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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the shade of a high sandstone arch, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and a platoon of American soldiers from the 1st Armored Division guard the main point of entry into Baghdad's Green Zone, the heavily fortified area west of the Tigris River from which the Coalition Provisional Authority governs occupied Iraq. The arch was built a few years ago by Saddam Hussein, in imitation of ancient gates that once protected Baghdad from Persian invaders. American soldiers now call it the Assassin's Gate.
Early each morning, before the sun grows dangerous, crowds of Iraqis gather at the Assassin's Gate. Some are job-seekers, others are protesters carrying banners: "please reopen our factories," "we wish to see mr. frawley." Demonstrators bring their causes here and sometimes turn into rioters. People hand out lists naming family members executed by Saddam's regime or carry letters addressed to L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq. With the old order overthrown, the Baath Party authorities purged, and the ministries stripped bare by looters, most Iraqis don't know where to take their grievances and petitions, where to unload the burden of their personal histories. So, like supplicants to the Caliph of ancient Baghdad, they bring them directly to the front gate of the occupation. But few Iraqis have the credentials to enter the Green Zone, and there are few, if any, interpreters at the gate. The Iraqis stand on one side of coils of concertina wire, gesturing and trying to explain why they must get in; on the other side stand American soldiers in body armor, doing twelve-hour shifts of checkpoint duty, keeping them out.
One day in July, a tiny woman in a salmon-colored veil stepped out of the crowd and thrust a handwritten letter at me. She was a schoolteacher, about thirty, with glasses and thick white face powder and an expression so pointedly solemn that she might have been a mime performing grief. Her letter, which was eighteen pages long, requested an audience with "Mister respectable, merciful American ambassador Pawal Bramar." It contained a great deal of detailed advice on the need to arm the Iraqi people so that they could help fight against the guerrilla resistance. The teacher, who was well under five feet tall, wanted permission to carry an AK-47 and work alongside American soldiers against "the beasts" who were trying to restore Saddam or bring Iranian-style oppression. She had drawn up a fake gun permit to illustrate her desire. She was having trouble sleeping, she said, and had all but stopped eating.
A man with a cane hobbled over from the line. His left hand, wrapped in a bandage, was missing the thumb. He explained to the teacher in Arabic that he had been paralyzed in a car accident while fleeing Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War, and that at some point he had lost the piece of paper entitling him to hospital care. Now that the Americans were in charge, he felt emboldened to ask for another copy--and so he had come to the Assassin's Gate. The man, unshaven and wretched-looking, began to cry. The teacher told him not to be sad, to trust in God, and to speak with the American soldiers at the checkpoint. He shuffled back into line.
"Please, sir, can you help me?" the teacher continued. "I must work with Americans, because my psychology is demolished by Saddam Hussein. Not just me. All Iraqis. Psychological demolition."
THE HISTORIAN
The Coalition Provisional Authority, or C.P.A., is headquartered in the Republican Palace, about a mile beyond the Assassin's Gate, down a road of eucalyptus trees, past bombed state buildings and concrete barriers. The palace, protected by a high iron gate and sandbagged machine-gun positions, is a sprawling two-story office building in the Babylonian-Fascist style favored by Saddam, with Art Deco eagles spanning the doorways. Evenly spaced along the top of the facade are four identical twenty-foot gray busts of Saddam, staring straight ahead, his eyes framed by an imperial helmet. Beneath these Ozymandian tributes, twelve hundred officials of the C.P.A. go about the business of running the country. Getting in to see one of them, a senior adviser to Bremer acknowledged, "is like a jailbreak in reverse." Though it is in the geographical heart of ochre-colored, crumbling Baghdad, the C.P.A. sits in deep isolation. There are legitimate security reasons for this: on November 4th, the compound was hit by mortar fire, and four people were injured.
The Republican Palace is lavishly paved in marble and granite, with mirrored alcoves, gilded faux-Louis XIV furniture, and, in one vast domed room, murals of Scud missiles and the Al Aqsa mosque in a Jerusalem without Jews. Along a second-floor corridor is the office of the C.P.A.'s advisers to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. After the overthrow of the Saddam regime, a thirty-six-year-old American, Andrew P. N. Erdmann, who has a doctorate in history from Harvard, became Iraq's acting Minister of Higher Education.
Drew Erdmann is a rangy, broad-shouldered former rower with a strong chin and short sandy hair parted in the middle; when I met him during a month's stay in Iraq, he had a bushy mustache that turned his face into that of a British colonial official circa 1925. His features and oarsman's physique, together with those double-barrelled middle initials, prepared me for a terse Anglophilic bureaucrat. Instead, Erdmann broods. He speaks in long, reflective sentences that are frequently interrupted by second thoughts and qualifications; he settles into a faster, more explosive rhythm when recounting something that angers him--often, his own conduct. He was getting just a few hours of sleep a night, sharing a cramped trailer on the grounds of the palace. By his own account, he was short-tempered and close to nervous exhaustion.
