Nobody searched me on my way into the Canal Hotel, the UN’s three-story headquarters on a lonely stretch of highway east of downtown Baghdad: two guard booths, but no searches. Vieira de Mello’s staff occupied a hall on the third floor, but before going to his corner suite I stopped to talk with his political adviser, a Lebanese professor and former culture minister named Ghassan Salamé. Vieira de Mello and Salamé had both been students in Paris during the events of May 1968, but they had met only a few months ago, when the career international civil servant from Brazil asked the political veteran from Beirut to help him in what seemed an impossible assignment. “He said he knew nothing of Iraq,” Salamé said, “and less of me.”
It was the last week of my first stay in Iraq, and a particularly bad one: continuing power failures, numerous ambushes, explosions at an oil pipeline in Kirkuk and a water main in Baghdad, fatal riots in Basra, a devastating car bomb at the Jordanian embassy. Though I didn’t know it then, two days before my visit to the Canal Hotel, the UN had received intelligence reports of an imminent bomb attack.
In spite of all this, Salamé, who occupied the office of the former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, was thinking historically. “My deep feeling is that the problem is not in Baghdad, but in Washington,” he said. “Those who decided this war and did it and won it are not the type of Americans Arab countries have been used to in the past fifty years or so. This is not the Corps of Engineers, this is not the American pragmatist problem solver.” Salamé, a brusque man with thick black eyebrows, was fiddling with a strand of gold worry beads. “They are new Americans, unknown Americans, Americans with an ideology, with a master plan, with friends here, not open to everybody, with interests—somehow missionaries.”
I pointed out that these new Americans were not unlike some of the old Americans who had fought the ideological Cold War in Europe and Asia. Salamé seized on the comparison.
“When I listen to Mr. Wolfowitz, I feel that he mistakes Baghdad for Berlin in 1945. He doesn’t know the place.” Salamé went over the main decisions taken by the CPA, singling out the plans for economic reform and a new investment code. “This country does not need at all the kind of sweeping privatization that these guys back in Washington are looking for. Either it’s ideological, or they have an interest—they want to sell away Iraqi properties before there is a legitimate Iraqi authority.” Ideology, he said, accounted for debaathification and the dissolution of the army, which led to security problems and ongoing sabotage. If only the Americans in Baghdad could liberate themselves from “this ideological-industrial complex” in Washington, Salamé said, “they would be able to do a much better job.”
The special representative’s office was at the end of the hall, overlooking an access road and a new security wall of hollow concrete blocks built to within a yard of the Canal Hotel. The section of wall just below the office was still unfinished—it reached only seven feet of an intended thirteen. Vieira de Mello had his jacket off, but as he sat down across his corner coffee table from me, the perfectly pressed suit pants and sky-blue shirt, the sleek gray hair, above all the emphatic film actor’s voice, made him every bit the elegant diplomat of reputation. Vieira de Mello’s UN career had taken him from Cambodia and Angola to overseeing the early reconstruction of Kosovo, and finally to playing the role of Paul Bremer in East Timor.
Upon arriving in early June, Vieira de Mello tried to help the Americans out of the trap in which they found themselves and to help the Iraqis at the same time. Bremer, having taken charge of a project in jeopardy, seemed unwilling to loosen his grip. An advisory council of Iraqis with no substantive powers was the only proposal on the table other than complete American control.
“My message from day one, to them and to Jerry in particular, was this won’t fly. It didn’t fly in my experiments elsewhere, and I’m sure it won’t fly here in the circumstances.” Vieira de Mello told Bremer that the council needed to have executive powers. “You’ve got to give them responsibilities, even though you might be ultimately challenged. Iraqis are traumatized, Iraqis feel humiliated, rightly so. Iraqis feel, you know, orphaned—there is a huge power vacuum there. They might be happy that Saddam is gone forever, thank God, but they’re not happy with this kind of situation.”
Vieira de Mello, Salamé, and others began to hold a series of conversations around the country with leading Iraqis. Gradually, the ranks of the original group of exiles and Kurds were expanded with Iraqis who had lived under Saddam. The negotiations with the CPA became more informal and took on their own momentum, as Iraqis began to influence the selection of names. Vieira de Mello spent hours persuading a representative from the main Shiite party that joining the council would not be political suicide. When Bremer objected to the appointment of a communist, Vieira de Mello argued that secular Iraqis who didn’t speak for sectarian groups would be vital. Ghassan Salamé came up with the Arabic term majlis al-hokum in place of the CPA’s toothless “advisory council,” and in early July the Governing Council became the first indigenous authority in Iraq since the fall of Saddam. “Over half would not have been there if Jerry could have had it his own way in the first half of June,” Vieira de Mello said. The council functioned, he admitted, “in a kind of cocoon.” Still, he thought that it would ultimately succeed. “I wouldn’t be touring countries in the region trying to sell the Governing Council if I didn’t believe what I’m saying, because the last thing I need and the organization needs is to be marketing the interests of the United States.” He hoped for a fast political timetable, with a constitutional referendum, national elections, and a return of sovereignty by early spring. Occupation would soon become untenable.
