Crude World (23 page)
“The Americans and British are talking to the Iraqi people as though we are naïve,” he said. “You say you are here to free us, but this is ridiculous.”
His face assumed a knowing look, somewhere between a scold and a laugh. He mentioned Stanley Maude, the general who led British troops into Baghdad in 1917. Maude is all but unknown in America and little remembered in Britain, but Iraqis memorize his role in their history. Before the end of World War I, Baghdad was a regional capital of the tottering Ottoman Empire. Maude led a British expeditionary force into the city, signaling its involuntary transfer into the custody of the British crown. Maude soon issued his Proclamation of Baghdad, in which he stated, “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” Later that year, Maude died from cholera, one of the first victims of his own triumph.
It was an odd liberation. The League of Nations soon recognized the newly created Iraq but placed it under a British mandate. The British imposed a Sunni king even though Sunnis were a minority, and this prompted the first Iraqi insurgency of the twentieth century, in which Kurds and Shiites fought their foreign occupiers. Iraq gained quasi independence in 1932 but British troops remained, because among the country’s attractions, a massive oil field had been found near Kirkuk. Maude’s evocation of the harsh Ottoman period that preceded British intervention—“your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage”—predated by almost a century the 2003 speeches of George W. Bush, who also offered a liberation narrative to justify his occupation.
Kashmoula pointed to the bullet holes in the chairs and walls of his office, the consequence of negligent strafing. “They could have been more surgical,” he said wryly. What offended him most was not the invasion’s violence or his need to acquire new furniture but the excuse, first evoked by Maude, that foreign incursions were for the sake of freedom and democracy. “We are educated,” Kashmoula said with a smile.
“I lived in the West for more than seven years. We know you have certain targets and reasons for coming here. We have oil and you need it. The whole world is built around oil, so let’s talk about it honestly.”
A few weeks later, I saw Kashmoula again in a conference room at the ministry, which was finally bouncing back to life. With April turning to May, more workers were allowed to return to their desks, though marines frisked everyone who entered and exited, lest they bring in bombs or carry out secrets. The conference room, off the marble-floored lobby, had become the setting for a series of first dates in which Iraqi officials met American experts who represented the occupying power but stressed that they were advisers rather than bosses. The irony (or significance) was lost on no one that the first senior American to meet Kashmoula and other top ministry officials was a former ExxonMobil executive, Gary Vogler, who arrived at the ministry one day with a crew cut, flak jacket and bodyguards. Walking into the conference room, Vogler encountered more than a dozen Iraqis and attacked them with a firm handshake.
“Oh, you’re the guy we need to work with,” Vogler told one of the Iraqis, pumping his hand enthusiastically.
“Good, good,” he told another, moving farther around the table.
“Great, we’ve got work to do with you,” he said to yet one more.
And so he circled the room, issuing superlatives rather than directives. Tea was served. I was nudged out of the room, but Kashmoula had already told me that occupier-to-occupied commands were not necessary. The Americans and Iraqis in the ministry shared the same short-term goal, to get oil flowing again. Whether Iraq would withdraw from OPEC, whether it would privatize its fields, whether American firms would receive preferential deals, whether the invasion was for petroleum rather than democracy—for oilmen, these issues were secondary to the task of repairing damaged wells and pipelines.
Yet something odd was happening. The passing inconvenience of postinvasion looting was turning into a permanent condition. A ministry official, Mohammed Aboush, who was responsible for the northern portion of Iraq’s oil industry and who was in the conference room with Vogler, told me afterward that his car had been stolen, and that
when he traveled to Kirkuk, a hundred miles away, he took a taxi because he didn’t want to risk losing another vehicle. Where oil still flowed, smugglers tapped into pipelines. Where it didn’t flow, looters walked off with the pipelines, selling them as scrap metal. Iraq was now in the ironic situation of importing gasoline from Kuwait, yet even so—and here humiliation was piled onto disgrace—people waited for days in dystopian lines stretching for miles to buy some of it. Iraq had joined Nigeria and Iran in the dumbfounded ranks of oil exporters that had to import gasoline. “We had meetings with KBR,” Aboush said, referring to the Halliburton subsidiary responsible for helping to patch up the oil industry. “They took notes of our problems and promised to look into it. But they are very bureaucratic. So far, nothing. The chain of command”—Aboush broke into laughter at this—“even Mr. Bush cannot do anything, apparently.”
