Father of Money

by Jason Whiteley

  The Ministry of Oil had no interest in supplying more gas to the domestic market at a subsidized price and preferred to continue attempting to export larger and larger quantities. This fed into the cycle of corruption because influential people could always cut to the front of the line and generously overpay for their gas, giving them an advantage that they desperately needed to validate their new status in society.

  One priority that the council members had wanted to settle was whether they could use their council identification tags to move to the front of the gas line. In the beginning, I had said no, believing in the promotion of a more egalitarian society. Now, however, I had arranged that my signature on an identification card could get any Iraqi to the front of the line. It had taken a few personal visits to the gas station. Because my presence there was unwelcome by the gas stationer manager, I went by as frequently as possible to remind him that he did not control me. It was quite the contrary—until the flag was raised.

  I was on my way to meet the governor at the DAC building when I noticed no fewer than twenty Iraqi policemen loitering in the gas station parking lot. We pulled into the middle of the parking lot, and I got out of the Humvee and looked around. I did not recognize any of the police from my neighborhood. One of them, a captain himself, walked over while eating a steaming bowl of soup. Between spilling sips, he gestured at me and Ali, dismissively saying something in Arabic. The people stopped pumping gas. Crowds walking by on the sidewalk froze. It was not necessary to speak Arabic to see what was happening here. This was a showdown for legitimacy. Who was in charge now, the Americans or the Iraqis?

  I slowly removed my sunglasses and counted his men. All of them, armed with AK-47s and Glock pistols issued by the coalition, tried to look as intimidating as possible. Behind me, there were my three Humvees, each with a heavy machine gun and with six soldiers spread out around them. Without looking back, I knew where each of the Misfits was positioned. We had been doing this every day for months now, and we had become an extremely proficient fighting force. I liked my chances in this showdown. Moreover, I was not about to start giving away the respect it had taken me months to earn. The silence grew louder as everyone waited for my response. The Iraqi raised his dripping spoon again, bringing another heaping mound of greasy soup toward his mustached mouth. His bristling smile was pulled back in smug satisfaction at his courage, and his mouth opened to nonchalantly accept another spoonful of lunch. He expected to taste victory, but his spoon never delivered its contents.

  Before the spoon reached his mouth, he felt my gloved fist shatter his nose. He stumbled backward, covered in blood and broth. People screamed and ducked behind their cars. As Ali began waving his pistol and yelling, I fired a few shots into the air from the AK-47 I now carried and pointed toward the street. Some of the Iraqi policemen ran to their trucks, while others ran where I’d pointed. With their leader down, they were content to leave.

  Stunned and confused, the Iraqi captain barely recovered his footing before I kicked him, not even allowing him to find his legs. My soldiers were acting in concert now by herding the straggling Iraqi policemen toward their vehicles. A few thrown fists and some arbitrary gunshots into the air or the ground near the policemen sped the process along. After a few tense moments, the police were gone and a spontaneous applause erupted from the crowd. This was confusing to me, because I would have expected people to be disappointed with the outcome. An elderly women soon explained the situation to me.

  As she approached, she held out a piece of bread. I accepted the bread, and she kissed me on both cheeks, leaving my face moist. She was crying. She explained to Ali that as we were arriving, the policemen were trying to take her jewelry from her. The police had been at the gas station for hours, stopping cars and demanding money. If the occupants did not have cash, then the policemen took their jewelry. We had arrived on the scene just as one of the policemen was attempting to take her ring.

  We heard more stories like hers as we walked up and down the gas queue. Not only would the police take personal possessions from people at the station, they demanded a surcharge for the gasoline and generally terrorized the population when the U.S. Army wasn’t around. The stories were heartbreaking and illustrated the very real problem with telling Iraqis that they were sovereign. Besides costing us our hard-fought legitimacy, it was placing the general population in the hands of mercenary caretakers.

  More than once, I saw people admiring my AK-47. It was a gift from a council member that I often carried in these scenarios, when impressing a crowd was important. Fully chromed, it was imprinted with a Ba’ath Party crest and a likeness of Saddam Hussein. It was rumored to look exactly like one that his son Uday used to carry. The Iraqi people respected the M-16, but they revered the Saddam-era weapons. They had been inculcated with respect for his image, and the mere sight of the chrome AK would start people flattering me and complimenting my actions. It was as if the mandate to rule passed through these symbols once borne by the Hussein family. I decided to make it clear to the Iraqi people just who was in charge.

  “No one pays for gas while we are here.” That was my order to the gas station manager. I knew that he had been routinely overcharging these people, deliberately putting his generators offline to lengthen the queues and increase the people’s desperation. He was charging a hundred times the official amount, and people paid it because it was the only place in southern Baghdad, other than the black market, to buy gas.

  “We need permission from Ministry of Oil…,” the gas station manager began in a faltering voice, no doubt with the bloody memory of the last Iraqi to defy me still fresh in his mind.

