Imperial Life in the Emerald City Read online

  Garner appeared to be “a deer in the headlights,” said Timothy Carney, a retired ambassador who was asked to join ORHA by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary. Garner asked Carney what job he wanted. Carney offered to be ORHA’s ombudsman but added that the State Department was seeking to have him named interim minister of industry and minerals. Carney had no background in industry or minerals, but that didn’t matter to the upper echelons at State. Carney was their guy, and they wanted as many of their guys as they could get in senior positions at ORHA. Garner agreed that Carney should run the Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Garner’s team was heading to Kuwait in two days. Carney, who needed training and equipment before he could deploy, would join them later. “See you in Kuwait,” Garner said.

  The rest of ORHA was assembled in a similar helter-skelter fashion. The Ministry of Education was assigned to a midlevel bureaucrat from the Treasury Department. Another former ambassador, with no prior trade experience, was told to run the Trade Ministry. Stephen Browning, an engineer from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was asked to head up four separate ministries: transportation and communications, housing and construction, irrigation, and electricity; a week after the fall of Baghdad, he got a fifth—health. ORHA staffers were smart and well intentioned, but they weren’t experts in their areas of responsibility, they didn’t have much background working in the Middle East, and they were overloaded. Carney had one deputy to help him run the Industry and Minerals Ministry, which had more than one hundred thousand employees.

  Back in Feith’s office, there was no cause for alarm. According to two people who worked for him, the intention was never to have large teams of American specialists at the ready to run Iraqi ministries. When the war ended, it was anticipated that Iraqi civil servants would return to work and the ministries would run themselves. An interim government, presumably led by Chalabi, would select new ministers. The assumption was that the best-case scenario would prevail.

  The ORHA team soon found itself plagued with the same internecine rivalries between the Pentagon and the State Department that had poisoned attempts over the years to formulate a unified plan for dealing with Iraq. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, wanted as many of their people as possible on Garner’s team. They regarded the presence of seasoned diplomats and Arabic-speaking Middle East specialists within ORHA as a bulwark against attempts to hand power over to Chalabi and other exiled politicians. State deemed it essential to involve Iraqis who had been living in Iraq in the creation of a transitional government. Pentagon officials believed that State’s old-school Arabists were making excuses to justify their belief that democracy wouldn’t work in the Arab world. In the Pentagon, the view was that Chalabi and his colleagues were going to lead the way in creating a secular, stable democracy. The White House let both sides snipe at each other.

  It was not until two days before Garner departed for Kuwait that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took a hard look at the team Feith and Garner had assembled. The next day, Rumsfeld summoned Garner. According to Garner’s account of the discussion, Rumsfeld began with an apology.

  “Jay, I haven’t paid enough attention to you,” he said. “I should have given you more of my time.”

  Then he proceeded to question the credentials of several top ORHA staffers, particularly those from the State Department. “He said, ‘I’m just uncomfortable with these people,’” Garner recalled. “I said, ‘Uh, it’s too late for you to be uncomfortable with them. I’m leaving tomorrow.’”

  “He said, ‘I’ll get you new people.’”

  “I said, ‘You don’t have time to get me new people.’”

  After more back-and-forth, Rumsfeld asked Garner to look over his staff list and indicate who “you absolutely have to keep.”

  “And I said, ‘By the way, who would DOD have that’s qualified to do agriculture?’ And he didn’t say anything, so I said, ‘How about education?’ And I went down [the list] and I said, ‘How about banking? Who could do banking?’ So he said, ‘Look, I don’t want to argue with you on this one, but I’m gonna get you better people.’”

  As soon as Garner left, Rumsfeld blocked the departure of senior State Department personnel assigned to ORHA on the grounds that they were “too low-profile and bureaucratic.” He relented only after Powell called and threatened to pull every State employee from ORHA, which undoubtedly would have been front-page news. The Pentagon wanted as few State people on the team as possible, but not at the price of a public-relations embarrassment.

  When Garner’s advance team arrived in Kuwait in early March, they were informed that there was no room for ORHA at any of the military bases in the city-state. They would have to find their own accommodations. The only place with enough beds was a Hilton beach resort, which set aside a wing of luxury villas for Garner and 168 other ORHA members, who arrived in Kuwait the day before the war began. The group spent almost six weeks consuming gourmet meals and sipping sparkling water as they worked up plans to deliver food rations and drinking water to Iraqi civilians. The Hilton’s two-story, cream-colored villas had down pillows, flat-screen televisions, maids’ quarters, and breezy balconies overlooking the Persian Gulf.

