Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (59 page)

“Iraq has the elements of either an amazing success or an outstanding disaster,” Barham Salih told me just weeks before the American invasion. “That’s the irony of Iraq.”

To the outside world, many Iraqis also appeared ready for change.

During his quarter-century rule, Saddam Hussein made more mistakes—at home and in the region—than any other Middle East leader. In 1980, he invaded Iran, a country four times the size of Iraq with almost three times the population. Baghdad boasted that the conflict would be over in weeks because Iran’s revolutionary regime was still fragile and fractured. The war instead dragged on, exhausting Iraq’s wealth and weaponry. Baghdad had to borrow heavily from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and take loans from Moscow to buy Russian arms.

In the mid-1980s, I covered Saddam’s campaign to get Iraqi women to donate their jewelry to pay for the war. Nightly television programs showed women turning in family heirlooms, gold bracelets bestowed at the birth of a child, and even their bridal dowry jewelry.

The war carried political costs too, as Saddam cracked down brutally to keep Kurds in the northern mountains and Shiites in the southern marshes along the Iranian border in check. Opposition outside the country—western-educated exiles in Europe, clerics and refugees in Iran, and Baathist rivals in Syria—gained new momentum.

In 1986, it began to look as if Baghdad could even lose the war as Iranian troops gained ground inside Iraq for the first time. It took Iraq two years—and massive amounts of mustard gas and poisonous nerve agents—to repel them. In a decisive 1988 Iraqi offensive to recapture the strategic Fao Peninsula, thousands of Iranian Revolutionary Guards were killed by chemical weapons, in part because gas masks did not fit snugly enough over their beards. During the two-year interval, Iraq had received an unusual combination of Arab, Soviet, European, and American assistance—funds, arms, training, and intelligence—motivated largely by shared fear of an Iranian victory. Tehran reluctantly agreed to a UN-brokered cease-fire four months after the battle at Fao Peninsula.

After eight years of the bloodiest modern Middle East war, however, neither side gained a square inch of territory—at the cost of more than one million casualties. The war had been for naught.

Owing billions, Saddam demanded that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait forgive his debts. He played to historic rivalries, claiming to have fought the Shiite Persian revolutionaries on behalf of all Sunni Arabs. When his neighbors balked, the Iraqi leader first accused Kuwait of stealing oil from wells along their common border. He then revived a long-standing claim to Kuwait as Iraq’s nineteenth province. And finally, in 1990, he invaded the little city-state.

Operation Desert Storm, led by the United States and including troops from three dozen countries, liberated Kuwait in 1991. Afterward, Washington tried to exploit the Iraqi leader’s vulnerability by calling on Shiites and Kurds to rebel against him. They did. But the United States had not required the grounding of Iraq’s air force in the cease-fire. So Saddam dispatched his helicopter gunships to put down the uprisings, bloodily. Thousands died. Hatred deepened.

After two wars, Iraqis and their treasury were spent—only to then face the toughest international economic embargo ever imposed, when Saddam Hussein refused to allow UN inspectors to track down his deadliest weapons programs. Over the next dozen years, Iraqis paid the price as daily life began to break down. By 2002, more than one quarter of the population struggled with poverty or need; per-capita income was estimated at less than one quarter of what it had been in 1980.
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Malnutrition was rampant. Child mortality soared.

In 2002, Saddam Hussein was given one more chance by the United Nations to cooperate. Again, he invoked the rights of sovereignty rather than allow UN inspectors to freely search his realm—even though by then he no longer had active chemical, biological, or nuclear programs. It was an extraordinarily arrogant bluff.

So by 2003, the American advocates of war argued, a confluence of factors made Iraq ripe for new direction. Ousting the regime in Baghdad would also be a catalyst for wider change throughout the Middle East. Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, told
The New York Times:

Operation Iraqi Freedom, launched on March 20, 2003, was initially easier than anticipated. The Iraqi military used no chemical or biological weapons, as had been widely feared. Resistance from Iraqi troops was limited. Many either disappeared or failed to put up much of a fight.

The U.S. blitz to Baghdad took only three weeks.

On April 9, as U.S. troops poured into the Iraqi capital, Iraqi weightlifting champion Kadhim al Jubouri rallied his neighbors to go to Firdous Square to bring down the statue of Saddam Hussein, a twenty-foot bronze of the Iraqi leader with his arm raised above the city he ruled. Jubouri, who had spent nine years in Saddam’s jails, reflected the initial relief of many Iraqis.

“There were lots of people from my tribe who were also put in prison or hanged,” he told reporters. “It became my dream ever since I saw them building that statue to one day topple it.”
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Over and over and over again, Jubouri slammed a sledgehammer into the massive concrete plinth beneath the statue until his hands bled. An American tank eventually rumbled in to help bring it down. Although Saddam managed to escape Baghdad, the toppling of the huge statue symbolized the end of his rule.

Yet by the time Powell arrived in Baghdad, six months after Saddam’s ouster, Iraq was rapidly unraveling.

Ali Allawi understood why. He saw it happening from the inside.

