All posts tagged debaathification

The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky (2015)

‘The Coalition promised regime change but instead brought about state collapse.’
(Unnamed Iraqi general quoted on page 101)

This is a disappointing book.

Emma Sky is mentioned half a dozen time in Thomas E. Ricks’s book The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006 to 2008. Her story is extraordinary. Aged 35 she had travelled widely in the Middle East, working for various charities and NGOs. She was working for the British Council back in Blighty when the organisation sent round an email asking if anyone wanted to volunteer to work for the new Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) being set up in the immediate aftermath of the US-led victory over Saddam Hussein in Iraq (May 2003).

Although relying on the authority of the US Army, the CPA itself was an entirely civilian organisation, charged with reconstructing every aspect of Iraqi society, battered by 8 years of war with Iran (1980 to 1988) then 12 years of sanctions after the first Gulf War (1991 to 2003), and then a second bout of disastrously accurate US bombing designed to destroy its infrastructure. The CPA was desperate. Anyone from one of the main allies with experience of working in the Middle East was considered.

Indeed Sky describes the astonishing lack of professionalism about the process whereby she applied, was interviewed, was hired, and found herself on a plane to Baghdad. No-one met her at the airport and when she reported to the ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad where the new authority was still setting itself up she was casually offered the role of ‘Governorate Coordinator’ of the province of Kirkuk in the north of Iraq, and just as casually accepted it. Within days she found herself based in a military barracks in Kirkuk deep in Iraqi Kurdish territory, one of only a handful of women among over 3,500 US soldiers, and sharing an office with the military commander, Colonel William Mayville of the 173rd Airborne Brigade (p.60).

On pages 17 to 21 Sky gives a potted biography of herself. She came from a broken home whose mother, nonetheless, managed to send her to prep and private school, from where she went on to Oxford and then the British Council. So, poor but pukka. This makes the sequence of events which led to her running an Iraqi province a bit more understandable, but not much.

Little did Emma realise at the time that her destiny was to be intertwined with Iraq for the next ten years nor that she would rise to play a key role as adviser to the head of the US Army in Iraq, General Ray Odierno. To be a bit more precise Emma had two periods of work in Iraq, punctuated by roles elsewhere, before she left altogether to move into academia. Her CV goes something like:

  • 2003 to 2004 Iraq: Governorate Coordinator of Kirkuk
  • 2005 Jerusalem: Political Advisor to General Kip Ward, the US Security Co-ordinator for the Middle East Peace Process
  • 2006 Kabul, Afghanistan: Development Advisor to the Italian and British Commanding Generals of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force
  • 2007 to 2010 Iraq: Political Advisor to US General Raymond T. Odierno, Commanding General of Multi-National Corps; and to General David Petraeus on the subject of reconciliation
  • 2011 to 2012 UK: Visiting Professor at King’s College London and a Fellow at Oxford’s Changing Character of War Programme
  • 2012 America: Senior Fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs
  • 2015: Director of the Yale World Fellows international leadership development program

So during her two spells in Iraq, Sky was a central figure. She worked with all the key players on the US side, and met all the powerful Iraqi politicians and religious leaders, as well as countless Iraqis lower down the pecking order, regional administrators, tribal chiefs and so on, right down to the man and woman in the street. She sat in on meetings which made key decisions about Iraq’s future, advised on many of them, had to implement ones she profoundly disagreed with.

It’s a chunky narrative (363 pages), with maps and glossary, which take us from the early days of the occupation in 2003 through to the withdrawal of US troops by President Obama in December 2011 and then through the years of Iraq’s collapse which led to the advent of Islamic State, which rose at great speed to take control of much of northern Iraq by July 2014, which is when Sky’s narrative ends.

Wow. She covers the entire period, she is a clever, independent woman with strong opinions of her own, she isn’t shy about criticising the leaders of the US civilian and military administrations to their faces. She has hundreds of good anecdotes to tell. So why is her book so disappointing?

Two reasons: the flat limited quality of her political analysis, and her pedestrian prose style. Thomas E. Ricks’s highly analytical account of the periods 2003 to 2006 (Fiasco) and 2006 to 2009 (The Gamble) proceeds by ideas or themes. Events out on the street are only mentioned insofar as they influence high-level American political or military policy, which is what Ricks is really interested in.

Sky’s narrative, by contrast, is more like a diary, like the diary of a very clever, independent-minded, sixth form schoolgirl. I did this. Then I did this. I attended dinner with so and so. I met so and so for the first time. Next day we went to meet tribal chiefs. I suggested we set up a committee to ensure better representation / rebuild the economy / provide more schools. That evening there was a formal reception. About this time a religious leader became prominent. I met him at a meeting of tribal chiefs. And so on.

Instead of being arranged by ideas or issue the narrative reads like one damn thing after another. It lacks detachment and analysis, an impression not helped by her often very naive impressions of people. She meets all the key players but her assessments are surprisingly shallow. Ricks portrays all the politicians and religious leaders in post-war Iraq jostling for power, focuses on their roles in Iraq’s poisonous power politics. It’s a rogues gallery of crooks and players. By complete contrast, Sky tells us they’re nice people and have lovely eyes (I’m not kidding, she has a thing about people’s honest trustworthy eyes). She makes friends with lots of leading sheikhs or clerics and is always bursting into tears when it’s time to leave (again I’m not exaggerating; there’s lots of crying).

Her prose style is dead in the water, flat and factual with overtones of The Little House on The Prairie.

We celebrated America’s Independence Day with the Kurds by the shores of Lake Dukan. It was apparently the largest lake in Kurdistan, created by the construction of a dam on the Little Zab River in the 1950s. I sat watching the sun set over the mountains. (p.15)

Or:

In the evenings I would often sit with Colonel Mayville in his office describing the state of the province. Our partnership developed into friendship. To my surprise I found myself growing to like the Colonel as a person and respecting him enormously. I came to realise that behind the bravado was a deep intellect – and a wicked sense of humour. (p.37)

Or:

Kara took me into Kirkuk city one afternoon. We ate in a restaurant and then walked through the market. It felt great to escape the cage from which I viewed Iraq and plunge once more into the Middle East, inhaling deeply the smells of coffee and vegetables, and feasting my eyes on the colours and peoples. (p.61)

‘Wicked sense of humour’, ‘feasting my eyes’. These are magazine clichés and have a cumulatively deadening effect. To quote linguist David Crystal, clichés are phrases which have ‘lost their meaning through overuse. They have become automatic reactions, verbal tics, a replacement for intelligent thinking…’ (The Story of English in 100 Words, 2012).

Every chapter has an epigraph. The epigraph to chapter 1 is: ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance,’ the John Lennon song. I realised at that moment that the narrative was likely to be as obvious and clichéd as that choice of song, and so it turned out.

Moments of thumping obviousness this occur again and again throughout the book and steadily lower your opinion of Sky. She comes over as the kind of person who’d think putting a sign in her office reading ‘Keep calm and drink tea’ was original and funny. Shame. This book cost a lot of money (£10), took 3 or 4 days to read, and wasn’t worth it.

Looking for father figures

In the Ricks book Sky is cited as coming to enormously admire the senior US military personnel she met; in fact she is quoted as saying the US Army is much better than the country it serves. In the hard-headed, cynical context of Ricks’s narrative that feels like an astonishing thing for an outsider, and a pacifist-minded British woman, to say. Unfortunately, once you enter the world of Sky’s narrative with its tendency to gush and hero worship, it doesn’t seem at all surprising.

In this respect I came to realise that the most important fact in the book is when she tells us, really early on in the narrative, that her father left her mother when she was very small. She never knew him, she grew up without a father (p.17). In fact happened not once, but twice. After he biological father walked out her mother fell in love again, and it was this step-father who organised Emma’s education at private schools and then onto Oxford. But while she was at university this step-father ran off with another woman, ‘leaving my mother heartbroken, penniless and distraught’ (p.20). So it happened twice, being abandoned by a father.

I was an only child from a broken-down family. (p.163)

So deep was the wound that she openly tells us it was this that made her, on graduating from university, decide to set out on an adventure to North Africa, ‘to escape the grief and anxiety that family seemed to cause’ (p.20).

I’m not projecting this into her narrative. It’s she herself who devotes several pages right at the start to explaining all this. So it seems pretty reasonable to see these traumatic childhood and teenage experiences as explaining why Sky is so quick to hero worship the big, strong military men she was working with, most of whom are old enough to be, er, her father.

