Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (60 page)

“We’d continue to pay them to do things like engineering, road construction, work on bridges, remove rubble, demining, pick up unexploded ordnance, construction work,” explained retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, a mild-mannered Vietnam veteran who had earlier worked in Kurdistan and was originally dispatched to administer postwar Iraq. “The regular army has the skill sets to match the work that needs to be done.”

At a press conference before leaving Washington, Garner said he did not want to immediately demobilize the military and “put a lot of unemployed people on the street.”

Little about Iraq went as planned, however.

Two decades of wars and economic sanctions left the Iraqi state chronically corroded. After Saddam fled, the capital crumbled into chaos and wild looting. By the time American administrators arrived in Baghdad, little of government was left to plug into. Seventeen of twenty-one Iraqi ministries had basically evaporated in the postwar anarchy. Files, documents, and records disappeared. Government buildings in the Arab world’s second largest city were looted down to bathroom fixtures, utility wires, and light bulbs. There wasn’t a single chair to sit on.

Iraq literally means “well-rooted” country. Like many modern Middle East states, Iraq was rooted around two institutions—the ruling party and security forces. For thirty-five years, almost half of Iraq’s life as a modern country, the two institutions had employed the largest number of people, many of the best educated personnel, and a huge chunk of the middle class.

The Baath Party penetrated politics, the economy, the professions, the tribes, and both big cities and remote villages. Membership had been the best way—and sometimes the only way—to get a decent education, find a job or win a promotion, and prevent harassment by security services. Membership estimates ranged as high as two million.

Yet two months after the fall of Baghdad, Washington dispatched a new governor whose first acts pulled up Iraq’s remaining roots.

In May 2003, only four days after his arrival, American governor L. Paul Bremer III issued Order No. 1. It disbanded the Baath Party.

It also fired senior and midranking members from any job receiving a government paycheck and banned them from ever being employed in the public sector again—in a socialist state. Overnight, civil servants, judges and hospital administrators, principals and university deans, provincial governors and city managers, and heads of state industries and banks were out of jobs—with no one ready to step in and no private sector to provide alternative employment. The decree then stipulated that Baathists were subject to criminal investigation.
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Sunnis cried foul. Most estimates put the true believers in the party at less than ten percent of its membership. As a result, many Sunnis believed the sweeping decree against all Baathists targeted them, vindictively, as a sect.

“In the early months, when I thought that I should participate in a new political order, one of the central features was to dismantle the Baathist state,” Allawi later told the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I was a firm believer—and still am—in the depravity of the Baath Party and its mismanagement. It was a prop for authoritarian rule. But de-Baathification became equated with de-Sunnification.”
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The process was selectively applied and manipulated. Rather than help define a just new political order, de-Baathification became the instrument of new injustice.

“It was a blunderbuss approach. It went over the top,” Allawi added. “All kinds of people were thrown out, many unjustly. Sweeping de-Baathification led to a group of angry people. The way the party was dismantled has come back to us—with a vengeance.

“By the end of 2003, Sunni opinion basically rejected the authority created after the invasion and occupation,” he reflected. “The insurgency was rooted in the community’s sense of disempowerment.”

During his second week in power, Bremer issued Order No. 2. It dissolved the entire Iraqi military.

Iraq’s land, air, and naval forces were was almost as important as the party. The military not only secured the state. It was also the single largest employer in Iraq, with more than 400,000 troops—and at least two million more family members dependent on that income. They instantly lost both pay and pensions, again in an economy with no private sector to absorb them.

Bremer argued that the Iraqi army had basically already disbanded. “By the time the conflict was over, that army, so-called, didn’t exist anymore,” he told me.

The second decree stunned Iraq’s military. Many Iraqi officers had been telling anyone who would listen—foreign journalists, U.S. diplomats, and American military officials—that they were simply waiting to be ordered back to their barracks.
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Many felt they had actually contributed to the American blitz through Iraq. Thousands of soldiers had gone home after the United States air-dropped millions of leaflets urging them not to fight.

Once again, Sunnis felt specifically targeted. The reaction was swift and angry. Tens of thousands of former troops took to the streets of Baghdad almost before the ink was dry on the decree.

D
ISSOLVING THE
I
RAQI
A
RMY IS A HUMILIATION TO THE DIGNITY OF THE NATION,
cried one of the banners borne by former soldiers who gathered almost daily outside the Green Zone.

“Instead of us using these personnel against terrorism, terrorists are using them against us,” lamented former Iraqi Special Forces Major Mohammed Faour, an exile who advised the United States. “You can’t put half a million people with families and weapons and a monthly salary on the dole. You can’t do this in any country. They’ll turn against you.”
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The two decrees backfired, undermining any prospect of winning support from Iraq’s major players. The unfinished war in Iraq soon got much messier. For the United States, enemies proliferated: An insurgency was led by loyalists to Saddam Hussein and fueled by Sunni disaffection. Foreign fighters throughout the region—from as far away as Morocco and Algeria in North Africa, and as close as neighboring Saudi Arabia and Syria—crossed the border to aid Arab brethren against a foreign army widely seen as occupying Iraq. And al Qaeda set up a new extremist network in Iraq.

The common denominator was that they were all Sunni.

The tactics of war also grew nastier. Suicide bombs and roadside explosives—never before problems in Iraq—became regular features. Unlike the U.S. invasion, there were no neat front lines. Every site was a target. And no one, Iraqi or foreigner, was safe.