He had just returned from a meeting at which he'd tried not to humiliate a university president who asked what "operating budget" meant during the fifth or sixth discussion of the subject. Two weeks earlier, on the campus of Baghdad University, Jeffrey Wershow, a twenty-two-year-old soldier from Erdmann's security detail, had been shot dead at point-blank range while waiting for Erdmann to come out of another meeting. Wershow was the seventy-first American soldier in Iraq to have been killed since the overthrow of Saddam. Since then, attacks on coalition forces have doubled--to more than thirty a day--and grown more fierce, sometimes involving car bombs. More than a hundred and fifty soldiers have been killed during the first six months of the occupation, and some twenty-two hundred have been wounded.
I sought out Erdmann in part because his dissertation adviser had been Ernest May, an authority on historical analogies. I was interested in the analogies that Erdmann was carrying around in his head for his new job of nation-building: The British in colonial Iraq? The Americans in postwar Germany? Lying on a cot in the trailer and fiddling with a Swiss Army knife, his feet propped on an Army duffelbag, his desk littered with water bottles, empty packets of Meals Ready to Eat, and unread books on the Middle East, Erdmann flashed a self-mocking grin. "I can't think historically--there've been times when I don't even know what I did forty-eight hours before," he said wryly. "I try. It's like a test for myself. Can I remember what I did the day before? I eventually can, but it takes effort. That's not a good situation. You should be able to remember what you did in the last twenty-four hours."
Hanging on the wall of Erdmann's office was a sign that reminded him of his mission. It read, "end state: a durable peace for a united and stable, democratic iraq that provides effective and representative government for and by the iraqi people; is underpinned by new and protected freedoms and a growing market economy; and no longer poses a threat to its neighbors or international security and is able to defend itself."
Erdmann believed in this goal, but he was wary of the lofty rhetoric. One of his favorite books, which he was trying to find time to reread in Baghdad, is the French historian Marc Bloch's "Strange Defeat," a firsthand account of the collapse of France in 1940. Bloch served in the French Army in both world wars and then joined the Resistance before his capture, torture, and execution by the Nazis. Erdmann, in talking about his own efforts in Iraq, more than once cited a passage from "Strange Defeat": "The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings."
The ongoing debate over the war in Iraq has rarely moved beyond abstract terms to take into account the human beings--Iraqis and Americans alike--whose lives are affected by decisions in Washington. To Erdmann, success in Iraq will ultimately depend on the small, concrete actions of individuals on the ground. The psychological demands of the occupation were daunting, he said, and added, "Some people can navigate it, some people can't. Some people can make a mistake and recalibrate, others can't. On both sides." He paused. "So much of this is up to the wisdom of people--their prudence, their judgment."
THE PLANNERS
Before arriving in Iraq, in April, Erdmann had done a lot of relevant historical thinking. In his dissertation, "Americans' Search for 'Victory' in the Twentieth Century," he wrote about Americans' growing realization that in a military intervention a careful transition from war to peace is as crucial as battlefield success. "The language that we live with today of 'exit strategy,' and the focus on the 'end game'--that's recent, and part of this historical evolution," he said.
Erdmann received his Ph.D. in 2000, and promptly abandoned an academic career. There is something self-punishing and obsessive in his character. A life spent analyzing military history would be insufficient; he was the sort of academic who had to know how he would do under fire. He wanted to be a good citizen more than a good professor.
In early 2001, Erdmann was about to fly to Kosovo and take the first job he could find--"Anything. Load bags of grain. That's how far away I wanted to get from academia"--when a call came from Richard N. Haass, who had just been named director of policy planning at the State Department. By May, Erdmann was in Washington, working for the Bush Administration. At Harvard, he had been an Eisenhower specialist, and he entered government in the old-fashioned spirit of a political independent. "This is a little too grandiose, but there is a previous tradition in foreign-policy circles of being more nonpartisan, serving the national interest," he said.
In the summer of 2002, when the Administration began leaning toward an invasion of Iraq, Haass asked Erdmann to analyze twentieth-century postwar reconstructions. In fifteen single-spaced classified pages--epic length for a State Department memo--Erdmann applied the ideas in his dissertation to a series of case studies from the two world wars through more recent conflicts such as Bosnia and Kosovo. One of Erdmann's fundamental conclusions was that long-term success depended on international support. In the short run, he explained to me one evening, "the foundation of everything is security," which partly depended on having sufficient numbers of troops. "You don't have to look too far to see that isn't the case here. And I don't fault the people who are here. There's no way any fault should be put on the kids in the 3rd I.D. or the brigade commanders. The question is, why weren't more people put in? That was the concern of my project--were we prepared to do what it took in the postwar phase?"
Last fall, Secretary of State Colin Powell circulated Erdmann's memo to Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. "Maybe it wasn't read," Erdmann said.
Erdmann's view that rebuilding Iraq would require a significant, sustained effort was echoed by the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Throughout 2002, sixteen groups of Iraqi exiles, coordinated by a bureau official named Thomas S. Warrick, researched potential problems in postwar Iraq, from the electricity grid to the justice system. The thousands of pages that emerged from this effort, which became known as the Future of Iraq Project, presented a sobering view of the country's physical and human infrastructure--and suggested the need for a long-term, expensive commitment.
