The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  “Iraq was not just beyond America’s capability, it was beyond doing, period,” adding, “but different approaches to the occupation could have resulted in a far less disastrous outcome.”

  Andrew Natsios adds this:

  “We never should have stood up a Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in the first place. We should have worked with what we were bureaucratically comfortable with for decades: simply a very large U.S. Embassy staff and USAID, coordinating with the military.”

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  Even though Gersony’s damning report on USAID’s disaster assistance response team reflected poorly on Natsios’s own leadership of USAID, Natsios—after he had fired several people connected with the affair—wanted everyone in Washington to know just what had happened, and thus he sent Gersony around town to brief his findings.

  When Gersony finished making the rounds, Natsios sent Gersony back out to Baghdad at the beginning of 2005. He now wanted Gersony to do an assessment of the entire civilian aspect of the occupation itself. The USAID administrator, having been burned already in Iraq, was no longer confident that he knew exactly what was happening on the ground there. And he wasn’t sure that Washington as a whole knew either.

  Gersony was overwhelmed. Iraq was the biggest American nation-building project since postwar Germany and Japan, even as it bore a closer resemblance to the American occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. This assignment meant investigating massive infrastructure rehabilitation, the recovery of an entire national power grid and sewage system, fiscal and central bank policy, industrial and agricultural regeneration, and the holding of elections: things he knew little or nothing about.

  He would interview 230 people who worked for the occupation authorities, each for several hours, some of whom were just finishing their tours. In the process, the situation became clear to him.

  Gersony first observed that Ambassador John Negroponte, who had replaced Ambassador L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer in July 2004 as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, had finally brought in the “pros”: capable and senior diplomats who took over from the ideological “clowns” on the Bremer team, many of whom had gotten their jobs through the political machinations of the Bush White House. Bremer had been a career diplomat and a success in the private sector, but he had relatively little experience running large organizations and was chosen to run the CPA, partly because he was the only figure that Powell and Rumsfeld could agree on. He was hampered by decisions that came from Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, and harbored what appeared as arrogance in dealing with Iraqis: Iraq began to fall apart under his watch.

  But with the DART disbanded and Bremer gone, USAID was working with “incredible competence,” according to Gersony’s report, thanks in large part to Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, the very able assistant administrator for USAID’s Asia and Near East Bureau who was part of Negroponte’s new order. There were many other examples Gersony documented, where things were done right and fast: from changing the currency to releasing funds for agricultural development, to improving the functioning of municipalities, to setting up Internet cafés in Iraqi towns and stocking local libraries with Arabic-language textbooks, to restoring electric power in many areas, to killing Bremer’s white elephant ventures, and on and on.

  But the problem was ultimately with the Department of Defense. And this made all the difference. Bremer may have been gone, but Rumsfeld was still the defense secretary. “DoD,” Gersony reported, “had no plan, no coordination, no connection with the grassroots, and was obsessed with projects that common Iraqis could not experience the value of.” For example, rather than fix the sewage pipes in Sadr City so that people wouldn’t smell human waste every morning when they woke up, the Department of Defense was renovating faraway plants that the Soviets had built decades before and which had never worked properly to begin with. This is why U.S. Army brass were constantly complaining that there weren’t enough projects to help them build rapport with the population. “Where there was raw sewage in the streets and no electricity, there were also frequent armed attacks against American forces,” Gersony reported.

  Natsios chimes in: “In Iraq we were too focused on construction projects rather than on building civilian institutions—exactly what had worked for us around the developing world throughout the Cold War. But DoD was obsessed with rapid, demonstrable, and visible results whereas institution-building is long-term and operates behind the scenes. We knew DoD and Rumsfeld were wrong,” Natsios goes on, “since we in USAID had decades of expeditionary experience in the Third World to rely on.” Indeed, because USAID was established during the early Cold War, its roots in development work were venerable.

  “For too long, DoD had no bottom-up connective strategy in Iraq,” says Gersony. He adds, “You needed a bossy, big-city-mayor type—a Mayor Daley of Chicago—who knew from the first day of occupation that it was all about creating jobs for young men: temporary jobs, permanent jobs, jobs in the army, whatever. Just employ young men and do it fast!” Instead, Bremer famously disbanded the Iraqi army.

  None of this was original thinking. Gersony was neither the first nor the last to discover what was amiss. Nevertheless, working alone, listening for hundreds of hours to different people, utilizing the same methodology as he always had, he came up with a hard, uncomfortable truth that couldn’t be denied, and that backed up other people’s assessments.

