The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

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  The disintegration of the country had been underway for a long time; in a sense, it had begun years before the Americans crossed the Kuwaiti border in March 2003. But by 2006 it was happening with alarming speed, and with all the signs of being irreversible. Iraqis who had once said that Iraq would need one or two years to emerge from violence now spoke in terms of a decade or more: a generation of chaos following generations of tyranny.

  Iraq never ceased to offer paradoxes. American policies and military tactics had contributed a great deal to the strength of the insurgency and the spiral of sectarian violence that followed. And yet, in the same month when I saw how far Baghdad had descended, I also saw evidence that the American military was finally learning to fight the insurgency in an effective way. In the northwestern town of Tal Afar, which had repeatedly fallen into the hands of Sunni extremists after the Americans failed to hold it, an armored cavalry regiment under a brilliant colonel named H. R. McMaster spent the better part of 2005 living in the city, developing relationships with local people, training counterparts in the Iraqi army, and practicing the classic counter-insurgency strategy of separating the civilian population from insurgents, providing security, and setting up institutions of government that could win popular support. All of this required a large, long-term American presence in the city and a willingness to take risks and suffer casualties. McMaster and his young officers had trained for this approach in Colorado and undertaken it in Tal Afar on their own initiative, as rebels against the intellectual failures of their senior civilian and military leaders. In Tal Afar, which had been the Falluja of the north, American and Iraqi forces managed to achieve a fragile peace. I saw what might have been possible had such things been done at the outset.

  It was too little and too late. After the years of mistakes and incoherent strategy from the Pentagon and the White House, America’s leverage in Iraq has greatly diminished. The tens of thousands of American soldiers who are still there, and who continued to die by ones and twos, are placeholders, buffers, trying to hold the structure of a national government together until it can exist as facts on the ground, while suppressing even worse violence—the nightmare specter of a full-scale civil war and a regional war that could consume the whole Middle East and leave the carcass of Iraq to be picked over by militias, terrorists, and predatory neighbors. America might still be able to avert the worst in Iraq, but there is no prospect of a stable, decent country for years to come. That chance was already slipping away when I first went there in the hopeful, troubled summer of 2003; it is now long gone.

  The failure of American policy in Iraq raises the biggest, hardest questions about the war. Was the insurgency inevitable? Could such a damaged and divided society ever have been expected to stay in one piece, let alone find its way to democracy? Could the administration of President George W. Bush ever have succeeded at a project as difficult as this, undertaken with such arrogance and blindness, with so few friends and so much international scorn? The stated cause for war—weapons of mass destruction and links to international terrorism—proved to be exaggerated or false. Could any other cause—the rescue of a country with which America has for years been historically entangled, the end of a tyranny, the beginning of Arab reform—have justified it?

  It’s still possible that the fondest hopes of the war’s architects will be realized in a generation or two, that regime change in Iraq will advance democracy and reduce extremism across the Middle East. But policy makers are accountable within the parameters of their own watch. For now, and into the foreseeable future, American and liberal, Western interests have been badly damaged by the fighting in Iraq. The war has been a disaster for our military, which has suffered grievous death and injury, lost a measure of its honor at Abu Ghraib, and in the deaths of far too many Iraqi civilians, and been overextended to the point where withdrawal might become necessary simply for want of available troops. The vast majority of soldiers did all that was asked of them, but many of the best—including John Prior—have decided to leave an institution they love. Failure in Iraq has been marked by a complete lack of accountability in Washington, which finally drove a handful of normally reticent retired generals to do something almost unprecedented in American military history: speak out publicly and point the finger of blame at their former boss, Donald Rumsfeld.

  The direct costs to national treasure are easy to measure, now well over $300 billion; the fraying of alliances, the loss of American power and prestige, the draining of attention and resources from other crises, especially the struggle against the twin dangers of worldwide jihad and nuclear proliferation, are harder to quantify but no less real. The war’s outcome has proved it to have been a mistake—a huge one, such as only happens once every few generations.

  The Iraq War brought to an end the age of humanitarian intervention, which had helped to make it thinkable. The war revealed what was already obvious to experienced soldiers and should have been to civilian idealists: moral purpose combined with force, without knowledge and wisdom, can be more dangerous than indifference. The consequences of any war are unknowable, other than inevitable death, and the ground in Iraq was always inhospitable to building anything durable and good. A war to end tyranny there—even one as monstrous as Saddam Hussein’s, for which the United States had a historical responsibility, first by arming him against Iran, then by leaving him in power in 1991, and finally by imposing sanctions that ruined the lives of millions of Iraqis—such a war should not have been undertaken as it was against such long odds, with so little legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Nothing is inevitable; human beings, organized by activities called politics and war, make things happen as they do, and Iraq might have turned out otherwise if the human beings involved had been and done otherwise. But war is too blunt an instrument to be used when the chance for success is so slight.