After a while you realise that everywhere she goes, she’s looking for Daddy. Judge for yourself this description of her first meeting with the man who would become the head of the US Army in Iraq:

I could not believe my eyes when I first caught sight of General Odierno. I had never seen such a large human being. He almost seemed a different species. His head was totally shaven. His hands were massive. Yet his face was strangely striking and his eyes were kind. (p.46)

And:

General O was our undisputed boss. He was so big, so confident, so decisive and so determined. I was in awe of him. I thought he was indestructible. As I was sure he could not be killed I felt totally safe when I was with him…(p.163)

And:

I loved travelling with General O and the Sergeant Major. There was so much warmth between the three of us and respect for what we each brought to the mission. (p.171)

And it’s not just big lovable General O. Sky finds father figures everywhere. Take General Mayville.

One evening we went to the local orphanage that we visited from time to time…After the dinner we distributed the presents that had been sent out by the soldiers’ families, keen as ever to support our efforts. It was wonderful to watch the children’s faces light up, loving the attention and gifts. Mayville naturally fell back into the role of father, playing with the kids. (p.74)

Again and again she’s quick to establish father figure-daughter relations with strong or older or important men. Sky’s concern and ability to listen impresses all the Iraqis she comes into contact with (she tells us). But quite often it’s difficult to tell whether she’s being respected or patronised.

Colonel Mayville and I decided in October that it was time to visit [prominent cleric Abdel-Fatah] Mousawi in the al-Husseini Mosque. Sheikh Agar, who frequented the mosque, agreed to take us. He brought me one of his daughter’s abayas and gave it to me as a gift. As we climbed out of the car I covered myself in the abaya, much to everyone’s amusement. Sheikh Agar beamed approval. ‘You are my daughter,’ he said. (p.64)

Or:

Somehow I never felt totally at ease with General Farouq. He kept saying that I was like a daughter to him. (p.192)

Or the extended scene towards the end when it’s announced that General O is being promoted and moving on. He asks about her plans, for example does she intend to marry, have kids maybe, a topic she finds ‘uncomfortable’, maybe because it’s none of his damned business, but also, the Freudian reader by this stage realises, because her unconscious desires (for protection and affection) are projected onto him. ‘He was being all paternal’ (p.341).

Crying

Sky not only converts the men she’s engaging with into father figures, but repeatedly casts herself as a little girl lost. When the tour of duty of the 173rd Airborne Brigade comes to an end and they rotate back to the States, Sky attends the elaborate army ceremony marking the handover to the replacement regiment and makes an emotional speech to the assembled regiment on how much she’s come to respect and admire them all. When their commander, Mayville, shakes her hand and leaves, she is inconsolable with grief. She tells us she spent the entire afternoon crying. Why? Another Daddy has left her (p.89).

Throughout the book this keeps happening; she makes close friends with the locals (pretty much 100% men) or with senior US military figures (all men); then she or they have to leave – when she moves from Kirkuk on to work in Baghdad, or when she leaves Iraq altogether – and there’s lots of crying.

Ismail Abudi came round to see me at the Northern Oil Company in Kirkuk where I was staying the night. We sat on the roof chatting…We discussed the 30 June deadline [when the CPA was due to hand over authority to the Iraqi transitional government]. I told him I would be leaving. ‘No…tell me it is not true,’ he said. We sat on the roof in total darkness with tears streaming down our faces. (p.115)

The Chinook helicopter carrying members of the CPA out of Iraq takes off and:

I had tears streaming down my face. (p.127)

Much later, when she’s leaving for the second time, she goes to visit Sheikh Anwar al-Assi to say goodbye and he tells her to write a book about her experiences. And then:

There were tears in both our eyes when we shook hands. (p.339)

The only woman among men

The other pattern which keeps repeating is the way Sky finds herself the only woman among men. This, also, stems back to her childhood. In that autobiographical sketch she tells us that when she was four her mother got a job as matron at an all-boys preparatory school near Oxford. When she was 7 she was accepted into the school as a boarder, one of only five girls in an all-boys school. When she was ten the stepfather mentioned above entered her life and took her to a new school, The Old Ride, in Bradford-on-Avon. Here she was the only girl at the school (p.17).

She claims to have hated it, saying it was a Lord of the Flies-type experience, with the boys being beastly etc. Nonetheless, it sheds great light on the experience most of this book is dedicated to describing, the way she ‘found herself’ the only woman in a US Army barracks of 3,500 soldiers in the remote north of Iraq, as if this is a completely unexpected surprise instead of, to the Freudian reader, a classic example of a lonely adult seeking to recreate the safe environment of their childhood.

What happens when you are the only woman in a US Army barracks of 3,500 soldiers? You are showered with attention. Lots of big tough men go out of their way to behave chivalrously, open doors, call you ma’am, shower you with attention. You become a very special and notable person.

Same happens when she attends the countless meetings of Kirkuki Arabs or Kurds or Turkmen, Sunni or Shia, religious officials, council meetings, army meetings, and so on: she is again and again the only woman in the room. From time to time she describes this as a great achievement but to the Freudian reader it feels like a situation she has engineered from deep psychological needs. She acquires affectionate nicknames, the Iraqis call her Emmasky, she is effusively greeted and hugged wherever she goes by sheikhs and mullahs.

On one level, obviously this all happened and she (presumably) performed an important function as adviser to the military and civil authorities, first in Kirkuk then in Baghdad. But because she herself has announced the themes of abandonment and loneliness, in some detail, right at the start of the narrative, it is hard not to read the book as the record of a partnerless young woman who again and again places herself in the almost exclusive company of men where she can be made to feel important, and showered with the male love and affection which she completely missed as a child.

I was met at the airport by an Italian colonel who greeted me with a big smile: ‘We are five hundred Italian  men with no women to dance with.’ (p.134)

Thus after her friend Sheikh Agar is assassinated, she attends the funeral and goes on to describe the way she has been virtually adopted by his family:

As I walked in I heard the whisper, ‘Emmasky has come’ being passed down the line. I spoke to the sons. The younger one, who I had often seen around the government building, had aged years. ‘Allah yarhamu,’ (May God have mercy on him), ‘Inna lillali wa inna ilaihi raji’un‘ (We are all from God and to him we return). Family members spoke to me. ‘You are our sister.’ ‘You are my brother’s daughter’. Sheikh Agar, bless him, had told all his family about me. And they were touched I had made the journey from Baghdad to pay my respects. Grief lay heavy in the air. I sat in the tent, the sole woman among so many men. (p.106)

This is just one of the surrogate families she is seeking in order to make up for the one she never knew in childhood:

I was on General O’s team. And no matter how badly we disagreed or argued he was not going to throw me out. This was a family that worked through its problems and did not break down. (p.197)

And so when her second tour of duty as adviser to General Odierno comes to an end, at the end of December 2007, there is the characteristic departure ceremony, with speeches and presents, during which Odierno very graciously thanks Emma for all her help and advice.

His loyalty towards me was extraordinary. And I knew, if ever called on again, I would follow him to the ends of the world – and that he would listen to my advice on how to get there.

Odierno is Emma’s Super Daddy. Then it’s her turn to make a speech, telling the assembled soldiers it had been an honour and privilege to be part of their team. And inside she knew:

I meant it. Amid the horror of war, I had experienced more love and camaraderie than I had ever known. (p.241)

When she has her second farewell, because she’s not just leaving Iraq, the Americans are leaving Iraq, and so she attends the passing out parade held by General O, at which he gives a long heartfelt speech to the assembled troops, then:

A long line had gathered to shake General O’s hand and say goodbye. I hung around saying my farewells to the military men who had made me feel so much one of their band of brothers. (p.342)

Solecisms

This is trivial, really, but your faith in her narrative is frequently rocked by small but symptomatic mistakes in English phraseology. Here she is describing how you ought to avoid a particular seat in an American military helicopter, the one right by the open door which is nicknamed the ‘hurricane seat’:

Whoever sat in the back right seat would have the wind soar through their face, with cheeks and mouth flapping furiously. (p.30)

‘Soar through their face’?

Then again

Then again let’s stop and take stock: Sky is a bureaucrat and maybe this is how effective bureaucrats think and write – in stock formulae, obvious clichés, with a shaky grasp of English. Thomas E. Ricks is a journalist, so he’s paid to make stories sound gripping and important, he’s paid above all to write. Sky is a bureaucrat: her job is to invite people to committee meetings, distribute the agenda, manage relationships with key stakeholders, maintain the organisation’s values, defuse confrontations, find negotiating positions. In other words, her job is to use the safe and uncontroversial language of large organisations, not to rattle cages, to soothe ruffled feathers, to seek consensus, not to stand out or be original.

