Imperial Life in the Emerald City Read online

  It was Saddam who first decided to turn Baghdad’s prime riverfront real estate into a gated city within a city, with posh villas, bungalows, government buildings, shops, and even a hospital. He didn’t want his aides and bodyguards, who were given homes near his palace, to mingle with the masses. And he didn’t want outsiders peering in. The homes were bigger, the trees greener, the streets wider than in the rest of Baghdad. There were more palms and fewer people. There were no street vendors and no beggars. No one other than members of Saddam’s inner circle or his trusted cadre of guards and housekeepers had any idea what was inside. Those who loitered near the entrances sometimes landed in jail. Iraqis drove as fast as they could on roads near the compound lest they be accused of gawking.

  It was the ideal place for the Americans to pitch their tents. Saddam had surrounded the area with a tall brick wall. There were only three points of entry. All the military had to do was park tanks at the gates.

  The Americans expanded Saddam’s neighborhood by a few blocks to encompass the gargantuan Convention Center and the al-Rasheed, a once-luxurious establishment made famous by CNN’s live broadcasts during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They fortified the perimeter with seventeen-foot-high blast barriers made of foot-thick concrete topped with coils of razor wire.

  Open spaces became trailer parks with grandiose names. CPA staffers unable to snag a room at the al-Rasheed lived in Poolside Estates. Cole and his fellow Halliburton employees were in Camp Hope. The Brits dubbed their accommodations Ocean Cliffs. At first, the Americans felt sorry for the Brits, whose trailers were in a covered parking garage, which seemed dark and miserable. But when the insurgents began firing mortars into the Green Zone, everyone wished they were in Ocean Cliffs. The envy increased when Americans discovered that the Brits didn’t have the same leaky trailers with plastic furniture supplied by Halliburton; theirs had been outfitted by Ikea.

  Americans drove around in new GMC Suburbans, dutifully obeying the thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit signs posted by the CPA on the flat, wide streets. There were so many identical Suburbans parked in front of the palace that drivers had to use their electronic door openers as homing devices. (One contractor affixed Texas license plates to his vehicle to set it apart.) When they cruised around, they kept the air-conditioning on high and the radio tuned to 107.7 FM, Freedom Radio, an American-run station that played classic rock and rah-rah messages. Every two weeks, the vehicles were cleaned at a Halliburton car wash.

  Shuttle buses looped around the Green Zone at twenty-minute intervals, stopping at wooden shelters to transport those who didn’t have cars and didn’t want to walk. There was daily mail delivery. Generators ensured that the lights were always on. If you didn’t like what was being served in the cafeteria—or you were feeling peckish between meals—you could get takeout from one of the Green Zone’s Chinese restaurants. Halliburton’s dry-cleaning service would get the dust and sweat stains out of your khakis in three days. A sign warned patrons to REMOVE AMMUNITION FROM POCKETS before submitting clothes.

  Iraqi laws and customs didn’t apply inside the Green Zone. Women jogged on the sidewalk in shorts and T-shirts. A liquor store sold imported beer, wine, and spirits. One of the Chinese restaurants offered massages as well as noodles. The young boys selling DVDs near the palace parking lot had a secret stash. “Mister, you want porno?” they whispered to me.

  Most Americans sported suede combat boots, expensive sunglasses, and nine-millimeter Berettas attached to the thigh with a Velcro holster. They groused about the heat and the mosquitoes and the slothful habits of the natives. A contingent of Gurkhas stood as sentries in front of the palace.

  If there was any law in the Green Zone, it was American. Military police pulled drivers over for speeding and drunk driving. When a shipment of office safes arrived, Halliburton prevented its American employees from lifting or delivering them until hand trucks and back braces had been sent to Baghdad. When one CPA staffer complained that she needed her safe—she said she was storing tens of thousands of dollars in her office toilet—Cole explained that Halliburton had to follow American occupational safety regulations.