As the secretary general’s representative in Iraq, Vieira de Mello had every reason to snipe at the Bush administration, which had spent much of the past year ridiculing, bullying, and snubbing the UN. In Iraq its profile was so low that Vieira de Mello admitted feeling irritated and embarrassed by “the total lack of authority.” But because he was pragmatic, and because he had once been in a role like Bremer’s elsewhere, he refused to be churlish. “I don’t want to be unfair to people who are up against an almost impossible task, having myself done similar things,” he said. “Criticism can be made in a constructive way, but simply to criticize without telling people how to do it better is pretty irresponsible, because you’re sitting on the fence and nothing is easier than to criticize those who actually are confronted with the challenge.”
Bremer, Vieira de Mello suggested, had two sides: a more internationalist face, which perhaps came from his years in the diplomatic corps, and a more hard-line face that reflected the administration in Washington. Their relationship had recently been getting rockier, as what he called “the more neocon side of Jerry’s personality” started emerging. But even when I threw what I thought was my fattest pitch and asked whether greater UN involvement early on might have prevented some of the CPA’s mistakes, Vieira de Mello was modest.
“Yes, we could have helped, and we would have been only too happy to do so, also pointing to our own mistakes—because unless you admit why things went wrong and why it is you are now offering a lesson, you won’t be heard. You see? And we could probably have done that. We still can. There’s still time.”
He looked at his watch: In a few minutes he had a press conference downstairs.
Six days later, at four-thirty on the afternoon of August 19, the day I left Iraq, an orange flatbed truck moving at high speed down the access road pulled up along the new security wall under Vieira de Mello’s corner office. American forces had blocked off the road with a five-ton truck, but because it was uncomfortable with a heavy military presence, the UN had asked that the obstacle be removed, along with an observation post on the roof and armored vehicles in front of the compound.
Sergio Vieira de Mello was sitting at the coffee table with several staff members and visitors when the one-ton bomb exploded. Ghassan Salamé, with glass in his hair, ran down the hall and found that Vieira d
e Mello’s office had collapsed two floors to the ground. “Sergio, courage,” he called down, in the French they used because of the shared experience of May 1968. “We’re coming to help you.”
A shaft of light shone down through the destroyed outer wall, and though Vieira de Mello didn’t answer, Salamé saw him wave his right hand.
“Sergio, answer me, are you alive?”
“Oui, Ghassan.”
Two floors had fallen on his legs. Soon American soldiers arrived and hustled Salamé out of the precarious building. From outside, he helped in the effort to remove debris. He kept talking so that the wounded man wouldn’t lose consciousness, but after a while the voice stopped answering. At eight-fifteen that evening, soldiers finally succeeded in clearing away the rubble, and Salamé identified the body of his friend.
Twenty-one others died with Vieira de Mello, including close aides, foreign humanitarian workers, and Iraqi employees of the UN. Elahe Sharifpour-Hicks, the Iranian-born human rights official, had left her office directly below Vieira de Mello’s a few minutes before the blast to get coffee, and so she survived. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, but there was also suspicion that some of the building’s guards, holdovers from the former regime, might have been involved. Ten days later, at the end of Friday prayers, an even more powerful car bomb killed Mohamed Baqr al-Hakim, spiritual leader of the largest Shiite party, and almost a hundred others outside the holiest mosque of Shiite Islam, in Najaf. And on September 20, Aqila al-Hashemi was shot in the stomach as she left her house to drive to a meeting of the Governing Council; she died five days later. Within two months, the number of foreign UN personnel in Iraq would dwindle from 650 to about forty, with none in Baghdad.
Paul Bremer was among those at the airport who said farewell to Sergio Vieira de Mello’s coffin as it was loaded onto a plane for Brazil. Then he returned to the Republican Palace and the job of governing Iraq alone.
7
THE CAPTAIN
SHORTLY AFTER THE FALL OF BAGHDAD, CNN aired footage of a Marine, confronted with a crowd of angry Iraqis, who shouts at them, “We’re here for your fucking freedom! Now back up!”
When the war of liberation turned into an occupation, tens of thousands of soldiers who thought they would be home by June saw their rotations out postponed, and then again, and again. They soon became the occupation’s most visible face. Combat engineers trained to blow up minefields sat through meetings of the Baghdad water department; airborne troops used to jumping in and out of missions in a matter of days spent months setting up the Kirkuk police department; soldiers of the Third Infantry Division who spearheaded the invasion passed out textbooks in a Baghdad girls’ school. The peacekeeping missions in the Balkans had given some of them a certain amount of preparation, but there was never any training for the massive project that fell on the shoulders of soldiers in Iraq. The CPA was months away from setting up provincial offices. Ray Salvatore Jennings, a consultant to USAID, who wrote one of the forecasts on postconflict Iraq that ended up on Bremer’s desk, kept coming across young officers trying to establish government in midsized cities who told him, “I’m doing the best I can but I don’t know how to do this, I don’t have a manual. You got a manual? Anything you can offer me I’d be profoundly grateful for.” A civil affairs captain asked Jennings’s colleague Albert Cevallos for training in Robert’s Rules of Order 101. Donald Rumsfeld’s nightmare of an army of nation builders came to pass all over Iraq.