  I pretended not to hear him as I unholstered the Taser. I aimed it away from him and pulled the trigger. The blue spark it created, with its violent snapping sound, still scared even me. The station manager relented.

  “As long as I am here, I am in charge.” It was a statement of fact that was met with a defiant stare from the gas station manager. He would have to account for the gas pumped today and make up the revenue from his own illicit takings. Two wrongs, one solution.

  Back outside, I told Ali to spread the word that the Al Dora council was happy to give everyone free gas today. There were smiles all around as people began clamoring among themselves, not believing their good fortune. I sent Ali to the nearby houses of several council members to bring them here to further solidify the rumor that the free gas and the freedom from the robbery of the Iraqi police were a gift from the DAC council. I thought it might help build their credibility.

  The problem with being a council member was that until now, if you took credit for your job, then you became a target of insurgents. As a result, few people even knew who their council member was or what he could do for them. It was difficult to grow the power and influence of the council members if they were always hiding when important events like this occurred. I understood their reluctance, but things had to change at some point. Because this gas station showdown had been purely a display of force, I could not imagine a drawback to aligning the council with the winning side. After all, force always begets allegiance in Iraq.

  This same strategy would be tested later that day at the meeting with the governor in front of the council as a whole. Could he take the palace from me, or could I hold it for the council as I had promised? The implications for my reputation going forward were enormous. If I were unable to protect my property, how could I protect the people who were loyal to me? I resolved to hold the property at all costs and to find the person who had called the governor in the first place. There was obviously a defector in my group seeking favor with a rival power broker; this was destabilizing and dangerous. I would have to find him and make an example of him, before his disloyalty got more extreme and my tenuous position of authority became imperiled.

  The showdown at the gas station had proved that the tide of Iraqi loyalty was turning and there was a fierce competition on now for the legitimacy to demand obedience in the street. Fueled
by a resurgent sense of nationalism, most Iraqis seemed conflicted about whom to support. On the one hand, they should support Iraqis because it was their country. Yet the potential pitfalls were obvious. Conditions since the invasion had been chaotic and anarchic. The society had abandoned any idea of collective sacrifice for a longer-term gain. Instead, as the police demonstrated, people who assumed positions of power relative to their peers—council members, for example, or policemen—would rapidly exploit their positions for as much as they could. They did not yet have a feeling of duty. The high level of personal risk, not knowing who might be in charge tomorrow, and the general desire to help one’s own family first all worked against the efforts to build stable Iraqi institutions.

  On the other hand, the Americans were widely perceived as just. The risk of our looting and extorting simply did not exist, but we were foreign and eventually we would leave. Attacks on markets and mosques in tolerant neighborhoods by religious extremists underscored the danger of being overreliant on the Americans; the Iraqis would be here long after the Americans are gone, and they would remember this betrayal. So for the short term, the time line with which we were dealing remained twisted into an insolvable puzzle. The best outcome for everyone would be a stable Iraq run by Iraqis, but no one, Iraqi or American, was comfortable putting the immediate future in the hands of the Iraqis. Insofar as we were expected to help this transition, I was unwilling to cede one inch of real authority to any Iraqi, for any reason.

  I walked across the street to the DAC building to prepare for the meeting with the governor. Inside the walls of the DAC compound, the guards who had watched everything were abuzz with excitement. No one liked what the new police force was doing.

  My commander arrived shortly afterward, and he was slightly less impressed. “People from the Green Zone are calling and saying Iraqi police are getting beat up and the gas station is giving away free gas. What the hell is going on?”

  I gave him a quick recount of the story, including the crowd’s reaction. He said he could appreciate the position I had been in and understood the support of the people in line.

  “Let’s do that every week,” he said, meaning, I assumed, forcing the gas station to run free—not breaking a police officer’s nose. “I think it is a good policy.”

  And just like that, the worries and inquiries of the Green Zone and the special consultants dissipated into thin air. They wrote lengthy papers and had endless PowerPoint presentations about how to legitimize the Iraqi police force, but around here we were still the only law that mattered, and that included the governor.

  His dark-blue Mercedes was one of a four-car caravan that arrived militantly in the asphalt parking lot—just like a proper government convoy. The cars glided to a stop in front of my commander and me, both of us with our respective security teams. To my left, the Misfits were augmented by my commander’s own six-soldier detachment and arrayed in a defensive, yet threatening, position.

  The doors swung open. From behind the dark-tinted glass, heavily armed Iraqis in suits emerged and moved purposefully toward us.

  “Put your weapons on the ground,” one of our sergeants instructed in English.

  He received no response. The governor’s security team moved closer and after two steps brought themselves within feet of us. Jaws tightened on all sides as the security teams sized each other up for an advantage. As the governor—a smallish man with a smug smile—emerged from the car, the sergeant repeated his order, and again it was denied.

