The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Bremer spoke directly to Iraqis every week in television and radio addresses, as well as in meetings with dignitaries around the country. He was personally popular, especially with women, and he enjoyed the approval of twice as many Baghdadis as disapproved, according to a Gallup poll (higher than the CPA’s ratings, and far beyond those of President Bush, who was not regarded favorably in the capital). His approach to the awesome task of leading a foreign country, in which Americans were still at war, through a political, social, and economic revolution was largely technical. Under pressure or criticism, he resorted to figures. Through the harsh summer, Bremer explained over and over that the power outages came from a lack of capacity in the system, aggravated by looting, sabotage, and the collapse of civil administration. Somehow, the message never got through. He reminded Iraqis just as often that they now had their freedom. This, too, sometimes failed to sink in.

  “You have to understand the psychological situation that Iraqis are in,” he said when I asked why they appeared to appreciate so little of what the CPA claimed to have achieved in its first months. “They went from this very dark room to the bright light in three weeks. It’s like somebody just threw a switch. And so this is pretty jarring psychologically anyway. And your mentality, if you’re an Iraqi, still is: It’s the government that fixes things. And here comes a government that can throw out our much-vaunted army in three weeks, so why can’t they fix the electricity in three weeks?” The failure to communicate, Bremer pointed out, “isn’t a technical problem of tuning a television to get the right channel. It’s psychological and intellectual.”

  He stood up, went over to his desk, and brought back some of the studies of postwar reconstruction that he was reading when he had time. “What I tried to do was study the relevant sort of reconstruction examples, of which there are four or five. There’s Japan and Germany after the war. There’s Bosnia, Kosovo. To some extent Afghanistan. And of those, the ones that are probably most relevant are Germany and Japan because they involved a war followed by a physical military occupation of those countries.”

  He opened a heavily underlined pamphlet written by a group of British experts and began to read aloud. “‘In the immediate postwar period, security and the rule of law are essential.’ Okay, well, that’s true.” Bremer had no interest in looking back at the looting and the failures of postwar planning. “I frankly don’t have time to go back and reread what we knew and didn’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to worry about tomorrow. There’ll be some great PhD theses that can be written on the subject.” He read aloud again: “‘Security means civilian policing, ability to arrest, detain, and try offenders. Minimize arrogance.’” He laughed. “Here’s vetting—decontamination and debaathification. ‘One of the lessons from particularly Germany was, typically, a deep process of vetting out occurs first and is best performed with speed.’ Which is exactly what we did. We took it down and then we can build it back up, and of course we’re turning it over to the Iraqis.”

  Bremer tossed the pamphlet on the coffee table. He was growing restless; he had things to do. I thanked him and said goodbye. There had been no small talk whatsoever, no curiosity about my own observations, and (this was quite striking in Iraq) no tea or other refreshment brought in. He made no effort to charm, and there was little evidence of wit. Bremer was already back at his desk by the time I was escorted out of the office.

  * * *

  THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY and intellect cut both ways. Almost all of Bremer’s confidants were Americans. The Arabic-speaking ambassadors with years of experience in the Middle East had less access to the administrator and less work to do than his small coterie of trusted aides from Washington. An Iraqi who was close to the CPA told me that, in general, the less one knew about Iraq, the more influence one had.

  When Bremer left the palace, it was necessarily under heavy security. One searing day, I joined his press pool and followed the administrator by Chinook helicopter as he hopscotched across the scorched southern desert. The first stop was a maternity hospital in the town of Diwaniya. Bremer, who forced himself to endure a suit and tie at all public appearances throughout the summer months, was received by local dignitaries in kaffiyehs and mustaches. He told them, “We of the coalition are glad that we were able to provide you with your freedom from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. You now have that freedom and you now have a better hope for the future.” He went on, “All of Iraq’s two hundred and forty hospitals are now operating. Ninety percent of the health clinics in the country are now working. The budget for the second half of this year is an increase of three thousand percent in health-care spending in Iraq. In May, five hundred tons of drugs were shipped in. Last month we shipped thirty-five hundred tons—a seven hundred percent increase in shipments in three months.”

