All posts tagged Green Zone

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.

New world disorder reviews

New world disorder reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 20, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in America, History, Middle East, War

Tagged #democracy, 173rd Airborne Brigade, Abdel-Fatah Mousawi, Abdul-Rahman Mustafa, Abu Ghraib, Abu Mohamed, Al Qaeda, al-Husseini Mosque, al-Qaeda in Iraq, America, Anthony Loyd, Ba'ath Party, Badr Corps, Bradford-on-Avon, British Chief of the Defence Staff, British Council, Bush, Cheney, Chinook helicopter, Coalition Provision Authority, Colonel Mayville, Colonel William Mayville, CPA, David Crystal, debaathification, Donald Rumsfeld, Emma Sky, Emmasky, Frank Ledwidge, General David Petraeus, General Farouq, General Kip Ward, General Ray Odierno, General Raymond T. Odierno, George W. Bush, Give Peace A Chance, Governorate Coordinator, Green Zone, Gulf War, Hollywood thinking, International Security Assistance Force, invasion of Iraq, Iran, Iraq, Iraq Army, Iraq War, Iraqi Kurd, Iraqiya, Islamic State, Ismail Abudi, Jack Fairweather, Jaysh al-Mahdi, John Lennon, Kirkuk, Kurdistan, Kurds, Lake Dukan, Little Zab River, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in the 9/11 Wars, Mahdi Army, Michael Ignatieff, Middle East, Middle East Peace Process, Muqtada al-Sadr, New world disorder reviews, Nouri al-Maliki, Osama bin Laden, Oxford, Paul Bremer, President Obama, Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, regime change, Saddam, Saddam Hussein, Sheikh Agar, Sheikh Anwar al-Assi, Shia, Sir Jock Stirrup, Sleepy Joe Biden, state collapse, State of Law Party, Sunni, the Coalition, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq 2006 to 2008, The surge, The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks, Turkmen, US army, US military, USA, Vice-President Joe Biden, war on terror, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yugoslavia

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/

Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq by Rory Stewart (2007)

‘If you put my cousin on the council, I will slit his throat.’
(Typical threat from an Iraqi sheikh, Occupational Hazards, page 231)

Rory Stewart

Stewart (born 1973) is posh. He comes from a family of Scottish landed gentry. Like lots of poshos born into a family which helped administer the last shreds of empire, Stewart was born abroad, in Hong Kong in his case, and then brought up in Malaysia. He, of course, was sent back to the old country to be educated at Eton and Oxford. After a brief spell in a posh regiment in the British Army (the Black Watch) he went on to work in the Diplomatic Service. Absolutely stock, standard posh-boy career. Then, in the footsteps of the posh travellers of the 1920s and 30s (Wilfred Thesiger et al), he left the Diplomatic Service to undertake a two-year walk across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal, and then, of course, wrote a best-selling book about the experience, ‘The Places in Between’ (p.8).

Post-war Iraq

Stewart’s posh boy qualifications, his experience in the Foreign Office, his (supposed) knowledge of Arab and Muslim culture (he’s very candid about his shortcomings in speaking or understanding Arabic, as he is about everything else) meant that when the Coalition Provisional Authority (the provisional Western power set up in Iraq after the American invasion of March 2003) put out feelers to the British Foreign Office for volunteers to work as ‘governorate co-ordinators’ in the southern provinces of Iraq (which had been assigned to the British to manage) Stewart was a prime candidate.

In fact, surprisingly, he received no response to his initial application and so, with the confidence borne of his Eton-Oxford-Foreign Office pedigree, he flew to Jordan, took a taxi to Baghdad and lobbied for the job on the spot. He was vouched for by the Director of Operations and Infrastructure at the CPA, Andy Bearpark and was duly appointed (p.73).

Stewart in Iraq timeline

Thus it was that on 28 September 2003 Stewart found himself on a flight from Baghdad down to Amara, capital of Maysan Province in southern Iraq (p.10). Here he worked as ‘governorate co-ordinator’ running a team of ten or so civil affairs officers, alongside the British Army’s (completely separate) military operations for the next 6 months.

Map of Iraq’s provinces, by Orthuberra and published under Creative Commons attribution Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

In November 2003 the American diplomat Molly Phee arrived, assuming the position of Governorate Co-ordinator and Rory switched to become her deputy (p.188). A few days later, Paul Bremer announced the CPA would hand over authority to a provisional Iraqi government on 30 June 2004. In the same month an opinion poll revealed that two-thirds of Iraqis described the allies as ‘an occupying force’ (p.220).

In January 2004 the security situation suddenly deteriorated and the compound at Amara started coming under attack (p.288).

In March 2004 Stewart was moved from Maysan to its western neighbour, Dhi Qar, and its capital Nasiriyah, where he served as senior advisor to the civil affairs team. There were mounting attacks on occupation garrisons throughout Iraq.

In April 2004 the Shiite cleric, politician and militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr unleashed his supporters’ insurgency against the occupying forces, leading to attacks against Coalition offices throughout Iraq, and against Stewart’s compound in Nasiriyah. The very fierce fighting would continue until al-Sadr declared a ceasefire in September 2004.

Meanwhile, in June 2004, the Coalition Authority handed all its powers over to the Iraqi Provisional government, and Stewart’s job came to an end.

He revisited Iraq a couple of times, later in 2004 and in 2005, but his day-to-day involvement at that point came to an end.

A memoir not a history

I bought this paperback when it came out in 2007. I remember being disappointed. Now I realise this was because I was expecting a historical overview, a comprehensive chronological account of the coalition invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, and Stewart’s book is definitely not that. For that kind of objective, historical and analytical overview, I recommend Jack Fairweather’s thorough and authoritative account, A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq (2012).

I now realise I was disappointed by Stewart’s account because it is something else entirely: it is a highly personal memoir of the day-to-day challenges he faced, first in Maysan and then in Dhi Qar, and doesn’t even attempt to be an overall survey.

Instead, it is much more like a diary account (it’s not quite a diary because, as he tells us, he didn’t have time to keep a day-by-day record) of where he went and who he saw, and the issues and challenges he had to address, of the countless conversations and arguments with innumerable Iraqi officials, political leaders, sheikhs and clerics, interspersed with conversations with senior officers in the British Army in both provinces, and occasional meetings with masters in the CPA up in Baghdad. Above all, it is an odyssey through the amazingly convoluted networks of tribes and parties and gangs and warlords and militias which made up the immensely complicated tapestry of political life in his province.

And it is very deliberately provincial in focus. Occasionally he mentions politicking up in Baghdad or outbreaks of violence in the rest of the country, but only the briefest of mentions because his focus is overwhelmingly on the multiple parties and sects and forces at work in his province that he has to deal with.

This explains several things about the book:

1. At 434 pages, it is surprisingly long. But as you get into it you realise this is because it takes a long time to get to know all the many, many tribal and political leaders in Maysan. Stewart’s understanding only inches forward via long conversations, arguments, meetings, pledges, threats and unexpected revelations. In all these ways his book is more like a novel than a history: it’s not to be read for the facts; it’s to be read so as to allow the behaviours, conversations, promises, threats and actions of the various factions to slowly build up a complex, multi-layered portrait.

2. It also explains why, right at the start of the book, there’s a 4-page list of dramatis personae i.e. key figures from the narrative, just as in a classic nineteenth century Russian novel. Initially I thought I could skip these, but slowly realised that reading the book only makes sense if you maintain a good grasp of who’s who and, more to the point, who is conspiring against who, rubbishing them behind their backs, and why. Or at least, why Stewart thinks they’re doing so.

At which point I realised something quite important: that there are more Iraqi, Arab and Muslim voices in this than any other book I’ve read about Iraq or Afghanistan.

The clash of cultures

This point brings us to one of the two central themes of the book which is the immense, unbridgeable cultural gulf between this highly educated, objective and dispassionate civil servant, and the maze of Iraqi politicians he struggles to understand and manage. Over the book’s 430 pages he (and we the readers) obviously gain insight into people’s characters and motivations; but it’s delusive. Tribal leaders still abruptly reverse their positions, or pull out of agreements, for no motive that Stewart can fathom. One minute he’s enjoying a cup of tea in his pokey office in the CPA compound in Amara with a Shia cleric who promises to work with Stewart’s plans to set up a provincial council. A week later the same person is leading an angry mob on the same compound, inciting them to riot, chanting ‘Death to the Coalition’ and publishing a leaflet calling for all devout Muslims to assassinate CPA officials like Stewart (p.228). It is an impassable gulf:

Even in the stable context of our office, with good translators, it was often difficult for us to understand Iraqi guests and for them to understand us…the truth was that the most basic concepts like, ‘civil society’ or ‘sharia law’, meant very different things to each of us. (p.242)

The more he understands, the more he realises he’ll never understand. Not least because quite a few of the local players themselves don’t fully understand what’s going on. In a Hobbesian world where everyone’s hand is against everyone else’s, nobody can be sure of any of their pacts or alliances or deals.

‘These people talk randomly,’ said the governor in a tense, tired, quiet voice. ‘Even among themselves they agree about nothing. It is impossible even to get a consistent demand from them.’ (p.294)

This explains something else absolutely central which is that, when push comes to shove, if you’re in doubt about who was your ally and who was conspiring to have you assassinated, the One Thing that was guaranteed to win you brownie points with almost all the other Iraqi parties, was declaring ‘Death to the West! Death to the Coalition!’

Stewart doesn’t say it in so many words, but it emerges naturally from his countless stories of promises broken and double crosses, that opposition to the Coalition, to the occupying forces, and the West in general, was so vehement because it was, at bottom, the only policy on which almost all the squabbling Iraqi parties could unite on.

