Imperial Life in the Emerald City Read online

  In the taxi, he paused for a moment before telling the driver where to go. “Peace be upon you,” he said. “The Convention Center, please.”

  The Convention Center was the main public entrance into the Green Zone.

  “Oh, do you work with the Americans?” the driver asked.

  “Of course not,” he said. “My brother was taken by the American troops. I’m trying to find out where he is.”

  “May God help you,” the driver said.

  “Inshallah,” Ahmed said. God willing.

  In the taxi, a Volkswagen hatchback with worn upholstery and no air-conditioning, he watched the city crawl by. The traffic lights weren’t working, the traffic police weren’t on duty, the Americans had shut down several main roads, and the CPA had eliminated tariffs on imported vehicles, which had resulted in an influx of cheap used cars from seemingly every European nation. Before the war, the trip from Ahmed’s home in eastern Baghdad to the Convention Center took ten minutes. After the Americans arrived, it took more than an hour.

  Iraqis who used to stay in their lanes and use turn signals now drove on the shoulders and sidewalks. But the worst offenders were the American soldiers. They drove like they owned the place, sometimes crossing the median and barreling toward oncoming traffic.

  The taxi crossed the Tigris River and passed the Assassin’s Gate, the northern entrance to the Green Zone, where scores of young men were holding a protest. They were unemployed and wanted jobs from the Americans. A dozen soldiers watched from the gate, ready to block off the road with barbed wire and a tank if the crowd tried to enter.

  The taxi passed a chockablock row of shops and stopped at the next intersection. This was as far as the driver could get. From there, Ahmed would have to walk to the Convention Center.

  I had first met Ahmed a few days earlier, while we were standing in line to enter the Green Zone. He didn’t tell me what he did right away. It wasn’t until I shared details of my life that he admitted he worked as an interpreter for the American army.

  Ahmed and I talked as we waited to pass through three separate checkpoints. He had to present two forms of photo identification and then submit to a pat-down and a search of his belongings.

  “They treat me like everyone else off the street,” Ahmed sniffed. He put his life on the line by working with American soldiers six days a week. The least they could do, he believed, was to let him enter in a separate queue, with one pat-down.

  After we made it through the third checkpoint, we were inside the Green Zone. We had been funneled onto a broad sidewalk leading to the Convention Center and the al-Rasheed.

  Before the Americans arrived, Ahmed had never been inside the part of the Green Zone that had been walled off by Saddam. When he saw those areas, he had no mental image to compare with the present. But he had driven on the boulevard in front of the Convention Center hundreds of times, and the sight of it now was jarring. Before the war, the eight-lane-wide road was the thoroughfare from central Baghdad to the main highways heading north to Mosul, south to Hilla, and west to the airport, to Fallujah and to the Jordanian border. Then, cars had zipped along at sixty miles an hour. Now it was blocked off with concrete barriers. Three Humvees used the road as a parking lot.

  “This doesn’t feel like Iraq,” he said of the Green Zone. “It feels like America.”

  I pointed out that in America, we didn’t see Humvees parked on the street and that roads were not barricaded.

  “Yes, but you have to admit, everything works in here,” he said. “The lights. The faucets. The food. It is not like the rest of Baghdad. It’s like America.”

  “Things are really improving,” Mark Schroeder declared. He couldn’t get into the details. Those were classified. But he wanted me to know that the bar graphs and trend lines were headed in the right direction.

  “Do you ever interview Iraqis?” I asked.

  “That’s handled by someone else,” he replied. “I don’t do public opinion. I deal with the raw data.”

  Other CPA staffers did talk to Iraqis at length, but many of those Americans mistakenly assumed that the hundreds of Iraqis who worked for the CPA as translators, secretaries, and janitors represented their twenty-five million countrymen. Those Iraqis on the inside knew they had great jobs—they earned as much as ten times more than the average Iraqi civil servant—and they weren’t about to risk their paycheck by complaining about the occupation or informing the Americans that their plans were foolhardy. Instead, they heaped praise on their masters, telling them everything they wanted to hear and minimizing any bad news.