A rifle company commander named Captain John Prior showed me his war log for the spring of 2003. After Charlie Company of the Second Battalion, Sixth Infantry Regiment, First Armored Division had fought its way up from Kuwait to the Baghdad airport, Captain Prior’s unit began an odyssey around central Iraq that lasted the better part of three months, before finally arriving at its permanent location in south Baghdad. Prior’s war log tells one story of soldiers coming to realize that what President Bush, on May 1, called the end of “major combat operations” was only the beginning.
Prior was a twenty-nine-year-old from Indiana, six feet tall and stringy (he lost twenty-five pounds in his first five months in Iraq). He had joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at a small engineering college in Indiana, then decided to make the military his career. His undergraduate’s face, deadpan sarcasm, and bouncy slew-footed stride did not prepare you for his toughness. “Some people are just born to do something,” Prior said. By his own account, he loved Army life, the taking and giving of orders. “The sappy reasons people say they’re in the military, and people say, ‘Nah, they can’t be’—those are the reasons I’m in the military. When Peace Corps can’t quite get it done and diplomacy fails and McDonald’s can’t build enough franchises to win Baghdad over, that’s when the military comes in.”
Charlie Company’s first mission after the fall of Baghdad sent Prior west to the city of Ramadi, to evacuate the body of an Argentinian journalist named Veronica Cabrera who had been killed in a highway accident. Prior and his soldiers were the first conventional forces to enter Ramadi, which was already—in late April—becoming a center of Baathist resistance. They were asked by Special Forces and the CIA to stay on for a few days and help patrol the town. As Prior’s convoy of Bradleys, Humvees, and armored personnel carriers drove down the main east-west road, a mosque began blaring anti-American rhetoric, and soon a crowd of three or four hundred Iraqis gathered. Prior and his soldiers found themselves in the middle of a riot, with insults, fruit, shoes, two-by-fours, rocks, and finally chunks of concrete flying at them and their vehicles. The Americans didn’t shoot and no one was seriously injured; in his log Prior commends his soldiers for their restraint. That night, Prior sent out another patrol along the same route, “to show the population of Ramadi that we are tougher and more resilient than they are and that we are here to stay.” This patrol came under small-arms fire from dark alleyways, but the shooters melted away before the Americans could find them.
In the following days in Ramadi, and then in nearby Falluja, Prior records a series of raids on houses and weapons markets. “Our soldiers are becoming experienced enough to know the difference between being nice and cordial to people and when it is time to not be nice and throw people to the ground.” Charlie Company is making the difficult transition from combat to stability operations—from Phase III to Phase IV—and Prior is pleased with his soldiers’ resourcefulness. Then something new and strange enters the margins of his account: Iraqis.
In Ramadi, a man who speaks broken English among other Iraqis suddenly pulls Prior to the side, cups his hands around the captain’s ear, and whispers in flawless English, “I am an American, take me with you.” When Prior tries to learn more, the man slips back into broken English and then clams up. On another day, another man, accompanied by his wife and small child, approaches a soldier at the gate of the university. Speaking perfect English with a British accent, he tells the soldier his story: He went to school in England, returned to Iraq in 1987, and has been unable to get out ever since. The man warns the soldier not to trust Iraqis, that things are not what they seem. Suddenly, a white truck pulls up and seven well-dressed men get out. The man at the gate quickly disappears with his wife and child before the Iraqis can speak to him. Prior and his first sergeant, Mark Lahan, track him down at home to find out whether he and his family are in danger. Now using broken English, the man tells them that everything is fine.
In another mysterious incident, an Iraqi approaches Lahan on a night patrol and bluntly asks, “How are things in Baghdad? Have there been any suicide bombings? Have any Americans been killed?” When Lahan replies that nothing of the sort has happened, the man looks surprised. Prior notes in his log, “It is interesting to see that here, after the bulk of the fighting is done in this country, the disinformation campaign by Iraqi hard-liners is still in effect, it will be a long time coming to get these people to be able to trust [one] another again and to understand how a government and law and order is supposed to work.” In fact, it isn’t d
isinformation from regime diehards. The guerrilla war is about to begin.
“The entire situation seemed very weird,” Prior writes on April 26, after five days in Ramadi. “It is clear now that they are not as happy as they say that we are here. For the first time in awhile, I felt extremely nervous being in such close proximity to Iraqi nationals. I do not trust them.” In another entry, from Falluja, he writes: “The Iraqis are an interesting people. None of them have weapons, none of them know where weapons are, all the bad people have left Falluja, and they only want life to be normal again. Unfortunately, our compound was hit by RPG fire today so I am not inclined to believe them.”
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