Being political illiterates, having absolutely no concept whatsoever of democratic processes or conventions, ‘Death to the West’ was the one and only policy that could (for a while) unite parties, tribes and interest groups who were, otherwise, at each other’s throats (for example, at the first meeting of the council Stewart has himself selected, p.277).

Security, security, security

All of which is related to the other, deeper, central message of the book which comes over loud and clear. Young Rory arrived with the naive belief that people are basically decent; that, if given space, law and order emerges naturally from the culture of a society; and so he initially allowed himself to be dazzled by the enormous number of economic and social development projects being worked up by the ten-person civil society team which he found in Maysan before him.

Only slowly and brutally, does he realise that the locals don’t give a monkeys about educational programmes on human rights, the free market, feminism, federalism and constitutional reform (p.82) or ‘gender-awareness workshops’ (p.83).

What they wanted was security security security. What they wanted was law and order. What they wanted was to be able to walk down the street at night (or even during the day) without being held up, mugged, sexually assaulted, kidnapped and held to ransom, or tortured and murdered.

And that, as it turned out – the provision of basic security, elementary standards of law and order – was something the occupying forces turned out to be completely incapable of providing. And Stewart’s account is a priceless testimony as to why. You might as well try to get a box of frogs to put on a military tattoo as get the endlessly bickering Arabs who Stewart profiles to agree about anything.

The rivals

Amid the blizzard of other projects and responsibilities, the central consuming project of the first, Maysan, part of the narrative, is Stewart’s attempts to appoint a provisional council which can then meet and agree a) a new provincial governor and b) a new chief of police.

The police are poorly trained, cowardly and corrupt (p.83). For example, tribal leader Abu Rashid drafted hundreds of his militia followers into the police, some of them as young as 12. The day before a meeting with Rashid Stewart hears that, when Abu Rashid’s mother had been told to wait when she went to hospital, some of these boys had drawn their weapons and threatened to shoot the doctors unless she was treated immediately (p.87). What can you do with a society split into such fiercely partisan warlord groups, and where that kind of instant resort to extreme violence is normal?

Pretty much all the sheikhs and party leaders he has to deal with are criminals. When Stewart appoints Abu Rashid chief of police it is in the knowledge that Rashid’s cousins run the major smuggling operation in the area. Stewart’s thinking is it’s better to have the big gangsters inside the organisation and let power slowly educate them, than simply making them eternal foes.

Most of the leaders he deals with are involved in some kind of criminal activity, such as smuggling drugs or diesel. Most have threatened to assassinate each other and some are responsible for murders, while most had had some member of their family killed over crime or tribal vendettas. Most of them run extortion and blackmail rackets. All the contractors he allots CPA funds to for ‘development’ projects, skim some or most of the money into their personal accounts, with sometimes hilarious results.

‘There were 54 political parties, 20 substantial tribes, and a dozen leading political figures in the province’ (p.169). Broadly speaking there are:

tribal sheiks: there are two massive tribes in the province but innumerable sub-tribes and smaller tribes all jostling for power, slow to forgive ancient feuds (‘Most urban Iraqis perceived the sheikhs as illiterate, embarrassing, criminal, powerless anachronisms,’ p.231)
some of these sheikhs had forebears who had proudly fought against the British occupier and coloniser in the 1920s and so, even if they’d wanted to be co-operative, family tradition and pride insisted that they be seen to be as unco-operative and obstructive as possible
there are the various candidates and parties which are all fronts for the self-styled Prince of the Marshes, a charming, educated and thoroughly untrustworthy figure, who leads a gang of semi-literate criminals who, immediately after Saddam’s fall, comprehensively looted Amara
clerics, all Shia, but with a surprising number of fierce rivals; incongruously to British readers, many of these religious leaders have their own militias which regularly kidnap or assassinate opponents
Iran-backed parties: during Saddam’s long tyranny (1968 to 2003) tens of thousands of political and religious leaders fled abroad; only a handful of them were ‘secular’ (or what passes for secular in a Muslim country); most of them were various flavours of Shia and fled east to Shia Iran; here they were kept on the Iranian government payroll awaiting the day when Saddam (a Sunni) was overthrown; so Stewart had not only to deal with Shia clerics who remained in the country, but with a whole cohort who had returned from Iran and were all, to some extent or other, in hock to Iran and carrying out pro-Iran policies; thus, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was funded by Iran and represented Iran’s interests (p.65), lobbying for wilayat-e-faqih, meaning government of the jurists i.e. a Shia theocracy identical to Iran’s
then there were the Sadrists, followers of Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who shouted the same kind of anti-Coalition slogans from their pulpits as the returners-from-exile but with one key difference: Muqtada had never gone into exile and was a fierce Iraqi nationalist i.e. opposed the Iran-backed parties as violently as they opposed the Coalition; his militia calls itself ‘the Army of the Redeeming Imam’ (p.86); Muqtada ‘created his own armed militia, assassinated clerical rivals, declared an alternative government and called for the immediate departure of the infidel Coalition’, p.253; Stewart makes the point that all the Shia groups seem to be represented by younger and younger men who reject the moderation of their elders; in other words, political Islam was becoming more unstable (p.230)
there weren’t many Sunnis in Maysan (the further south in Iraq you go, the more Shia it becomes) but by and large the Sunni were more moderate and better educated than the Shia, who they regarded as uneducated, backward heretics (p.46)
last and least, quavering in the shadow of all these fierce and violent factions, were the handful of genuinely secular, middle class, liberal democratically minded Iraqis and the handful of ‘feminists’; none of these stood a hope in hell of being elected to anything but Stewart and his boss, Molly Phee, appointed some to their provincial council because it’s what the CPA in Baghdad, and all the Western politicians bankrolling the whole thing, had told their populations we were doing in Iraq – building a modern democratic state which respects the human rights of all blah blah blah

The point is that nobody in Iraq trusts anybody else; they are all prepared to believe the absolute worst of all the other tribes, clans, groups, militias, police forces and so on; and, knowing no other way of calmly settling disputes, and also conceiving of power as a zero sum game where you are either in total control or nothing, they routinely try to kidnap or assassinate each other.

A society where nobody believes in anybody else’s good intentions, yes, it probably does require a strong, authoritarian ruler to quash all these rival sources of authority and, above all, of violence. Only a really strong, violent man with a strong, violent security apparatus can quell all the other violent rivalrous groups into submission. Stewart starts off believing this is anti-Arab propaganda, but runs into trouble when Arab after Arab tells him it is true.

‘We Iraqis, we admire strong men. We have tough heads. You must be strong.’ (His first Iraqi interpreter, page 32)

How many Iraqis are you going to ignore when they tell you point blank that their society just won’t function unless it is governed with a fist of steel? It may be racist for us to make such sweeping statements, but isn’t it just as racist to ignore an Arab’s description of their own society because we supposedly know better than they do?

Thus various tribal and religious and political leaders tell him again and again that only an extremely strong, dictatorial authority can enforce security in Iraq (pages 59, 81, 82). When he and Molly finally agree settle on the members of the provisional council they’ve nominated, Stewart gives a characteristically droll summary of them:

I knew these people well. Most had killed others; all had lost close relatives. Some wanted a state modelled on seventh-century Arabia, some wanted something that resembled even older, pre-Islamic tribal systems. Some were funded by the Iranian secret service; others old oil on the black market, ran protection rackets, looted government property, and smuggled drugs. Most were linked to construction companies which made immense profits by cheating us. Two were first cousins and six were from the same tribe; some had tried to assassinate each other. This dubious gathering included and balanced, however, all the most powerful political factions in the province and I believed that if anyone could secure the province, they could. (p.268)

And at their very first meeting the Sadrist member announced that the council was illegal, poisoned by the presence of the Coalition and forbade anyone from taking their oaths. Lolz, as my kids would say.

Or when, after the first guy they appointed as chief of police is assassinated, after much heart-searching Stewart and Molly appoint the Prince of the Marshes’ brother, Riyadh Mahood Hatab on the basis that he is a competent administrator with 20 years experience in the civil service, the respect of the ministry directors, the power of his brother’s militia behind him and contacts in Baghdad. Yes, he’ll do. And then the comic horror with which Molly and Rory listen as the newly installed chief of police outlines his programme: he wants to take full control of the police, set up a secret intelligence service, ban demonstrations, arrest a journalist who had insulted him and expel his Sadrist opponents from the council (p.275).

This is how everyone they try to negotiate thinks about power; it is a zero sum game and, if they are given a position of power, they must immediately move to assume complete control as quickly as possible in order to forestall the inevitable attempts and assassinations and coups which all their rivals will mount against them. Given half a chance, everyone turns into Saddam. No-one turns into the kind of mild liberal democrat the CPA in Baghdad, and their masters in Washington and London, fantasised about.

Violent rhetoric

In the build-up to the Iraq war Saddam Hussein promised the Mother of all Battles but as soon as the invasion started most of his soldiers ran away (some didn’t; some stayed at their posts and fought very hard until obliterated by bombs from the air). I have read serious, sympathetic, Arab writers trying to explain that flowery and impassioned rhetoric is part of their culture. Alternatively, maybe they genuinely are as bloodthirsty and cut-throat as the characters in Stewart’s book suggest.

Stewart visits one of the many schools he’s helped refurbish with CPA money only to bump into the Prince of the Marshes who is ranting about the shoddy quality of the plasterwork, leading up to the blood-curdling threat:

‘Now I need to know the name of the contractor who did this work – tell me his name and I will rip out his tongue.’ (p.98)

Is this bombastic showing off, especially as he said it for the benefit of the school’s headmistress who was standing nearby? Even so, it’s hard to fit this kind of language into anything that might be said in a civilised society. Or was it meant literally? After all, there was always a low level current of mafia-style violence across the province and that was before the insurgency began, which itself degenerated into sectarian civil war, when thousands of people were kidnapped, had their eyes gouged out, their kneecaps drilled through and otherwise hurt in the most cruel and sadistic ways imaginable.