  The Green Zone had no mayor. Bremer was its most important occupant, but he didn’t trouble himself with potholes and security fences. The physical area was technically the responsibility of the army commander in charge of Baghdad, but he lived near the airport and didn’t delve into minutiae. There was a colonel whose brigade guarded the zone, but he cared more about perimeter security than the operation of the city within a city. If an American staked claim to a villa, there was nobody to stop him.

  Veteran diplomats who had lived in the Arab world or worked in post-conflict situations wanted local cuisine in the dining room, a respect for local traditions, and a local workforce. But they were in the minority. Most of the CPA’s staff had never worked outside the United States. More than half, according to one estimate, had gotten their first passport in order to travel to Iraq. If they were going to survive in Baghdad, they needed the same sort of bubble that American oil companies had built for their workers in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Indonesia.

  Cole, who had been charged, along with his Halliburton colleagues, with creating that bubble, worked in a tiny room in the palace. The sign over his door said CUSTOMER SERVICE. When he wasn’t fielding complaints, he posted the cafeteria menu and bus schedules on the CPA’s computer network. He refurbished the palace’s movie theater and started showing films every night at eight. Shoot-’em-up action movies were the most popular, but they weren’t Cole’s favorites. He liked Lawrence of Arabia and The Third Man, the latter based on the eponymous Graham Greene novella about post–World War II Vienna. In his spare time, Cole began writing a novel. It was about two young men who go to a war zone for the first time.

  “It feels like a little America,” Mark Schroeder said as we sat by the pool on a scorching afternoon, sipping water bottled in the United Arab Emirates.

  Schroeder and I had grown up in the same suburb of San Francisco, but we hadn’t known each other as children. We connected in Baghdad—first by e-mail, then by phone, and finally in person—because of our mothers, who had struck up a conversation in a grocery store and discovered that they both had sons in Iraq. Schroeder, who was twenty-four at the time, was your typical California kid: he had a tan and wavy blond hair and wore an expensive pair of sunglasses. He had been working for a Republican congressman in Washington when he heard that the CPA needed more staff. He sent his résumé to the Pentagon. A few months later, he was in the Republican Palace.

  He was an essential-services analyst. He compiled a weekly report for Bremer with bar graphs and charts that showed the CPA’s progress in key sectors. How many megawatts of electricity were being generated? How many police officers had been trained? How many dollars had been spent on reconstruction? The reports were shared only with Bremer and his senior aides. Copies were sent electronically to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. After the bigwigs had seen it, analysts at the Pentagon would redact the secret information and distribute the document to hundreds of government employees who worked on Iraq. One of them regularly forwarded the reports to me. Some of those charts and graphs—usually the ones detailing the state of electricity generation and police training—were at odds with the rosy figures released by the CPA public relations office.

  Schroeder created his reports in a small office near Bremer’s. He spent his days—and many an evening—sitting in front of a computer. He lived in a trailer with three roommates and ate all his meals in the mess hall. On Thursdays, he’d hitch a ride with a friend to the al-Rasheed’s disco or another bar. In the two and a half months since he had arrived in Baghdad, he’d left the Green Zone only once—and that was to travel to Camp Victory, the U.S. military headquarters near the airport.

  When he needed to buy something, he went to the PX, the military-run convenience store next to the palace. There he could pick up Fritos, Cheetos,
Dr Pepper, protein powder, Operation Iraqi Freedom T-shirts, and pop music discs. If the PX didn’t have what he wanted, he’d go to the Green Zone Bazaar, a small pedestrian mall with seventy shops operated by Iraqis who lived in the Green Zone. The bazaar had been built so Americans wouldn’t have to leave the Green Zone to purchase trinkets and sundries. There was Mo’s Computers, run by a savvy young man named Mohammed. Several shops sold mobile phones and bootlegged DVDs. Others hawked only-in-Iraq items: old army uniforms, banknotes with Saddam’s face, Iraqi flags with the words GOD IS GREAT in Saddam’s handwriting. My favorite was the JJ Store for Arab Photos, the Iraqi version of those Wild West photo booths at Disneyland: you could get a picture of yourself in Arab robes and a headdress.

