"This must be what it was like to enter Paris in 1944," recalled Gordon Rudd, an army historian on Garner's team, who was awed by the pro-American reaction of the Kurds. "It didn't occur to me until later, but the press corps wasn't with us."
It wasn't just a case of hiding his light under a bushel—in his few encounters with the press, Garner didn't shine. Circumventing Washington's gag order, Tutweiler arranged to have members of the press "ambush" Garner, so it would look like he had no choice but to give a quick interview.5 He made his points—that Iraq was not the humanitarian tragedy everyone had feared, that Saddam hadn't torched the oil fields or gassed anyone—but did so with a bit too much enthusiasm and not enough nuance.
"We ought to be beating our chests every day!" Garner said in one of his first reported comments since arriving in country. "We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say, Damn, we're Americans!'"
At the end of April, Garner held a "big tent" meeting in the Baghdad convention center with more than three hundred Iraqis interested in shaping their future government. Barzani and Talabani drove south to Baghdad the same day, but they didn't make the meeting, which amounted to an irrelevant free-flowing discussion. On May 5, Garner announced the plan he had arranged up in Kurdistan, to appoint within ten days the core of a provisional new government. The following day none of it mattered. On the evening of May 6, Hoshyar Zebari made a frantic call to his old friend Colonel Dick Naab.
"Dick, what the hell's going on?" Zebari said. President Bush had just announced that Garner would be replaced by former ambassador L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, who would be named presidential envoy to Iraq. Naab hadn't heard about it until Zebari called him. Only days earlier, Garner had been warned that the president had picked a new envoy, but not much explanation accompanied the move. The Bush team tried to make it look like part of a long-term plan, but Bremer later revealed that he had gotten the call from the White House only two weeks before he deployed to Iraq. They felt Garner wasn't taking charge, and more important, he wasn't projecting success and control to the press.
Bremer didn't look good to the Kurds. Foremost, his resume always started with his time as chief of staff to Dr. Henry Kissinger and later an executive at Kissinger's lobbying firm. In Kurdistan he might as well have said he was Satan's scribe and foot-page. Kissinger's involvement in the betrayal of Mulla Mustafa Barzani in 1975 made him one of the greatest villains in Kurdish history. Otherwise, Bremer was an unknown, not even clearly aligned in the blood-feud between the Pentagon and the State Department. Thought he had been briefly posted to Afghanistan in the mid-1960s, Bremer had spent the vast majority of his career in European countries—or in Washington, where he had a reputation as a shrewd bureaucratic infighter. In 1986 President Reagan made him ambassador at large for counterterrorism, and Bremer visited the Middle East, but not Iraq, never mind Kurdistan. He knew roughly as much about Iraqis as they knew about him.
Garner pledged to stay on through the transition, but he had lame duck written on his forehead, and so did Zalmay Khalilzad, who had been following Iraq and meeting with opposition figures since 1991. As the Middle East advisor for the National Security Council, Khalilzad was probably the only member of the George W. Bush cabinet with even a working knowledge of Iraq, but he suddenly discovered that the White House had picked another man with his same job description and title. Bremer had objected directly to President Bush that he needed unity of command. Khalilzad departed Baghdad quietly and without official explanation.6 The Kurds had lost two familiar faces at the very top of the American occupational authority—men who didn't always give them what they wanted, but who at least knew their history. What's more, the American soldiers in the north who had worked so closely with the pesh merga had been replaced at the end of April by strangers from the 101st Airborne Division.
That change hadn't come gently either. The small teams of Special Forces, who had fought in baggy trousers alongside the pesh merga, disappeared as soon as reinforcements arrived. A few members of the original advance team stayed a short while longer—they seemed to have gone native after being stuck in the north so long.
"We were really sad when they left," recalled Lahor Talabani, who escorted many of the "special Americans" to the airport as they were called away to Baghdad. In particular the one he called the "cave blower," from their exploits in the attack against Ansar al-Islam, gave him a somber warning.
"They said, 'It's going to go downhill from here.' It was like they'd been through all this before. The next group will be worse, and the group after that will be even worse," said Lahor. He soon understood what the cave blower meant.