If it was rhetoric, it paved the way for real life atrocities. But more likely, the language just matched the actions.

Tribal fights were still very common – it was not rare for two or three men to be killed in a week in tribal disagreements. (p.143)

Stewart helps a sheikh of the Suwaad tribe who graciously invites him for lunch. Next day the sheikh’s house is firebombed. At an art exhibition he is introduced to Dr Kifiyah, a confident woman who is working for an aid organisation educating women (p.175). He supervises the election of a mayor for the town of Ali Al Sharj. Three days later, the mayor is ambushed and killed (p.226).

The central event of the first section, set in Maysan, is the assassination of the chief of police who Stewart and the CPA had put all their hopes on, which unleashes a kidnapping, and various forms of sectarian violence. The point is that everyone has so many enemies that they’re not at all sure who carried out the assassination.

Under siege

The first 300 pages chronicle Stewart’s time in Maysan. Around page 300 he leaves that post and is driven across the border into Dhi Qar province and on to the Coalition’s base in the provincial capital, Nasiriyah. He discovers it is a far bigger, more populous place than Maysan. He discovers that the team here held elections to appoint a provincial council and they were judged a success, shedding light on his decision to appoint a council, which led to all the problems which made up most of the text about Maysan.

The next most important thing he discovers is the military presence here is Italian and, living down to their hard-won reputation, they are useless. Never on time, never serious or committed, they rarely lose an opportunity to run away from a fight. To be fair this was because, a few months earlier, in November 2003, a huge truck bomb had detonated at the Italian headquarters in Nassiriya, killing 17 Italians. At which point Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered his 2,300-strong contingent not to take any risks. Any more casualties and negative public opinion would force him to withdraw from the Coalition. There were strong political and operational reasons for the Italians’ tardiness and unreliability.

All of which is important because Stewart is in Nassiriya when the dual insurgencies, of Sunnis in Fallujah and Sadrist Shia militias across the entire south, kick off in April, and the CPA compound in Nassiriya comes under sustained attack. It’s a really serious situation, with the compound besieged, running low on water, two guards at the gate are seriously injured, scores of mortars and RPGs attack the compound continuously, the entire civilian staff have to take cover.

Eventually he manages to get them extracted from the besieged base in a convoy of armoured patrol vehicles, only for them to trundle straight into an ambush and be bombarded with machine guns and RPGs and, having remained behind in the base, he has an agonising half an hour wondering if he’s just sent his entire team to a violent death, before getting a phone call to confirm that they had all arrived safe at the allied base at the airport outside of town.

Even here there’s Waughesque comedy, as the incompetent driver of the first APV unexpectedly throws it into reverse, nearly running over Stewart and a colleague who were remaining behind. When his infuriated commander leans down to cuff the harassed driver round the ear, he then accelerates into a pile of barbed wire which promptly tangle up the wheels and prevent it going any further, till the wire is slowly painfully untangled.

There’s page after page detailing the amazing ineffectiveness and cowardliness of the Italians, and it’s not just Stewart who is gobsmacked. A team of British and American security contractors from Control Risk Group (CRG) remain in the base with him and cannot believe how useless the Italians are (pages 390 to 393). Eventually after 3 days of siege a Coalition Spectre plane uses its night sights to locate the mortar bombers and pick them off one by one, killing or wounding the entire insurgent group. Next day the city is back to its normal bustling self. Stewart is full of praise for the consultants (aka mercenaries) who manned the machine gun posts and prevented the Sadrists storming over the walls and massacring Stewart and the garrison.

But Baghdad orders the compound to be evacuated. Obviously, the minute they’ve left the looters move in and strip the place of any moveable values, right down to the wiring, before gutting and burning it.

Once safely ensconced in the Italians’ main base at Tallil Stewart comes to like them. Wherever they go, they build pizza ovens and their food is extraordinary. In fact, once you stop thinking about the Italian Army as soldiers, but actually as great chefs in fancy uniforms, what’s not to love about them?

The CPA

In case I’m accused of being anti-Arab, Stewart also has a chapter devoted to a visit to the Coalition Provincial Authority in Baghdad which overflows with details of the inane, out of touch, ludicrous, over-ambitions of inexperienced Yanks who worked all the hours that God sent and yet somehow presided over a complete shambles (pages 105 to 121). I particularly liked the deliberately comic passage where he describes going to one of the evening discos in the Green Zone and being introduced to two men who were both under the impression they had been appointed acting Interior Minister. A little later he meets two men who both think they are the Media Commissioner (p.112). Chaos.

More seriously, Stewart describes talking at different times to two soldiers, one American, one British, who both try to get him to admit that the whole war and occupation was to do with taking Iraqi oil. If even the troops on our own side believe this myth, Stewart reflects, what hope of stopping most of the Iraqi population from believing it, too (p.108). After all, Iraq is sitting on the second biggest oil reserves in the world and yet throughout the Coalition’s rule, ordinary Iraqis had to form long lines at petrol stations. Why else could that be except that the West was stealing their oil? The real explanation, that Saddam’s extraction and refining industry was on its last legs and insurgents kept blowing up pipelines and facilities, was believed by no-one (p.152).

Talk of blowing up stuff raises the point that the Iraqis devoted an extraordinary amount of energy not just to killing each other, but to destroying the infrastructure of their own country (pages 205 to 206). The Great Looting in the days after the allied victory wasn’t an anomaly but a revelation of the true character of the Iraqis, a nation of looters and thieves.

Long after those days of chaos the looting continues. Everything not tied down is stolen. Factories are looted, warehouses are looted. In January, rioters storm the governor’s compound and loot every single piece of moveable furniture or equipment, even the filing cabinets (pages 289 to 297).

Several times Stewart mentions the practice of Iraqi criminal gangs who blow up power pylons so they can strip the copper from the coil, melt it down and sell it on the black market. The criminal gangs get tens of thousands of dollars from the venture but it costs the Americans tens of millions to rebuild series of pylons and rewire them. Obviously, most of the rest of the population suffers even worse power shortages than they already did.

As soon as he, the Italian garrison and the mercenaries withdraw from the CPA compound in Nasiriyah, it is comprehensively looted and trashed.

In a sentimental mode he describes the huge mudhif, a building built entirely out of marsh reeds using ancient skills of local builders, which had been constructed in such a way as to let light through a latticework of openings. It is ornate and beautiful as a cathedral. The Sadrists burn it to the ground.

When you have a people so absolutely determined to loot and vandalise their own country, what can you do? Leave them to get on with it.

On 28 June the CPA formally handed over authority to local council and governors in Iraq’s 34 provinces. The ones Stewart was involved in immediately plunge into chaos and violence. The Prince of the Marshes promptly allies with the Sadrists against the Iranian-backed parties. He shoots the chief of police of Majar dead. The remaining Coalition compounds such as the one where Stewart spent his first 6 months, in Amara, are now under continual, ferocious attack.

Church and state

It’s my view that it took hundreds of years for us in Britain to break the power of religion over the state. Three hundred years ago it took a civil war and a revolution to loosen the grip of the church over the nation’s political life. During the long Victorian century and well into the twentieth, the Christian denominations still exercised a very negative, anti-progressive influence, especially on what is loosely called the nation’s morals (anti-sex, anti-abortion, anti-free speech, anti-gay). It was a long, hard battle to overthrow religious influence on our national life.

Here, in this book, are countless examples of Muslim clerics insisting that their religion, their religious values, their ancient forms of social organisation and their dark age forms of political process eclipse, trump and obviate the need for ‘modern, ‘western’ ideas like democracy or human rights or women’s rights. A cleric named Seyyed Faqr puts it with particular clarity:

‘What matters is not the law. What matters is God, children, possessions, lives. These things are more important than the law. Forget the law. God is above the law and I represent God.’ (p.222)

But what happens if two clerics claim to represent God, a Sadrist and an Iranian? And if you throw in a Sunni cleric? And one from this tribe and one from that tribe? And they all claim a direct line from God so that they can’t negotiate or compromise? Then you have a recipe for endless civil war, as in Libya, Sudan, the Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

Only when all sides agree to abide by a law which is above all of them, impersonal and objective, and agree to thrash out their disagreements via legal channels, can you have a civil society. This is the lesson the Coalition Provisional Authority should have been trying to teach the fractious Iraqis. A legal system to which everyone submits, an independent judiciary, and an impartial police force, these are the bedrock of a civilised states, not the flashy trappings of elections. Elections and the trappings of democracy are a subset of law and order, which trumps every other concern. (cf p.315)

Humorous stories

Anyway, so far this summary has failed to mention the single most important thing, not about the book’s subject and themes, but about it’s style and manner. For this is an extremely readable and enjoyable book. I thought I’d had enough of books about Iraq and took it down off my shelf one evening only because I was bored watching TV. To my surprise, the next time I looked up, I was on page 50. I was hooked.

Occupational Hazards is beautifully written and by far the easiest to read of all the books I’ve read about Iraq and Afghanistan. A large part of that is down to Stewart’s appealingly British irony and deadpan humour which you may or may not attribute to classic upper-class sang-froid and irony. He expects things to go wrong and is never upset when they do. Many of the accounts of his meetings, with tribal leaders or top army officers, or foreign civilians in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) end with a bathetic, ironic, darkly humorous punchline.