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  The war has given rise to a deeply skeptical view in this country: that Iraqis have proven that they were always incapable of living together, of forming a nation, of creating a democracy; that they have the wrong culture. It’s true that, once the lid was lifted, Iraq turned out to be more religious, more tribal, more suspicious, and more violent than most outsiders had imagined. This had less to do with something hereditary and permanent called “Iraqi culture” than with a history of government by force, from Iraq’s origins in boundaries drawn by Europeans to the damage inflicted by thirty-five years of Baathist rule. If the best armed and least tolerant factions came to dominate post-Saddam Iraq, this hardly reflected the free will of the Iraqi people. The cardinal sin of the Americans was to create the conditions for chaos. From the moment of the old regime’s fall, no one in Iraq was safe from violent intimidation, and it was only a matter of time before insurgents and militias became powerful. Ordinary Iraqis, whatever society they might have wanted to live in—and many of them could not yet have known—were never allowed to practice the art of citizenship. The three elections of 2005 showed that Iraqis were capable of political courage and maturity, but the elections also ratified what had already become reality in the streets: sectarian violence led to sectarian votes. The rule of the tyrant was followed by the rule of the gunmen. By failing to secure the country, the Americans failed to give Iraqis the true freedom to decide their future for themselves.

  For better or worse, our fate is now tied to theirs. There can be no phased withdrawal from the future of Iraq. Some significant withdrawal of American troops in 2006 and 2007 seems inevitable. Whether it happens according to a timetable determined by American politicians, through a plan negotiated between the American and Iraqi governments, or according to the advice of military commanders under great pressure to show success on the ground, the withdrawal will have far more to do with American politics than with the war in Iraq. The debate in Washington is so shrouded in partisanship and illusion as to be almost meaningless. For Iraq to have any real chance of stability, large numbers of foreign troops will need to remain in Iraq, heav
ily involved in security and reconstruction, for years to come. Perhaps the U.S. government will decide that the large-scale American commitment has achieved all it can in Iraq, and that our national interests require moving troops to Kuwait or Qatar, where they will try to secure oil supplies, deter neighboring countries from encroaching, and act as a last-resort intervention force in case the insurgency makes dramatic gains and the Iraqi government is about to fall. If that day comes, it will have nothing to do with success in Iraq. The administration will declare victory, the opposition will declare vindication, but Iraqis will know that they are being left to sort it out among themselves. And although the American presence in Iraq has thrown the Middle East into turmoil, an American departure will only enhance the position of the regional powers—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey—and tempt them to fill the vacuum left behind. There is also a good chance that western Iraq will be under the control of no government, Iraqi or foreign, and will become a base of operations for regional jihad. The effort to create representative government and hold the country together against forces of violence and fragmentation will have lasting consequences for Americans, far greater than Vietnam ever did. The notion that we can withdraw our forces and be done with it, leaving the Iraqis to sort things out, is a fantasy.

  Throughout the new nightmare into which they awoke from the nightmare of Saddam, Iraqis have shown a patience and a resilience, born of many years of suffering, which is one of the very few sources of hope I can find in Iraq today. The ordinary people I know there who long for a decent life, without suicide bombs, electrical outages, or the secret police, make it difficult for me to write it all off as an irredeemable disaster. It took me a long time even to be able to consider the biggest historical questions about the war; they required a distance from the hope and suffering in Iraq that I couldn’t achieve. Once the regime fell and I began traveling there, all the old arguments about the merits of the war fell away with it. What mattered was the drama being played out across the country, and I had no doubt where my sympathies lay: I wanted Iraqis to have the chance at the decent life they’d been denied for so long. I wanted what the American invasion had unleashed to succeed. I also wanted to understand why it was failing, but my feelings made the detachment that truly objective analysis needs impossible.

  For all the horrors of daily life in Baghdad, I always wanted to return there, and while I was there I didn’t want to leave. There was something strangely compelling about the place even after the worst violence began. Human encounters were more intense; relationships formed quickly, conversations got straight to the point; the Iraqis I knew felt no shame about expressing strong emotions, and this was also true of Americans, including soldiers. People of very short acquaintance were sometimes prepared to risk their lives for each other. The news in Iraq was full of unspeakable brutality, but my experiences were marked far more by generosity and kindness, and I always found it hard to leave behind friends who have to go on living there, whose lives grow more precarious every day.

  I came to feel that the most appropriate response to the events of the past few years was neither justification nor reproach, but simple grief for the hopes and sacrifices of Iraqis and Americans alike. The Iraq War is not an argument to be won or lost; it’s a tragedy.