  At the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006, Gersony again made the rounds back in Washington: briefing the National Security Council, the CIA, and the Defense Department about what he had discovered on his second assignment in Iraq. “We knew things were bad, but not this bad,” said one of the high officials Gersony had briefed. Gersony’s findings constituted one small element in the eventual removal of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in November 2006, after the younger Bush administration had suffered a disastrous midterm election defeat. Rumsfeld had as early as autumn 2004 and spring 2005 repeatedly submitted his resignation. But President Bush kept him on, partly to resist pressure from the media and a collection of former generals who were publicly calling for Rumsfeld’s head. Had Rumsfeld been ousted after Bush was reelected in November 2004, rather than two years later as he was, the Iraq War might have turned out measurably different.

  Knowing all that I know now about Iraq, Gersony’s description of the occupation makes it impossible for me not to think of Graham Greene’s novel about Vietnam, The Quiet American, published in 1955. As cruel a caricature as it was of American motives and sensibilities in the Third World, the subsequent debacle in Vietnam and the invasion and occupation of Iraq have proved the book incredibly clairvoyant. As it concerns the book’s protagonist, the American diplomatic and intelligence operative Alden Pyle, Greene’s narrator says, “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” Pyle saw Vietnam only through the abstract mental concepts about democracy that he had heard in the “lecture-hall.” He had no feel whatsoever for the vivid complexity of the country itself—“the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fishers’ fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot’s platform…the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst,” and so forth. People in Vietnam (or, for that matter, Iraq) did not want democracy or any ism, Greene concludes. “They want enough rice…they don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want.”2

  Bob Gersony intuitively grasped this. He was immersed in the local complexities of every situation he came across around the globe, even if he had no eye for the local landscape. He was intense and committed, but at least not in the way that Greene decried. He hated grand schemes and formulas, as Tim Knight had learned about him in northern Peru and Bosnia, and as Bambi Arellano had learned about him in Ecuador. He u
nderstood the tragedy and irony of good intentions. Graham Greene certainly would have approved.

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  In the early spring of 2006, just after Gersony had finished his second Iraq project, Andrew Natsios, thoroughly exhausted after five years as USAID administrator during both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, submitted his resignation. Natsios’s replacement was Randall Tobias, a big Republican donor and the former CEO of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which he had, in fact, rescued. The result: Gersony was again in the wilderness with no onward assignment. Tobias, according to observers, was primarily interested in the organizational aspects of USAID rather than in the bread-and-butter work of the agency in the field. Tobias cared about position and authority, and was determined to be a deputy secretary of state, so that the actual projects of USAID on the ground concerned him relatively little. He simply had no interest in a Bob Gersony.

  And there was something else about Randall Tobias. He wanted to downsize USAID and fold it into the State Department: make the agency disappear, in other words. Whenever USAID’s invaluable foreign area specialists gradually retired, he didn’t replace them. He was following a classic corporate strategy of hollowing out an organization by attrition. And everybody in USAID knew what he was up to.

  Gersony went a year without the phone ringing. Nobody in the USAID hierarchy seemed to be able to find work for him. But in April 2007, Joe Williams was at his desk when he suddenly heard a commotion all around him. “It was like being at a soccer stadium when someone scores a goal,” he remembers. “People were practically dancing and celebrating around their cubicles.” The news had just broken that Randall Tobias had been forced to resign—after he was caught making phone calls to an escort service linked with prostitution. The effort to fold USAID into the State Department was stopped in its tracks. Not long after Tobias was gone, Joe Williams, who was as wry and laid-back in manner as Gersony was perpetually earnest, called Gersony. Williams needed help with a problem that had recently been thrown into his lap: a typhoon planning assessment required for the Federated States of Micronesia in the Pacific.

  Micronesia, along with the Marshall Islands, spans an arc of 2,000 miles of ocean, with a population of only 180,000 people spread over 2,000 islands. The Micronesian and Marshall EEZ, or exclusive economic zone, is around twice that of the Mediterranean. This vast stretch of sea came under U.S. jurisdiction as a result of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (when the U.S. conquered the nearby Philippines) and World War II. It was a storied American legacy, in other words. Thus, when these islands became independent, they opted for “compacts of association” with the United States. Under these compacts, Washington had both the right and the obligation to provide entirely for their defense.

  Yet something had recently changed. Congress in its wisdom had decided that no longer would Micronesia and the Marshalls, in the event of natural disasters, be helped by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but instead would come under the jurisdiction of USAID. This constituted a weakening in the link between the United States and Oceania, since FEMA dealt with the fifty states and USAID with foreign countries. The islanders were rightly worried that henceforth they wouldn’t be getting the same level of assistance.

  To investigate the islanders’ concerns, Joe Williams dispatched Gersony to Oceania to do a blueprint for USAID typhoon planning. Gersony, sixty-two, in the professional wilderness for a year without an assignment, had no problem with a winter in the South Seas, where there were no dangers, no health risks, and no political controversies.