It helps that so many of the facts are themselves blackly, bleakly comical, in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s comic accounts of Africa, walking a fine line between horror and hilarity. The secret is in the very dry, clipped phrasing. Here he is reflecting on the rather ludicrous title the Prince of the Marshes had awarded himself:

In truth, of course, Iraq didn’t have princes any more, and it hardly had marshes. The last princes were murdered on the kitchen steps of the palace in 1958 and disembowelled and mutilated in the streets, where the mob used the Regent’s intestines as necklaces. (p.18)

This is the Waugh tone, the casual, ironic, drawling half-humorous description of shocking criminality or scandalous behaviour:

I had spent my first two weeks almost entirely in my office or in camp and I was eager to visit rural towns, which I had heard were bastions of corruption, inefficiency and political tension. (p.90)

On one of these rural rides Stewart stops at an isolated compound to chat with a genuine farmer, not some politico with an axe to grind:

As I left I asked him what I should be doing. ‘Don’t trust the police chief, he replied. ‘He is a gangster. Don’t trust anyone who lives south of Al Amara. They are thieves and bandits.’
‘But you live south of Al Amara,’ I protested.
‘Don’t trust me either,’ he said. He presented me with a live guinea fowl in parting as a gift. (p.96)

The guinea fowl clinches the comedy of the anecdote. Whether this encounter ever happened or took place as Stewart recounts it, who cares? It’s not as if it made the slightest difference to what actually happened in Iraq. It’s these throwaway details at the end of each anecdote or cadence which give it the true Waugh feel.

The Bazun sheikhdom was in dispute between the two main families, one of which had stolen all the heavy digging equipment from the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works. (p.234)

And:

We drove past the main government building, which Nate had seen demolished by rockets: only a fragile facade of coloured tiles remained, and a sculpture commemorating the Iraqis’ 1920 uprising against the British. It depicted a British officer being shot in the back of the head. (p.303)

Of course horrible things happen. For example, quite a few of the Western civilians, administrators and soldiers Stewart meets on his first arrival end up dead, shot or blown up in suicide attacks. And then, in April, the four US contractors are lynched and their burned bodies hung from a bridge in Fallujah (p.342) which so infuriates President George W. Bush that he orders the US Army to storm the city to find their murderers and ‘bring them to justice’ ho ho ho. In the same week Muqtada al-Sadr starts his Shia rebellion across the whole south of the country. Hundreds and then thousands died as a result of these parallel insurgencies, one by Sunnis (Fallujah), one by Shias (Muqtada’s).

Black comedy

An extended comic sequence is provided by the story of the kidnapping of a British hostage, Gary Teeley. The first part is all panic and concern among CPA officials and the military to establish who kidnapped him and why and how to get him back. In the event, some of the many tribal leaders Stewart has been having lengthy discussions with simply turn up at the gates of the compound and hand over the filthy and disorientated Brit, directly to Stewart, in person, expecting thanks.

Over the next few days various other tribal and religious factions, including the Sadrists, contact Stewart to claim the credit for releasing Teeley, even though it seems fairly certain that some of them were the ones who kidnapped him in the first place.

But that’s just the start. Stewart debriefs the shattered and disorientated hostage, who had been kept blindfolded for a week, then packs him into an ambulance to be taken to the nearby Italian hospital. Walking back through the compound he is accosted by an irate British woman who tells him she is a hostage negotiator who has been on high alert for 3 days, why didn’t he contact her? Because he didn’t know she existed. Why did he hand over Teeley to the Italians? Because he clearly needed to go to a hospital to be checked over. Yes, says the woman, but he should have been sent to the British hospital at Basra.

By now Stewart realises there is a propaganda battle going on between the British and Italian military, both wanting to be seen to be the hostage’s liberators, not least for the benefit of the Americans and the CPA in Baghdad. Thus the Italian commander sends an email round claiming the release was the result of the Italians working with their favourite tribal leader, Sheikh Talib of the Beni Rikaab tribe.

But it’s not finished yet. The released Teeley turns out to be selling his story to the papers, and – in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel of Fleet Street, Scoop – three different British newspapers print three completely conflicting accounts of his ordeal. The Daily Telegraph leads with a big photo of the Italian general shaking hands with Teeley as if the Italians negotiated his release. Then The Sun reported that Teeley had been released by Italian forces who used a helicopter to track a suspicious car to an apartment which they then stormed, discovering the captive bound by the legs. Then The Mail on Sunday led with the scoop that the Italian forces who had been credited with finding and releasing Teeley were in fact elite SAS officers wearing Italian military outfits!

Three different packs of lies, each more outrageously untrue than its predecessor.

The moral(s) of the story

1. Stewart’s book shows in more granular detail than any other account the sheer folly of expecting a backward, illiterate, tribal, sectarian society full of cut-throat, corrupt, criminal and hyper-violent tribal, religious and political leaders to become anything like a democratic society in the sense we understand it.

In Stewart’s account any Iraqi leader who gains even a modicum of power immediately moves to reinforce their position, arm their followers, and harass, arrest or assassinate any possible rivals. Saddam politics. This is what even the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri al-Malaki, did as soon as the Americans finally withdrew, in 2011. I love the fact that the very day after the last US forces withdrew, Maliki issued an arrest warrant for his own vice president, the Sunni Tariq al-Hashemi, who was forced to flee to Turkey and, convicted of terrorism, was swiftly sentenced to death in his absence. Saddam politics.

2. If there’s one message from all this, as from all the other books I’ve read about the British effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s not to believe a word about the Britain’s foreign exploits, either a) given in press releases by the military but b) even more by the British newspapers, who will fall over themselves to invent any old lies to promote their respective agendas (The Sun: ‘Our Brave Boys Save The Day’; The Telegraph: ‘Secret SAS Mission’; The Guardian: ‘Shame of British Troops’ etc).

Lasting thought

As I closed the book and reflected on it for a few days, one thought rose above all the others, which is that there are more Iraqi, Arab and Muslim voices in this than any other book I’ve read about Iraq or Afghanistan. OK, not saying things the Coalition or the West or Iraqi apologists or themselves would be very pleased to read. But all the other books I’ve read focus on Americans and Brits and Westerners and the occupiers – Stewart’s book, alone, goes way out of its way to focus on the actual Iraqis he met and talked to and tried and failed to manage.

In fact, this ends up being the conclusion of the epilogue he added to the paperback edition of the book published in 2007. By that point the insurgency had become general and had evolved in many places into a sectarian civil war. Stewart criticises politicians, academics and journalists for dealing in fine words, abstract concepts and abstract statistics.

No one is offering a granular and patient account of the insurgency in all its evolving and surprising multiplicity. We prefer the universal and the theoretical: the historical analogy and the statistics. But politics is local, the catastrophe of Iraq is discovered best through individual interactions.

And it’s precisely a multitude of such ‘individual interactions’, bleakly disillusioning though most of them are, that this impressive, illuminating and drily humorous book offers, in abundance.

Credit

Occupational Hazards by Rory Stewart was published by Picador in 2006. References are to the revised 2007 Picador paperback edition.

New world disorder reviews

New world disorder reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 18, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in History, Middle East, War

Tagged Abu Rashid, Afghanistan, Al Amara, Ali Al Sharj, Amara, Andy Bearpark, Arabic, Army of the Redeeming Imam, assassination, Baghdad, Bazun sheikhdom, Beni Rikaab tribe, British Army, civil society, Coalition Provisional Authority, comedy, contemporary history, Control Risk Group, CPA, CRG, Daily Telegraph, Dhi Qar, Diplomatic Service, Dr Kifiyah, Eton, Evelyn Waugh, Fallujah, Foreign Office, Gary Teeley, Great Looting, Green Zone, history, humour, India, invasion of Iraq, Iran, Iraq, Iraq War, Iraqi Provisional government, irony, Islam, Italian Army, Jordan, Majar, Maysan Province, modern history, Molly Phee, Mother of all Battles, Muqtada al-Sadr, Nasiriyah, Nassiriya, Nepal, new world disorder, NGO, non-governmental organisation, Nouri al-Malaki, Occupational Hazards, Oxford, Pakistan, Paul Bremer, political Islam, Post-war Iraq, President George W. Bush, Prince of the Marshes, revenge, Riyadh Mahood Hatab, Rory Stewart, Saddam Hussein, Sadrist Shia militia, Scoop, Seyyed Faqr, sharia law, Sheikh Talib, Shia Islam, Shia theocracy, Silvio Berlusconi, Sunni Islam, Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Suwaad tribe, Tallil, Tariq al-Hashemi, the Black Watch, the Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, The Places in Between, The Sun, Thomas Hobbes, tribal sheiks, Turkey, upper-class irony, vendetta, wilayat-e-faqih, Wilfred Thesiger

Posted by Simon on October 18, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/18/occupational-hazards-rory-stewart/

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

New World Disorder reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 4, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in History, Middle East, War

