The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Hodgkinson was the CPA’s adviser on “transitional justice.” This meant that he, like the occupation authority in general, was more concerned with the past crimes of the Baath Party than the present predicament of Iraqi detainees. He was a young ex-Army JAG with the blond good looks and breezy manner of a fraternity president. I told him about the sheikh’s group, and he expressed interest. The sheikh was one of the Iraqis who had quickly sized up the American occupiers for his own interest, and he’d been urging me to set up a meeting with someone from the CPA who funded groups like his, pumping me for advice on how to handle it. “Forget your American citizenship for thirty minutes and take my side with them,” the sheikh pleaded.

  On the drive from the Green Zone to Kadhimiya (CPA officials still made such trips without security in the early months), Hodgkinson said that “the word on the street” had the sheikh aligned with extremist Shiite tendencies, perhaps with the radical young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the son of a martyred ayatollah, and his Iranian backers. I asked if that would keep the CPA from funding him. “Only if the money would go for bazookas,” Hodgkinson said. “If he’s just anti-coalition, if he wants us out, all the better.”

  The sheikh was waiting for us on his swivel chair in the sitting room. He greeted me effusively. “George must have some Arab blood!” The arrival of these important people from the CPA, with tens of thousands of dollars to distribute, made the sheikh nervous. “George speaks well of you, Mr. David. Did you pay him?” He showed us the ring he’d put on for the meeting. “I wear this ring for courage—like when I have to talk to my wife.” As he had done with me the first time, he reeled in his new visitors with the story of his years in prison: the terrible over-crowding, the physical and psychological tortures, the man who sliced up his own shoe and ate it in a sandwich. At one point he was so overcome that he had to excuse himself. When he opened the door to his inner office, I noticed that the Khomeini portrait had disappeared.

  Five minutes later he came back. “I’m sorry to bother you with this conversation.”

  “It’s very important for us to hear,” Hodgkinson said.

  “Let’s talk about the prisoners’ association.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Do you want me to continue the story,” the sheikh asked, “or talk about the association?” And there was another half hour of personal history.

  The subject of the files created some awkwardness. Hodgkinson wanted the sheikh to acknowledge that they belonged to the Iraqi people.

  “We ask humanity to work together to keep these documents,” the sheikh said. “They don’t belong to any one person, or even to the Iraqis, but to all humanity. Maybe Bush is a second Saddam, and maybe he’s better.”

  “The Iraqi governing body, with the coalition’s assistance, will use the documents to prosecute crimes or tell the story for the whole world to know,” Hodgkinson said. “There are currently projects in place to centralize evidence.”

  “But this will take many years, many files will be burned, and many heads will be cut off. So I want to build a storehouse to keep them in—it will be safer because it will be under the care of my tribe.” There was also a lack of office equipment, he added.

  The meeting ended with no specific promise of money but a sense of mutual goodwill. Hodgkinson said, “I’m glad to get out of the CPA.”

  “It’s a big jail,” the sheikh said.

  “You were in prison and now you’re free. We’ve left our prison to come share your freedom.”

  Among the foreigners in Baghdad whom the sheikh was trying to cultivate was a UN human rights officer named Elahe Sharifpour-Hicks. The sheikh had given her a wish list without a budget: It included eight computers, four vehicles, a guard, a generator, an air conditioner, and a new building. Sharifpour-Hicks found the sheikh charming and dangerous. She had grown up in Iran as a member of the revolutionary generation; she had taken part in the overthrow of the shah and then seen the mullahs break all their promises to bring freedom and democracy. She was certain that the same thing was happening in Iraq.

  “This ayatollah is hooking the international community by using prisoners,” she said. “No one should underestimate these ayatollahs, and I’m afraid the Americans are doing this.” As we spoke over lunch at the UN cafeteria, she became upset. “There are many like him. The dream, the model, the idea is to come to power the same way as in Iran. I can see with my eyes the same things as in the revolution.” She found the Americans’ reluctance to interfere maddening; the religious factions were growing stronger, while secular groups were too frightened to make noise. “The Americans are very shy and timid to look like occupiers. They say, ‘Oh, we want the Iraqis to lead.’ But what kind of Iraqi should lead? It is so painful, at the end of the day I am in tears.”