On a sweltering summer day a month before Powell’s visit, a cement truck had approached United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. It was a clever choice; a cement truck was welcome anywhere because it signaled reconstruction. Only this one carried a massive bomb. Two of my friends were inside the building. Ghassan Salameh, the chief UN adviser on Iraq, had just returned to his office when the explosives went off. He scrambled through the thick smoke and flying brown debris to search for Sergio Vieira de Mello, the charismatic Brazilian diplomat who headed the UN mission, and who many thought could one day become Secretary-General. He found de Mello, who was crushed from the waist down between slabs of collapsed concrete but still had the presence of mind to use his cell phone to call for help. Rescuers could not extract him in time; he died three hours later. Almost two dozen were killed in the attack.

The UN bombing was an early turning point. Unable to protect its people, the United Nations evacuated staff. Aid groups became reticent about setting up big operations in Baghdad. Other countries were reluctant about opening embassies.

The two decrees also created a triple long-term challenge.

First, they created a vacuum in personnel.

The United States scrambled to find new and untested management to rebuild every arm of government, occasionally from scratch. American advisers, many of whom did not speak Arabic and had never been to Iraq before, were tasked to get ministries up and running again—often with Iraqis who had never worked in the ministries either. Several were exiles, including Allawi, who had not even been in Iraq for years.

Second, the two decrees left a vacuum on security at one of the most vulnerable moments in Iraq’s history. The early looting gave way to rampant criminality—theft, kidnappings, rape, and murder.

“Imagine waking up and finding that your leaders have dismantled all police and military. As a result, there is not one police or law-enforcement agent or guard or army to protect you,” Iraqi Vice President Tariq al Hashemi, the highest-ranking Sunni in government, told me. “That’s what has happened in Iraq.”

The United States did not have sufficient troops to restore order and patrol the streets of a country with twenty-seven million people, much less end an escalating war. American soldiers initially had orders
not
to police Baghdad. The absence of an established army and police paved the way for illegal militias—all with sectarian loyalties—to step in and take over neighborhoods and carry out their vendettas. And once they exerted control, it proved very difficult to fully dislodge them.

Finally, the biggest challenge was the new political disorder.

The two decrees were designed to prevent the old regime’s return and to create political space for others to emerge. But abruptly dismantling the Sunni-dominated party and military—without new cross-confessional and multiethnic institutions ready to begin taking their place—just as abruptly shifted the balance of power. Virtually overnight, control swung from minority Sunni to majority Shiites, and from secular to religious parties.

The Baath Party and the military had been the two most secular institutions in Iraq. In their place, the largest new political forces were all Shiite, Islamist, and aligned with Iran—the opposite of what the United States originally intended. In the new Iraq, Sunni and Shiite were split in ways unprecedented since the country was created in 1920.

Many of Allawi’s early allies were Shiite brethren in Islamist parties. Yet he noted the dangers of their one-sided dominance in his diary. “Once it was clear that the Shiites were going to follow a sectarian agenda, the violent response was inevitable,” he later explained. “I have a diary entry in 2003 when I say to myself that…we are heading toward a far clearer definition of sectarian community identity.”
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The war steadily escalated throughout 2003 and 2004, even after the United States pulled out its governor and handed over control to a U.S.-appointed Iraqi council. The first prime minister was Allawi’s cousin, Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and a bear of a man who had worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency during his years in exile. Ali Allawi became defense minister.

The first real hope was offered in 2005. It was the year of elections to put in place a permanent government.

Iraqis took fairly well to democracy as voters went to the polls three times: In January 2005, they elected an interim parliament. It was the first multiparty elections in fifty years. Despite escalating violence, fifty-eight percent of Iraqis voted. The enthusiasm was inspiring.

“I would have crawled here if I had to. I don’t want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me,” said Samir Hassan, a young man who had lost a leg in a car bomb attack. “Today I am voting for peace.”
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The downside was the clear pattern of voting—or not—by cultural identity. Shiites and Kurds turned out in throngs to vote for candidates from their own communities. Groups of Kurdish men danced outside polling stations as they waited to cast ballots. Smiling Shiite women proudly held up purple ink-stained fingers to be filmed or photographed. But the majority of Sunnis boycotted the election.

Allawi, one of the winners, became minister of trade. He had run in an alliance with Shiite Islamist parties. The outcome, he noted, was not what the United States had anticipated.

“One of the principal myths that underlay justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq lay in ruins. When given the choice, the Shia did not vote for the secular, liberal or pro-western parties,” Allawi later noted in his own account. “Instead, they voted in ways diametrically opposed to the original hypothesis of the war’s ideological promoters.”
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The short-lived government’s main job was to craft a new constitution. It was pulled together in three months. Debate was intense. In the end, many contentious issues—including how much power to grant the Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish regions—had to be postponed until later.

In October 2005, Iraqis went to the polls a second time to vote on the document. Sixty-three percent turned out at the referendum. This time Sunni Arabs went to the polls, although mainly to vote against the constitution. It squeaked through.

The final vote was held in December 2005 for a permanent government. This time, nearly eighty percent of Iraqis turned out, the highest tally so far. In a stark contrast from Saddam Hussein’s one-party rule, 228 parties and nineteen coalitions competed for the 275-seat parliament. The downside was that Iraq’s divisions were deeper than ever—sometimes within a sect as well as between them. Religious parties fared better than secular groups.

The largest Shiite and Sunni winners were Islamist parties. Ali Allawi, who left the Shiite alliance, lost his seat.

The hope spawned by the three elections in 2005 faded early in 2006. Iraq steadily unraveled.