The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  These were abstract questions, but they led quite directly to the most interesting stories, the ones that kept me coming back to Iraq. The only justification for the war left standing, in my view, was the creation of a government that would give Iraqis the better lives they deserved. It would have to be democratic, but it would have to fill in the bare forms of democracy with substance. It would require more than the palace intrigues and backroom deals that were Iraqi politics under the CPA and the interim government. It would require the involvement of those ordinary people who had become so hard to know. If, by the end of 2004, with huge explosions and terrible casualties and the discovery of mass graves a daily occurrence, there was any will left at all to push ahead with the transformation of Iraq, the credit didn’t belong to the Americans or the Iraqi political elite. It belonged to ordinary Iraqis, who, after so much suffering, were apparently capable of toughing out this, too.

  The problem all along was that the strongest people in Iraq were the extremists with guns and militias. The most open-minded Iraqis were the weakest. From the start, Iraqi politics evolved in a way that was disfigured and illusory, though not all that unusual after totalitarianism. At the top were a handful of men in their sixties and seventies, mostly representatives of the former exile parties, who commanded backing along narrow ethnic and sectarian lines. (Ahmad Chalabi, who had almost no support of any kind inside Iraq, stopped talking about universal rights, attached himself to the Shiite bloc, became a champion of Moqtada al-Sadr, and revived his fortunes after the U.S. government dumped him and raided his house in Baghdad. Even Chalabi’s harshest critics had to admire the man’s shrewd opportunism.) These were the politicians whom the Americans dealt with—power brokers with armed militias—whatever the talk of liberal democracy might have been in the Pentagon, the White House, the think tanks, and the writings of Kanan Makiya. Bremer and his aide, Meghan O’Sullivan, put their time and energy into cultivating the leaders of the Shiite religious parties, Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which had thousands of men under arms. The American officials visited these leaders’ houses and paid them special attention on the Governing Council, with the idea that, if the CPA could keep them inside the tent, it could have some influence over the outcome.

  Instead, out in the streets, where the Americans had little control and little knowledge, the militias of the religious parties vied with Moqtada al-Sadr’s followers for power. Mosques, hospitals, and schools were taken over by armed men chanting ominous slogans; women were threatened, and worse, for their un-Islamic appearance, or even for being out of the house. Inside the Green Zone, long hours of negotiation about the role of Islam and women’s rights in the new state; outside the Green Zone, a harsh social code enforced by vigilante rule. Then there was the Sunni insurgency, which made sure that only the bravest, most dedicated citizens would dare show their faces at a public meeting.

  In these circumstances, the growth of anything like normal civic life was impossible. The Iraqis one hoped would come to the fore—those with more democratic ideas but without powerful backers—remained off to the side, waiting to see which way things went. A tough old doctor named Mahmoud Othman, who was a Kurdish independent on the Governing Council, once said to me, “The country now is ruled by militias, mullahs, and warlords. The simple citizen is not allowed to have his own rights, to say freely what he wants.” He put part of the blame on the Americans. “They are not caring much for a simple Iraqi citizen. They care for a chief of a tribe here, a mullah there, a religious man here, a militiaman here, head of a party there.”

  * * *

  IT WAS POSSIBLE to find Iraqis who were already coming forward to lay claim to their country’s political future. They were few in number, vastly outmatched in money and power by the parties and the militias, and they were, I thought, the toughest people on earth. Sometimes there were Americans ready to support them.

  The National Democratic Institute was an organization funded largely by the U.S. government and affiliated with the Democratic Party; it operated with relative independence, under the direction of the National Endowment for Democracy. The institute’s purpose was to find the “simple citizens” in a place like Iraq and help them to participate in democratic political life. This tended to be obscure, poorly funded work, but the Bush administration was trying to pour half a billion dollars into Iraq for “democracy-building” programs before the national elections. The escalation of violence made it hard to spend the money.

  Early one morning, I drove to Hilla, ninety minutes south of Baghdad, with a group of Iraqis and Americans working for NDI. We traveled in unarmored vehicles, without guards. In the backseat of one of the sedans, wearing a navy blue suit, a salmon-colored tie, and glasses, was David Dettman, a pale, chain-smoking political consultant from Ohio. For years, Dettman, who was thirty-three and had the nervous, self-deprecating sense of humor of a Jack Lemmon character, had worked successfully as a campaign consultant. Then he ran for the Ohio state legislature as a Democrat, got creamed, and had an epiphany. “What got me charged up is that I really believed in the process,” he said. He decided to leave the world of cold-blooded operatives and became one of NDI’s democratization missionaries, posted in Ukraine (where, at the end of 2004, his work would bear fruit in the Orange Revolution that overthrew Ukraine’s corrupt government). To the dismay of his wife, his mother, and his boss, Dettman had come to Iraq for two weeks to train groups of aspiring political party activists in Baghdad, Tikrit, and Hilla.