  The last time I went to see the sheikh that summer, I asked him what kind of government he wanted for Iraq. He ignored the question; there were three CPA cell phone applications he wanted me to fill out, for himself, his wife, and his six-year-old son. For the first time in my presence, he unwrapped his turban—and suddenly he was a balding, sweaty, pushy man. Our mutual enchantment was coming to an end.

  I finished the applications. “Dave Hodgkinson heard you might be a follower of Moqtada al-Sadr,” I said.

  “Moqtada al-Sadr! He’s a small man. He doesn’t have a fraction of the level of my religion.” The sheikh was convincingly outraged. “Those who said it to Mr. David are my enemy.”

  I said that Hodgkinson and the CPA didn’t seem to care about his politics.

  “That’s good. But we must fix this idea about me.” I knew that he was worried about his funding. “If it’s proved I follow some line or am a member of any political party, I will stop working and sit at home.”

  I asked what he thought of Iran’s system.

  “Are you working for an intelligence agency?” the sheikh demanded, staring at me with no hint of the charmer’s smile. “I have a mind and a heart. My heart is calm with you. My mind tells my heart to be careful.”

  What was the proper role of Islam in a democracy?

  “After I answer this question, will you free me for God?” It was the hour of prayer. The sheikh took me rather roughly by the chin. “I’ll make you calm by this answer, I’ll cool your heart. Trust me, and I’ll tell you honestly: I believe in Socrates and his circle. There’s a line in the middle.” He drew an imaginary line across a wooden coaster that was on his desk. “One side is hot, the other cold. This is the middle. As the philosopher believed, the best is the middle. Is that enough for you, or do you have other questions?”

  A few days later, I received an e-mail from Elahe Sharifpour-Hicks. She had gone to see the sheikh that day: The CPA had given him forty-three thousand dollars. “He is in good shape,” she reported. “He has now at least two computers and a generator.”

  * * *

  DREW ERDMANN left Baghdad in late July, for meetings in Washington and to see his wife in St. Louis. They spent a beautiful Saturday morning walking through the dazzling green of an organic market, but he felt remote, as if he were looking at the world through a thick pane of glass. He woke up every morning before dawn, just as he did in Baghdad, feeling the stress of what remained to be done. It was nearly impossible to tell his wife what he’d been doing. When they went out with friends, he couldn’t sit still for the conversation. He felt physically dizzy, his hands shook with nervous energy, and he wanted to get back.

  In Washington, Erdmann was offered a position at the National Security Council, as director for Iran and strategic planning. His conversation with Condoleezza Rice at the White House lasted only a few minutes. “They don’t like us much, but they like the alternatives less,” he told her. Rice looked surprised, but the conversation moved on. Back in Baghdad, he told me that he didn’t want to leave Iraq, he had never experienced anything like this work, he liked operating with pressure and uncertainty, and higher education was one sector that was showing signs of success. But because it mea
nt being closer to his wife, he would take the job in Washington.

  On one of his last days with the CPA, I accompanied Erdmann to the campus of Baghdad University. Until that morning, I had never quite understood his constant tension, his irritability, his ferocity about remnants of the old regime, the sense he conveyed that this was still a kind of combat. His team traveled in two civilian cars, staying in radio contact; in the seat next to me, Erdmann shoved a clip into his 9-mm. Beretta. The campus was largely empty—in spite of war and looting, the universities had completed their academic year in July—but there was a group of about thirty men standing under a tree in the plaza near the parking lot. They were debaathified professors, and as Erdmann walked past, his pistol hidden under his shirt, three of them fell into step with him.

  “Are you Dr. Andrew Erdmann?” one professor said. “We have some forms.” The men looked middle-aged, neatly dressed, and downcast. They displayed copies of the Agreement to Disavow Party Membership, with their signatures.

  “The only exceptions are granted by Ambassador Bremer,” Erdmann told them.

  “We need your help about the situation.”

  “I understand the disruption in your life. But I hope you understand the coalition’s May 16 proclamation.”

  “But we’ve done absolutely nothing that—”

  Erdmann said that he couldn’t promise anything. “Some of your colleagues don’t deserve exemption. Some should return and some should not.”