Tagged 1991, 9/11, Ahmad Chalabi, Al Qaeda, al-Howza newspaper, al-Raschid Hotel, Alex Dehgan, America, Arabs, Ari Fleischman, Ba'ath Party, Baghdad, Baghdad Airport, Bank of England, Battle for Baghdad, Blackwater USA, capitalist economy, Chandrasekaran, Cheney, civilian contractors, coalition of the willing, Coalition Provisional Authority, Coalition Provisional Authority Order 1, Colonel Elias Nimmer, command economy, Constitutional, Corps of Engineers, CPA Order Number 2, de-Ba'athification, debaathification, Deputy Secretary of Defence, Dick Cheney's wife, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, economics, Emerald City, English civil war, Fallujah, fatwah, Feith, Fiasco, First Battle of Fallujah, Fox News, Frederick M. Burkle Jr, Frederick Smith, free enterprise, General Colin Powell, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Green Zone, Gulf War, Halliburton, Harvard Business School, Henry Kissinger, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, industrial capitalism, Iraq, Iraq War, Iraqi dinar, Iraqi Kurds, Iraqi National Congress, Israel, James K. Haveman Jr, Jay Garner, John Agresto, John Locke, John Smathers, Kurds, Kuwait, L. Paul Bremer, Lebanon, Lewis Paul Bremer III, liberal democracy, Lieutenant General John Comparetto, Mark Schroeder, Maryland, Michael Cole, Michael Fleischer, Middle East, Muqtada al-Sadr, Mustafa Yaqoubi, Najaf, Nazi, neo-cons, neo-conservatives, New York, ORHA, Osama bin Laden, Paul Wolfowitz, Peter McPherson, PowerPoint, PowerPoint presentation, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Republican Party, Republicans, Rumsfeld, Saddam, Saddam Hussein, Sadr City, security contractors, Sergeant Jerry Swope, Shia, Shia Uprising, Stephen Browning, Steve Browning, stock market, Sunni, the Green Zone, the Iraq War, The Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the Office of Really Hopeless Americans, the Pentagon, The Sadr Revolt, the West, the White House, the Wizard of Oz, Thomas E. Ricks, Thomas Foley, Thomas Warrick, Tim Carney, Tony Blair, US army, US Secretary of State for Defence, Vice President Dick Cheney, war on terror, Washington, weapons of mass destruction, West, Wolfowitz, World bank

Posted by Simon on October 4, 2023

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

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks (2006)

Perhaps the worst war plan in American history.
(Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, page 115)

‘It failed utterly.’
(Verdict of Marek Belka, Prime Minister of Poland which contributed troops to the coalition, describing the entire American project to invade and ‘liberate’ Iraq, p.347)

Bad assumptions

The US Army invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003. The moving forces behind the invasion – Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, Douglas Feith – said the war would be over in a matter of months, would require the bare minimum number of troops and would pay for itself out of Iraq’s increased oil revenue. They based these conclusions on the assumptions that:

large numbers of Iraqi security forces would be willing to change sides and help the occupiers
the ‘international community’ would pick up a lot of the task of reconstruction, meaning other Western countries, NGOs etc
a provisional Iraqi government would spring into being within months which the US could hand interim authority over to i.e. they could stop being responsible for everything
the war would not cost much ($1.7 billion, the head of the US Agency for International development, Andrew Natsios, told Ted Koppel on the Nightline TV show, p.109) and this would all be paid for out of the new democratic and grateful Iraqi government’s oil revenues

All four of these premises, along with most of the other assumptions made by the invasion’s planners, turned out to be completely fallacious. To take one very specific example, the advance units of the American Army were told to expect the Iraqi forces they faced to quickly surrender or maybe even desert to them. In the event, none did. Everything else was like that – completely wrong and unexpected.

The US-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation. (p.3)

There were plenty of critics who warned of the probable consequences:

Michael O’Hanlon from the Brookings Institute
Pentagon official Alina Romanowski (p.65)
Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni (p.51)
a conference of 70 national security and Middle East experts (p.72)
General ‘Stormin” Norman Schwartzkopf (p.82)
Air Force strategist Colonel John Warden (p.108)
defence consultant Gary Anderson (p.137)

and plenty of others, predicted that the Americans would be entering an ethnic and religious minefield and get drawn into a country which was likely to collapse and split along ethnic or religious lines, requiring US forces to be there for 5 years or more. All correct predictions, all ignored or rubbished by the hawks, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith.

More than one critic assigns the consistent errors of the neo-con Republican hawks to ‘intellectual arrogance’ (p.99). Like Liz Truss and Kwazi Kwarteng, they knew they were right and all the critics, all the academics, regional experts, and senior army officers were dismissed as unduly negative, lacking vision, enemies of growth or America, anti-patriotic pessimists. ‘Rumsfeld’s self-confident stubbornness made him a big part of the problem’ (p.169).

They think it’s all over

The most profound mistake was thinking that once they had seized Baghdad, the Americans would have won the war. In fact, as they quickly found out, it was only the start of the conflict. The Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz clique thought they would be greeted like an army of liberation, like the Allied armies who liberated France in 1944. Instead, almost all Iraqis quickly came to regard them as an army of occupation, and many of the soldiers behaved like one, bullying, abusing and threatening all the locals they met. Aide to Rumsfeld, Lawrence Di Rita, told the press that US forces would be in Iraq for 120 days, tops (p.106). In fact US forces were to remain in Iraq for over 8 years.

No phase IV plan

And here’s where the greatest fiasco occurred. The Americans had no plan for what to do once they had overthrown Saddam Hussein, no planning at all for what was called, in military terms, Phase IV of the invasion i.e. the aftermath (p.151). Ricks, with his typically forensic and cerebral approach, cites two of the most famous theorists of war on just this subject:

The first requirement in war is not to take the first step without considering the last (Karl von Clausewitz)
To win victory is easy; to preserve its fruits, difficult (Sun Tzu) (p.59)

For the crucial months of April, May and June 2003, after they had won the actual war, the Americans delayed and prevaricated while they tried to cobble together a plan for the reconstruction of the country and installation of interim government. It was, as Captain David Chastain, a 3rd Infantry Division officer put it, ‘a clusterfuck’ of chaos (p.151).

President Bush realised the need for some kind of post-war administration late in the day and, just a month before the invasion, appointed retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner to post of Director of the hurriedly cobbled together Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq (ORHA).

In the event Garner’s term in post lasted less than a month, from 21 April to his abrupt replacement by L. Paul Bremer on 11 May. In fact the entire ORHA was abruptly closed down and replaced by another hastily cobbled organisation, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Neither ORHA nor CPA were properly staffed or organised, with new staffers being hired and flown out to Baghdad in a mad hurry, with minimum or zero qualifications, handed roles they were woefully inexperienced for, throughout the spring.

‘No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes,’ (Colonel Ralph Hallenbeck who worked at the CPA, p.203)

Crucially – decisively – with no actual plan to hand, the Americans’ delay meant they lost the initiative, which passed over to the various types of religious, political and ethnic opposition groups or allowed these groups to come into existence and establish themselves. These groups seized abandoned government arms, organised, made plans, and commenced the ‘insurgency’ which was to bring havoc, violence and death across Iraq for the next 8 years.

Thomas E. Ricks

Thomas E. Ricks was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal for 17 years, latterly a specialist in the US military, until he joined the Washington Post in 2000 as senior Pentagon correspondent. His extremely detailed and thorough account of the invasion and its aftermath was published in 2006, three years into the painful and protracted unravelling of America’s plans.

Far from…

Far from being over in a few months with minimal casualties, the war in Iraq was to drag on until December 2011, lasting 8 years and nearly 9 months.

Paul Wolfowitz predicted the locals would welcome the Americans, there would be no ethnic fighting and that within a few months of victory, the troop numbers would be down to 34,000 (pages 97, 98 and 106). However, far from requiring a minimal army of 130,000 the troop numbers rose to a peak of 200,000 which most commentators still thought wasn’t enough. The Rand Corporation published a report claiming the task the US set itself would have required 500,000 troops. According to Army Central Command planner Colonel Agoglia, Wolfowitz suffered from ‘a complete and total lack of understanding’ of what was need to invade Iraq and create a new, independent state (p.128).

Far from costing a few billion dollars which would be paid for by the country’s own oil revenue, the US Congressional Budget Office has estimated the total cost of the war in Iraq to the United States will be around $1.9 trillion.

Legacy of the Gulf War

Many people thought Bush Jnr wanted to complete what his dad, George Bush Senior, began with his ejection of Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. Republicans and foreign policy hawks came to regret how the father ended the 100-hours war as soon as the Iraqi forces were expelled back onto Iraqi soil. Specially when Saddam went out of his way to prove what a bastard he was by massacring the Marsh Arabs who Bush Senior had encouraged to rise up against their dictator, and then turned his wrath on the Kurds in the north, who he drove from their towns and villages into the freezing mountains where many perished before the ‘international community’ stepped in to enforce a no-fly zone (Operation Northern Watch, p.13).

Throughout the 1990s the Allies maintained this no-fly zone despite Saddam’s policy of continually nagging and provoking them, and also enacted strong sanctions against the regime. He remained a thorn in the side of successive American administrations. Foreign policy hawks became obsessed with the idea that Saddam was moving heaven and earth to build facilities for creating weapons of mass destruction i.e. chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

In response to these provocations and paranoia, in October 1998 removing the Iraqi government became official US foreign policy with the enactment of the Iraq Liberation Act. This followed the creation of an advocacy group of neo-conservative Republicans, the Project for a New American Century, set up in January 1998 to lobby then-President Clinton for regime change in Iraq. Members included Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, future UN ambassador John Bolton and other hawks, who were to come into power when George W. Bush was elected president in November 2000.

Choosing to attack Iraq on a false prospectus

Hence, within days of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush and senior figures in his administration (vice-president Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld) began soliciting opinions from State Department officials and the military about the feasibility of completing the job of getting rid of Saddam.

Little over a month after 9/11 the US attacked Afghanistan whose Taliban rulers had refused to surrender Osama bin Laden who had emerged as the culprit for the 9/11 attacks. But alongside the Afghan plan, a definitive assault on Saddam’s Iraq was being planned.

Throughout 2002 the administration ramped up the pressure with an escalating series of deadlines for Saddam to surrender his weapons of mass destruction, obey sanctions and so on. Saddam’s truculence and mishandling of UN weapons inspectors played with into the US hawks’ plans.

Colin Powell’s day of shame

Early in 2003, on 5 February, Bush sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN to make America’s case, to present ‘evidence’ that Iraq was hiding unconventional weapons. His presentation to the UN was later shown to be wrong and misleading in every single detail (pages 90 to 93). The Americans were warned by British and other security services, at the time, that this ‘evidence’ was very flaky, based, for example, on the claims of an Iraqi emigrant living in Germany who later admitted having falsified his testimony (p.91). The monitoring efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency had found no evidence of WMD at all – but the Bush administration ignored anything which stood in the way of their determination to overthrow Saddam.