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  It would be in Micronesia where the full reality of America’s misadventure in Iraq hit Gersony squarely in the face; by way of the contrast. Iraq constituted the bleak, ghastly, bloodstained imperialistic waste of U.S. foreign policy: the ultimate fatal distraction. Micronesia would constitute the soft, caressing crystalline seascape of Oceania, where the more crucial and intensifying challenge of China loomed just over the horizon. Iraq was the past; Micronesia, the future. In Micronesia, for a pittance compared to what a few days of the Iraq occupation was costing America, authoritarian China’s geopolitical rise might have been diluted and delayed. I say this as someone who had been an early supporter of the Iraq War—which Gersony obviously was not.

  Micronesia, as the twenty-first century wore on, would become a litmus test for the U.S.-China competition. The United States military was trying to manage the Chinese threat in hub-and-spoke Bismarckian fashion: that is, from a geographic point of comparative isolation—the Hawaiian Islands—with spokes reaching out to major allies such as Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and India. These countries, in turn, formed secondary hubs to help the U.S. manage the Micronesian, Melanesian, and Polynesian archipelagoes, as well as the Indian Ocean. China, for its part, had its sights set on dominating the South China Sea, which would enable Beijing to soften up Taiwan, as well as gain naval access to the Indian Ocean and the wider Pacific: this would mean effective Chinese control over the Micronesian and Melanesian archipelagoes.

  Put another way, China’s strategic goal was to control the First Pacific Island Chain, meaning the large landmasses off the mainland of Asia stretching from Japan south to the Philippines. Once that was accomplished, China would be able to project power outward to the Second Pacific Island Chain, encompassing Guam and the Northern Marianas Islands, the gateway to Micronesia. China was already flooding Micronesia with investments and aid packages. Truly, in this emerging naval century, where power means the ability to oversee the sea lines of communication that enable container shipping—the very foundation of globalization—Oceania was indeed at the heart of geopolitics.3

  “We need to do a good job on these disaster services or the Chinese will use our inaction and mistakes as a wedge,” one highly respected expatriate in Micronesia told Gersony soon after he arrived. “The Chinese are already quite active here—we can’t leave a vacuum,” warned one U.S. ambassador.

  Gersony was instantly overwhelmed by the seascape of Micronesia. It offered a true demonstration of infinity, the next best thing to space travel. The water was an interminable panel of vast blue and pearly welts interspersed with reptilian green islands, which might as well have been small planets, volcanic and coral both, with the coral islands shaped like narrow flat daggers that were easily overrun by tidal waves. Indeed, the typhoons never really stopped here. In terms of Mother Nature, local populations lived on the edge. “People here needed reassurance that we were not nickel-and-diming them by switching from FEMA to USAID, and by removing the local U.S. post office. Such a petty thing to do,” Gersony complains.

  Indeed, the historical markers on these islands were a stern reminder of a U.S. legacy and sustaining commitment: the deaths of thousands of U.S. Marines who had stormed these beaches, fighting inch by inch to take a pillbox. The European theater in World War II produced one D-Day; the Pacific theater produced one after another: Tarawa, Guam, Saipan, Enewetak, Kwajalein, Truk…Micronesia and the nearby island groups also represent significant fish stocks, as well as votes at the United Nations. Yet, as Gersony immediately saw, it was now China that was building hotels, sports stadiums, and other infrastructure on these islands, as well as sending its most able diplomats here. China had spent $5 million on just one sports stadium in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, as well as $80 million on other projects. Taiwan had built a convention center in Micronesia, and Japan had spent tens of millions of dollars on school and health-care systems throughout the far-flung archipelago. But it was China that had been using America’s distraction in the Middle East to slowly, methodically, and quietly expand its influence throughout all of the Indo-Pacific. The mega-concerns of Afghanistan and Iraq in Washington were working to obscure the very fact of these islands, as well as so much else. The U.S. military, particularly the Navy, would not be able to fully respond to the danger until around
2017.4 (Indeed, as I write, the U.S.-China competition is assuming the characteristics of a bipolar, Cold War–style conflict, but one with an important asterisk: the lesser threat of Russia.)

  Because Gersony had spent time getting briefed in both Washington and Honolulu before arriving in Micronesia, he quickly became aware of a cultural challenge, in terms of how the U.S. government’s different bureaucracies viewed the South Seas.

  Gersony was aware that he had spent his life at the intersection of politics and humanitarianism, and it was often at this intersection where it was easiest to get things done, since Washington was usually more likely to appropriate money for humanitarian concerns if it saw a geopolitical interest in a place. But here in Micronesia and the Marshalls, both USAID and the State Department lived far away from that intersection. The Pentagon’s Pacific Command, however, headquartered in the Hawaiian capital of Honolulu, lived right at the heart of it. That’s why Gersony found the uniformed officers at Pacific Command more enthusiastic about humanitarian assistance in Micronesia and the Marshalls than were the bureaucrats at USAID and State. Because the Pentagon’s Pacific-based bureaucracy knew the value of these islands, it wanted to help any way it could, even if it was diverted in the Middle East and thus had its hands somewhat tied.