Having worked in UK government departments and agencies for 15 years or so, I recognise the type and recognise the tone of voice, full of terms borrowed from the private sector – where they mean something – and imported into the public sector where they are neutered of all meaning and verve.

Thus Sky tells us that she held a series of meetings with a view to improving the ethnic balance of the Provincial Council – fair enough – but when she goes on to tell us that ‘”No change” was not an option’ you can hear the tone of the civil servant or bureaucrat, quietly priding themselves on their no-nonsense attitude and tough talk.

In reality Sky seems to have been a people person. Her key achievements aren’t setting up this or that committee (though the narrative is larded with references to them) but getting people to trust her. The stories about local leaders accepting her as family, welcoming them to meals, festivals or funerals which I’ve cited, and more like them, testify to what seems to have been her key skill: this was getting suspicious people, in very perilous situations, to trust her sufficiently that they could talk to her, make their demands clear, and then she work her magic at getting the cumbersome CPA or the military-civilian government which replaced it, to actually accede to these Iraqis’ requests and get them what they want. At which point they trust her even more, and decide to try to get their way without resorting to violence.

In this way, as the narrative develops, Sky becomes a kind of one-woman embodiment of the policy of Reconciliation which accompanied the US military surge in 2007.

And seen from this angle, her readiness to fall into father-daughter relationships with important men was a positive asset, because strong men let their guards down around their daughters, share their feelings and wishes, admit their weaknesses and worries a bit more than they would around rivalrous sons, especially in a very traditional, patriarchal society like Iraq.

Maybe she tells us about her broken family background right at the start, and drops scenes of older men hugging her and calling her their daughter throughout the narrative, because she knows that this – above and beyond all the day-to-day admin and bureaucracy and setting up meetings and getting former enemies to talk – was her secret superpower.

Factual learnings

Lack of native politicians

America was always going to struggle to find politicians and administrators to step into the vacuum they created by ousting Saddam and banning the Ba’ath Party. Most of Iraq’s educated middle class had long since fled the country and had no wish to return. Or Saddam had killed them. He took great care to wipe out potential leaders who rose to prominent in any of the country’s many ethnic or religious minorities or among his own minority Sunni community (p.49).

Debaathification

Sky repeats the account of Ricks and every other reporter, that Paul Bremer’s rash decision to ban all members of the Baath Party from holding any official position ever again in effect decapitated Iraqi government at every level, made it very difficult indeed to find new people with authority or experience to run anything, and turned hundreds of thousands of clever, educated people against the occupiers.

The Kurdish return

Sky arrives in Kirkuk to find the Arabs very pissed off indeed at what they saw as the Kurdish takeover of every level of the administration. Many Sunni Arab families had received cash incentives from Saddam to settle in the north under his policy designed to water down the Kurdish majority (10,000 dinars, p.350). These were referred to as ‘new Arabs’. But now they found the police run by Kurds, local councils run by Kurds, Kurds who had left decades previously being offered incentives to return etc. So many of the new Arabs were looking to allies across the border in Syria to help them. Arab resentment of the Kurds is the persistent theme of the first 100-plus pages of the book, covering her time in Kirkuk, and carrying through to the very last pages, where she revisits a resurgent Kurdish region in 2014.

The sectarianism of Nouri al-Maliki

Sunni leaders were convinced that Nouri al-Maliki’s government was not only dominated by Shias (after all, Iraq as a whole has a Shia majority) but included Shia figures who had spent their exile from Saddam in Iran and were thought to be actively working for Iran. Not only that, but there was evidence al-Maliki protected the firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, figurehead of the murderous Jaysh al-Mahdi or Mahdi Army or Badr Corps. (On page 253 she describes al-Sadr as ‘rash and irascible’, on the next page refers to his many psychological problems.) If the book has one thread it’s the growing authoritarianism and unpopularity of Maliki which goes hand in hand with the Obama administration’s bad decision to give him their full backing.

The extremists overplay their hands

This explains why many in the Sunni community not only joined the insurgency against the American occupying forces, but also tacitly or actively supported al Qaeda in Iraq when they began recruiting and operating in Sunni areas. However, during 2006 into 2007 al Qaeda overplayed its hand and began killing Sunni leaders who opposed them. When, as part of the so-called surge, US forces made it clear they would amnesty Sunni insurgents who had been fighting them, and even set up a scheme to pay them to join local ‘citizen defence forces’, many Sunni fighters decided they preferred this option and turned on al Qaeda who, as a result, escalated their atrocities, which in turn brought more fence-sitting Sunnis into the process of Reconciliation.

Something similar happened on the Shia side. Sky reports being surprised when al-Sadr announced a ceasefire of his forces against the US and Iraqi Army but it was at least in part because many on his own Shia side had become sick of the violence the Shia militias brought and the apparently endless round of  Shia attacks and reprisals either by US forces or Sunni insurgents. Sky describes the process with characteristic brevity i.e. in not enough detail, on page 238.

The surge

Other factors were at work too, such as 1) the huge shift in attitude among the US Army to the new mode of counterinsurgency, as described in such detail by Thomas E. Ricks, by the change in policy to break up America’s supercamps and set up small operating outposts embedded within towns and cities and communities. Also 2) the fact that the US government finally saw sense, realised they didn’t have enough boots on the ground, and allowed an additional 20,000 soldiers to be sent to Iraq.

British embarrassment

On page 232 she describes the British Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, in a meeting with General Odierno, and visibly embarrassed that the British more or less gave up in Iraq while the Americans persisted and, despite their ongoing losses, were able to learn and change their tactics. (Read Frank Ledwidge’s book ‘Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in the 9/11 Wars for a searing indictment of the British failure in Iraq.)

Terrible Iraqi politicians

Maybe so many of these countries are doomed because their leaders are blinkered and inept; their political class is irredeemably useless, incompetent and corrupt. This isn’t my view, it’s what many Iraqis say. Sky’s friend Abu Mohamed marvels at the way General Petraeus walked with them on a visit through the streets of a town named Jihad, not wearing body armour, talking to children, taking Iraqi dinars from his own pockets to pay for things in the market. Very clever, very savvy public relations, all of which leads a doleful Mohamed to conclude:

‘We don’t have leaders like that in Iraq.’ (p.250)

Other Iraqis make the same point. Abdul-Rahman Mustafa, former governor of Kirkuk, says:

‘Despite all the resources nothing gets done. Iraq is still going backwards. It is hard to see how the country will stay unified with such politicians in power. Iraq has good people but bad politicians.’ (p.354)

If your political class thinks only in terms of power grabs for themselves and their faction, your national politics will remain fractious. If, as soon as anyone gets power, they set about securing it for themselves, their family and clan, going to the extent of threatening and sometimes murdering rivals, then the only was a war of all-against-all can be brought to an end is by a very strong man, by authoritarian rule, by dictatorship. Which is what keeps happening again and again in Arab countries.

Iraqi politicians the problem not the solution

The American government kept hoping that once the level of violence had been brought down to an acceptable level, it would create the ‘political space’ in which Iraqi politicians could agree national plans of reconciliation and reconstruction. What the Americans were slow to grasp was that all the politicians put themselves and their tribes first and national Iraqi interest a long way second. In fact, many of the politicians were behind the violence the Americans were trying to control. They were using it to rally their own ethnic or religious communities behind them, to create followers and voting blocs to keep themselves in power. Rather as the nationalist leaders in Yugoslavia rallied their own communities and demonised other ethnicities, in order to remain in power (p.257).

Hollywood thinking

Mind you, the Americans have plenty of blind spots of their own. Sky puts into words something I noticed in Michael Ignatieff and Anthony Loyd’s accounts of former Yugoslavia and Ricks’s of Iraq which is that senior American politicians and military leaders have an astonishingly simplistic, black-and-white view of the world. They think in terms of the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, as if life was a Western, or a Hollywood movie. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld-level leaders are quoted talking about getting ‘the bad guys’ and helping ‘the good guys’. This incredibly naive way of thinking explains why it took the Americans at least 4 years to understand the polyphonic, multi-stranded political, ethnic and religious situation in post-Saddam Iraq, which was not only complex in itself, but continually shifting (p.230). Where are the good guys, they kept asking? But what if there aren’t any good guys?

This explains something else which is the mistaken belief that if you take out the top ‘bad guy’ you solve the problem. This betrays a complete failure to grasp that societies are complex entities made out of multiple tribes and ethnicities and religious groupings, regions and classes. The Americans were hampered by this simplistic Hollywood thinking right from the start when they thought all they had to do was overthrow the bad guy, Saddam Hussein, and Iraq would promptly turn into a shiny modern democracy like France or Germany. World class idiocy. Breath-taking stupidity and ignorance.