Aboush’s office reflected the chaos that continued to linger in the country. His computer and his wall decorations, which had vanished during the fall of the regime, had not been replaced. Before U.N. sanctions had been imposed in the 1990s, Aboush had been responsible for evaluating the bids of foreign companies; he’d realized that the worst were Chinese and Russian (“lousy, incompetent”) while the best were American. The French were technologically adept but financially unsavory—they would cheat their grandmothers, Aboush said. Of course, none of this mattered back then, as Saddam awarded contracts for political rather than technological reasons. Things worsened once U.N. sanctions limited Iraq’s industrial partners to shady firms willing to operate on the margins of international law. The invasion, Aboush hoped, would change everything. As he wishfully told me, “Instead of giving contracts to people who don’t know the difference between oil and fish and chips, we will be deciding between Exxon and Conoco.”
Yet Aboush was not enjoying the luxury of such choices. The famous disarray of the occupation—the lack of troops to provide security, the scarcity and cluelessness of reconstruction experts—plagued the oil sector, too. Vogler, the former Exxon executive, did not appear in Baghdad until weeks after U.S. troops, and he arrived without a boss. It wasn’t until early May that Philip Carroll, a former chief executive
of Shell, was named as the top American oil adviser, and he didn’t get to Baghdad until weeks after that. The midlevel American official through whom I tried to arrange interviews with Vogler and Carroll was hobbled by the fact that he shared a computer and satellite phone with several other occupation officials, and he did not have his own vehicle to travel between the ministry and the American headquarters at the Republican Palace, a few miles away. With my own laptop, sat phone and SUV, I was better equipped than a key official in the postoccupation oil hierarchy. This was not how Aboush imagined an invading superpower would manage the world’s third-largest reserve of oil.
Aboush, who was as round as he was tall and as warm as he was round, launched into an explanation of the attractions of Iraq’s oil. He talked of the vast stretches of desert that had not yet been probed, he noted the attractive shallow depths of the nation’s reservoirs, he emphasized the low cost of extraction, he praised the prowess of American firms—“even without arm twisting, they will get the contracts”—and he said world prices would fall once oil flooded out of rebuilt Iraq. Why did he bother mentioning the obvious? It struck me that Aboush was urging more American attention to Iraq’s oil rather than less. His main fear wasn’t that Iraq’s petroleum would be owned by Halliburton but that it would be ignored by Bush. An expert in what happens above-ground as well as below, Aboush sensed that Iraq’s geological potential might be defeated by its geopolitical dilemma. “We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but our wealth has not been used well,” he noted. “Oil has not been a blessing. Without oil, we would not have had these wars. But I am a patriot. I want to see my oil spent on my people.”
Aboush knew that when America has a monocular aim, it tends to get the job done. After the Gulf War of 1990-91, hundreds of fires in Kuwait burned through millions of barrels of oil a day, but by year’s end the fires were out and the oil flowed again. Aboush needed only to make a short and dodgy drive to see that Iraq’s oil sector—supposedly the grand prize of invasion—was starved of attention from its occupiers.
• • •
The bridge across the Tigris to Dora was a double-decker affair with four lanes on each level. Its notability arose not from its design, which was a triumph of concrete over aesthetics, but from its linking of Baghdad to a neighborhood that hosted one of Iraq’s three refineries. Dora’s refinery, an industrial crown jewel, was targeted by American bombs during the Gulf War of 1990-91. Afterward, it was rebuilt with around-the-clock work that concluded with a visit by Saddam Hussein, who congratulated his team of reconstruction wizards.