  A few thousand other Iraqis lived inside the Green Zone, in bungalows along tree-lined streets between the palace and the al-Rasheed. They were a mix of Sunnis and Shiites who had had jobs in the palace before the war but were too low in the ranks of the Baath Party to flee or wind up in American custody. They traveled outside the walls all the time, to work, to shop, to see relatives. Some of them even spoke English, and had Americans in the palace offered to listen to them, they would have heard an unvarnished description of life in the real Baghdad. But except for the odd, adventurous CPA staffer, most Americans didn’t bother seeking out their Iraqi neighbors.

  Schroeder and his fellow CPA staffers kept abreast of developments in Iraq by watching Fox News and reading Stars and Stripes, which was printed in Germany and flown daily to Baghdad. Some used the Internet to scan their hometown newspapers. But none of those news outlets had much information about the Green Zone.

  There was no Green Zone newsletter. Information—and rumor—was shared by word of mouth. When an army officer was stabbed on the way to his trailer one night, everyone assumed a knife-wielding insurgent was on the loose. Investigators quickly determined that the attacker was a fellow American, but that information was never shared with CPA staffers. For weeks, they looked over their shoulders.

  Inside the Green Zone, the concern wasn’t that too little information was being disseminated; it was that too many secrets were at risk. World War II–era posters urging vigilance were tacked up in the palace. One depicted the hand of Uncle Sam muzzling a fedora-clad man. QUIET! LOOSE TALK CAN COST LIVES, the poster warned. Another showed a cocker spaniel resting his head dejectedly on the chair of a dead soldier. Below it were the words… BECAUSE SOMEBODY TALKED!

  There were some CPA personnel who damned the torpedoes and traveled outside the bubble to meet and talk to Iraqis, to eat in their homes and shop in the local markets. To those who got outside, the Green Zone came to seem like a fantasyland. They began to call their home the Emerald City.

  2

  A Deer in the Headlights

  I HAD MY FIRST LOOK INSIDE what would become the Emerald City two days after an American tank toppled a garish statue of Saddam in front of the Palestine Hotel. I crossed the al-Jumhuriya Bridge on foot, passing bullet-riddled vehicles and a dead donkey, before turning into the Assassin’s Gate. A tank idled under the sandstone arch. It had flattened the imposing iron gate, but its turret pointed outward, an unambiguous message that what lay inside was not open for looting. I flashed my press pass, and the tank commander–turned–bouncer waved me inside. It’s a long walk, he warned.

  No more than a hundred yards from the tank, I spotted two bedraggled men staggering out of a white stucco villa, their arms full of crystal light fixtures. These were bold looters. They had either sneaked around the tank or had scaled one of the walls nobody had dared to look over a week earlier. When I went up to them, the older one introduced himself as Ahmed Mohsen, a farmer from Kut, a city southeast of Baghdad. I followed him inside the villa, where we found a professional, competition-grade billiards table, gold-inlaid doors, and marble floors.

  “We live in mud houses. We don’t have water,” Mohsen growled. “Our lives are terrible, and he lives like this?”

  I didn’t break it to him that the villa wasn’t Saddam’s house, that the dictator had lived in far grander surroundings.

  I forged on, passing buildings evisce
rated by American munitions, intersections littered with copper shell casings, bunkers reeking with the unmistakable odor of decomposing bodies. A laminated identification card on the sidewalk caught my eye. It belonged to a Republican Guard soldier. There was a small notebook nearby. An Iraqi friend picked it up and flipped through the pages. “This is bullshit,” he said as he read. “It’s all praise for Saddam.”

  At the palace, a group of soldiers stood guard to repel even the most determined looters. Seeing my credentials, one of them summoned his lieutenant, an animated young West Point graduate named Joe Peppers. Peppers was in a jovial mood because for the first time in the three-week race to Baghdad, he had relieved himself in a toilet instead of a hole in the desert. “Not just any toilet,” he said. “It was one of Saddam’s gilded toilets!” He offered to give me a tour of the palace.