  The Green Zone also provided its own good time. The CPA had a “morale officer” who organized salsa dancing lessons, yoga classes, and movie screenings in the palace theater. There was a gym with the same treadmills and exercise machines you’d find in any high-end health club in America. The devout could attend regular Bible study classes.

  Even in the first months after the fall of Saddam’s government—when Americans were regarded as liberators, the insurgency was embryonic, and it was safe enough to drive across town without guards and armored vehicles—American civilians working for the CPA and its predecessor, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, were dissuaded from venturing beyond the area around the palace. Security officers insisted that Baghdad was insecure. The only safe place was inside the walls. That’s why they called it the Green Zone.

  If you wanted to leave the Green Zone, you had to travel in two cars, and each car had to have two “long guns”—an M16 rifle or an even more powerful weapon. In the early days, this seemed unreasonable. But then attacks on Americans became more frequent. The rules tightened. More guns were required, then more cars, then a military escort. By the time Schroeder arrived, Iraq was so dangerous that you needed a good reason to get a security detail to leave the zone. If you were a senior staffer who needed to visit a ministry, no problem. But if you were an essential-services analyst who wanted to go shopping, no way.

  I couldn’t fault Schroeder for not traveling outside. Even if he had wanted to break the rules, as some did, by driving around in a beat-up sedan with Iraqi license plates, he still would have had to leave the Green Zone by one of the three exits. Everyone assumed that the bad guys were watching. Would they notice him? Would they choose to attack? Such an action was perceived as Russian roulette.

  Schroeder was incredulous when I told him that I lived in what he and others called the Red Zone, that I drove around without a security detail, that I ate at local restaurants, that I visited Iraqis in their homes.

  “What’s it like out there?” he asked.

  I told him about living in the decrepit Ishtar Sheraton Hotel, just across the Tigris River from the palace. The room service was so abysmal that we had installed our own kitchen—with a four-burner gas stove, a chest freezer, and a meat grinder—in one of the rooms. I described the pleasure of walking through al-Shorja Market, the city’s largest bazaar, and of having tea in cafés in the old quarter. I spoke about discussions of Iraqi culture and history that occurred when I went to the homes of my Iraqi friends for lunch. The more I talked, the more I felt like an extraterrestrial describing life on another planet.

  From inside the Green Zone, the real Baghdad—the checkpoints, the bombed-out buildings, the paralyzing traffic jams—could have been a world away. The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin’s call to prayer, never drifted over the walls. The fear on the faces of American troops was rarely seen by the denizens of the palace. The acrid smoke of a detonated car bomb didn’t fill the air. The sub-Saharan privation and Wild West lawlessness that gripped one of the world’s most ancient cities swirled around the walls, but on the inside, the calm sterility of an American subdivision prevailed.

  To see the real Iraq, all anyone in the Green Zone had to do was peer over the Hesco barriers—the refrigerator-size containers filled with dirt that protected soldiers from shrapnel—at the entrances to the enclave. Checkpoint Three, on the street in front of the Convention Center and the al-Rasheed, resembled a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Concrete slabs blocked off what had been an eight-lane expressway. Dead trees lined the sidewalk. Shell casings, wrappers from military rations, and punctured tires lay scattered on the ground. Coils of razor wire snaked in every direction. Plastic bags and candy wrappers fluttered from the concertina, snagged by the razor blades. Bits of trash filled the air. Garbage had been picked up with Swiss efficiency before the war, but collections had become sporadic after liberation, like every other municipal service.

  In the mornings, starting at seven and lasting until eleven, the queue of Iraqis waiting to enter the checkpoint amid the razor wire stretched for hundreds of yards. Each of them had to present two forms of identification and submit to three separate pat-downs. American soldiers, sipping cold water from plastic tubes attached to bladders in their backpacks, barked at the Iraqis. “Stay back!” “One at a time!” “What’s your reason for entering?”

  “I am here for my salary.”