The Bush White House case was based on the claims that a) there was a direct link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and b) that Saddam had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that posed a serious threat to the West. Whereas:

in 2004, the 9/11 Commission concluded there was no evidence of any relationship between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda
and no stockpiles of WMDs or active WMD program were ever found in Iraq (p.375)

Has any US president ever told such a pack of lies with such catastrophic consequences? Ricks doesn’t hold back.

Blame must lie foremost with President Bush himself, but his incompetence and arrogance are only part of the story. It takes more than one person to make a mess as big as Iraq. (p.4)
President Bush’s response to the growing violence in Iraq was even more painfully wrong than Rumsfeld’s. (p.172)

Ricks’s intelligence and authority

What makes Fiasco such a blistering record of the intellectual arrogance, blinkered ignorance, chaotic mismanagement, wishful thinking and stupidity which characterised the American invasion of Iraq is the supreme intelligence and incisive analysis Ricks deploys on every page. He is an extremely clever guy, a deep thinker, with the added huge advantage of managing to get pretty much all the key players, all the senior people at the State Department (America’s Foreign Office) and Pentagon (the military), to talk to him and give often scathing and bitterly critical insights into the chaos and mismanagement which operated at every level of the US administration.

But it wasn’t just the US government and key figures in the US army who made terrible mistakes and miscalculations. The press was shamefully complicit in this slack, badly planned wishful thinking. Ricks names and shames the cheerleaders for the invasion in the American press and TV, some of whom saw their careers destroyed for recklessly supporting the administration (Ricks singles out New York Times reporter Judith Miller for particular criticism, p.35).

And Congress pitifully failed in its duty to review the executive’s plans, especially war plans. Members of Congress were intimidated by the great wave of patriotic rhetoric flooding the airwaves. In the feverish mood after 9/11 Congress didn’t want to seem unpatriotic and so subjected the administrations plans to pitifully inadequate questioning, and failed in its duty of overseeing the Executive branch of government (p.88 and p.387). Fail fail fail.

Ricks subjects specific each of the main players, in the White House, State Department, Pentagon and Army to detailed and authoritative profiles and then withering analysis of their failures, which leave virtually none of their reputations intact.

General Tommy Franks, the man given overall charge of the invasion, was widely thought to have no grasp of strategy; he was a tactical, operations man incapable of seeing the big picture.

‘[Franks] ran an extremely unhappy headquarters’ (p.33)
‘the intellectually shoddy atmosphere that characterised war planning under Franks’ (p.34)

Thus it was that Franks fell in with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who both continually demanded a smaller force, chipped away at the proposals, demanding that army commanders reduce their numbers to a size which was to prove completely inadequate for the task ahead. As late as April 28 Wolfowitz was insisting the Americans only needed the 135,000 troops they had so far deployed, even as the evidence came in that this was completely inadequate. Ricks’s description of the shambolic office run by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Jay Feith, beggars belief:

The owlish Feith was a management disaster who served as a bottleneck on decision making. (p.76)
‘the dumbest fucking guy on the planet’ according to Tommy Franks (p.78)
‘incredibly dangerous’, according to general Jay Garner (p.78)

Franks announced his retirement very soon after combat operations finished, on 22 May 2003. He was replaced by General Ricardo Sanchez who, according to the sources Ricks speaks to, struggled with the scope of the role. Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Holshek: ‘He was in over his head. He was a fulfilment of the Peter principle’ (p.173).

‘Historians will remember Sanchez as the William Westmoreland of the Iraq War – the general who misunderstood the nature of the conflict he faced and thereby played into the enemy’s hands,’ retired army Colonel Andrew Bacevich (p.392)

Who would have suspected so many senior administration officials were so incompetent and divisive?

Strategy versus tactics

Quite apart from the riveting and mind-boggling stories on every page, two big concepts underpin Ricks’s account. One is the difference between strategy and tactics. He explains that to ascertain strategy you must ask four questions:

who are we?
what are we trying to do here?
how will we do it?
what resources and means do we need to do it?

Answering those questions completely and correctly gives you your strategy (p.127). Once you have established this, tried and tested it against the evidence, then you are in a position to start developing the tactics which you will apply in specific situations or areas which will all work towards achieving your overall goals.

Ricks shows in fascinating detail how the general in overall command of the war, Tommy Franks, was great at working out detailed tactics but completely failed to grasp the overall strategy, which was itself laughably unrealistic, the ambition not only to overthrow Saddam but to re-engineer the entire Middle East to suit America and Israel’s convenience. The result was that the US effort more closely resembled a coup in a banana republic than a deeply through-through, carefully worked out, large-scale, long-term plan to alter the politics of a crucial part of the globe (p.128).

The neo-conservative Republicans who drove the invasion thought there was no need for a phase IV because the Iraqi population would greet the Americans with flowers and kisses (p.96), Iraqi politicians would quickly set up their own government, and their army and police would manage the transformation of Iraq into a shiny new democracy. They were completely and utterly wrong (p.170).

The looting

Before the invasion phase of the war (19 March to 30 April) had even finished, Iraqi society began to fall apart. The TV cameras caught the pulling down of the massive statue of Saddam at the centre of Baghdad on 9 April 2003 (I remember watching it live on TV; it took ages). But even as they did so the epidemic of looting, burning and destruction of the country was beginning. The French, liberated from their Nazi occupiers carried on with their civic duties. The Iraqis, liberated from Saddam’s totalitarian rule, went mad with a spectacular outburst of civil disorder and chaos on the streets.

And did the Americans have the manpower to enforce security, law and order? No, because Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and their creature at the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, and the many other true believers, had moved heaven and earth to have the smallest possible supply of boots on the ground.

Interviewed on TV Rumsfield famously dismissed the looting by saying freedom is messy (p.136). In other words, he was a cretin. He and his fellow believers didn’t realise that it was in those early days that America lost the respect of the nation they had conquered, that an entire people saw American soldiers standing by idly while ministry buildings were comprehensively sacks, looted and set on fire, criminal gangs roamed the streets, cars were hijacked, civilians kidnapped, women raped. Not my problem, said Rumsfeld.

Excellent at sending laser-directed bombs at infrastructure targets, the American Army turned out to be useless at enforcing law and order. Within days many Iraqis began to pine for the good old days under Saddam. At least under the tyrant the streets were safe to walk or drive through. It is vital for an invading force to gain the population’s trust and to display competence and command. During the orgy of looting the US forces lost all this and never regained it (p.136).

Mission accomplished?

On 1 May Bush made his Mission Accomplished speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln cruising off the coast of California (p.145). Ricks goes out of his way to say that Bush never used the phrase ‘mission accomplished’, it was just the words on a huge banner hanging behind him. But even to an informed amateur like myself it was obvious what a stupid, short-sighted and profoundly ignorant speech it was. The Americans’ problems were just starting, as anybody who knew anything about the Middle East or the Arab world could have told the hawks for the price of a pint.

Weapons of mass distraction

It is amusing to learn how, during these crucial first days and weeks, US forces wasted an immense amount of time and resources searching for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction instead of policing the streets, which is what a country descending into chaos needed (p.146).

What’s more, in the quest for phantom WMD, American forces left hundreds of thousands of conventional weapons untouched, partly for fear that detonating them might blow up gas or chemicals, mostly because they were looking for the phantom factories and warehouses. And so they allowed insurgents-in-the-making to walk in and loot vast amounts of arms and munitions and walk off with them at their leisure. Breath-taking, amazing stupidity.

hence the jokey phrase that the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in practice turned out to be weapons of mass distraction, distracting US forces from the more straightforward and useful task of securing Iraq’s armouries. Not only were WMDs a fake reason for the invasion but they then significantly contributed to the arming of the insurgencies which were to bedevil the American occupation.

Definition of ‘the initiative’

In late April and early May the Americans, with no clear plan in place and insufficient personnel to secure the country, lost the initiative. In most people’s hands this would be a phrase, but what makes the book outstanding is the way Ricks gives these terms careful definitions, often within the specific context of military doctrine. Thus he defines ‘the initiative’ as ‘the ability to choose the time and location of battle, a key and often decisive factor in any military engagement’. Instead, the Americans’ drift and lack of direction handed the initiative over to countless angry insurgents.

According to the Pentagon, 250,000 tons of ordnance was looted, providing a significant source of ammunition to the future insurgents. In addition, the Iraqi army and Republican Guard had created hundreds of hidden weapons caches before the invasion in preparation for prolonged resistance.

There weren’t enough US troops:

to stop the looting which wrecked then occupiers reputation and damaged important infrastructure
to secure the borders, specially in the west with Syria, across which streamed zealous jihadis
to train new Iraqi police, a task delegated to contractors
to supervise detainees who swiftly filled the gaols to overflowing

Chronic lack of personnel in each of these areas – on the direct personal orders of Rumsfeld – was have catastrophic consequences (p.147).

The scandal of Abu Ghraib

The most florid and attention-grabbing was the complete failure to prepare to handle the large number of detainees the army soon started rounding up and sending to prison to be interrogated. Which prisons? The same ones Saddam had used such as Abu Ghraib just west of the capital, only even more degraded and squalid than during his time. So much for ‘liberation’.

There weren’t enough trained interrogators who could speak Arabic, so interrogation often ended up as a lot of slapping and shouting, plus the new techniques of waterboarding and other forms of abuse and torture. What was required was Military Police but large units of these had been deliberately and specifically dropped from the invasion plan by Rumsfeld in person. And it was this Rumsfeld-created shortage of Military Police or soldiers trained to run such facilities meant they were run by the likes of the badly trained and inadequately supervised junior soldiers who took all those photographs of terrorising Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib which leaked out with a catastrophic loss of reputation for America, for all time. A reputation for holding the moral high ground, around the developing world, which it will never really capture (pages 197 to 200 and 290 to 293, 296 to 297).