  I had been in one of Saddam’s homes before. Four months before the war, the Information Ministry had invited foreign journalists inside one of his smaller palaces after United Nations weapons inspectors had paid an unannounced visit to the palace and found nothing. The tour was intended to mock the inspectors. I remembered a green plastic fly swatter displayed on a wooden rack atop a table, and I was expecting more of the same kitsch in the Republican Palace.

  Peppers heaved open an enormous gilded door and let me inside. As the door creaked shut, he pulled out his flashlight. The power was out inside the palace, as it was across Baghdad. It would be a few more days before American engineers would discover the giant generators Saddam had installed to ensure his palace was not beholden to the country’s rickety electrical grid.

  I followed the narrow beam of his torch, heeding admonitions to beware of stairs and debris. The marble floor, caked with dirt and broken glass, crunched as we walked. Blast waves from the American shock-and-awe bombing campaign had shattered all the windows early in the war, allowing fine desert sand to blow inside and coat everything. I felt as if we were entering a medieval castle that had been boarded up for a century.

  “Guess how many rooms are in here,” Peppers said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe a hundred?”

  “Two hundred and fifty-eight,” he said. “Can you believe it?”

  He had dispatched one of his privates to count. It took him an hour.

  Everything seemed gigantic. Our first stop was a ballroom the size of a football field. The walls were adorned with friezes depicting Iraq’s eighteen provinces. At the end of the room was a balcony. Peppers hadn’t been to Versailles or Buckingham Palace or even to Hearst Castle. His only point of reference was the United States Military Academy.

  “Wow,” he gasped as he entered the ballroom. “This is even bigger than the dining hall at West Point.”

  Next on the tour was a meeting room as big as two basketball courts. Peppers’s flashlight illuminated one elaborate chandelier after another. Then it was off to the basement movie theater, the spacious swimming pool, and a room that looked like a bordello, with cherry red carpeting and mirrors on the walls. Most of the rooms had been stripped of furniture and files. What remained were tacky knockoffs of French provincial furniture: ornate armchairs with orange upholstery and golden trim. At the end of one hallway hung a plaque that read PALACE OF THE PEOPLE.

  We ended up in a giant marble rotunda. Peppers stopped talking and turned off his light. We were in the very center of the palace. Despite the lack of air-conditioning, the darkened room felt almost chilly. All I could hear was Peppers’s breathing. Life outside—the looting, the firefights, the chaos in the streets—felt a world away.

  On the way out, we passed by the half dozen rooms into which Peppers’s battalion was crammed. With so much space, I asked him why they had not spread out. He answered without hesitation.

  “We feel the less we occupy, the easier it is to move out when a new government is named,” Peppers said. “We’re not going to be here long.”

  President George W. Bush gave the order to begin planning for the invasion of Iraq just a few months after the September 11, 2001, attacks. But the Pentagon’s planning for what to do after the war did not commence until the following fall. It was a task delegated to Douglas J. Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who headed a secretive cell called the Office of Special Plans, which mined intelligence reports for data to make the case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and was in cahoots with al-Qaeda.

  Feith was a fan of Ahmad Chalabi, a divisive and mercurial exile who headed a political organization called the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi, an MIT-trained mathematician who wore bespoke suits, was persona non grata at the State Department and the CIA, where officials regarded him as corrupt and unpopular among Iraqis. But within the neoconservative orbit, which passed through Feith’s office, Chalabi’s glib talk about creating a secular democracy, one that would embrace the West and recognize Israel, was just what they wanted to hear. He became the neocons’ dream candidate to rule after Saddam was toppled.

  Feith’s office conducted its postwar planning with utmost secrecy. There was little coordination with the State Department or the CIA, or even with post-conflict reconstruction experts within the Pentagon, and there was an aversion to dwelling on worst-case scenarios that might diminish support for the invasion. Feith’s team viewed the mission as a war of liberation that would require only modest postwar assistance. They assumed that Iraqis would quickly undertake responsibility for running their country and rebuilding their infrastructure.