  The dignitaries listened and applauded. In turn, they presented Bremer with lengthy supplications. Then he paid a visit to the wards upstairs.

  Bremer traveled with a sizable contingent of aides and civilian bodyguards with MP-5 automatic weapons and wraparound sunglasses; along with the journalists in tow, this phalanx swept down the second-floor hallway past startled doctors and into rooms where even more startled mothers and infants lay in beds. His aides gave him stuffed animals to present to the patients. In one room, a withered and skeletal premature baby lay in its mother’s arms. On a nearby bed, a child of about three had its head lolling back against its mother’s body, mouth open. This was sickness, maybe even the approach of death, not childbirth. The smile died on Bremer’s face as he realized where he was. “I don’t like seeing this at all,” he said, and asked the photographer to stop taking pictures.

  Disturbed, I broke away from the group and went back downstairs. I fell into conversation with a couple of young doctors. They said that the electricity was on only because we were here—it had been off all week. The interruptions to power had doubled infant mortality here: Without proper incubation, the rate was now seven to ten deaths per day. The hospital had several broken generators. A Marine reservist had told me that with twenty thousand dollars in repairs the generators could provide the hospital all the power it needed for twenty-four-hour service. The doctors said that the generators could cut the infant mortality rate at least in half.

  One of Bremer’s press aides, Chris Harvin, gravitated toward us. “Are you happy with Saddam gone?” he asked the young doctors, pushing the conversation back on message. “Things are better now?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Kassim al-Janaby said, mustering a smile. “Yes.”

  “What’s the best thing about Saddam being gone?”

  “I can’t understand your question,” said Dr. Mohamed Jasim. Harvin had to repeat it three times. “Only one, I think only one,” Dr. Jasim said. “Only the free talking. Only only only. But no doing. No doing.”

  “Do you think over time it gets much better?”

  “Yes, we are thinking the next time it gets better.”

  “Patience? Yeah?”

  “We need continuous electricity,” Dr. Janaby said flatly. “Security in our city also is not until now. That’s it. Also the salary.”

  Harvin, a veteran of the Bush 2000 primary campaign in South Carolina, which had sought to make hash of the reputation of John McCain, was undeterred by the young doctors in Diwaniya. “But don’t you think with time it will get better? What do you think? What can we do?”

  “Security,” one of them said.

  “Americans? Iraqis? Both working together?”

  “Yes.”

  “So … the economy will stabilize the looting?”

  * * *

  THE CPA’S GOOD NEWS didn’t always bear scrutiny. Again and again, Iraqis were told that the electricity output would soon be increased. But it didn’t reach even prewar levels until a year after the Americans arrived, and meanwhile the hardships intensified. Naturally, this inclined the Iraqis to greater skepticism about their occupiers. The health figures that Bremer cited at the hospital in Diwaniya were somew
hat undercut by a chance conversation I had the next day with Dr. Jean-Bernard Bouvier of the British medical charity Merlin. The Ministry of Health had become a hollow shell, without any central control, Bouvier told me. Nobody had any information about inventory at the warehouses of the Central Pharmacy. “They said they’ve put out six hundred tons—of what? If it’s twelve trucks of IV fluid, I don’t give a damn. Where? For what?” Sixteen tons of drugs were dumped on a single clinic, and the stacks of boxes left no room for patients. Bouvier had drawn up an “Emergency National Distribution Plan for Drugs”; after two months there was still no response from the coalition. A veteran of many disasters, he found that the expertise of NGOs like his kept falling into a void at the CPA. “This is missing in their experience. They don’t see the fragility of the system. And they don’t see the emergency of the situation. It’s not that children are starving yet, but it’s a structure that is slowly crumbling. It’s just falling apart, without the impact showing up yet.” He added, “You can degrade a society slowly bit by bit, but then you reach a point where you just crash.”