"We were the only ones linked to the Americans, and the first thing the Americans did was disarm the Kurds! The pesh had just been through two fights, side by side with the Americans, and two days later they're getting their weapons taken off them. But the pesh didn't understand that these weren't Special Forces; they said, 'Americans are Americans,'" Lahor remembered.
In and around Mosul the Americans didn't seem to distinguish between the KDP's pesh merga and lingering enemy fighters. Upon their arrival at the end of April, hundreds of troops from the 101st Airborne got into a tense standoff around several KDP checkpoints. Instead of taking up the matter with the Kurdish command, the Americans called in attack helicopters and forced the pesh merga to yield their guns.
The soldiers from the U.S. Army 101st can't be blamed for a bit of disorientation. They had just completed a feat of military logistics, flying three hundred miles from south of Baghdad, refueling in the air along the way. Their commander, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, had prepared his men for pitched battles up to Baghdad, not stabilization and policing in a multiethnic powder keg. Petraeus, with thirty years in the army and a Ph.D. from Princeton University, was accustomed to a rapidly evolving mission, but when he arrived in Mosul, he didn't even have accurate maps to work with.7 The general requested a meeting with the KDP leadership, who happily showed him their own very special maps—and gave him an earful. Nechirvan Barzani, still officially prime minister of the KDP section of Kurdistan, couldn't believe what he heard—that America was asking him to disband the pesh merga.
"I said, you know, Iraq is not Switzerland, and our neighbors are not Germany and France," Nechirvan Barzani recalled telling Petraeus. "My pesh merga fought side by side with you and shed blood side by side with you for this liberation. So your policy is this? Whoever is hostile to you, you respect them? And whoever is your friend you don't respect them?"
Petraeus had arrived in Salahudin to find ORHA liaison Dick Naab living in the KDP's guesthouse. It was far too close a relationship for the general, even if the Kurds had been allies in the war. "It is very easy to be sitting at the guesthouse or Lake Dukan and almost become beholden to them, or certainly become very partial. There's a natural inclination because of the nature of being allies during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They're more secular, more Western; a lot of them have been educated in the West. It is very easy to develop a feeling of kinship. But you have to try to do your best to be somewhat impartial," Petraeus said.
Accordingly, Petraeus demanded that the Kurds take down their checkpoints, remove their party flags, and stop displaying maps of Kurdistan that laid claim to Kirkuk and the areas around Mosul. The border with Turkey at Ibrahim Khalil would also have to fly an Iraqi flag, Petraeus said. Nechirvan went ballistic.
"I told him, 'General, if you try to go to the Ibrahim Khalil border crossing and try to bring down the Kurdistan flag or the flag of the KDP, the next day we will have a bigger flag in its place. If you think that creating a problem for you is difficult, I'd like you to know that it's very easy for us to create problems for you. Just like this [he snapped his fingers] I can create a lot of problems for you. But you are our friends.'"
Nechirvan even threatened to bring protesters into the streets of Zakho and shut down the border—the only functioning crossing in hundreds of miles. Petrae
us quickly retreated into diplomatic language—the last thing he needed was unrest in the quietest part of Iraq. He learned to call each of the Kurdish leaders by their title within the regional government; Nechirvan was "prime minister," even though Iraq had no government. He stopped referring to the pesh merga as a militia and opened lines of communication with both major Kurdish parties. With the KDP so near to Mosul, Petraeus made monthly trips to consult with Masoud Barzani, often meeting him outside cities at the scene of some of Barzani's more famous battles.
Petraeus stands out for his knowledge of Iraq among the division commanders during the invasion, some of whom never even learned to correctly pronounce the names of the cities (or the country) they were occupying. After his first deployment in Iraq, Petraeus returned to Baghdad to train Iraq's security forces and then spent two years stateside overseeing the revision of the U.S. Army's counterinsurgency manual. In 2007 he would return to lead the Bush administration's last-ditch effort to take control of Baghdad. "If you want one Iraq, you can't side completely with one or the other. That's difficult to understand in a winner-takes-all culture," said Petraeus, reflecting on his experience in the north.