  “I want apply for job for translator.”

  “My son was detained by the coalition forces.”

  Sometimes the soldiers were gracious. Sometimes they were surly.

  “I need help,” a middle-aged man in front of me told a soldier one morning. “My son, he was kidnapped five days ago.”

  “You need to go to the police,” the soldier said. “We cannot help you.”

  “I have gone to the police, but they don’t want to help. They wanted a bribe.”

  “This is an Iraqi-on-Iraqi issue. There’s nothing we can do for you.”

  “I thought you came here to help us. If you won’t help us, who will?”

  One morning, as a throng of Shiite pilgrims jostled their way inside the Imam Kadhim shrine in northern Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives belt. A second bomber waited around the corner and set off his belt when survivors ran away from the first blast. Then a third bomber blew himself up. And a fourth.

  The courtyard of the shrine filled with smoke and the screams of the dying. Blood pooled on the concrete floor. Dazed young men staggered about seeking help. Other survivors stacked the maimed onto wooden carts and pushed them toward wailing ambulances.

  When I arrived at the scene an hour later, I saw corpses covered with white sheets. Arms and fingers had been blown atop third-story balconies. Piles of shoes belonging to the dead dotted the floor. Later, after visiting the local hospital to talk to survivors, I saw dozens of bodies piled outside the morgue, covered with blue sheets, rotting under the sun. Relatives of the dead and injured sobbed, but the doctors went stoically about their business. “Today is nothing special,” one told me. “We see catastrophes like this once a week.”

  That evening, I met a group of CPA staffers for dinner in the palace. They talked about the interim constitution that had just been drafted, with its expansive bill of rights. “It’ll be a model for the Middle East,” one said.

  Hearing about their work, I stopped thinking about what I had seen earlier that day. In the Green Zone, I could hear stories with happy endings. Nobody mentioned the bombing over dinner. The shrine was just a few miles north of the Green Zone, no more than a ten-minute drive away. Had they heard about what had happened? Did they know that dozens had died? “Yeah, I saw something about it on the office television,” said the man to my right. “But I didn’t watch the full report. I was too busy working on my democracy project.”

  Mahmud Ahmed slept through the screeching morning call to prayer. He had been at work until three in the morning. When he woke up at eight, there was no electricity in his neighborhood. Not again, he groaned to himself. The blackouts made no sense to him. Baghdad had had plenty of power before the war.

  He turned on a faucet, but nothing came out. This was new. Even during the war, there had always been water. Years ago, the tap
water had even been safe enough to drink. He harrumphed. He could survive without a shower, but not without his morning tea. He had to have tea.

  Ahmed was a trim man of medium height with thick black hair and a thin mustache. At the age of twenty-eight, he had the poise of a middle-aged man. He wore a striped Oxford shirt and gray slacks, and carried a leather portfolio.

  A 1988 Chevy Caprice was parked in his driveway. The desert sun had weathered the car from royal blue to the hue of a well-worn pair of jeans. He’d bought it used a few years earlier from a high-ranking member of Saddam’s Baath Party. Ahmed suspected the car had been looted from Kuwait after Iraqi troops invaded in 1990. Every time he got in it, he had the feeling that it didn’t really belong to him.

  As he entered the Caprice, he noticed that it was almost out of gas. He drove to the nearest service station, where the line of cars waiting for fuel stretched for more than a mile. This never happened under Saddam, Ahmed muttered to himself. But then he bit his tongue. He was happy to be free of the dictator. Liberation meant a satellite dish and a well-paying job. And that meant a chance to save enough for a dowry.

  Across from the gas station, greasy kids standing next to jerry cans waved siphon hoses. They charged four dollars a gallon. A gallon of regular was less than a dime at the pump.

  Ahmed finally decided to leave the car at home and hail a taxi to get to work. It would cost a dollar, but he had no choice. He’d lose his job if he didn’t show up.

  “If I was working for Iraqis, it is no problem to be late,” he said. But in the Green Zone, where he worked, “You have to be on time.”