The same magical thinking was revealed in their over-excitement at the assassination of Osama bin-Laden, the same naive belief that if you take out the so-called leader of ‘the bad guys’ then everything will be alright. Whereas, of course a) by 2011 (the year he was assassinated), bin Laden had become irrelevant to the situation in both Iraq and the wider Middle East, which remained as fractious, unstable and violent as ever and b) al Qaeda has gone from strength to strength after his death, extending its reach far across North Africa.

Fear

Fundamentally, what drives the desperation of so many of the politicians in these countries to stay in power at absolutely any cost, is fear of what will happen to them and their people once they lose power. Arrest, exile, prison, execution is the all-too-common fate of political leaders in developing countries once they leave office. In countries like this you don’t cling on to power to serve; you cling on to power to protect yourself and your clients and lackeys from what will happen once you lose it. Fear is the key to the entire political system. Thus:

Even before the last [American] soldier had departed [at the end of 2011] Maliki had launched a political coup aimed at crushing Iraqiya. (p.345)

And Maliki proceeds to arrest, intimidate, threaten or drive into exile most of his political opponents (detailed list on page 360). Abdul-Rahman Mustafa again:

‘[The Americans] should not have tried to transplant Western democracy to Iraq. It is not possible. Iraq is not a democracy. Change takes time. There are no democrats in Iraq.’ (p.358)

Betrayal by Obama and Biden

The most surprising thing about the book is its finale. Sky comes down heavily against President Barack Obama and his Vice-President Joe Biden. Parliamentary elections were held in Iraq on 7 March 2010 to decide the 325 members of the Council of Representatives who would elect the prime minister and president. However, the elections didn’t show a clear winner and so negotiations for those posts proved fraught with tension and delay. A final decision wasn’t taken till November of the same year – after eight months of divisive, sectarian bickering and intimidation.

Sky’s claim is that Obama’s regime, its ambassador and envoys, proved inept at managing the situation. They seemed unaware of Iran’s growing influence in the country, and sitting Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s tendency throughout the year to become more sectarianly Shia, more prone to Iranian influence, and more authoritarian. Sky meets opposition politicians who are scared that they will be arrested, even tortured by Maliki’s security services.

And yet it was this creepy figure, Maliki, who the Americans now threw their weight behind. Obama had been elected president in November 2008, took office in January 2009, and ratified the deal signed by George W. Bush to withdraw all US troops by the end of 2011. As the Iraqi politicians dragged out the backroom wheeling and dealing about the next Prime Minister for most of 2010 Obama became impatient. He was facing mid-term elections for Congress in November and wanted a foreign policy win.

Thus it was expedient, it was the simplest thing, just to confirm Maliki in the post of Prime Minister which he already held. Thus it was that the US administration averted its gaze from Maliki’s worrying tendencies, including the embarrassing fact that Maliki was Iran’s favourite candidate to continue as Prime Minister, given that the leaders of the other parties were Sunnis.

And so it was that during Joe Biden’s flying visit to Iraq in November 2010, Sky is in the room, and at the table, and makes several attempts to get Biden to change the administration’s approach. She then accompanies him to a meeting with senior members of the Iraqiya party, a secular and diverse grouping more appropriate than Maliki’s State of Law Party. by her account Sleepy Joe Biden was already gaga, repeating an utterly inappropriate anecdote about his Irish grandfather who grew up hating the British and then applying it to the attending notables, as if it somehow shed light on the sectarian problems of Iraq. After Biden finally tottered out some of the Iraqiya Party asked Sky what he’d been on about.

Biden was a nice man but he simply had the wrong instincts on Iraq. If only Obama had paid attention to Iraq. He, more than anyone, would understand the complexity of identities and how people can change. But his only interest in Iraq was in ending the war.

I felt sad, angry and very afraid for Iraq’s future. Washington had reneged on the promises it had made to Iraqis to protect the political process and it had betrayed the very principles the US military believed it was fighting to uphold. (p.338)

Summary

As a personal memoir of a unique experience, The Unravelling is possibly, maybe, an acceptable read. But if you want to understand how the war came about, why it went so badly wrong, and how the Americans struggled to fix a terrible situation, forget it. Read Fiasco and The Gamble. Read Frank Ledwidge and Jack Fairweather.

The looting

Concrete example of Sky’s inadequate treatment: on page 98 Sky deals, in one sentence, with the central fact that the occupying forces left a security and policing vacuum right at the start, immediately after the Iraqi army had surrendered, and that the CPA was never able to recover from that initial loss of initiative and control. One sentence! Ricks devotes half his book to this fact, explaining why it came about, how it manifested itself in the first days and weeks, what the full political, military and social consequences were, returning to them again and again to give you an ever-deepening understanding of this catastrophic failure. But in Sky, just one sentence.

Abu Ghraib

Similarly, Sky records in her characteristic schoolgirl diary way, a visit with other CPA staff to Abu Ghraib prison after the photos were leaked and the scandal broke. Here is her analysis in its entirety:

At Abu Ghraib I saw evidence of the worst side of human nature. With weak supervision in the jail, a number of American soldiers had used their power to create a perverse world, breaking the monotony of their days with sadistic acts on detainees under their control. It was truly sickening. Abu Ghraib was one of those places that exuded evil. (p.94)

This is a wholly inadequate analysis, in fact no analysis at all, it’s just a comment by a tourist. By contrast, Ricks gives a detailed explanation of the complex causes of the scandal, the two most notable ones being: 1) the huge numbers of ‘insurgents’ some American forces were rounding up and indiscriminately sending to prison, instead  of questioning, assessing and probably releasing most of them in their own provinces; and 2) Donald Rumsfeld’s obsession with keeping the number of US forces cut to the bare minimum and his express refusal to send out enough US military police properly trained in running prisons. In their absence, inexperienced managers and completely untrained junior soldiers were lumbered with  a job they didn’t know how to do, with the disastrous outcome the whole world got to see.

Ricks’s account is thorough, well researched, fascinating in its own right, and an illuminating insight into the importance of properly running prisons and interrogation facilities during a conflict. Sky – a one-page description of a tourist visit and a Daily Mail-level comment.

She was there. She worked with the key players. She got to know the country and the situation. And yet her analysis repeatedly feels inadequate and superficial. Making lots of lovely friends and repeatedly bursting into tears is sweet but no replacement for analysis.

Credit

The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky was published by Atlantic Books in 2015. References are to the 2016 paperback edition.

Related link

New world disorder reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on October 20, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in America, History, Middle East, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on October 20, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/20/the-unravelling-high-hopes-and-missed-opportunities-in-iraq-emma-sky/

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2006)

‘Yee-haw is not a foreign policy.’
(Hand-written sign in the bar of the British compound of the Green Zone, Baghdad)

Why America invaded Iraq

In March 2003 the US Army, accompanied by forces from the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’, invaded Iraq with the aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. The architects of the invasion, US Secretary of State for Defence Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, persuaded all concerned that the Saddam needed to be overthrow because a) he was running programs to produce and launch weapons of mass destruction which presented a clear and present danger to America and other Western nations, and b) he supported Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, who had been responsible for the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

The neo-con sponsors of the Iraq War

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their chief supporter in the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their gofer at Defence, Douglas Feith, assured the President, the press and the sceptical military that the Army would be greeted as liberators, much like the Allies who liberated Italy and France from Nazi rule. They argued that the US need only deploy the minimum number of troops possible because the Iraqi army and police would quickly take over law and order duties. They didn’t work out a detailed post-invasion plan on how to reconstruct the country after a decade of sanctions and Saddam’s mismanagement had run it into the ground because they thought Iraqi civil servants would remain in place, the various ministries would continue to function smoothly, and that an interim Iraqi government would quickly be put in place. Whatever it cost would be covered by revenue from Iraq’s abundant oil reserves.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith were right-wing Republicans, also known as neo-conservatives or neo-cons (p.128). They had a long-standing, hawkish, interventionist view of foreign policy, believing the US should use its military superiority to every other country in order to reshape the world to suit American political and economic interests, and took advantage of the confused and hysterical atmosphere after 9/11 to:

  • remove Saddam and solve the Iraq Problem once and for all
  • rebuild Iraq as a model democracy which would be an example to the region
  • rebuild not only the political system and infrastructure on a Western democratic model, but remake the economy as a model free market economy, privatising all the nationalised industries, setting up a properly run stock market, and opening the country to foreign investment
  • ensure the new Iraqi government would be a friend and ally of Israel, a country to which all neo-con Republicans are fiercely attached

Backing Ahmad Chalabi

The neo-cons (especially Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans, p.216) put their faith in the smooth-talking Iraqi exile politician Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress who bolstered their thinking at every turn, assuring them Saddam was an immediate threat with his weapons of mass destruction, assuring them the US army would be greeted with flowers and celebrations, assuring them he could form a national government which would be friendly to America and Israel, assuring them the Iraqi economy, for decades a command economy consisting of state-supported industries, could easily be converted to a flourishing free market economy, and so on and so on. All lies and fantasy (p.30).