  The CPA’s isolation behind security perimeters and the difficulty of communications made it a fairly opaque institution, to Iraqis and journalists alike. The inaccessibility was also partly deliberate. “I’ve just reorganized the strategic communications center here,” Bremer told me a day after ordering Meghan O’Sullivan not to speak with me about anything (as a result of our conversations, she fell temporarily out of his favor). Stratcomm functioned as an offshore extension of the White House press office, relentlessly on-message. Its chief concern was to control the perceptions of the American audience in the twenty-four-hour news cycle, not to develop a source of information that could compete over the long haul in the reality of Iraq. I once received four separate CPA press releases announcing “Ruptured Baghdad Water Main to Be Quickly Restored”; when it was not restored as quickly as promised, Iraqi discontent inevitably rose, while Americans back home were none the wiser.

  The CPA’s own news outlet for Iraq became an unmitigated fiasco. The $82 million contract for the Iraq Media Network had been awarded to a San Diego company, Science Applications International Corporation, with no relevant experience in media but with relevant ties to the office of the secretary of defense. SAIC paid its American “media advisors” more than two hundred thousand dollars a year while nickel-and-diming the network, which produced a mix of official CPA announcements and Arabic singing. This reminded Iraqis sufficiently of TV under the old regime that most of them turned instead for their information to the inflammatory broadcasts of al-Jazeera and the Iranian antenna station. The CPA squandered the early opportunity, which would not come again, to begin the civic education that would be vital for Iraq’s transition to democracy. Everyone in Baghdad knew that the media project was a disaster; in London, Tony Blair knew, and he was tearing his hair out trying to get it fixed. But as with so many other aspects of the occupation, the origins of the problem lay in Washington: The insipid programming reflected the Pentagon’s desire to proclaim freedom in Iraq without doing the harder, riskier work of helping Iraqis create the necessary institutions, which would have meant giving up a measure of control. Even as Bremer and the CPA began to resurrect Iraq physically from its long decay and sudden collapse, the intellectual failures of the planning continued to haunt the occupation.

  The manager of the media network traveled to Washington and warned Paul Wolfowitz about this unilateral disarmament in the battle for hearts and minds. Wolfowitz, the architect of the administration’s democratic strategy for Iraq and the Middle East, replied that the Pentagon had full confidence in its contractor and brought the matter to a close. The manager was replaced and didn’t return to Baghdad. These were the priorities chosen, the chances missed, the decisions made and not made, largely out of public view, in the occupation’s early months when everything was still up in the air, as Drew Erdmann said, still fluid, before it all began to harden.

  * * *

  I WENT BACK AND FORTH between the Green and Red zones, between the CPA and Iraq, feeling almost dizzy at the transition, two separate realities existing on opposite sides of concrete and wire. The CPA insisted that progress was being made; the Iraqis didn’t see it. An Iraqi on Erdmann’s staff told him, “Look, if I didn’t work with you I wouldn’t want you Americans here. I see what you guys do, but the rest of society doesn’t. What they know is there isn’t electricity. And you’re not convincing. You’re not making the case. They don’t feel there’s a plan.”

  The furious activity of the Americans in the heat of Baghdad put me in mind of someone trying to dig his way out of a hole as the earth kept collapsing under his feet, or spinning his wheels in sand and sinking deeper. And yet in those first months I saw no alternative to the CPA. It was better than the power vacuum of April and May, and it was better than any Iraqi entity I could think of. The exile politicians were manifestly unpopular, perhaps even less popular than the Americans. The “internals,” as they were called, had no viable organizations, and the shoots of local government that I was watching grow around the city were barely alive. I was slow to grasp the possibility that a weak, feuding, and corrupt Iraqi government might be better than an isolated, illegitimate American one.