  On January 17, 2003, two months before the war began, Feith called Jay Garner, a retired lieutenant general, and asked him to take charge of postwar Iraq. It wouldn’t be for long, Feith said, perhaps for just ninety days after the war. By then, Feith predicted, an Iraqi government would be formed and an American ambassador would be dispatched to Baghdad.

  Garner was an avuncular man, short but solid, with gray hair, metal-frame glasses, and a bourbon-smooth drawl. He exuded Southern hospitality mixed with country-boy informality, greeting people with a firm handshake and bidding them farewell with a back-slapping hug. Feith had called Garner because, for a brief period in 1991, after the Persian Gulf War, Garner had run the American military operation to protect ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq. He knew Iraqis, and he had experience providing humanitarian aid on Iraqi soil. He wasn’t eager to return to a war zone—he had a lucrative defense contracting job and a comfortable life in Orlando, Florida—but he was a soldier: when your country asks, you serve.

  When Garner arrived at the Pentagon in January, he had no staff and no blueprint for the job ahead. He was assigned to what he called a broom closet in Feith’s suite. His first calls were to a few of his buddies—fellow retired generals—whom he beseeched to help him. Over the next few weeks, several military reservists were sent his way, as was a small group from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and a handful of other civilian government employees. The State Department also insisted on seconding a few of its diplomats. Some of those who joined Garner’s team were first-rate; others were the dregs of the federal bureaucracy.

  Everything in the Pentagon has an acronym. Garner’s group became known as ORHA, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Weeks later, several ORHA staffers joked that the acronym stood for Organization of Really Hapless Americans. Others referred to Garner and his fellow retired generals as the Space Cowboys, a reference to the Clint Eastwood movie in which a bunch of geriatric ex-astronauts blast off to save the world.

  Garner claimed he never received any of the plans that were produced by Feith and his deputies. In fact, he said he didn’t know that Feith’s office was engaged in planning for the postwar administration of Iraq until ten days after he arrived in Baghdad, when his deputy, Ronald Adams, one of the Space Cowboys, returned to Washington because of a lung infection. Adams spent a few days working in the Pentagon and discovered there that Feith’s operation was working up policies for how to purge members of Saddam’s Baath Party, what t
o do with Iraq’s army, and how to install Chalabi and other trusted exiles as national leaders. An incredulous Adams called Garner and said, “Hey, you know there’s a whole damn planning section on postwar Iraq here?”

  “No way,” Garner replied. “Did they just put it together?”

  “I think it’s been here for a long time,” Adams said.

  “What are they doing?”

  “I have no idea. They won’t let me see the stuff.”

  What Garner also did not see, but which would have been far more useful, was any of the reams of postwar plans and memoranda produced by the State Department, or any of the analyses generated by the CIA, or even the unclassified report written by the military’s own National Defense University based on a two-day workshop involving more than seventy scholars and experts. Garner asked Feith for copies of planning documents that had been drawn up in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the U.S. government. Garner said Feith told him that nothing useful existed and that he should develop his own plans. Feith’s hope, as articulated to others in the Pentagon, was that without a clear blueprint for the political transition, Garner would turn to Chalabi and his band of exiles. Feith would get the outcome he wanted without provoking a fight ahead of time with State and the CIA, both of which regarded Chalabi as a fraud.

  Flying blind, Garner divided ORHA into what he called “three pillars”: humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, and civil administration. He further divided his team into three administrative zones. But his zones bore no resemblance to the boundaries of Iraq’s provinces or to the placement of military forces. Given his previous experience in Iraq and a series of dire warnings by the United Nations that disease, hunger, and population displacement could affect millions of Iraqis in the event of war, most of Garner’s attention was devoted to planning for a humanitarian crisis. Reconstruction was the domain of a team from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Civil administration—the most important pillar, as it turned out—was handed off to Michael Mobbs, Feith’s former law partner. Garner paid little attention to that “pillar.”