Anybody who expressed a negative opinion of this wonder-worker was liable to lose their job, such as Thomas Warrick, one of the few staff at ORHA who knew what they were doing but expressed a strong aversion to Chalabi who he regarded as a ‘smarmy opportunist’ (p.40). So Rumsfeld got him fired.

Military operations

The invasion phase of the war began on 19 March 2003 (air) and 20 March 2003 (ground) and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations. After 22 days Coalition forces captured the capital city Baghdad on 9 April 2003 after a 6-day battle. On 1 May US President George W. Bush declared the ‘end of major combat operations’.

The Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

The Americans had made some preparations for managing the country after it had been conquered but left it very late and never developed one authoritative, commonly agreed plan; different plans produced by different parts of the bureaucracy floated around, none of them complete in the necessary detail.

It was as late as 20 January i.e. just 2 months before the start of the invasion, that Rumsfeld got round to creating a body to act as a caretaker administration in Iraq until the creation of a democratically elected civilian government. This was the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). They appointed retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner as Director, based on Garner’s experience managing the relief effort for Iraqi Kurds in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War (p.31).

Garner quickly realised that the lack of a plan for the reconstruction of post-war Iraq was just one among a whole host of problems he faced These included a lack of qualified senior managers to take over every Iraqi ministry and a severe shortage of experienced civil servants to assist them. Senior staff were dumped on him purely because of their ideological commitment to the Republican party rather than any expertise or qualifications.

  • Tim Carney was a retired ambassador. He was nominated to ORHA by Wolfowitz and assigned to run the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Carney had no knowledge whatsoever of industry or minerals. He was given no information and no briefing, no idea how many workers the industry employed, no idea how many factories or state-run companies there were, so he looked it up on the internet and busked it from there (p.38).
  • A bureaucrat from the US Treasury was put in charge of the Iraqi Ministry of Education, despite having no knowledge whatsoever of education.
  • A former ambassador with no experience of trade was put in charge of the Ministry of Trade.
  • Stephen Browning from the Corps of Engineers was asked to head up four Iraqi ministries, of Transport and Communication, Housing and Construction, Irrigation, and Electricity (p.34).

The Great Looting

Then came the looting. While they awaited the end of the conflict in their Kuwaiti hotel rooms Garner and his staff watched on TV the astonishing level of looting which the under-manned US army allowed to happen in the immediate aftermath of the Battle for Baghdad (p.43). Because Rumsfeld had obstinately insisted on keeping the US force to a minimum, the occupying army simply lacked the manpower to protect key buildings and facilities. Day after day American soldiers stood by and let looting on an industrial scale devastate every administrative office in the capital and every factory, warehouse and industry, down to power stations and electricity substations. Everything that could be dismantled, taken away for personal use or for sale on the black market, was.

Tim Carney of ORHA was quickly to conclude that the looting did far more damage to Iraq’s infrastructure than the Allied bombing campaign (p.49). For example, all but one of the nation’s fire stations had been completely looted of all their equipment; the service would need to be rebuilt from scratch (p.100). All bank records of all businesses and municipalities disappeared (p.134). The countries’ universities were stripped of all moveable assets, computers, lab equipment, desks, chairs, even wiring (p.186). Hospitals were completely gutted of all valuables, equipment and medicines (p.235).

With the result that when they finally arrived in Baghdad, Garner and his team had nowhere to stay, no agreed plan, little or no budget, and inherited government buildings which had been ransacked and, in many cases, burned to the ground, with the loss of all the key information about the Iraqi economy, assets and businesses.

Little surprise, then, that ORHA began its work in an atmosphere of confusion and demoralisation which only got worse as the scale of the disaster and the challenge sank in. Its own staff quickly gave it the joke name ‘the Office of Really Hopeless Americans’ (p.32). Garner’s pessimistic reports back to Rumsfeld in Washington, and his insistence that power be handed over to the Iraqis themselves as soon as possible, quickly turned the neo-cons opinion against him.

ORHA replaced by the CPA

With the result that, to the surprise of Garner and his staff, he was relieved of the job after just one month (p.60). In fact it was announced that ORHA itself was being shut down and replaced by a new entity, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). This was to be assigned ‘executive, legislative, and judicial authority over the Iraqi government’ and headed up by staunch Republican, Lewis Paul Bremer III.

When he’d arrived in Baghdad Garner found no accommodation had been arranged for him or his staff. He’d had to scrounge help from spare military officials who had helped him find one of Saddam’s vacant palaces which had escaped bombing but had no water or electricity and so where his staff camped out while Halliburton, the government’s logistics supplier, put them on the long waiting list for camp beds, portable stoves and suchlike (p.55).

Setting up the Green Zone

Garner and ORHA were just one of several US administrative teams, the Army, the CIA and numerous private contractors who quickly realised that the palace area of Baghdad offered many advantages. Even in the first few weeks the general streets of Baghdad were lawless because the Iraqi civil administration had broken down, all the army and police stayed home and there weren’t enough American troops to enforce law and order. Baghdad’s big swish hotels (where the world’s press had stayed during the Gulf War) couldn’t be made secure enough by the insufficient numbers of soldiers and freelance security contractors (p.46).

Whereas, over a decade earlier, Saddam had begun work building palaces and reception buildings on a grand scale in an enclave of the city which fronted on the Tigris River. Here buildings were constructed on an epic scale, even the houses of the staff were luxurious, the roads were wider and shaded by trees. More to the point, Saddam had enclosed the whole thing in a solid, rocket-proof brick wall. The Americans quickly grasped this was a ready-made secure location for all their administrative staff and added 17-foot-high blast barriers topped with coils of razor wire. The precinct had just three entrances which were protected by concrete blast barriers, troops and tanks.

The Americans quickly named it the Green Zone, by contrast with the rest of Baghdad, and then of Iraq as a whole, which quickly degenerated into chaos and violence. Inside these walls, insulated from the privations of the entire Iraqi population which was going without fresh water, electricity and basic supplies, where the complete breakdown in law and order had resulted in burglary, theft, muggings, carjackings, shootings, murder and rapes, the thousand or so fresh-faced staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority, published reports festooned with statistics and graphs showing how the country was going from strength to strength, cooked up impressive project plans for restructuring the economy or turning Iraq into a Western-style democracy, in complete ignorance of the reality of the world outside their comfort zone.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

And it is this – the heroic, ironic, often hilarious and sometimes tragic disconnect between the pipe-dream rhetoric of the CPA and the steady descent into chaos of the country they claimed to be running – which is the subject of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s award-winning book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

It is ‘imperial’ life because Bremer was, in effect, the viceroy of the imperial power, America, which ran Iraqi affairs from Washington DC. And Chandrasekaran calls it ‘the Emerald City’ because of the happy colour coincidence between ‘Green Zone’ and the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz books, a handy overlap which also conveys the sense of never-never quality of most of the CPA’s fantasies of nation building.

Chandrasekaran and Thomas E. Ricks

In Fiasco, his extraordinary account of the Iraq War, Thomas E. Ricks gives a high-level and highly analytical account which focuses on all aspects of the military involvement of the war, giving extraordinary insight into just how such a war is conceived and planned, with quotes and comments from an awesome cast of senior military figures, active and retired. Ricks sheds light on the huge amount of bureaucratic in-fighting which accompanies such a huge undertaking, not least between the conservative and sceptical diplomats at the State Department, run by former General Colin Powell (p.34), and the far more gung-ho, hawkish neo-conservatives at the Department of Defence (also referred to as the Pentagon) led by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who despised the former:

Veteran Middle East hands were regarded as insufficiently committed to the goal of democratising the region. (p.95)

Although Chandrasekaran also covers some of the same territory as Ricks (he shows us Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz making the same mistakes as Ricks does, and Powell and other experts expressing the same reservations), by and large he is more firmly in the Green Zone, meeting numerous staffers, describing their everyday life of hamburgers and American movies, working out at the gym, and producing fantasy plans and utopian policies (their ‘crazy ivory tower schemes’, p.254) to please their ideological masters back in Washington which had no possibility of ever being carried out in Iraq. If Ricks is all about the Army, Chandrasekaran is all about the CPA and its people.