  “I realize that,” the professor said. “But our income now is absolutely zero. In this time, in this age, we can do absolutely nothing. There is no job we can do.”

  The men under the tree were watching us. One of Erdmann’s Iraqi colleagues from the CPA said, “Let’s keep moving.”

  Another Iraqi was approaching. “Let’s get out of here,” Erdmann said. “I’m about to have a serious sense-of-humor failure.” We walked away, toward a white pillar at the edge of the plaza. Behind it was the glassed-in cafeteria. An anti-Baathist poster was taped to a wall: “THERE IS NO ROOM HERE FOR THOSE WHOSE HANDS DRIP WITH THE BLOOD OF INNOCENTS.”

  “This is where it happened,” Erdmann said. “This corner. The body was lying there. I pulled the car up here.”

  Around noon on July 6, while Erdmann was meeting with UNESCO representatives in the building across the plaza, one of his military escorts, Jeffrey Wershow, walked alone into the cafeteria with his helmet off and bought a ginger ale. Wershow was twenty-two, a specialist in the Florida National Guard, an only child, a lawyer’s son with an interest in politics. The soldier was holding his ginger ale near the white pillar when a man approached and shot him once in the head at point-blank range. The shooter, who was thought to be a Yemeni engineering student, disappeared into the crowd of students. By the time Erdmann sprinted across the plaza, shouting, gun drawn, soldiers had cleared out the crowd and wrapped the soldier’s head wound. They placed the body in the back of Erdmann’s Chevy Suburban, and he drove out of the campus to an improvised landing zone. The wounded soldier was stable when the helicopter arrived, but he died before reaching a military hospital.

  That evening, Erdmann tried to clean the bloodstains out of the car with detergent. He decided to go back to campus the next day. “I can’t let the last image of us be tearing out of town, throwing someone in the back of my Suburban and driving away.” He had to request an escort from soldiers in the dead man’s unit. “I’m the civilian and one of them got killed because of me. That’s the way I feel. I don’t necessarily think that’s the way they feel—I wouldn’t put that on them—but that’s what happened.” Erdmann smiled in his mirthless way. “Guy got killed so I could go and talk to some people from UNESCO.”

  The main reason for visiting the campus on this morning in mid-August was to say goodbye to Dr. Sami Mudhafar, the biochemist who had been elected university president in May. Mudhafar, in his sixties, was wearing a navy blue suit and had the hair and thick glasses of Henry Kissinger. He and Erdmann, thirty years younger and wearing olive khakis and a blue polo shirt, sat down in the president’s office and went over the week’s business. Erdmann reported that the State Department was resuming Fulbright scholarships for Iraqis. Mudhafar complained that professors suspected of working in bioweapons were being arrested on campus. Erdmann promised to take an application for an air-conditioning system in the political science department to the CPA.

  “I wanted to tell you that I’m going back to the U.S.,” Erdmann said.

  Mudhafar looked stunned. “For a visit?”

  “Permanently.” Erdmann said that he was leaving just when the hard work of rebuilding the universities was paying off, and the focus could now turn to curriculum reform, which was his real interest. “I don’t want to leave.”

  “I’m sorry to hear this news,” Mudhafar said. “We’ve gotten used to you. We will miss you, really, because you are a good man and I wish you a good future. You have done the best you could. We have come through very serious days, and really very dangerous. We have argued, we have eaten together—and that’s life.”

  Each of them had separately criticized the other to me. Erdmann complained that Mudhafar demanded independence from the CPA but lacked the nerve to fire bad administrators on his own. And Mudhafar once said that Erdmann had not always known how to deal with Iraqis, recalling that during the May 17 vote, when the noise got out of hand, the young American had screamed at the theater full of Iraqi faculty members, “Shut up!”

  On this day, they seemed affectionate and nostalgic, bound together by shared experience. Mudhafar reminded Erdmann of the ordeal of simply finishing the academic year on time. “Many people were hoping we would not succeed. Especially those people from the past regime, and also some countries around Iraq. They were hoping it would not be completed.”

  Erdmann said, “I hope we’ll both be able to look back in a few years and say we did good work.”

  “Don’t forget us there, at your new position.”