Allawi was just the kind of Iraqi the United States wanted to lead the new Iraq. He bridged the two worlds. A tall, trim man with salt-and-pepper eyebrows, Allawi is usually attired in well-made suits and looks the businessman he is. Born in Baghdad in 1947 to a wealthy Shiite family, he spent large chunks of time in the West after the monarchy was toppled in 1958. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Business School. He worked at the World Bank, then in finance in London and Kuwait. But he was also a practicing Shiite. His wife Munya wore a head scarf and modest Islamic dress even when she visited the West.

Allawi went back to Baghdad three days before Powell’s visit to take part in rebuilding Iraq. He initially believed in the dream.

“I returned on September 11, 2003. It was the culmination of something I had been working toward for years,” Allawi later recalled, almost wistfully. He agreed to serve under the U.S. occupation government, the Coalition Provisional Authority. He became the first minister of trade.

“My expectation was that we’d help in stabilizing the country short-term. We’d build a foundation for post-Saddam Iraq, realizing there were shortcomings in the Iraqi state, not just the dictatorship. This would be the first step,” he told me.

Allawi kept a diary of his impressions and Iraq’s prospects. He very soon began chronicling the political shadows accumulating over Iraq.

“Within a month, I was dissuaded, as I saw the incoherence of the American project. By October, the whole thing seemed to be spinning out of control,” he recounted, with polite anger. “I became very dispirited.”

Like many Iraqis, Allawi concluded that the United States made two basic mistakes that doomed any early success—and possibly the long-term mission. The first was miscalculating the dynamics within Iraqi society.

“The United States embarked on its invasion with very little understanding of the country,” Allawi told me. “The Americans didn’t even grasp that Iraq had been through this before.”

Iraq is a microcosm of many Middle East countries. It was artificially created in 1920 with the decline of the Ottoman empire. Britain won the mandate for Iraq, which was formed by the merger of three Ottoman regions—with disparate populations—centered in Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.

Iraq challenged foreign rule from its earliest days. Both Sunnis and Shiites rebelled against the British in waves of attacks. Iraqi militias, clerics, and politicians all had a piece of the action. In an eerie foreshadowing of the American experience,
The London Times
editorialized in 1920, “How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?”

The 1920 revolt took four months to put down. By the time it ended, some 6,000 Iraqis and 500 British troops were dead.
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In 1921, the British installed King Faisal I to govern Iraq. The choice riled Iraqis for many reasons, foremost because Faisal was not Iraqi. Born in what is today western Saudi Arabia, he had been a representative for Jeddah in the Ottoman parliament. During World War I, he worked with the allies—in a role later made famous in the epic film
Lawrence of Arabia,
in which he was played by Alec Guinness. For a few months in 1920, Faisal was made king of Greater Syria, until France won the mandate for Syria and expelled him. Britain then put Faisal on the throne in Baghdad.

Iraq was still a predominantly tribal society. Tribal sheikhs were unfamiliar with the concept of modern statehood, uncomfortable with recognizing a higher authority, and unwilling to cede control, resources, or revenues with uncertain return—especially to a foreign king. Winning their fealty proved difficult.

In the young state, Islam was the most common denominator, although it too often divided rather than unified. Faisal and his British-backed entourage were largely Sunni, but the majority of the population was Shiite.

“In 1920, the Shiites rose against the British, but found themselves on the losing side of the power equation. They were disempowered for the next eighty years,” Allawi told me. “That history has haunted Shiites ever since.”

Identity became a constant in Iraqi politics, with the Kurds believing they had been cheated of their own state and a host of other minorities wanting a secure stake in the new system too.
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In 1932, the year of Iraq’s independence from Britain, King Faisal I lamented:

Faisal died a year later. The monarchy went through two more kings but continued to struggle with resentment against it and deep rifts within Iraqi society. In 1958, the monarchy was overthrown.

Thirty years later, a Library of Congress report in Washington assessed the long-term damage.

The Baath Party also failed to coalesce Iraqi society. Baath is Arabic for “renaissance.” Founded in 1951 as an underground offshoot of Syria’s Baath Party, the socialist movement sought to modernize Arab societies and eventually unite them in a regional political collective. After a false start in 1963, Iraq’s Baathists came to power in a 1968 coup. Some Shiites signed up, but the Baath Party over the next thirty-five years was really about entrenching Sunni domination.

So by 2003, eighty years after the state’s creation, Iraq’s national identity was still precarious. “It’s hard to have a strong national state,” Allawi told me, “when large numbers feel alienated from government.”

The second mistake, which played off the first, was plotting Iraq’s future.

“There was only cursory prewar planning. Iraqis were unrealistically expected to adapt quickly to the premises of Western democracy,” Allawi later reflected in his own book. “A massive opportunity was lost.”
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The United States initially counted on tapping into a functioning state, including government ministries, a police force, and public services—just without Saddam and his inner circle. The political strategy became known as “plug and play.” The plan for Iraq’s military forces was to get rid of Saddam’s henchmen, downsize the armed forces, and use thousands of troops for reconstruction.
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The strategy was nicknamed “purge and protect.” The military would be the primary tool of nation rebuilding.
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