The notorious photos from Abu Ghraib prison showing untrained low-ranking American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners

One of the keys to winning a counterinsurgency is to treat enemy captives well; if won over with leniency and understanding, today’s captive may be converted to tomorrow’s mayor or council member, a useful ally in reconstructing civil society (p.421). So how did America treat its prisoners? Worse than animals. Hence 8 years of war.

Bremer’s historic mistakes

Within a week of taking over command of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer made his two infamous decisions (pages 158 to 165):

Coalition Provisional Authority Order 1 banned the Ba’ath party in all forms and banned from public life anyone who had been a member of the party, no matter how lowly
Coalition Provisional Authority Order 2 dismantled the Iraqi Army, 23 May 2003

The first one deprived over100,000 generally honest Iraqi citizens of their livelihoods. The second did the same to about 400,000 members of the armed forces. Both were overnight deprived of their livelihoods, income and the respect so important in an Arab country. Some were angry and protested outside the newly established Green Zone. Others took steps to join the nascent insurgencies, many of which offered them cash to join.

Ricks quote numerous army officers such as Major General Renuart, saying things like: ‘That was the day that we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory’ (p.163) or Colonel Alan King: ‘May was the turning point. When we disbanded the military and announced that we were occupiers, that was it’ (p.164); Colonel Paul Hughes: ‘When we disbanded the Iraqi army we created a significant part of the Iraqi insurgency’ (p.191) and many more like them.

More strategically, in a country riven by ethnic and religious divisions, the army had (as in so many developing countries) been one of the few unifying national institutions. Not only did abolishing it turn hundreds of thousands of angry and well-trained soldiers into insurgents, it hugely exacerbated ethnic division (p.163).

Counter-insurgency

The other Big Idea which increasingly comes to dominate Ricks’s accountt is that of counter-insurgency. In brief, it became more and more obvious to intelligent observers (i.e. nobody in the Bush administration) that the Americans were fighting the wrong kind of war. The army had been briefed from top to bottom to fight a conventional war, advancing in formation, accompanied by tanks and air support overhead, against conventional forces arrayed in trenches or battle formation etc.

First of all the military was blindsided when, having won the conventional war in a matter of weeks, it turned out that they were being called on to maintain the peace, enforce law and order, manage the never-ending influx of detainees, something none of them had been trained for (Abu Ghraib).

But then the situation took a further turn, as the insurgents, taking advantage of the Americans’ complete lack of a plan, began to launch an insurgency. It took the people in charge, in the Pentagon and State Department months and months to realise this was what was happening. The conflict changed from the quick, easy war they’d been bragging about into another Vietnam-style, prolonged, small-scale, low-level insurgency, precisely the kind of thing they’d sworn blind would never happen.

What is counter-insurgency?

In a conventional war your aim is to kill as many of the enemy as necessary until they surrender and cease to be combatants. The civilian population are uninvolved bystanders to the clash between two uniformed, centrally organised armies. In an insurgency the opposition does not wear uniform, blends in with the civilian population, launches small attacks on vulnerable targets (police stations, foot patrols) before disappearing back into the population.

Therefore, the key plank of counterinsurgency warfare is to win the population. The population are the battle space and the goal of counter-insurgency. Only with the passive assistance of the general population can an insurgency survive. If you win over the population, the insurgents have no background to slip back into. The general population is the goal and therefore you do everything in your power to win them over.

How? By providing what they need: bringing security, enforcing law and order, getting the electricity and drinking water working. Above all you are polite and respectful. A country like Iraq gives great importance to personal dignity, especially of the male head of households or the elders of communities, villages and tribes. Therefore extreme respect must be shown at all times. The army must go out of its way to win the respect and trust of the civilian population. That is the only way to slowly, patiently, strangle an insurgency, by steadily reducing the pool or recruits and the places it can hire.

Did the Americans practice counter-insurgency?

No, they did the exact opposite. Hence the 50 page-section Ricks ironically titles ‘How to create an insurgency’ (pages 149 to 200).

The Americans stood by while the country collapsed into chaos, the Americans did nothing as criminal gangs roamed the streets. The Americans allowed government ministries, museums, schools and hospitals to be looted and destroyed.

On a personal level, the Americans were extremely rude and aggressive with Iraq civilians. They forced other road users off the roads. They drove round pointing their guns at everyone. They shot first and asked questions later, killing unarmed civilians in the process, on several notorious occasions killing Iraqi policemen who they themselves had helped to train (by accident and incompetence, rival night patrols opening fire on each other, that sort of thing).

And the Americans carried out systematic abuse of prisoners or ‘persons under control’ (PUC). Ordinary soldiers developed an attitude called ‘Fuck a PUC’ (p.278), yelling and abuse was the start which often escalated to beating, punching, up to breaking bones, threatening with guns etc.

As the insurgency ramped up, US forces took to raiding entire quarters of any town or city where an insurgent attack took place, kicking open the doors of domestic houses, waving guns around, chucking hand grenades into cellars, corralling women and children screaming with terror into the main room and telling them to shut the fuck up. Very often they deliberately humiliated the man of the house in front of his women and children, forcing him to the floor, kneeling on his neck, yelling abuse, letting off pistols right by his ear. Ricks tells the story of the soldier who told an older man he was going to execute one of his two sons and to pick which one to save and which one to condemn to death before taking one of them outside, out of sight and firing his gun, reducing the father to tears of hysteria (p.273).

At a higher, operational level, the Americans made the bad mistake of regularly rotating troops back to the States. This meant that individual commanders and soldiers on the ground were just beginning to establish relationships with local communities, civic leaders and so on, building trust and respect, when they were moved on and a new bunch of soldiers came in who had to start all over from scratch (p.142).

In short, the Americans broke every rule in the counter-insurgency guidebook and did everything they possibly could to turn the entire population against them.

Ricks makes the specific point that men who had been publicly humiliated in the way I’ve described, were compelled by their culture’s sense of honour, to redeem their manhood. Even if they didn’t particularly want to, or weren’t naturally violent, their culture demanded they strike back to redeem themselves and so hundreds of thousands of men were recruited to give active or passive assistance to the insurgency.

It took over a year for the Americans to realise they were fighting the wrong kind of war. Ricks’s book is absolutely riveting as he describes the way some military leaders (Major General David Petraeus, Marine Corps General James Mattis) always knew this or learned it and promulgated it to the divisions under their command.

Classic guides to counter-insurgency

Ricks’s description of counter-insurgent warfare is so insightful and clear and useful partly because he cites classic works on the theme. These include:

27 Articles by Lawrence of Arabia
Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Nagl (2002) (p.133)
Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice by French Army Lieutenant Colonel David Galula (1964) (p.264)
Best Practices in Counterinsurgency, Military Review, May to June 2005, pages 8 to 12: a review of the hallmarks of success and failure, which established that the US military had followed only one of the 12 rules for success but enthusiastically prosecuted all 9 of the rules of failure

Galula’s book lays out four principles:

The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population rather than control of territory.
Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority.
Support of the population may be lost. The population must be efficiently protected to allow it to cooperate without fear of retribution by the enemy.
Order enforcement should be done progressively by removing or driving away armed opponents, then gaining the support of the population, then strengthening positions by building infrastructure and setting long-term relationships with the population. This must be done area by area, using a pacified territory as a basis of operation to conquer a neighbouring area.

These echo the four principles laid out by a British soldier, Sir Charles Gwynne, who wrote in his 1939 textbook ‘Imperial Policing’ that, because counter-insurgency is primarily a political strategy (p.266):

the civil power must be in charge
civilian and military powers must cooperate closely in everything to ensure one chain of command and unified approach
if required, action must be firm and prompt
but force should always be kept to an absolute minimum to avoid losing the population

Or to put it another way:

A lesson of every successful modern counterinsurgency campaign [is that] violence is the tool of last resort, especially for troops foreign to the local population (p.225)
The great body of successful counterinsurgency practice…holds that firepower should be as restrained as possible. (p.234)
One of the most basic concepts of counterinsurgency campaigns, that they succeed when a minimum of firepower is employed. (p.250)

For in counterinsurgency warfare, the population is the prize (p.318):

Classic counterinsurgency doctrine…holds that the objective is first to gain control of the population and then win their support. (p.250)
‘The population…becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy’ Galula, quoted p.266)
‘Success in a counterinsurgency environment is based on winning popular support, not on blowing up people’s houses’ (p.315)

The immensely complicated effort required for modern warfare

Obviously the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was catastrophic in all sorts of ways which Ricks’s book describes in excruciating detail. But what really comes over is a sense of how complicated it is a mount a modern military campaign, at how many levels or aspects you have to manage to manage so many people with so many conflicting priorities and opinions.

At the very least there’s the international diplomatic scene to be managed, relationships with NATO partners as well as with the usual antagonists at the United Nations, Russia and China.

There’s public opinion which has to be managed and, in this case, lied to about weapons of mass destruction, in order to psych it for war.

But Ricks’s book makes abundantly clear that the real struggle comes within your own administration itself, where you need a) the right person as minister of war and b) the right person in charge of the Army; you need c) both to be in charge of functioning, well-managed organisations, and d) the two top guys to be able to communicate and work together to a shared goal.

One small criticism

Obviously the book only goes up to early 2006, when it was published, whereas the conflict continued on until 2011. My 2007 paperback edition has an afterword in which Ricks gives several scenarios to how he thinks the conflict might play out.