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  On a quiet street in eastern Baghdad, behind a garden with lawn chairs arranged in rows, there is a small, unremarkable two-story building. The sign in front, which says “Al-Janna Center,” is barely visible from the street, for reasons of safety. Al-Janna means “Paradise,” and Dr. Baher Butti, who directs the clinic, had been warned by anonymous fundamentalists that paradise cannot be found on Earth.

  In the three years that I had known him, Dr. Butti had been perpetually, and increasingly, skeptical about the motives of the Americans, Iraqi politicians, religious leaders, and the country’s neighbors; and yet he pursued with great persistence the idea that had first come to him after the fall of the old regime: he wanted to open a “psychosocial rehabilitation clinic” that would rebuild the humanity of his countrymen. Dr. Butti believed that, after decades of dictatorship, wars, sanctions, and occupation, Iraqis need to learn to talk, to think, to tolerate. He had registered his proposal for the clinic with the occupation authority and successive Iraqi ministries, but none of them had given him support. In 2005, a Baghdad newspaper owner donated funds, and in January 2006, just before I visited, the al-Janna Center finally opened.

  In the waiting room, brightly colored abstract paintings by patients hung on the walls. Up a narrow flight of stairs, there were several small meeting rooms where Dr. Butti planned to hold lectures, poetry readings, computer-training courses, and women’s mental-health group meetings. The center was humble and barely furnished, but, amid the grinding ugliness and violence of Baghdad, it felt like an oasis of calm. “If we gain humanitarian care for our patients, then the rebound will be a humanitarian movement in all of the society,” Dr. Butti said. “This place is not just a scientific institute. It’s also a place for literature and arts. We are trying to educate people about communication.”

  Dr. Butti lived in Dora, the mixed neighborhood in south Baghdad that had been particularly violent. “There are no direct clashes in the streets, but when every day you have one or two of your acquaintances killed, this is civil war.” Most of his friends and colleagues were leaving Iraq, along with much of the country’s professional class.

  When we sat down in his office, with cups of tea, he said, “Let me tell you about my own conflict.” His conflict was simple: to stay or to leave. In May 2005, his young daughter was badly injured when her school bus was hit by a suicide car bomb. After that, his wife insisted that the family move to Abu Dhabi. Yet Dr. Butti had finally achieved something tangible in Iraq, and to leave now would be like abandoning a child. “I feel like someone who’s been cut from the roots,” he said.

  Dr. Butti’s decision depended on what would happen in the next few months, and on the formation of a new government. He didn’t have much hope for improvement any time soon, but he was looking for some sign of stability. “Or it will go into a civil war, and all will be lost, and there will be nothing to be done here anymore. It’s either this year or none.” He added, “Not one of the Iraqis believes that you should leave tomorrow. Believe me. Even the Sunni leaders—they announce it in the media, but that’s for, let’s say, public use. They know that we can’t have the American army leaving the country right now, because, excuse me to say, George Bush did a mess, he must clean it.” He shrugged and smiled, in his pained way. “We are attached in a Catholic marriage with our occupiers. It’s not able to have a divorce.”

  He walked me outside into the sunlit garden. On the street a car passed slowly by. For an hour, I had forgotten to be afraid, and now that we were saying goodbye I was reluctant to go. In the past we had always shaken hands, but on this occasion Dr. Butti kissed my cheeks, in the Iraqi way. Perhaps he felt, as I did, that we might not meet again for a long time.

  May 2006

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  This is mainly a book of reporting. Dozens of Americans, Iraqis, and others allowed me to interview them, follow them around, and learn from them. Some people gave me many hours or even days of their time. They are too many to be named here, and a few wouldn’t want to be, so at least the published version of my thanks will have to remain collective and anonymous.

  In addition to interviews, I depended for information and insight on the Iraq coverage in the world press, especially The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, Time, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Knight-Ridder, the Associated Press, Reuters, The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Observer, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, The Daily Star of Beirut, the Stanhope Centre’s Iraqi Media Developments Newsletter, and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s Iraqi Press Monitor. I was also helped by the publications and Web sites of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Council on Foreign Re
lations, the United States Institute of Peace, the Brookings Institution, the Royal Institute for International Affairs, and the Middle East Media Research Institute. I regularly read a number of Iraqi blogs, especially www.healingiraq.blogspot.com, and I also benefited from information and links on www.andrewsullivan.com, www.juancole.com, www.warandpiece.com, and the “Iraq’d” blog of The New Republic.

  The following books and articles were also useful:

  Fouad Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey. New York: Pantheon, 1998.