  The workshop in Hilla took place in the city’s former secret-police headquarters, which had become a human-rights center. Forty Iraqis—including a political science professor and an unemployed sports instructor—had traveled at some risk to attend the class. They listened intently and took careful notes as Dettman stood, shoulders hunched, before a flip chart and presented his ten-step program on message development and voter contact. Mayasa al-Naimy, an Iraqi staff member of NDI, gamely translated the exotic campaign terminology: “earned media,” “communications strategy,” “wedge and base issues.” Dettman had told me earlier, “Politics is the art of getting people to vote for you. It’s applicable all over the world. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have a job.”

  After two hours of discussion, an Iraqi raised his hand. “This shows me we’re making a transition from dictatorship to democracy,” he said. “That makes me feel good. But this is the question: Will the American administration leave it to us? Or just throw someone on us? Will all these efforts be lost?”

  Outside, in the distance, there was an explosion—mortar fire—and then a second, closer one, followed by gunfire. Dettman glanced out the window and grinned with alarm.

  “Does that answer your question?” someone asked.

  “I’m not the government,” Dettman said. “I’m NDI. We have to eat lunch. Can we talk about this later?”

  After lunch, Dettman returned to the question. “My opinion is if America invaded Iraq for nothing other than to have a friendly dictator, then all of the American and Iraqi lives that were lost will have been wasted,” he said. “I supported the invasion because I’m in the democratization business. I don’t know anything about WMD—I don’t know if anyone was telling the truth or not—but I do know the Iraqi people deserve freedom. I can’t say the Americans won’t do anything wrong, because they already have done many things wrong in this occupation. And I’m sorry. But there’s a reason NDI is here now, and there’s a reason we didn’t bring a tank. We’re the least armed Americans in Hilla. We’re here trusting your hospitality. Because democracy is good and right.” He went on, “And if this traumatic war was fought for anything other than that, I’m gonna be mad. Here’s the problem: I can’t do much. I’m just the arrogant American in a suit standing up in front of you. I haven’t suffered as much as you have. Only you can build democracy here. But if I just thought America was going to steal the freedom we fought for, I would have stayed home with my wife and had a lovely time.”
>
  “Aren’t you having a lovely time here?” someone asked.

  “I am having a lovely time. But I miss my wife.”

  It was a heartfelt speech, and it was received with scattered applause. Then a man sitting near me muttered to himself, “A British guy named Hempher laid plans decades ago for presidents to take turns ruling Iraq.”

  The people in the room belonged to what Dr. Shaker, the forensic-medicine specialist at the Baghdad morgue, called “the middle level of mind.” They were neither mullahs nor militiamen, and some of the parties they belonged to counted no more than several hundred members. They were hardly cast in the image of Western liberals; they wanted more religion in their government than the board members of the National Democratic Institute would likely have preferred. There were only three women present. The mention of Hempher, the supposed British spy blamed for so much trouble in the Muslim world, showed that these Iraqis were as prone to a sense of powerlessness and the conspiracy theories it gave rise to as most others. But what really mattered was that they had made the decision to take part in political life.

  One of the participants was Jawdet al-Obeidi, a former army officer from Hilla. He fled Iraq after taking part in the Shiite uprising in 1991 and ended up in Portland, Oregon. He started a small limousine company there, and in 2003 he sold it and returned to Iraq, as a member of a militia aligned with the U.S. invasion force. In Iraq, Obeidi poured $150,000 of his savings into building a coalition of almost two hundred small political parties to challenge the larger parties in the national elections. The coalition’s platform combined a moderate Muslim agenda with Iraqi nationalism and a respect for individual rights, a deliberately mild mixture that seemed designed to have broad support. Obeidi, a balding, middle-aged man with a salesman’s cheerfulness, had received death threats, and his brother-in-law survived three bullets in the head.

  Also at the meeting was a married couple from Mahawil, a village of dirt roads and salt marshes a few miles north of Hilla: Emad Dawood, who worked in a shop selling construction materials, and his wife, Saad, who had received a business degree in Baghdad but was unable to find work and was now raising their three children. Like the other women at the meeting, she covered her head.

  Her husband explained to me, “We go everywhere together.”

  “Any educated couple would do this,” Saad said.

  “Of course, we have religion, and we go by the rules,” Emad added. “The Islamic religion doesn’t say women can’t mix with other men, but everything has to do with limits.”

  Saad pointed out that Islam didn’t deny women the right to participate in politics: “They should have a role in everything.”

  In Hilla, the repression of the 1991 Shiite uprising had been particularly brutal, and in 2003 mass graves containing thousands of victims were uncovered on the periphery of the town. Saad and Emad had each lost a brother and many friends. The couple had only the vaguest notion of what was in Iraq’s interim constitution, but they knew very well what it was like to live under Saddam. “It’s like a hammer on your head every day,” Emad said, “and then they take it away.”

  The Dawoods had once seen the Americans as heroic liberators, but the feeling was short-lived. According to Emad, as the occupation ground on, with constant power outages and rampant crime, ordinary unhappiness was turning into a kind of insanity. “Things are just getting worse here,” Saad added. “Of course, if there was democracy, things would change.”

  “But democracy needs a long period of time,” Emad said, “because we’ve been living so long under Saddam.”

  “Most people do not get the idea of democracy,” Saad said. “Ask anybody about democracy, and you’d find most people would say, ‘What am I going to do with democracy? Give me security first.’”

