The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  At that same moment, the chronic Sunni insurgency in Anbar province suddenly exploded into full-scale combat. The mutilation of the four Blackwater contractors on March 31 shocked the American public. At the White House, President Bush declared, “I want heads to roll.” It was an impulsive reaction, based on the domestic impact of the pictures from Falluja, as if Iraq were a shootout in which personal honor was at stake (just as Bush’s response to the initial stage of the insurgency had been to say, “Bring ’em on”). Officials in Baghdad called this kind of long-range tinkering “the eight-thousand-mile screwdriver,” and at the other end was a president who often said that the lesson of Vietnam was that politicians shouldn’t try to do the job of generals. The order went down the chain of command for the new Marine division in Anbar to surround Falluja, which had been left unpatrolled for weeks by the Eighty-second Airborne, retake it, and hunt down the contractors’ killers. The commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General James Conway, later said that he wasn’t happy about the order to attack a whole city in revenge for four deaths; the Marines had come to Anbar with the idea of taming the rebellious province with a smoother, softer touch than the ham-fisted Eighty-second, and Conway wanted to handle the crisis with targeted operations. Bremer was also opposed, according to an official in Washington, but Rumsfeld overrode him, and Bremer’s appeal to Bush was in vain.

  Conway was unhappier still when, three days after the assault began, with the Marines approaching the city center in close fighting, the order came from the Pentagon to stop. Unconfirmed reports on Arab satellite TV of hundreds of civilian deaths in Falluja were inflaming opinion all over Iraq and the region; Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special representative in Baghdad, said that his mission was about to collapse, and several members of the Governing Council threatened to quit. The fighting in Falluja, which spread to Ramadi, created for the first time an alliance of Sunni and Shia against the Americans: Shiite mosques organized blood drives and aid convoys for besieged Fallujans, and Sadr’s picture appeared in Sunni mosques. There was even some tactical coordination between fighters. Most of the country now seemed to be in open rebellion against the occupation. The United States was fighting a two-front war without enough troops, and in the first two weeks of April, a year after the formal end of major combat operations, forty-eight soldiers were killed.

  The Marines eventually withdrew from Falluja. The city was handed over to a contingent of former Iraqi soldiers called the Falluja Brigade, which soon lost control to the insurgency and in some cases went over to the other side. The Falluja Brigade was Lieutenant General Conway’s idea; the CPA wasn’t consulted. Falluja would become a Taliban-like fiefdom and base of operations for Iraq’s most violent jihadis, foreign and local, until a new division of Marines would retake the city by frontal assault in November. Sadr’s militia was soon repelled from Kut and other towns by American forces and armed tribes; under pressure from Shiite clerics and politicians, Sadr returned control of the holy cities to the Iraqi police. But the Mahdi Army was still armed and far from finished. It would take a second round of fighting in Najaf and Sadr City, Sistani’s intervention, and then the beginning of serious negotiations and reconstruction projects, to persuade Sadr to end the Shiite insurgency and join Iraqi politics—a rare strategic success for America in Iraq.

  “Six months of work is completely gone,” said a CPA official who survived the April battles in the south. “There is nothing to show for it.” By sheer fecklessness, confusion, and ignorance, the administration in Washington and the occupation authority in Baghdad had allowed Iraq to become explosive and had then triggered the detonator themselves.

  During the violence of April and May, the credibility of the CPA collapsed. The civilian and military spokesmen, a Republican appointee named Dan Senor and a brigadier general named Mark Kimmitt, stood up at daily press conferences in the convention center and issued statements about the history of Sadr’s arrest warrant and the coalition’s intentions toward the rebels that were usually at odds with the facts, on occasion flatly untrue, and often in direct contradiction to statements made a day or a week earlier—all the while insisting that American policy remained firm and the violence was sporadic, minor, and under control. Senor and Kimmett were only repeating the blithe reassurance coming from the White House and Pentagon in the midst of a presidential campaign, but in Baghdad their words took on the tone of farce, and the audience that mattered most—the Iraqis—wasn’t fooled.

  The scandal of prisoner abuse, which had been going on for months but broke publicly in early May with the uprising still seething, became a microcosm of the larger failures. Bremer had known that the prison system was broken for some time, but an official who worked on the issue of detainees told me that Sanchez and the military steadily resisted the CPA’s attempts to get information about the prisons or have certain prisoners released. The attitude was: This is our job, we know what we’re doing, stay out. Bremer never publicly showed that the issue concerned him, and Iraqis, including those who could get no word about the fate of family members, believed that the entire occupation was to blame—which, in fact, it was. Bremer and Sanchez, the senior civilian and the senior soldier in Iraq, “literally hated each other,” an official in Washington said. “Jerry thought Sanchez was an idiot, and Sanchez thought Jerry was a civilian micromanaging son of a bitch.” So the CPA allowed the single worst stain on its reputation to spread indelibly.

  “What’s the moral difference between Saddam Hussein and us?” one soldier, who didn’t find the abuse itself particularly terrible, wrote me in May. “Obviously a lot, I believe, but the problem is that those who don’t know America aren’t going to see it that way. It’s set our work back a long, long ways, which is the greatest shame if you’re like us and want to see Iraq succeed. That’s the depressing part, its effect on everyone else, not what actually happened.”