  I saw Erdmann again in September, back in Washington. He was wearing a blue business suit and a White House pass draped around his neck. Iraq was not his portfolio, but he was soon drawn back to working on it again almost full-time. Erdmann found that no one, in or out of government, really understood what it was like in Iraq. The gap between headquarters and the field was profound. “I sound like, ‘It’s Khe Sanh, damn it! Charlie’s inside the wire!’” he said, laughing grimly and adopting a Dennis Hopper tremor. “‘You don’t understand, man!’” He said that he was still unable to think as a historian. He joked that he hoped never to write a book on Iraq called Strange Defeat. But it made no sense to claim any certainty about how Iraq would emerge from the ordeal. “I’m very cautious about dealing with anyone talking about Iraq who’s absolutely sure one way or the other.”

  * * *

  BY LATE AUGUST, Paul Bremer was ready to lay out an ambitious vision for the CPA in Iraq. It would require spending tens of billions of dollars, which the American public and Congress had no idea they would be asked to pay. And it would mean a seven-step political process—writing a constitution and organizing several stages of national elections, before turning sovereignty back to Iraqis—that might last another year or more. America finally had a plan for Iraq.

  A new entity called the Governing Council had been established in July, composed of twenty-five Iraqis and dominated by former exiles, but its power was unclear, its visibility poor, and ordinary Iraqis felt little connection to it. To create the Governing Council, Bremer had relied on the help of the United Nations mission in Baghdad, led by the secretary general’s special representative. Sergio Vieira de Mello, a career UN diplomat from Brazil, had reluctantly left his new job as high commissioner for human rights in Geneva to take a temporary post in Iraq whose authority and purpose were worryingly vague. The Bush administration decided soon after the fall of Baghdad that, whatever its rhetoric about a “vital” role for the UN, the country that had waged the war should control the postwar and enjoy
its benefits. No incentives were offered to countries that had opposed the war to involve their own troops and money in the reconstruction. Bremer saw no reason for internationalizing Iraq as time went on, and whenever a colleague—usually British—brought up the UN at a meeting, Bremer would roll his eyes as if the subject were a waste of time. The occupation would remain an American affair, and its legitimacy would depend on America’s legitimacy.

  Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British UN ambassador who came to Baghdad in September as Tony Blair’s envoy, told me, “The UN wouldn’t have begun to be capable of keeping the lid on this. A, they were unpopular before it began. B, they don’t produce that kind of leadership. Third, you can’t have this kind of exercise being run by committee like the Security Council. I’ve been on it for five years—I know where the capability of the UN runs out, and so does Kofi Annan. He’s never looked to be in charge of this theater.” Between UN control and American control, there was always a third option: the early formation of an interim Iraqi government, not by the Pentagon with its handpicked favorites, but by a national conference under international supervision, with Iraq’s many constituencies, including the Sunnis, represented. Bremer never seemed to consider it; he was moving ahead resolutely with his own plan.

  But the small UN team in Baghdad brought certain virtues that the CPA lacked. One of them was experience in the nation-building efforts of the nineties that the Bush administration considered irrelevant and worse than useless for Iraq. Another was a corps of Arab officials who knew the region’s politics. The team also had an ability to reach out and listen to a broader array of Iraqis than the Americans seemed able to. UN officials traveled to the disaffected Sunni provinces, where violence against the occupation was beginning to grow serious, and heard the complaints of Sunni Arabs who felt marginalized by the dissolution of the army and debaathification. Vieira de Mello himself met personally in the holy city of Najaf with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s highest Shiite cleric, who commanded vast support among the country’s religious majority. Sistani refused to receive CPA officials. He made it clear from the beginning that he wanted elections in Iraq as soon as possible, and he issued a fatwa insisting that the new constitution must be written by an elected, not an appointed, body. Banners repeating the words of his fatwa hung from walls throughout the Shiite districts of Baghdad. But when people who had audiences with Sistani at his rented house in an alleyway in Najaf tried to convey the importance of the fatwa to Bremer, the administrator brushed them off. “Sistani is saying different things in private,” he assured a visiting delegation. One ayatollah wasn’t going to tell the occupation authority how to run the country. With the formation of the Governing Council, Bremer seemed to regard the UN’s role as finished. By the time I met Vieira de Mello in August, he no longer knew exactly why he was still in Iraq. His mandate would expire soon, and he would return to Geneva.