn’t have good enough information.” Most of them didn’t even know what they didn’t know. They were always stretched thin, and there were never enough of them, nor enough vehicles and phones and bodyguards and money and time. Trips out of the Green Zone were constantly canceled for lack of escorts. In the summer of 2003 the CPA was less than 50 percent staffed, and it never rose above 70 percent; turnover was extremely fast, and hard-won knowledge was short-lived.

  In late July, I met Meghan O’Sullivan at the palace. She had survived an unhappy experience under Jay Garner and become one of Paul Bremer’s key advisers on political matters. She was wearing jeans and a lime-green top under a long-sleeve shirt; her pale, thin face was lightly made up, her auburn hair pulled back, her toenails painted. I had the sense that keeping up appearances was part of maintaining morale. She was working eighteen hours a day, with no days off; she usually got to bed around one a.m., and the phone started ringing at six. “There is very little to do for pleasure here,” she said. Some of her colleagues who had come in with Garner were already gone and others were finishing up their tours, but O’Sullivan had signed on for the duration, though it meant turning down a position at the NSC. She wanted the whole picture, she said, and she could make a greater difference in Baghdad than in Washington.

  We sat in the echoing emptiness of the chapel, and with a faintly amused smile she told me about her dreams. In one, the palace was filling up with smoke, there was shooting, she couldn’t find the way out, and she calmly told herself: All right, this is dangerous, I could get killed. In another, a Black Hawk helicopter dropped her in the middle of the desert and took off, leaving her alone. She woke up from that dream yelling. “Then I tried to remember where I was,” she said. “I was in the middle of the desert—alone.” She was living on an upper floor of the Rashid Hotel, at the edge of the Green Zone. Although the room was more comfortable than a trailer, she was uneasy staying there: The CPA had intelligence that the Rashid was a security risk. Early one morning a few months later, in October, while Paul Wolfowitz was staying at the Rashid, the hotel was hit by half a dozen rockets. O’Sullivan’s door was sealed shut by the force and heat of the blast, and the room began to fill with smoke as in her dream; when the noises of flight and rescue out in the hall died down and no one came to save her, she climbed out of her window ten floors up onto a narrow concrete overhang, inched her way across to the next window, which happened to be open, and saved herself. By 8:30 in the morning she was at her desk, working on requests from Bremer in Washington.

  O’Sullivan was completely absorbed in the CPA’s high-level policy work, and yet a part of her mind remained open to the skepticism that would press on any thoughtful person. At the outset, Iraqis had approached her in the street to thank her for their liberation. She found—it was hard to acknowledge—that they wanted to be given instructions, and Garner’s team had made the enormous mistake of trying not to act like rulers. The looting and power vacuum of the early days continued to undermine the work of the occupation, from the smallest logistical detail to the great question of whether Iraqis would support the American project. Was America capable of nation building on this scale? Or should the Iraqis be the ones in charge? Yet the embryonic Iraqi institutions that the CPA was trying to set up were always on the verge of collapse.

  * * *

  ON THE DAY THAT SAIGON FELL to North Vietnamese troops in 1975, the British writer James Fenton found a framed quotation on a wall of the abandoned and looted American embassy: “Better to let them do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their way, and your time is short.” The words were from T. E. Lawrence.

  The failure of the first weeks, and the replacement of Garner with Bremer, produced a new vision of the American role in Iraq. The Pentagon had prevented a serious strategic plan from ever being written. Now, the CPA under Bremer began to plan in earnest, essentially forcing the White House and Pentagon to go along with initiatives taken in Baghdad. The CPA was going to fill in all the blanks left empty back in Washington by the war’s visionaries who had imagined that freedom and democracy would appear spontaneously in Iraq. The new plans included goals and timetables for the training of Iraqi security forces, the writing of a constitution, the creation of new government structures, economic reform, legal reform, education reform: nothing short of an overhaul of Iraqi society from top to bottom, culminating in the return of sovereignty at an indeterminate date.

  Brad Swanson, an investment banker who arrived in Baghdad some months later to work in the CPA on economic development, described the reversal this way: “First there was the arrogance phase, and then there was the hubris phase. The arrogance phase was going in undermanned, underplanned, underresourced, skim off the top layer of leadership, take control of a functioning state, and be out by six weeks and get the oil funds to pay for it. We all know for a variety of reasons that didn’t work. So then you switch over to the hubris phase: We’ve been slapped in the face, this is really much more serious than we thought, much more long-term, much more dangerous, much more costly. Therefore we’ll attack it with everything we have, we’ll throw the many billion dollars at it, and to make Iraq safe for the future we have to do a root-and-branch transformation of the country in our own image.” The two approaches seemed like opposite extremes, Swanson added, but they had this in common: “They’re very conceptual, ideological. They’re not pragmatic responses to a detailed understanding of facts on the ground.”

  With such an ambitious undertaking, the CPA faced, and in some ways didn’t face, a paradox that was unavoidable. The Americans were trying to rebuild Iraq in a way that allowed Iraqis, for the first time in their history, to take control of their own destiny. But if the power, the money, the guns, and the ideas remained with the Americans, how would all the plans ever lead to Iraqi control?

  On the second floor of the palace, where the senior advisers to the ministries had their offices, Drew Erdmann was trying to negotiate the paradox every day, and the effort was wearing him down. People he hardly knew were telling him, “You look beat.” His temper was worse than it had ever been in his life.

  “The thing that I am constantly struggling against,” he said, “and this is the American part of you, whether it’s a national attribute I don’t know—you just want to get things done. But of course you can’t just keep doing that, you can’t just keep doing it for these people. And you’ve got to let them fail sometimes. And you know it’s going to happen.” He gave me an example: At a recent meeting on budgets, one university president had requested a doubling of his faculty over the next six months. “In a situation where the country just went through this. What do you think? I mean, why even … you know, come on. It defies … what planet are these people on? It reaches the level of literally defying common sense. It doesn’t pass anyone’s
laugh test anywhere in the world. But then you have to work through it.” With so many highly educated and technically skilled people in Iraq, Erdmann had concluded that the administrative incompetence must be a product of “the absolutely pernicious effects of living in this police state that has beaten people down so much.”

  Erdmann decided from the start to put as much authority as possible in Iraqi hands. In May, after he convinced all the university presidents appointed under Saddam to resign, Erdmann announced that their replacements would be chosen in open elections by the faculties. He came to this decision only after intense debate within the CPA, his team of mostly Iraqis, and himself. These would be among the very first votes in Iraq, and some in Washington and Baghdad feared that Baathists or religious extremists might be able to hijack any elections. But Erdmann concluded that entrusting the Iraqi faculties themselves, though not without risk, was the best option available. With communications nearly impossible in large parts of the country, the CPA had little idea who the best candidates might be. That was the practical reason. The principled reason was to get Iraqis involved quickly, to give them the feeling that a new era had indeed begun. If the newly arrived administrator vetoed the idea, Erdmann had made up his mind that he would have to resign, since his credibility with the Iraqi educators would be gone at the start. But with Bremer’s backing, the votes went forward in mid-May.

  On May 17, seven hundred faculty members packed the sweltering theater of Baghdad University, along with al-Jazeera, CNN, and other media. Sweating in his poplin suit, Erdmann stood up to make a few opening remarks. “It’s time to mark a fundamental change and a liberation of the academic establishment from the old order,” he said. “And part of that is new leadership. There was a regime change, and this is a tremendous opportunity to bring in a new era.” Then he stepped aside, to let the Iraqis run the process of nominating, voting, and counting ballots. The winner was a biochemist, Dr. Sami Mudhafar, respected for his integrity under Saddam.