Ordinary people and amateurs

For the first part of the book Chandrasekaran is interested in people and their stories, generally the lower echelon staff, who populated the Green Zone. These guys were flown in to staff the CPA, often at very short notice, and generally with little or no expertise in the jobs they were expected to do.

Half had never been abroad before and for many it was their first full-time job (p.15). What comes over loud and clear is that all that mattered was ideological purity and commitment to the Bush Republican Party, that they be ‘the right kind of Republican’ (p.59). Ideology trumped both experience and expertise, as the whole world was able to tell, from the results.

Take John Agresto. He was 58 when Chandrasekaran met him. John had been assigned the daunting task of rehabilitating Iraq’s university system, comprising some 375,000 students located at 22 campuses which had all been trashed in the post-conquest looting. John had no experience of post-conflict reconstruction. He had no experience of the Middle East. His job back in the States was running a small college in Santa Fe with under 500 students. So what the devil was he doing in charge of rebuilding Iraq’s entire higher education system? Well, on the board of that little college back in Santa Fe just happened to be Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s wife and, when John had a stint working on the National Endowment for the Humanities, he had got to know Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, too, and they both told their husbands about him.

Getting a job at the CPA really was a case of not what you knew, or even who you knew but who knew you. However, once you were in post, none of your fancy contacts from back home in the States helped with getting the actual job done. After 8 months of assiduous research, John had concluded that he needed more than $1 billion to rebuild Iraq’s higher education facilities. When Chandrasekaran met him, he’d received just $8 million from the CPA. Neoconservative Republican nation-building…on the cheap (p.3).

At least Agresto had some experience of what he was charged with. Michael Cole was just 22 and barely out of college when he found himself employed by the ubiquitous contracting corporation, Halliburton, as ‘customer service liaison’ for the catering and canteen laid on for the CPA’s 1,000 or so staff. Did he have any experience of catering, of working with the military or in a warzone? Of course not. He had been working as a junior aide to a Republican congressman from Virginia when the Halliburton vice president overheard him talking to friends in a bar about handling irate constituents. She (the vice president) introduced herself, gave him her card, three weeks later Halliburton rang him up and offered him a job in Baghdad. That simple, that random.

Chandrasekaran’s book is about the extraordinary alternative reality which developed inside the enchanted city, populated as it was by young, fresh-faced American college kids who knew nothing about the real world, and less than nothing about Iraqi culture and society, but who carried on churning out PowerPoints and spreadsheets showing US policies transforming the country for the better, improving Iraq according to all kinds of gee-whizz metrics while, in the real world outside their bubble, the country was collapsing into hyper-violent sectarianism.

Another example is Mark Schroeder. This keen young fellow was employed to produce PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets with graphs showing how everything was getting better and better in liberated Iraq. He had never been outside the Green Zone and had no real idea what conditions were like. He didn’t even interview or talk to the thousand or more Iraqis who had the menial service jobs inside the Zone. He had no interaction with any of the population of the country he was reporting on whatsoever. Instead Mark got all his information from Fox News which, of course, promoted George Bush’s agenda, so he thought everything in Iraq was just dandy (p.25).

When, after some delay, Bremer and his deputies realised the extraordinary power wielded by Iraq’s most influential Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, they sent an emissary to him and who did they choose for this crucial mission? An Iraqi-American who knew nothing about politics or diplomacy but was a wealthy urologist from Florida who had developed a penile implant for impotent men (p.88).

The spirit is summed up by the comment of one unnamed staffer: ‘I’m not here for the Iraqis, I’m here for George Bush.’ (p.90) Not many of these staffers had voted Democrat and those who had quickly found out it was a secret best kept to themselves in this overwhelmingly partisan and zealously Republican environment.

Chandrasekaran has a section on how the vetting was carried out by pro-Bush partisans. According to Frederick Smith who served as deputy director of the CPA’s Washington office:

‘The criterion for sending people over there was that they had to have the right political credentials.’ (p.101)

People with much-needed expertise were rejected if they lacked commitment to Bush-type neo-conservatism. Rather than questions about the Middle East, Arabic or Iraq, applicants were questioned about their attitude to the Republican shibboleths of abortion and gun control. So they got an administration of people who voted the right way but had no qualifications for the job.

Bremer’s office advertised for 10 young gofers. The 10 who were hired were all vouched-for solid Republicans. Six of them were put in charge of Iraq’s $13 billion budget although none of them had financial management experience.

Bremer had hugely ambitious plans to completely remodel Iraq’s centrally planned command economy into a free market, neo-liberal, capitalist economy. When the first nominee to this role, Thomas Foley, proved too zealous for the post, Bremer replaced him with Michael Fleischer. Fleischer had no experience whatsoever of creating free enterprise in a formerly socialist economy but…his brother was White House press secretary Ari Fleischman. It was all about contacts and connections, not expertise (p.251). That’s why billions and billions and billions of dollars were completely wasted.

L. Paul Bremer

Chandrasekaran describes the personality and working practices of the CPA’s chief executive, L. Paul Bremer, appointed on 11 May 2003, in chapter titled ‘Control Freak’. (This is not as rude as it sounds. It is how Bremer was described by Henry Kissinger, who he at one point worked for as a special assistant, as described on pages 70, 75 and 215).

Chandrasekaran travels with Bremer to ministries and schools and interviews him en route. Bremer talks a good game. He works long hours, incredibly hard. He insists on seeing every memo, signing off every document. And yet, as the Wikipedia article on the CPA pithily puts it:

At the CPA, Bremer moved quickly to install opaque and corruption-prone methods for the withdrawal and transportation of extremely large amounts of cash often transported from the US to Iraq by C-17 transport plane…The CPA was strongly criticised for its mismanagement of funds allocated to the reconstruction of Iraq, with over $8 billion of these unaccounted for, including over $1.6 billion in cash that emerged in a basement in Lebanon.

American valules. Bremer is, of course, remembered for his first two major acts as ‘viceroy’ of occupied Iraq, which plunged the country into chaos and condemned America to an 8-year occupation, the loss of some 5,000 US troops, an equal number of civilian contractors and a truly awesome amount of money, at least $757 million. Wikipedia again:

The first act of the CPA under Bremer, Coalition Provisional Authority Order 1, was to order the de-Ba’athification of Iraqi society. On 23 May, CPA Order Number 2 formally disbanded the Iraqi army as well as other public servants including nurses and doctors and eventually led to the direct unemployment of more than 500,000 Iraqi citizens.

Chandrasekaran discusses the background to the debaathification order on pages 76 to 81, and to scrapping the Iraqi army on pages 81 to 86. He goes out of his way to play devil’s advocate, to explain Bremer’s thinking, and point out that he wasn’t alone.

Nonetheless, lots of experts, his colleagues in the CPA, State Department officials and senior army generals, Bremer’s predecessor, Jay Garner, Steve Browning the man running five ministries – all warned that these orders would be catastrophic (p.78). They would create at a stroke over half a million angry, humiliated men and women, rendered jobless and aimless in a society awash with weapons. (Thanks to Donald Rumsfeld’s obstinate refusal to send enough US troops to adequately police the hundreds of military barracks and arms depots these were left unguarded and promptly looted, keeping insurgents and militia groups happily armed and provisioned for the best part of the next decade).

But Bremer went ahead despite all the advice to the contrary and all the critics and warners were proved correct.

Challenges of rebuilding a country

Initially I thought the whole book would be a kind of freeflowing satire of the hapless American’s incompetence as demonstrated by the youth and inexperience of so many staffers. But around page 100 of this 330-page book the narrative becomes a lot more structured. Henceforward each chapter deals in some detail with one particular challenge the CPA faced, namely:

Privatising the economy

Describes the woeful state of the Iraqi economy and CPA officials various plans to convert its socialist command economy into an America-style free enterprise, capitalist economy. This implied a raft of changes which included:

  • privatising the many industries managed entirely by the state
  • changing Iraqi laws to allow foreign companies to invest in Iraqi businesses
  • letting the Iraqi dinar float on international currency markets
  • setting up a stock market according to best international standards of transparency
  • abolishing the complex system by which state industries were subsidised and kept uncompetitive
  • reducing personal taxes to encourage initiative and entrepreneurship

Managing all this was handed over to Bremer’s economics czar, Peter McPherson. Unfortunately, the only difference everyday Iraqis noticed was that a) a lot of them lost their jobs in uncompetitive industries which were closed down; the Iraqi dinar plummeted on international markets so everything became more expensive. An unintended consequence of deleting the complex system of cross-subsidies between state-run industries was that the most efficient of them saw all their capital held in state banks wiped out.