But Iraq's culture didn't change with the arrival or departure of the 101st Airborne. Petraeus was a disaster from the Kurds' perspective; in many ways they saw that the war was still on and thought the Americans should be reinforcing their success, not trying to rehabilitate Ba'athists, an enemy they had never really defeated. To the Kurdish leaders, Petraeus's attempts to co-opt Mosul's majority Sunni Arabs stank of appeasement. On May 5, Petraeus presided over a provincial council that voted in a former Ba'athist general, Ghanim al-Basso, to be the governor of Mosul and Nineveh province. With a leathery balding pate and a gray mustache, al-Basso addressed the council wearing a dark suit and checkered tie.
"I thank all the people who have come here from afar and made me responsible for all the province," al-Basso said in front of hundreds of delegates Petraeus had summoned from across Nineveh province. "I will be a loyal soldier."8
The Kurds screamed that al-Basso was a loyal soldier—to Saddam (and indeed a year later he was removed for corruption and aiding the insurgency). But Petraeus and the Kurds were already talking past one another. The general wouldn't accept the Kurds' numerous offers to help restore order in the north and began to doubt their intelligence tips (which Petraeus says were mostly dead ends). Although the Kurdish offers to pacify Mosul seemed nothing more than expansionism to Petraeus, they were also a bid to head off anarchy and nip the insurgency in the bud. Relations strained further when the Kurds arrested several infamous Ba'athist enforcers and handed them over to the 101st, only to see the men back on the street again. That summer the PUK tracked down Saddam's fugitive vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the "ten of diamonds" in the coalition's deck of playing cards depicting the fifty-five most wanted Iraqis. The PUK offered his location to the Americans several times, but apparently the 101st had more important things to do. Finally, Kosrat Rasul, now based in his native Erbil, sent his pesh merga into Mosul, where they nabbed Ramadan in the middle of the night without firing a shot.
"I was not planning to hand him over to Petraeus," said Kosrat, who felt slighted by the American. Cooler heads prevailed. "Barham Salih is a friend of mine, and a friend of Petraeus, and he asked me to hand him over,"9 said Kosrat.
Rocky dealings with one general in the north seemed like a glitch at the time, something that would soon be sorted out with the coming of a new Iraqi government. In any case the real authority was supposed to lie with ORHA, represented in the north by the Kurds' old friend Dick Naab. But ORHA was already limping—it had been sent to Iraq without any ready cash.
"We didn't have a pot to pee in," Naab said. He watched as Petraeus used the army's discretionary funding and other creative ways to get Mosul's civil servants paid. Naab waited for money, personnel, and plans sent from ORHA in Baghdad, but the organization was lost in the desert. Then three days after his arrival in Iraq on May 12, Ambassador Bremer scrapped what few plans Garner had.
AMBASSADOR PAUL BREMER landed in Iraq with a clear mission to bring the hammer down and get the country back onto the schedule dreamed up for it back in Washington. Bremer already considered "ORHA" a dirty word. His new outfit was called the Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, some Americans briefly called it "OCPA" until they realized how much it sounded like "occupation." In fact that word hit the mark. Bremer saw himself more as MacArthur—unlike either the unassuming Garner or the savvy Khalilzad. From the outset he sought to put the Iraqis in their place, postponing a meeting with Jay Garner's group of seven Iraqi leaders. "I wanted to signal to the Iraqi political figures that I was not in a hurry to see them. And finally I wanted to show everybody that I, not Jay, was now in charge," Bremer wrote in his memoir.10
Almost instantly he displayed his ignorance of Iraqi culture, and he compounded the problem by not understanding that in such a culture, no one was going to tell him to his face just how badly he was doing. He made a trademark of his appearance—a dark suit and tie worn over desert combat boots. Many of Bremer's staff, including a younger set who fancied themselves a conservative American peace corps, adopted his dress code, even though they would rarely leave the paved streets and marble halls of what became the Green Zone. The boots said it all: Bremer either didn't know or didn't care to learn the most basic rules of Middle East etiquette, and he often showed the bottoms of his garish combat boots to visitors in his office, an extremely offensive gesture across the region. Bafel Talabani recalled sitting in on a meeting in Baghdad between Bremer and a few of the Kurdish leaders. Years later Bafel couldn't recall what the meeting pertained to—he could only remember the bottom of Bremer's boot, hitched up across his knee and gesticulating to and fro as he spoke to his distinguished guests.