  One evening I had drinks at a hotel with a young official of the United Nations team in Baghdad. He described the complaints that the UN was hearing from Iraqis: the detainees whose families could get no word of them, the ostracism of Iraqis associated with the old regime, the heavy-handed manner of American soldiers, the bad Arabic spoken on the CPA’s TV network. I listened with growing impatience. Were these really the most important things going on in postwar Iraq? Was I supposed to feel sorry for a Baathist who had done God knows what while he was in power and had now lost his job? What about the enormous crimes of the Baath Party and the chance Iraqis now had to move past them?

  “They’re under occupation,” the UN official said. “They’re not happy about it.”

  On one of my visits to the office of Sheikh Emad al-Din al-Awadi, a fellow ex-prisoner named Abdul-Zahra Abid, a stout middle-aged man with thick glasses and a broad Olmec nose, took me aside and told me about the case of his nephew, a banana importer. The nephew had been arrested by American soldiers at his office, along with nineteen other men, even the tea server. The soldiers also took twelve thousand dollars in Iraqi dinars and the company’s BMW. Now the relatives of the nephew couldn’t find out anything about his fate. They went first to the Assassins’ Gate, hoping to get into the Republican Palace, but they were stopped by soldiers who said that they had no information. The soldiers suggested that the relatives try the airport, where high-value detainees were being held at the vast American base. At the airport the relatives were turned away as well. They went to a central police station where they had heard there were lists of names, but the nephew’s name wasn’t on them. The next day they drove past a sentry into the American base near the Olympic Stadium. A soldier pointed a gun and ordered them to leave, and they thanked the soldiers, got back in the car, and left. They tried the airport again, without luck. Under the old regime they would have known whom to bribe for information, but after four days of searching all over Baghdad, the family didn’t know where to turn.

  Abdul-Zahra Abid, who had spent a year and a half in prison for cursing Saddam’s regime, told me this story as we stood in the anteroom to the sheikh’s office, sandwiched between floor-to-ceiling metal shelves that were crammed with the pink and green folders of former prisoner files. “I’m not defending him. But even if he was involved in something, from a humanitarian point of view they should inform the families,” Abid said. “They arrest people, they don’t give information to families—like the Baath. The past and the present—there’s no difference. There should be a difference.”

  Then Abid softened. He wanted to thank both George Bushes: the father for exerting the pressure that had led to his release from prison, the son for getting rid of Saddam. “Americans
are humans like us. We’re no better or worse. They make mistakes.”

  A couple of days later I was allowed to sit in on a commanders’ meeting at the headquarters of the First Armored Division’s Second Brigade. The intelligence officer in charge of the PowerPoint display showed satellite photographs of a banana importer’s office that had been raided; the targets were financing insurgent activity, he said. The officers around the table joked about the insurgency’s reliance on bananas. The case came up again the next day at the convention center, which was the one place where Iraqis who made it past the triple layers of searches and ID checks on the way in could present a problem directly to the occupation authority. At the Iraq Assistance Center I ran into a man named Raad Shaker Abid. He was the brother of the banana importer, and his odyssey had taken him here after the International Committee of the Red Cross told him that it could do nothing until the Americans allowed the ICRC itself to see detainees. From there he had gone to an ex-prisoners’ association that was a rival of the sheikh’s, and one of their members had brought him here.

  It was chance that I kept crossing paths with the case of the banana importer, and it was chance that a CPA official named Dave Hodgkinson was at the convention center at the same moment that I met the detainee’s brother. Hodgkinson told the brother to go see the colonel at the civil-military affairs headquarters near the Republican Palace. So the search for the detained man finally led his relatives back to where they had started, the Assassins’ Gate. As Hodgkinson and the brother spoke, I noticed a sign on an easel propped up near the information desk: “CMOCS, HACCS, CIMICS, CMACS, ALL YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW.” “It was only by an improbable accident or extraordinary perseverance that an Iraqi could negotiate the forest of American military acronyms and armed gatekeepers to find the piece of information he needed, such as the whereabouts of a relative; most of them gave up long before. I never learned the banana importer’s fate.