  This time his words were followed by a flurry of action. Tasers fired from either side of me, hitting the first two bodyguards squarely in the chest. Their muffled cries were drowned out by the harsh clicking and rasping of raw electricity pouring into their bodies. Their bewildered colleagues, momentarily frozen by the suddenness of the attack, were quickly brought to their knees as the soldiers fell on them, violently disarming them and driving them to the ground. Where there had just been a fairly official delegation, there was now only a series of splayed suits pressed against the pavement by the booted feet of the U.S. soldiers. Only the governor remained upright, although his repeated swallowing and fervent side-to-side looks showed that he was not comfortable with what had just happened.

  “I will tell General,” the governor promised.

  His threat sounded more like that of a whining child. We had just taken his toys, and now he was threatening to tell Mom. Unfortunately for us, he did have the capacity to actually speak to U.S. Army general officers and their civilian counterparts. Nonetheless, we had established a pattern of not really caring who people threatened to tell. There were always two sides to every story. The way I saw this one, a gang of armed men had threatened us, and we reacted in self-defense. I am sure my commander felt the same way, because he seemed equally unimpressed by the warning that the governor would contact a superior officer.

  This was really all part of the pre-meeting charade, in which the governor tried to discern exactly what level of authority my commander and I had. It was clear he was speaking as much to the council members huddled near the building’s entrance as he was to us. He was trying to undo the hierarchy that we had built in the eyes of the Iraqi people, specifically the council. Although each of us, my commander and I, did answer to superior officers, I had carefully created an image in the Iraqi society that I was the sole arbiter of power. My boss, the commander, could not be bothered to intercede on anyone’s behalf, and I had to preserve the image that my boss was above the local fray, in order to deter efforts by Iraqis to play us against each other. This was the governor’s move now, to show that we were not comporting with a hierarchy that could force us to obey, while he was fully powerful. I am not sure how the council members interpreted his actions, but watching his entire security detachment lying motionless on the ground while my commander inattentively listened and blew cigar smoke in his face probably did a lot to discredit the governor’s attempt.

  After that exchange, we all went inside to discuss the future of the community center—except the governor’s bodyguards, who remained prostrate. The governor presented a blizzard of papers with official seals that discussed zoning and land use and his rights to use the residence. The council members passed the papers around and looked at one another quizzically. I studied their faces. Someone here must have known the governor from before and told him about the center. As the conversation went back and forth, I watched carefully, but Iraqis could be remarkably impassive.

  The governor and the council debated the center’s ownership for almost half an hour. According to my own research, no one could predict how the Iraqi government would eventually designate and use the former Hussein properties. The army had occupied some and renovated some. The squatters had occupied and destroyed others, while some stood intact and were looked after by caretakers from the former times. At the moment, the government effort—and where, in my opinion, this governor should have been spending his time—was on drafting the rules for an upcoming national election in January and a constitution that would establish property rights and the settlement of property disputes. Many of these questions would be answered by those documents. Talking about law, especially Iraqi law, as the governor droned on about it, was as pointless as talking about life on the moon. Yes, it might make things easier to understand, and it is a fun hypothetical discussion, but enforceable laws simply did not exist in a meaningful way at this time.

  At precisely thirty minutes, I gave my commander a nudge and told him we should leave. He stood up, and the rest of the table, sans the governor, rose in unison. By leaving early, my commander displayed that his time was more valuable elsewhere, and the Iraqis’ overwhelming demonstration of respect and acknowledgment left no doubt who had prevailed in this room. The governor had come in with a fair amount of bravado, and he would be leaving with only remnants of that confidence. The same calculus conducted by the people in the gas station had just been conducted in this conference room. Once again, I saw Iraqis eschew the oppo
rtunity to back one of their clearly corrupt leaders in favor of continuing a relationship with the American administration. Twice, in as many hours, I had witnessed the people choose to support what we were doing, and I was more convinced than ever that we were doing it better than anyone else—Iraqi or American.

  Back in the FOB, we celebrated by trudging over to the mess hall and eating deliciously sloppy spaghetti. The incidental drippings on our sweaty and dirt-covered body armor too closely resembled blood for my taste, but those thoughts were swept aside by the euphoria of having faced down some major challenges to my authority and the broader plan of stabilizing our sector. The incident inside the FOB with the contractors was history, and we rarely even saw them slink through the mess hall anymore. The police had been put squarely back in their place, and the people noticed. Most important, the governor and the threat of losing face in front of the council had been thoroughly dismissed in a great show of strength and solidarity.

  “The governor of Baghdad was killed in a complex ambush after leaving the district of Al Dora.”

  The newswire on our confidential Internet was the first story I saw after dinner. Apparently, after the governor left the DAC building and was traveling across town, his convoy was stopped and machine-gunned by unknown assailants. He and most of his bodyguards were killed.

  I walked into my commander’s office and handed him the news. He looked up at me, smiling.

  “Did you set this up?” Although I was flattered that he might think I had the tactical acumen to pull off the ambush, it was well out of sector, and I had not even considered it.

  “No, sir,” I answered a bit defensively.