  Over time, it became clear that the ultimate responsibility lay in Washington, at the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and finally the White House. The memos on torture and the Geneva Conventions written by the president’s counsel Alberto Gonzales and others made abuses inevitable. One administration official who had served in Vietnam said, “There’s no doubt in my mind as a soldier that part of the responsibility for Abu Ghraib and for Afghanistan belongs with the secretary of defense and the president of the United States. There’s an old aphorism: Keep it simple, stupid. KISS is the acronym. You always have personalities in uniform—I had them in Vietnam—who will take advantage of any ambiguity, any lack of clarification in the rules of engagement, and kill people, or whatever his particular psyche is liable to do. You don’t have rules for your good people. You have rules for that five or six percent of your combat unit that are going to be weird. You need those people, because sometimes they’re your best killers. But you need the rules. And when you make any kind of changes in them, any relaxation or even hint of it, you’re opening Pandora’s box. And I fault Gonzalez, the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the chain of command, Myers, Abizaid, Sanchez, the whole bunch of them.”

  All of these men kept their jobs. One was even promoted. The failure to hold anyone in authority responsible ensured that immoral and, from a practical point of view, worthless methods of interrogation would continue. Even after the world saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib, prisoners would go on being tortured in American custody.

  The events of April and May 2004 showed that no one was making decisions based on a clear, realistic strategy. No one was really in charge of Iraq. Bremer acted without consulting Washington, Washington kept stepping in to overrule Bremer, the Pentagon was still battling State and NSC, the White House had its eye on the political calendar, Bremer and Sanchez were barely speaking, Sanchez left his division commanders to pursue wildly different tactics. When something went wrong, it was somebody else’s fault—a psychopathic sergeant, or the press corps, or the Iraqis. And the Iraqis turned out to have their own ideas abou
t their country’s fate. Looking back, a senior CPA official said, “What they needed was somebody in charge in Washington and somebody in charge in Baghdad, and they needed to be twins, in the sense that they were really on the same wavelength. Rumsfeld was kind of washing his hands, it seemed. Jerry over time began dealing more and more with Rice and Powell. Unfortunately, by then you had a full-blown insurgency.”

  * * *

  THE FIGHTING DELAYED THE REDEPLOYMENTS of twenty-five thousand soldiers for two or three months. The plan to reduce American troop levels to 115,000 was tossed out as the coalition once again had to improvise. Departing convoys of exhausted soldiers were turned around on the road to Baghdad International Airport. The First Armored Division was sent south from Baghdad to Najaf and other cities to take over from the overwhelmed multinational force. Within a few weeks of his departure, and hastily married, John Prior was back in Iraq.

  Prior’s battalion ended up at a base in a former chicken factory, twenty miles south of Baghdad outside a squalid town called Mahmudiya. Prior’s war log for April 2003 recorded that thousands of jubilant Iraqis had thronged the main road in Mahmudiya as Charlie Company liberated the town on its way to Baghdad. The area was now called the Triangle of Death. The town was mixed Sunni and Shiite, but the outlying lands were largely Sunni, with a large number of former Republican Guard officers in houses built after 1991 by the old regime to create a line of defense between Baghdad and the Shiite south. Mahmudiya was dense with munitions factories, which had been looted after the invasion, and was now the scene of constant roadside explosions and even suicide car bombings. One car bomber drove into a checkpoint and blew up eight soldiers in an explosion so powerful that his steering wheel landed two hundred feet away and a thirty-ton Bradley was disabled. Insurgent attacks on Shiite policemen and pilgrims traveling to the holy cities were increasing, and Mahmudiya was also notorious for the shooting of journalists and other foreigners along the highway that passed through the middle of town. Mortar or rocket fire was directed at the chicken factory almost every night. Charlie Company was spending the last of its fifteen months in Iraq in a bleak, hostile place.

  I went to see Prior there in the middle of June. Highway 8, the strip down from Baghdad, was closed to civilian traffic, and one section of the road, a bridge over a canal, had recently been blown up. The soldiers who escorted me down to the base made no secret of their feelings about the prolonged stay in Iraq. “I sympathized with the Iraqis when we first got here,” said a young sergeant who had spent every day of the occupation in Iraq. “But now I’m cold, I feel no remorse. When you see some of your friends get killed, it changes you.” I asked if he still distinguished between good and bad Iraqis. “How can you tell them apart? The same guy that waves at you can shoot you with an RPG.”

  At the base I heard the same thing from almost every soldier I talked to. The bitterness extended beyond Iraqis to their own chain of command. Rumsfeld, who had sent them out here without enough men and armor and then extended their deployment several times, came in for particular hatred, and even the president wasn’t popular; a number of soldiers said that they intended to vote for John Kerry, who at least had served in Vietnam. Everyone was still doing his or her job, but the heart had gone out of it and a stale air of cynicism hung over the place as the soldiers waited for their orders to ship out. After the close relationships Prior and his lieutenants and NCOs had developed with their translators in Zafaraniya, it seemed an unfortunate development that the portable toilets at the base in Mahmudiya were segregated between American soldiers and Iraqi workers. The Americans complained that the Iraqis kept breaking the seats by standing on them. Thousands of years of civilization, the Americans said, and these people still didn’t know how to use a sit-down toilet.