The single most risky change was that, under Saddam, all Iraqi families received free food baskets. The CPA Republicans were strongly against this, wanting at the very least to replace the system with a monthly sum in cash or vouchers, and so they disappeared into evermore complicated and impractical ideas to replace it.

This kind of thing turned out to be very interesting. It was fascinating to learn how 40 or so years of Ba’ath Party rule had created a particular kind of command economy, and fascinating to get into the details of what the CPA wanted to change, and why, and why it was so often impractical.

And the issue of political contacts trumping expertise occurs here as everywhere else. Brought into oversee the privatisation program was Thomas Foley who had no experience of working in a command economy or post-conflict situation, but he was a major Republican Party donor and had been Bush’s classmate at Harvard Business School (p.140)

Crooked contractors

There’s a chapter devoted to a couple of chancers who set up a service supplier company which, initially, bid to provide security at Baghdad Airport, despite having hardly any security guards on their books and little or no experience of such a large project. But Chandrasekaran shows how, in the Wild West environment of post-war Iraq, lack of experience and expertise didn’t stop the companies risk-taking owners from accumulating over $100 million in government contracts before they were revealed as overcharging and scamming. Chandrasekaran doesn’t say as much but the implication is that many of the suppliers of services to a panic-stricken CPA also milked them for millions.

Electricity

A fascinating explanation of why the world’s number one superpower couldn’t get the power working again in a country sitting on one of the biggest reserves of oil and natural gas in the world, thus creating ‘overnight nostalgia for Saddam among people who had cheered his fall (p.170).

Lieutenant General John Comparetto turns the challenge over to Steve Browning, clever and resourceful, who begs electrical engineers from the army, sends them to assess the state of Iraq’s power stations, and uses the information to pull together a national plan (p.173).

I found the technical explanations of why the power grid was in such poor shape fascinating. Basically, ever since he decided to attack Iran in September 1980, Saddam had wasted his nation’s oil income on weapons and war and let its once admirable infrastructure rot. The infrastructure had been further degraded when during the brief Gulf War of 1991 when a few choice American missiles obliterated key parts of the power generating and distribution system. This was followed by 12 long years of sanctions, when the country’s engineers were prevented from getting the spare parts they needed to repair anything. And then, of course, came the brief 2003 war which had just ended:

American bombing during the war damaged about 75% of the country’s power-generating capacity. (p.167)

So that when Browning did his assessment he discovered most of the biggest power stations were held together by string and sellotape and were on their last legs. In other words, to crank electricity generation back up to first world levels would costs billions and billions of dollars of investment (the World Bank eventually calculated it would require $55 billion over 4 years to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, p.175).

Trouble is, almost all the other policies of the CPA depended on the whole notion of having a good, reliable power supply. Take privatising Iraq’s industries: who wants to buy a factory which has no electric power. In fact most elements of a modern society, starting with a police service providing law and order, rely on power for computers and even lights in buildings.

Chandrasekaran explains a further bad decision which exacerbated things. Knowing he had far less power than his country needed Saddam took the cynical decision to channel as much as possible of it to Baghdad, home of most of the citizens and also his biggest possible rivals, the army generals. But when he learned about this Bremer, like a good American democrat, decided this was wildly unfair and that the limited power should be distributed fairly around the country. This had the effect of alienating everyone – the entire citizenry of Baghdad who now struggled to have power for even half of the day, thus rendering all kinds of businesses nearly impossible to run, specially anything connected with processing and storing food; but it didn’t please people in provincial towns and cities that much because they, also, only had intermittent power.

Reading Chandrasekaran’s descriptions of the genuinely complicated technical, engineering, managerial, budgetary and political problems thrown up by every single aspect of rebuilding Iraq, for the first time made me start to sympathise with Bremer. It was an impossible job.

Constitutional wrangles

Compared with rebuilding the entire national grid and trying to reboot the economy, the challenge of writing a new constitution should have been easy. it’s not as if the world is short of national constitutions, even if some account had to be taken of Iraq’s heritage, its multi-ethnic make-up and its Islamic faith: after all, there are plenty of Arab states and they all have constitutions.

But in a complicated chapter Chandrasekaran describes how the precise process of how this constitution was going to be written hit insuperable obstacles. To be honest I got lost in the maze of discussions but I think Bremer wanted to convene a cohort of leaders of different communities who would draft a constitution, whereupon some kind of national election would be held about just the constitution alone, which would then be installed or adopted and only then would actual elections be held for the first government.

But there were problems every step of the way, starting with the highly contentious choice of who would be the members of the convention who would produce a draft constitution, given the requirement to take account of the country’s three main groups, the Sunni and Shia Arabs and the Kurds. Another cause of disagreement the issue of exiles and remainers i.e. the animosity between leaders who’d lived in exile for decades and often lost touch with life under Saddam but had the ear of people in Washington such as Cheney and Rumsfeld; and those leaders who’d remained in the country and, by necessity, made compromises with Saddam and the Ba’ath Party.

Then there was the simple question of whether any of these so-called ‘leaders’ had any actual followings in the country at large or were just chancers who’d floated to the surface and succeeded in sucking up to the Americans. `The only way to find out was to hold elections. But elections couldn’t be held until you had a constitution. But what kind of mandate did these politicians hand-picked by the Americans have if none of them had been elected?

And this is where Bremer’s plans ran into Iraq’s most influential Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani who intervened to publish a fatwah or holy ruling which is that no constitution should be accepted unless it was drawn up by elected representatives, not Bremer’s hand-picked crew. (It is very characteristic that key CPA staff involved in the constitution building were seeking to establish an entirely Western separation of church and state and therefore thought al-Sistani not only could be ignored but should be ignored, p.183).

All these forces interacted to produce a situation of mind-boggling complexity which Chandrasekaran explains at great length and made me feel even more sorry for Bremer, working 12 hour days and getting nowhere.

Other reforms

Only somewhere in this sequence of issue-based chapters did I begin to realise that the book amounts to a history of the CPA and its long list of utopian fantasy reforms. There are entire chapters or long passages devoted to other major issues, including:

  • rebuilding the entire medical system which had been damaged in the war and then trashed beyond repair in the national looting, a huge project with multiple aspects which was handled by a succession of appointees (Frederick M. Burkle Jr, Steve Browning, James K. Haveman Jr) who developed complicated multi-faceted plans, fought valiantly to get adequate funding, up against the shrinking deadlines imposed by the evershifting constitutional arguments and all of whom, in the end, failed (pages 232 to 244)
  • setting up a media service to compete with the anti-American messages of all the Arab TV and radio stations Iraq’s citizens tuned into
  • rewriting Iraq’s entire highway code: this task was handed to John Smathers who was a personal injury lawyer from Maryland; lacking any other sources he based his new Iraqi highway code on the  highway code of his home state, Maryland, which he downloaded from the internet and tweaked to local conditions; in the event his code was merged with the eccentric and often irrational one proposed by Iraqi officials and both, in any case, carried on being ignored by both police and drivers; Smathers was seriously injured in an insurgent ambush and flown back to the States before his ineffective, mongrel code was finally signed into Iraqi law by Bremer (pages 263 to 268)
  • persuading Iraq’s scientists, especially involved in weapons programmes, to come out of hiding and join a new science centre where they could make peaceful and positive contributions to the country, assorted out by unconventional State Department nominee Alex Dehgan

And, of course, all this was being attempted in a country which was becoming more violent and lawless by the day. For most of the period Chandrasekaran covers the Green Zone was an oasis of well-lit, well-fed calm in a city racked with violence. But then he gives a harrowing description of a rocket attack on the al-Raschid Hotel on the edge of the Zone and the severe injuries sustained by Colonel Elias Nimmer whose hotel room was directly hit by a rocket, 26 October 2003. The atmosphere deteriorated. Many staffers decided they had to leave.

The Sadr Revolt

By page 200 I’d realised that the book amounts to a history of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ended with the muted ceremony whereby Bremer formally handed power over to the Interim Iraqi Government on 28 June 2004 ad flew home.

I’d begun to formulate a mild criticism that Chandrasekaran’s narrative focuses entirely on the history of the civilian CPA with almost no mention let alone analysis of the deteriorating military and security situation outside the walls of the Emerald City (much more the subject of Ricks’s Fiasco) – but then, at this point, the narrative suddenly switched into full battle mode.