The Pentagon also spent time developing a postwar scenario, but, because of Rumsfeld's battle with Powell over foreign policy, it didn't coordinate its ideas with the State Department. The planning was directed, in an atmosphere of near-total secrecy, by Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and William Luti, his deputy. According to a Defense Department official, Feith's team pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar reconstructions. The fear, the official said, was that such people would offer pessimistic scenarios, which would challenge Rumsfeld's aversion to using troops as peacekeepers; if leaked, these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war. "You got the impression in this exercise that we didn't harness the best and brightest minds in a concerted effort," Thomas E. White, the Secretary of the Army during this period, told me. "With the Department of Defense the first issue was 'We've got to control this thing'--so everyone else was suspect." White was fired in April. Feith's team, he said, "had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived."
This was the view held by exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi. The exiles told President Bush that Iraqis would receive their liberators with "sweets and flowers." Their advice led policymakers to assume that Iraqi soldiers and policemen would happily transfer their loyalty to the Americans, providing a ready-made security force. "There was a mistaken notion in certain circles in Washington that the Iraqi civil service would remain intact," Barham Salih, the Prime Minister of the Iraqi Kurdish administration and a strong advocate for the overthrow of Saddam, said. A week before the war, he discussed the problem of law and order with a senior member of the Administration. "They were expecting the police to work after liberation," Salih told me. "I said, 'This is not the N.Y.P.D. It's the Iraqi police. The minute the first cruise missile arrives in Baghdad, the police force degenerates and everybody goes home.' "
In the Pentagon's scenario, the responsibility of managing Iraq would quickly be handed off to exiles, led by Chalabi--allowing the U.S. to retain control without having to commit more troops and invest a lot of money. "There was a desire by some in the Vice-President's office and the Pentagon to cut and run from Iraq and leave it up to Chalabi to run it," a senior Administration official told me. "The idea was to put our guy in there and he was going to be so compliant that he'd recognize Israel and all the problems in the Middle East would be solved. He would be our man in Baghdad. Everything would be hunky-dory." The planning was so wishful that it bordered on self-deception. "It isn't pragmatism, it isn't Realpolitik, it isn't conservatism, it isn't liberalism," the official said. "It's theology."
On January 20th, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive No. 24, which gave control of postwar Iraq to the Department of Defense. At the end of the month, the Pentagon threw together a team of soldiers and civilians, under the leadership of retired General Jay Garner, in the newly christened Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. orha would administer Iraq after the end of hostilities. The war was only seven weeks away.
In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, Garner had led the largely successful effort to save Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq. Garner and his inner circle of generals and ambassadors essentially used the same template for the war in Iraq. orha was divided into three "pillars," as Garner called them: humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, and civil administration. Garner's experience in northern Iraq led him to focus on the potential for a humanitarian disaster: displaced populations, starvation, outbreaks of disease, prisoners of war, and, above all, chemical-weapons attacks. The U.N. was warning of the possibility of half a million deaths. orha thoroughly prepared for each of these nightmares--and if any one of them had come to pass Garner's foresight would have been applauded.
But in concentrating on possible emergencies he failed to consider the long view. On February 21st and 22nd, some two hundred officials gathered in an auditorium at the National Defense University, in Washington, for a "rock drill"--a detailed vetting of the plans that had been made so far. The drill struck some participants as ominous.
"I got the sense that the humanitarian stuff was pretty well in place, but the rest of it was flying blind," one orha member recalled. "A lot of it was after hearing from Jay Garner, 'We don't have any resources to do this.' " Plans for running the country's ministries were rudimentary; orha had done little research. At Douglas Feith's insistence, his former law partner Michael Mobbs was named the head of the civil-administration team. According to Garner and others, Mobbs never gelled with his new colleagues. Yet this "pillar" would turn out to be the one that mattered most.
During the rock drill, Gordon W. Rudd, a professor from the Marine Corps's Command and Staff College, who had been assigned to Garner's team as a historian, noticed that a man sitting four rows in front of him kept interjecting comments during other people's presentations. "At first, he annoyed me," Rudd said. "Then I realized he was better informed than we were. He had worked the topics, while the guy onstage was a rookie."
It was Tom Warrick, the coordinator of the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, and his frustrations had just begun. Two weeks after the rock drill, after a meeting at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld asked Garner, "Do you have a guy named Warrick on your team?" Rumsfeld ordered Garner to remove Warrick from orha, adding, "This came from such a high level I can't say no." Warrick, who had done as much thinking about postwar Iraq as any other American official, never went to Baghdad.
The war between State and Defense continues: For months, Feith's office has held up the appointment of other senior State Department officials to the C.P.A., even as the organization remains fifty per cent understaffed. The reports of the Future of Iraq Project were archived. In Baghdad, I met an Iraqi-American lawyer named Sermid Al-Sarraf, who had served on the...
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