"I wanted to smash him," said Bafel. "This muddy shoe in my face—I thought, 'Leave it, Bafel, leave it' . . . but, his shoe in my face! And I've been twenty years in England. What does this man do in front of an ancient tribal leader?"
On the morning of his fourth day in Iraq, Ambassador Bremer began by signing the first of two earth-shattering CPA decrees, ordering a deep purge of Ba'ath Party officials from all of Iraq's institutions. That afternoon he met with representatives from Garner's group of seven, referring to them as "the exiles"—accurate except in the case of the Kurdish leaders. He summarily canceled Garner's promise to announce an Iraqi government any time soon, blaming the group for not bringing in a broad-enough spectrum of Iraqis. Soon afterward Bremer dropped his other bombshell: on May 23 he formally abolished Iraq's armed forces.* Iraq and its various American envoys would spend the next four years recovering from and reversing Bremer's decisions. But at the time he thought he was doing fine, thanks in part to what he did next. Bremer accepted an invitation to visit Masoud Barzani in the cool of the north.
"Congratulations on formally abolishing Saddam's army. It's a wonderful thing you've done," Bremer recalled Barzani telling him in one of the Kurdish leader's signature mountainside chats.† Bremer thought he had been credited with holding Iraq together by abolishing the hated army. More likely he had crippled the Iraqi state at a crucial moment. For conspiracy mongers in and outside the country, Bremer's destruction of the institutions of Sunni Iraq, and then his willingness to travel up to Kurdistan to see Barzani instead of insisting that Barzani come down to Baghdad, showed that America was hell-bent on cutting up the country. For believers in a new Iraq, it didn't bode well, but most of the KDP leadership who were hosting Bremer were hardly champions of Iraqi unity.
"Bremer wanted to show that he's tough, he's in charge—I am the one who decides; you are nothing," recalled Nechirvan Barzani. While Nechirvan found Bremer arrogant, he couldn't argue with what the ambassador had done. "With one signature, he dissolved four Iraqi establishments, all four of which loved to antagonize us. The army, the Mukhabarat, the Istik-barat, and the Ba'ath Party—the most important Iraqi institutions
and cause for suffering of the Kurds."11
The KDP leaders had received the new American viceroy with apprehension, fearing a puppet master trained by Henry Kissinger. The reality soon put them at ease. As the KDP welcomed Bremer in a long reception hall, he looked up at the portraits on the wall of General Mulla Mustafa Barzani. He nudged Masoud Barzani, who looks an awful lot like his father, and asked, "Who's that gentleman?"12
Nechirvan Barzani, standing next to Bremer, felt offended but nonetheless reassured. "Our impression was not positive. But once we realized that he doesn't know anything—nothing!—then we were more comfortable with him," Nechirvan recalled with a laugh.
"General Garner's policy was very wise regarding the Iraqi situation. He didn't want to destroy the whole system. He wanted to remove the bad elements, gradually to do everything else. His heart was with the Kurds, but his sword was facing us. When Bremer came, he was arrogant, but maybe he had not realized himself how much we benefited. We had to take politics over personalities," Nechirvan observed.
Bremer announced his plans to create a larger governing council and made a good faith effort to include more of Iraq's minorities—Turcomans, Christians, women. Hardly a set of American yes-men, the twenty-five on Bremer's list even included a member of Iraq's small but resilient Communist Party. The council itself set up a strange system of rotating its presidency among the nine power members—a slightly expanded version of Garner's list of seven. With a new president each month, the council was almost guaranteed to get nothing done, but just in case, Bremer gave himself veto power over the council's actions.* Then he proposed that the council members engage in a bit of theater with the Americans, which he apparently thought would help their image. Bremer would give them a list of the CPA's plans, and then the Iraqis could pretend to demand those exact objectives from him, and for public consumption he would bow to their orders. The Iraqis knew their council was a mess, but this patronizing attitude cemented their dislike of Bremer. His plan for Iraq's constitution was similarly paternalistic. Not trusting the Iraqis to hold a constituent assembly, as had been done in Afghanistan, Bremer proposed that a system of caucuses select the national committee that would draft the constitution. The members of the caucuses would be chosen by Bremer's CPA. Bremer's plans drove his strongest detractors together almost immediately.
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