It’s not really a criticism but the one big thing I wish the book had contained was more about the contemporaneous situation in Afghanistan. Given the tremendous detail Ricks goes into about the structure and bureaucracy and funding and planning and key personnel of the US military in Iraq, it feels like a big piece of the jigsaw is missing in that he only occasionally mentions that the US was fighting a whole other war, in Afghanistan, at the same time.

I would expect that the commitment to Afghanistan caused all kinds of problems for the Army planners mapping out the plans for Iraq, but you don’t get any detail on that. I would also have expected lessons learned in one place to be applied to the other i.e. there must have been dialogue between the occupying forces in both countries, but Ricks gives no sign of it.

Relevance to Ignatieff’s theories

The aim of Michael Ignatieff’s 2003 book Empire Lite is to argue that, given the chaos which has engulfed numerous weak and failing states in the light of the withdrawal of the two superpowers from their imperial dominance at the end of the Cold War, America, if it wants to achieve geopolitical security, needs to really commit to imperial intervention in the worst of these failing states and to ‘state building’ there.

Some countries, Ignatieff argues, can only conceivably be saved by imperial intervention, by which he means long-running and deep commitment to put troops on the ground and stay the course, to establish peace between warring ethnic groups and build the apparatus of a state, not just the usual guff about ‘internationally supervised democratic elections’, but the infrastructure stuff which really counts, from education to clean water.

My reply to Ignatieff is that the Americans tried to do this – in a reasonably planned way in Afghanistan, for a good 20 years, in a far more chaotic, make-it-up-as-they-went-along way in Iraq. And the point is that they failed in both. America’s engagement in both countries amount to two different but extended and very expensive attempts to implement Ignatieff’s proposal for longer, deeper Western involvement in developing countries riven by ethnic conflict and civil war. Surely the conclusion of both experiments is that such extensive and expensive commitment by the West does not work.

In reality America, and her half-hearted allies in NATO, are committed to trying to control situations in a huge number of countries round the world:

the US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries
in 2020 the US had around 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries (source: al Jazeera)

But never again will the US and its allies invade a country with the blithe confidence that it can impose western norms of law, politics and democracy.

Iran triumphans

According to a 2019 US Army study, the only country to emerge as victor of the Iraq war was America’s long-time nemesis, Iran. Although they make up a majority of the population of Iraq, Shia Muslims were liable to repression and imprisonment under the rule of Saddam, a Sunni Muslim, especially in light of the terrible Iran Iraq war (1980 to 1988). The overthrow of Saddam and American promises to implement democracy immediately placed Shia parties in a commanding position. This led to internecine fighting between Shias and Sunnis with entire areas of Baghdad ethnically cleansed at the cost of much torture and bloodshed. It led to the sudden rise to prominence of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

But above all it meant that, whichever party won power, which ever government ran Iraq, would include figures who had been in exile in Iran, were mentored by Iran, were under the control of the Iranian government. Twenty years later Iraqi politics remain fraught and complex but the one unqualified winner to emerge from the whole shambles was Iran. And it was the increased ‘threat’ from Shia Iran which hardened hawkish attitudes in Sunni Saudi Arabia, and which explains why Iran and Saudi Arabia are fighting proxy wars against each other in Yemen and Syria.

Back to Ricks who cites an unnamed US intelligence officer drolly commenting that:

‘The difference between Tommy Franks and Tehran was that the Iranians had a good Phase IV plan.’ (p.123)

Credit

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks was published by Penguin Books in 2006. References are to the 2007 paperback edition.

New world disorder reviews

New world disorder reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 2, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in America, History, Middle East, War

Tagged 'Stormin'' Norman Schwartzkopf, 27 Articles, 9/11, 9/11 Commission, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, air force, Al Qaeda, Alina Romanowski, America, American history, Andrew Natsios, Arab world, Ba'ath Party, Best Practices in Counterinsurgency, Brookings Institute, Bush Jnr, Cheney, China, Coalition Provisional Authority, Coalition Provisional Authority Order 1, Coalition Provisional Authority Order 2, Cold War, Colin Powell, Colonel Agoglia, Colonel Alan King, Colonel Andrew Bacevich, Colonel John Warden, Colonel Paul Hughes, Colonel Ralph Hallenbeck, Congress, Congressional Budget Office, contemporary history, counter-insurgency, counterinsurgency, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, CPA, David Chastain, David Galula, David Petraeus, Deputy Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, Empire Lite, Feith, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, France, Fuck a PUC, Gary Anderson, General Anthony Zinni, General Ricardo Sanchez, General Tommy Franks, George Bush, George Bush Senior, George W. Bush, Green Zone, history, Imperial Policing, insurgency, international affairs, International Atomic Energy Agency, international community, invasion of Iraq, Iran, Iraq, Iraq Liberation Act, Iraq War, Iraqi army, Israel, James Mattis, Jay Garner, John Bolton, Judith Miller, Karl von Clausewitz, Kuwait, Kwazi Kwarteng, L. Paul Bremer, Lawrence Di Rita, Lawrence of Arabia, Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Holshek, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Nagl, Liz Truss, looting, Major General Renuart, Marek Belka, Marine Corps, Marsh Arabs, Micahel O'Hanlon, Michael Ignatieff, Middle East, Military Review, Mission Accomplished, Nato, neo-con Republicans, new world disorder, New York Times, Nightline, no-fly zone, occupation of Iraq, Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq, Operation Northern Watch, ORHA, Osama bin Laden, Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon, phase IV, Poland, Politics, prisoner abuse, Project for a New American Century, Rand Corporation, Republican Guard, respect, Rumsfeld, Russia, Saddam, Secretary of Defence, Sir Charles Gwynne, State Department, strategy, Sun Tzu, Taliban, Ted Koppel, the initiative, the Kurds, the Pentagon, the State Department, Thomas E. Ricks, Tommy Franks, United Nations, US army, US foreign policy, US military, US-led invasion, USS Abraham Lincoln, Vietnam, Wall Street Journal, war in Iraq, Washington Post, weapons of mass destruction, White House, William Westmoreland, WMD, Wolfowitz

Posted by Simon on October 2, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/02/fiasco-thomas-e-ricks/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 707 other subscribers
Topics
Afghanistan Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art Augustus book Britain British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero civil war Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Germany Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism India Iraq Islam Italy Jews Julius Caesar Literature London Nazis New York novel Painting Paris photography Play poetry Politics religion Roman Empire Rome Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex short stories Slavery South Africa Soviet Union Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Syria Tate Britain Tate Modern theatre thriller Translation war
Categories
- Adventure (143)
- Africa (112)
- America (93)
- American literature (31)
- Ancient history (142)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Archaeology (2)
- Architecture (27)
- Art (543)
- Australia (11)
- Autobiography (30)
- Biography (70)
- Biology (10)
- Books (775)
- British Empire (14)
- Buddhism (1)
- Cartoon (13)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (21)
- China (14)
- Christianity (76)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (152)
- Communism (23)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (13)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (4)
- Detective stories (30)
- drawing (1)
- English literature (111)
- Environment (8)
- Essays (14)
- European History (175)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (492)
- fairy tale (2)
- Fantasy (32)
- Fashion (4)
- Feminism (32)
- Film (21)
- Flowers (4)
- France (63)
- French literature (44)
- German literature (3)
- Germany (23)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (74)
- History (457)
- Holocaust (14)
- Horror (10)
- Illustration (12)
- imperialism (24)
- India (4)
- Irish literature (16)
- Islamic terrorism (8)
- Japan (8)
- Latin America (11)
- Latin literature (2)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (69)
- Literature (153)
- Mathematics (6)
- Middle Ages (71)
- Middle East (16)
- Museum (11)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (571)
- Novella (5)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (34)
- Philosophy (38)
- Photography (107)
- Play (80)
- Poetry (98)
- Politics (100)
- Prints (5)
- Psychoanalysis (18)
- Psychology (5)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (6)
- Russia (18)
- Russian literature (15)
- Saga (39)
- Science (29)
- Science Fiction (126)
- Sculpture (44)
- Second World War (103)
- Sex (37)
- Short stories (138)
- Slavery (46)
- Spy novel (65)
- Theatre (88)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (225)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (76)
- Travel writing (16)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (8)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (256)
- World War One (17)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Green Zone

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

Looking for father figures

Crying

The only woman among men

Solecisms

Then again

Factual learnings

Lack of native politicians

Debaathification

The Kurdish return

The sectarianism of Nouri al-Maliki

The extremists overplay their hands

The surge

British embarrassment

Terrible Iraqi politicians

Iraqi politicians the problem not the solution

Hollywood thinking

Fear

Betrayal by Obama and Biden

Summary

The looting

Abu Ghraib

Credit

Related link

New world disorder reviews

Share this:

Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq by Rory Stewart (2007)

Rory Stewart

Post-war Iraq

Stewart in Iraq timeline

A memoir not a history

The clash of cultures

Security, security, security

The rivals

Violent rhetoric

Under siege

The CPA

Church and state

Humorous stories

Black comedy

The moral(s) of the story

Lasting thought

Credit

New world disorder reviews

Share this:

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

Why America invaded Iraq

The neo-con sponsors of the Iraq War

Backing Ahmad Chalabi

Military operations

The Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

The Great Looting

ORHA replaced by the CPA

Setting up the Green Zone

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Chandrasekaran and Thomas E. Ricks

Ordinary people and amateurs

L. Paul Bremer

Challenges of rebuilding a country

Privatising the economy

Crooked contractors

Electricity

Constitutional wrangles

Other reforms

The Sadr Revolt

The First Battle of Fallujah 4 April to 1 May 2004

Impact on the CPA

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

Summary

Credit

New World Disorder reviews

Share this:

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks (2006)

Bad assumptions

They think it’s all over

No phase IV plan

Thomas E. Ricks

Far from…