A dozen years later, I drove over the bridge to meet Dathar Khashab, the chief wizard. He was a raspy engineer to whom the intervening years had been good—he had become the refinery’s director, presiding over a curious testament to the strange American role in the region. More than half a century ago, the refinery had been built by Kellogg Brown & Root and Foster Wheeler, Ltd., which meant that Americans had built a facility they would later bomb. Despite the wallop of precision missiles, the refinery still used, in 2003, much of its half-century-old equipment, including a vintage IBM clock that workers continued to punch their time cards into. The refinery’s administrative building, fronted by a grass lawn and semicircle of palm trees, had a winding iron stairwell that was a mixture of Bauhaus and Tara. The sign for the men’s bathroom said, quaintly, “Gents.” An executive conference room was decorated with a portrait of the refinery’s first director, George Mitchell, who served, as a gold-plated plaque attested, from May 25, 1955, until December 2, 1959. Dathar Khashab looked forward to working once again with the foreign engineers who’d taught him and his predecessors everything they knew. He pointed to the portraits of the dozen or so Iraqis who’d followed in Mitchell’s footsteps. “This man was a British graduate,” Khashab said. “This one, an American graduate. This one, British. This one is living in London. Here, a British graduate.” Khashab touched his own chest. “I got my degree at Sheffield University.”
He was a chip off the block, shaking hands and slapping backs and barking orders like a profane Texas oilman. He had a KBR construction hat behind his desk and all but worshipped W. Edwards Deming, a 1950s management guru who’d emphasized the role of quality as a
route to profitability. “He is a fantastic man,” Khashab said. “His book is, for me, like a god.” Though a member of the Ba’ath Party—Iraq’s business class had to join, Khashab said, defensively—he had always admired the business acumen of the nation that had just invaded his own. The KBR hat behind his desk was displayed without irony.
“It is much easier to work with British and Americans,” he added. “We speak the same language, the same standards and equipment. When I talk with Russians and Chinese, it’s all obscure to me. I don’t know their standards or goals. We have a hard time just getting them to understand what we are talking about.”
His Ba’athist affiliation was trumped by his devotion to the steel pipes and pressurized stacks that were his flammable love. Yet he was stunned to realize that although his refinery was crucial to Iraq’s oil infrastructure, its survival was not guaranteed. Dora was already on its way to becoming a lawless satellite. In the weeks after the invasion, the short hop from Baghdad to Dora had become a lethal test, because trying to cross the bridge had turned into a carnival of carjacking. Thieves were in the habit of setting up roadblocks at its midpoint or driving alongside cars and aiming guns at drivers to persuade them to stop. The best defense was to wait on the Baghdad side for other vehicles to go first. If bandits attacked the car ahead, there was time to turn around.
Unlike the Oil Ministry yet like the bridge, the refinery did not get prompt attention from the American military. With law and order breaking down even before the invasion’s culmination, looters besieged the refinery, which was a paradise for them. Not only did the complex contain an abundance of oil, gasoline and heating fuel, but its accessories included cars, trucks, buses, computers, fax machines, tools, desks and chairs. Even its trees were valuable, because they could be uprooted and sold on the black market. When the attacks began, Khashab scrounged up a hundred assault rifles and handed them out to workers whom he divided up into defense teams. For three sleepless days and nights, Khashab’s impromptu militia held looters at bay. The arrival of the marines in Firdos Square did not change things; looters continued to try to sneak and shoot their way into the refinery. And why shouldn’t they? The invaders were standing aside as “stuff”—Rumsfeld’s
euphemism for anarchy—happened. Another day passed and the looting siege worsened. The next day, looters issued an ultimatum to Khashab: surrender or large-caliber weapons would be used against him. Khashab put a machine gun at the entrance and manned it himself, though this was a bluff because there was almost no ammunition left. He was saved by the arrival of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division. They came only to check the condition of the refinery, but as Khashab shook the commander’s hand he said, “Now that you are here, you have to provide security.”
The incompetence of the American occupation has been amply documented, but the initial neglect of Dora seemed to reflect more than the astonishing sweep of American blundering. If oil was the motive of invasion, surely Baghdad’s only refinery would be protected at the first possibility and afterward provided with all the soldiers, experts and supplies it needed. The White House might not care about the National Museum or the Al-Kindi Hospital, but surely the oilmen-turned-politicians in Washington would look beyond the ministry building to devote more than passing attention to the preservation of the petroleum infrastructure. They didn’t, and I wanted to understand why, so I hung around the refinery to see what would happen.