  I spent several nights at the base. On the second evening, two mortar rounds flew overhead and exploded somewhere outside the perimeter, but otherwise my visit to Mahmudiya was quiet. One morning I went out on patrol in a convoy of two Bradleys and two armored Humvees (in Zafaraniya the thirty-ton Bradleys had stayed at the base, but here no one patrolled without them). The commander of the Humvee I rode in, Sergeant Scott McKissen, had seen his son a total of fourteen days in the boy’s fourteen-month life. Another soldier had canceled his wedding three times. McKissen, a blond, good-natured thirty-one-year-old from a small town in Utah, was still doing his damnedest to complete the mission, waving at pedestrians on the main road who resolutely refused to wave back. Most Iraqis didn’t look at the heavily armored vehicles lumbering through their town, but the few stares were hard; no one smiled, not even a child.

  “The hardest thing is treating these people with dignity and respect,” McKissen said, “because I haven’t met one yet that I can trust. We know what they’d do if they got their hands on us. And the fatigue of being here so long and wanting to go home doesn’t make you want to be friendly. I think the biggest battle here is just trying to be friendly with these people. You gotta try—it’s the only way to fight the fight, trying to set them up with a democratic government. It’s not going to work if you just shoot ’em. They’ve been living this way for centuries. Are we going to change that in a year? All you can do is try.”

  At the southern edge of town a tread fell off one of the Bradleys, and we stood out on the shoulder of the road in the summer heat, soldiers fanned out with guns at the ready position, while a mechanic lay in the dirt with a wrench. I started broken conversations with a couple of Iraqis walking by and took a perverse pleasure in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have lasted here more than a few seconds on my own. Later, we heard over the radio that a car bomber was cruising the area. After an hour we moved on in what struck me as a pro forma patrol, speeding down the stretch of highway south of the city where IEDs were particularly bad. McKissen looked hard at every pile of garbage and dead dog on the roadside. The land was flat and dust blown, with lines of palm trees in the distance and fields of sunflowers wilting on their stalks.

  We stopped by the railroad tracks, near a canal overgrown with papyrus rushes. A section of the line had been blown up near here two weeks ago. Eight lonely Iraqi national guardsmen were digging a trench in the dirt perpendicular to the tracks. The Americans stopped and got out to talk, but there was no translator with them. “Good idea, but it’s facing the wrong way,” a soldier tried to explain to the guardsmen. “You want to face toward the tracks.”

  It was a pathetic sight. A lot of sweating and digging had gone into the trench, but the sandbag and plywood reinforcements were next to worthless. The men themselves looked too skinny and too old for the work; a few had gray hair. They wore different pieces of uniform, some without regulation boots, none with flak vests. Their only protection was their AK-47s. The area was rife with insurgents, and within a couple of weeks these guardsmen or others like them would start to die five or ten at a time under daily attacks against which they would be practically defenseless.

  McKissen was on the radio back to the base chuckling about the new fighting positions. An Iraqi explained with gestures that a nearby unit had been fired on a few minutes ago. “I’m not surprised,” McKissen said matter-of-factly. “It happens often.”

  The Americans offered their counterparts a thumbs-up and headed back to the base. The Iraqis returned to digging.

  That night, I shared a dinner of MREs around a table in Charlie Company’s cramped tactical operations center, which doubled as Prior’s sleeping quarters, with Prior, his lieutenants, and his new first sergeant. Mark Lahan had gone back to Germany, and his replacement, Karl Wetherington, a wiry thirty-nine-year-old, let me know what he thought about the people that the Americans had come here fifteen months ago to liberate. “An Iraqi came up to me and said it pisses them off to have to wait for military traffic. I told him, ‘If you wouldn’t blow us up with car bombs, we’d let you pass us.’ Shitheads.”

  The men around the table, from small towns in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina, all had the same view: After working here
for more than a year, they had concluded that Iraqi men were unreliable, didn’t tell the truth, couldn’t think rationally, never showed initiative. Prior had reluctantly come to believe that the religion, with its treatment of women and its pervasive fatalism, was a serious obstacle to democracy in Iraq—that it would take years and years. After relinquishing his company command he was going to study for a year on an Army fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and he imagined that the other students would think him a right-wing racist if he dared to utter these hard-learned home truths.

  “During Vietnam, Americans were against the soldiers and the administration,” Wetherington said. “Here at least the public supports the soldiers, even if they might not support the administration.”

  “Although that’s changing with Abu Ghraib,” Prior said. When he was in Boston in April, he had seen demonstrations and overheard bar talk that disheartened him.

  “I’m sick of reading about what five people did to a bunch of shit-bag Iraqis,” Wetherington said. One day, while he was driving in a convoy through Mahmudiya, children had lined the streets holding up newspapers with pictures from Abu Ghraib. “I mean, what they did was wrong. Just not representative.”