The penultimate chapter starts innocuously by describing another day in the life of Sergeant Jerry Swope as he drives his team of Humvees into the tightly packed slum quarter of Baghdad known as Sadr City on their regular, boring but very smelly mission to drain the open sewers which overflow into the streets as part of the general decay of all Iraq’s infrastructure. The whole area was the stomping ground of radical young Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who had organised his followers into what was loosely described as ‘the Mahdi Army’. Jerry saw disaffected young men hanging round on the streets but they’d never caused trouble before.

What Jerry didn’t know was that five days earlier, on 28 March, Bremer had decided to take Sadr on. First he closed Sadr’s al-Howza newspaper for an article which likened Bremer to Saddam Hussein. Then the day before, Bremer had Sadr’s main man in Najaf, Mustafa Yaqoubi, arrested for an alleged murder.

Before they knew it Jerry’s patrol came under attack, for pistol, AK47 and RPG fire. When they tried to accelerate out of danger they found the road blocked. When he reversed he discovered two of his four Humvees had been rendered immobile. So he gathered his men and ran down the nearest alleyway till they found a 3-story house, stormed into it, set up machine guns on the roof and became seriously besieged. He radioed headquarters who sent out relief vehicles and, when these ran into trouble, seven tanks. Jerry and his men were besieged till after dark and ammunition was running low when they were finally rescued. In this one encounter the army suffered eight soldiers dead and 50 wounded.

It was the start of the 10-week-long Shia Uprising which made not just parts of Baghdad into no-go warzones but spread to other towns and cities across the predominantly Shiite south. Later, Army generals were scathing of Bremer’s behaviour; he had taken on the leader of up to 10,000 heavily armed militiamen with no military plan whatsoever. Bremer though al-Sadr would meekly back down like the editor of some local paper in America. Instead he triggered a major insurrection across the country.

The First Battle of Fallujah 4 April to 1 May 2004

What made it nearly catastrophic was it occurred as the same time as the Battle of Fallujah. This city is 70 kilometres west of Baghdad and a Sunni stronghold. Ever since the occupation there had been a series of very violent incidents, with American troops shooting and killing unarmed protesters, and a steady flow of fatal attacks on US soldiers.

On 31 March 2004 Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah ambushed a convoy containing four American private military contractors from Blackwater USA. All four were shot dead, their bodies mutilated, burned and strung up from a nearby suspension bridge. Footage of the bodies and local civilians shouting and cheering were given to Arab news stations and beamed round the world.

Inevitably this caused outrage etc in Washington but, in Chandrasekaran’s account, the key fact is that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured President Bush that Fallujah could be taken and pacified by US Marines with few if any casualties, and the guilty parties brought to justice. He claimed the good inhabitants of the city would willingly hand over the murderers to the authorities (p.306).

This was just the latest in a long line of ignorant, arrogant, wishful thinking and profoundly wrong opinions delivered by Rumsfeld, a man who emerges from both Ricks’ and Chandrasekaran’s books as a dangerous moron.

Because when Rumsfeld persuaded Bush to send in the Marines, it turned out they met far stiffer resistance than anybody anticipated, with American troops dying on the first day and numbers steadily escalating, not to mention the many innocent civilians killed. Meeting resistance, the Americans increased their firepower, raining death from helicopter gunships. Footage of all this was also beamed round the Arab world and helped crystallise the image of the Americans as trigger-happy murderers of unarmed women and children.

Not easy to be an imperial power, is it?

But the massive assault, which threatened to drag on for days, was unpopular not only around the Arab world, but with America’s nominal allies. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair rang up from Britain saying it must stop, President Bush reluctantly stopped it in mid-flow. The Marines commanding officer was livid. He estimated they were two days away from fighting their way to the city centre and securing the whole city. Don’t start a military offensive if you’re not prepared to carry it through. But in a way that’s the moral of the entire invasion and occupancy; wishing a fantasy goal (convert Iraq to a lovely liberal democracy) without willing the means (huge numbers of troops, a comprehensive political, engineering and economic plan, and a huge amount of money).

Impact on the CPA

The impact on the CPA was simple: all reconstruction shut down. The fighting dragged into early May and the CPA was due to hand over power to the Iraqi Provisional Government in June. What was the point?

In the last few pages Chandrasekaran describes the last-ditch attempts of committed CPA staff to push through at least some reforms, notably the heroic attempts of John Agresto to screw funding out of the elephantine US bureaucracy for his cherished restoration of Iraq’s universities.

But he also quotes quite a few staffers reflecting on their achievements. It was a failure. Ignorant of conditions in wider Iraq, ignorant of Iraq’s history, social economic make-up, unable to a man to speak the local language, cocooned in their bubble, highly educated staffers fretted about rewriting the Iraqi highway code or the precise medicines to be placed on a national formulary or fantasising about giving every home in the country broadband access while beyond their walls, hundreds of thousands of angry young men, deprived of their jobs in the army or police or fired because they’d been Ba’ath Party members, plotted their revenge, which exploded that spring of 2004 in insurrection and insurgency right across the country.

It’s not about democracy, it’s about civic society

One guy puts his finger on it. It’s a piece of cake to ‘build’ a democracy, to write a spiffy new constitution, hold a census, draw constituencies on a map and arrange a day when everyone puts an X next to a candidate. That’s easy.

Whereas it’s almost impossible to build a deeply rooted civil society of the type which exists in the advanced West. Our liberal democracies are hundreds of years old, with their roots in even older values of Protestantism with its emphasis on individual human rights, the primacy of the individual conscience and so on. It’s taken at least 300 years, since the time of Locke and the post-English Civil War theorists, to combine a secular philosophy of individualism with the panoply of complicated fiscal and economic policies (the establishment of the Bank of England, the development of banking law, the invention of the limited company) which enabled the rise of industrial capitalism in the West – and these developments were not without all kinds of wars and civil wars, continental conflagrations and atrocities even in the so-called ‘civilised’ West.

To think that the products of this deep, rich and complicated history can be imposed on a country with a completely different history, culture and religion shows a moronic lack of self awareness. Chandrasekaran focuses on Agresto because it’s his summary that the book ends with:

The problem with democracy building is that we think democracy is easy – get rid of the bad guys, call for elections, encourage ‘power sharing’, and see to it that somebody writes a bill of rights. The truth is the exact opposite – government of the few or government by one person is what’s easy to build; even putting together good autocratic rule doesn’t seem to be that hard. It’s good, stable and free democracies that are the hardest thing. America’s been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule [but it isn’t]…We as a country don’t have a clue what has made our country work… (p.320)

My interpretation is that the key component to successful Western democracy is none of the apparatus of democracy itself, nor the details of a particular economic model (free market capitalism). What makes them work is a very deep-seated commitment among most of the population to civic spirit and civic responsibility. We abide by the rules, we abide by the law, no matter how grudgingly, because our parents did and they brought us up in these traditions, in this culture.

The evidence from Chandrasekaran’s book is the Iraqis had absolutely none of this. Every Iraqi in any position of power demanded a bribe to carry out even the slightest duty. The Iraqi police demanded bribes to let malefactors off. Iraqi civil servants demanded bribes before they would process your claim.

The objective rule of law does not exist. Iraqi culture relies entirely on family, clan and religion, elements of personal identity it gives vastly more importance than most socially atomised Westerners can grasp. Rather than be loyal to some remote state or its officials who are corrupt to a man, for generations people have put their family, their clan, their tribe, and their religious allegiance first.

Handing out a spiffy new constitution along with a whole set of ridiculous documents like a westernised highway code, while the actual population was suffering from power shortages, food shortages, water shortages and anarchy on the streets, was the height of fatuousness.

Summary

Thomas E. Ricks’s book, Fiasco, is the irreplaceable, definitive account of the comprehensive lack of planning by Washington politicians and the military for the post-conquest situation which led to catastrophe in Iraq.

Chandrasekaran’s book perfectly complements it by showing you what the lack of a plan meant on the ground, in practice, when the badly conceived, badly organised and badly staffed Coalition Provisional Authority tried to rebuild and remodel Iraq’s economy, infrastructure and political system, and why it was always doomed to abject failure.

Read together these two books amount to a crushing indictment of the American political class, in particular the ideologically driven fantasy world of the Republican Party, and above all the unbelievably stupid, ignorant, short-sighted and disastrous policies promoted by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Paul Bremer I came to pity for the impossibility of the task he was handed, but he too was blinded to reality by his ideological Republicanism and made a series of awesomely bad decisions which helped plunge an entire country into murderous chaos.

Credit

Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2006. Page references are to the 2008 Bloomsbury paperback edition.

New World Disorder reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on October 4, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in History, Middle East, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on October 4, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/04/imperial-life-in-the-emerald-city-rajiv-chandrasekaran/