  Emad said, “I know a guy who shot two bullets at random. He said, ‘Isn’t this freedom?’”

  As for Dettman’s presentation, it clearly meant something to this couple that Americans had come to meet with them in Hilla. Dettman had given them a lot of helpful information, they felt. Their only complaint was that there was no exam at the end, to test how much they’d learned about democracy.

  The chances of the people at the meeting in Hilla having any immediate success on the political stage were poor. Marina Ottoway, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said that, after the fall of dictatorships, “You always have a lot of political parties forming, and they never get anywhere. For that reason,” she added, NDI was “bravely doing something that is completely futile.” But electoral success wasn’t the only measure of its effect. In Hilla, it felt like an achievement simply to hold a discussion, amid gunfire, about democracy, in which there was a genuine give-and-take between Iraqis and foreigners. Les Campbell, NDI’s Middle East director, said, “Even with all the problems in Iraq, there is already more civil society space and party organizing than in any other Arab country by orders of magnitude.” He described how NDI’s Iraqi staff members, such as Mayasa al-Naimy, had begun to blossom intellectually. “Even in the midst of the killings, which are terrible, and even though the planning and administration continue to be a joke, something interesting is going on here. And it makes me sort of sick to think it might not work.”

  * * *

  I WENT BACK TO IRAQ one more time in January of 2005. The national elections that Ayatollah Sistani had been demanding ever since the fall of the regime were finally going to happen. The Bush administration, having resisted for the better part of a year and a half, had become their strongest advocate, and the date of January 30, 2005, was now set in stone.

  There had been good reasons for delaying elections. The best-armed, best-organized groups, with funding from Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, had all the advantage over the less sectarian or extreme ones, such as those I had seen in Hilla. There were examples in recent history—Bosnia was one—where precipitous postwar elections had simply enshrined the least democratic forces in power for years to come. UN experts had been as wary as American officials of early elections. But as with every other plan for Iraq, events ran out of control and overwhelmed the bright ideas of people in Washington and Baghdad. Former CPA officials began to say privately that the big mistake had been the failure to hold local elections at the start of the occupation. If Iraqis had been able to vote for their local councils soon after the fall of the regime, and then provincial councils, and finally a national government, they would have become participants in Iraq’s politics in a way that never happened, and the occupation might have gone very differently. But it was much too late for alternative scenarios.

  Instead, the country’s first democratic vote would take place almost two years after the invasion, in less than ideal circumstances. Even after a Marine assault in November of 2004 pried Falluja out of jihadi control, the insurgents only seemed to gain strength as they expanded company-size operations from Anbar province to Mosul and took over large areas of Baghdad itself. In Washington there was a new conventional wisdom: Not only was there a full-blown guerrilla war in Iraq, but America was losing it (Colin Powell was reported to have said this to friends). Iraqis would have to vote under the direst threats. The Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi recorded a statement, posted on the Internet, that declared war on the Iraqi elections, calling democracy an evil form of polytheism that replaced God with politicians, a conspiracy of “crusader harlots” and Shiite “rejectionist pigs.” Anonymous leaflets scattered around the capital threatened to “wash the streets of Baghdad with the voters’ blood. To those of you who think you can vote and run away, we will shadow you and catch you, and we will cut off your heads and the heads of your children.” In most parts of the country, the essential elements of an election campaign—public meetings, voter education, parades, door-to-door canvassing—were nearly impossible. The parliamentary lists kept the names of most candidates secret in order to protect their lives; voters would hardly know whom they were choosing to represent them. A team of
international observers announced that it would monitor the Iraqi elections from Amman, hundreds of miles away in another country. The administration had defined its project for democracy in the Middle East so far downward that it seemed as if the elections would be a bloody exercise in going through the motions.

  Amman was my point of entry and exit on trips to Iraq. It was a blessedly dull city where the stoplights worked and there were no police checkpoints. At the Four Seasons Hotel, the elevator music and turned-down bedspreads and buffet breakfasts were dreamlike luxuries. The desk clerks were trained to say, “Welcome back, Mr. Packer,” and it always gave me a cheap pleasure to be personally welcomed to a place where I could let down my guard. Tame Amman, with its pleasant hilltop air and dyed-blond Arab women, was the closest thing the Iraq War had to Bangkok. In the plush lobby of the Four Seasons you always met journalists on their way in or out, international aid workers biding their time while they monitored the violence, Iraqi government officials holding meetings that would have been too dangerous in Baghdad, and Iraqi exiles sitting deep in armchairs, sipping Turkish coffee, glancing around with vaguely conspiratorial looks and all the time in the world on their hands.

  By the beginning of 2005 there were at least three hundred thousand Iraqis in Jordan, and housing prices in Amman had skyrocketed. Some were escapees from the violence, usually with an unpleasant experience like burglary or kidnapping in their recent past. Others were just taking a breather, as if Jordan were a spa where fortunate Iraqis could go to have their nervous breakdowns. And still others were Sunnis unhappy with the new order of things in Iraq, where Shiite and Kurdish politicians seemed poised to take over their country. Some of these Sunnis had connections to the insurgency; a few were among its leaders.