  Meetings consumed much of the mornings, but most were rambling affairs lacking specificity. Because everyone assumed that Iraq would be in the throes of a humanitarian crisis after the war, several sessions were devoted to planning the distribution of food and water. Garner also convened “rock drills,” military-speak for simulation exercises. One drill assumed that corpses would be littering the streets of Baghdad, electricity would be out, and parts of the city would be on fire. Some ORHA members regarded the scenarios as far-fetched, but they nonetheless talked about how they would respond. They knew they didn’t have enough staff or equipment, but they figured they would have military units at their disposal to provide transportation, communication, and other much-needed assistance.

  It wasn’t that Garner didn’t have a plan. The one he had was titled “A Unified Mission Plan for Post Hostilities Iraq.” It was marked SECRET/REL USA MCFI, meaning it could be shared only among Americans with appropriate security clearances and vetted members of governments who had joined Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” By the time Garner arrived in Kuwait, the second draft of the document had grown to twenty-five pages. It began with a one-page introduction written by Garner. The first sentence was both prescient and banal: “History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.”

  The first section cautioned against staying too long. The document went on to warn of potential civil disorder and noted that the “establishment of a secure environment is the highest priority military task.” But key parts of one of the document’s most important sections were noticeably blank. Section 8—the civil administration pillar—lacked a mission statement, a concept of operations, key objectives, or time lines. Those parts of the document were unfilled less than a week before American marines felled Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.

  The responsibility for pulling together a civil administration plan rested with Mobbs, Feith’s former law partner and a former arms control official in the Reagan administration. Mobbs had spent months in the Pentagon working up strategies to fight the oil well fires that Iraqi troops were expected to ignite as American troops invaded. He had no prior experience in the Middle East, no history of working with Iraqi exiles, and no exposure to other post-conflict reconstruction operations. He quickly lost the confidence of Carney and the other State Department personnel assigned to his pillar. In Kuwait, Mobbs would convene a morning meeting of the people on his team and then he’d vanish. “He was not a leader. He didn’t know what to do,” one ex-ambassador said. “He just cowered in his room most of the time.” The State people began to joke that Mobbs couldn’t organize a two-car funeral. A week after the ORHA team arrived in Baghdad, Garner sent Mobbs back to Washington.


  David Dunford, a retired ambassador who was put in charge of the Foreign Ministry, was among the fortunate few to receive a briefing packet before his deployment. In it was a four-page memo about the ministry that seemed to Dunford as though it had been written by a summer intern at the State Department. When his requests for more information from State went unanswered, he posted a plaintive query for advice on an Internet message board frequented by Middle East specialists. The gist of his message, Dunford said, was “Here I am and I don’t have a clue as to what to do.”

  Carney, who was given no guidance or information about the Ministry of Industry and Minerals, also spent his afternoons in Kuwait trolling the Internet. He found a biography of the Iraqi minister, but little more. He had no idea how many workers the ministry had or how many factories and state-run companies there were. He began surfing online for books. He ordered the translated works of al-Mutanabi, Iraq’s most famous poet. Miraculously, they arrived before he left for Baghdad. He quickly settled upon his favorite line: “When a lion shows its teeth, do not assume he’s smiling at you.”

  Although he enjoyed the poetry, there was one set of documents Carney desperately wanted but could not get: the reports of the Future of Iraq Project.

  According to people who were privy to what little postwar planning was conducted by the U.S. government, including the classified reports produced by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, the Future of Iraq Project was Washington’s best attempt to prepare for the post-Saddam era. Run by midlevel State Department personnel, the project organized more than two hundred Iraqi exiles into seventeen different working groups to study issues of critical importance in the postwar period, including the reconstruction of shattered infrastructure, the creation of free media, the preservation of antiquities, the administration of justice during the transition, the development of the moribund economy, and, most important, the formation of a democratic government. The working groups produced reports with policy recommendations that totaled about 2,500 pages. Although the finished product was far from exhaustive—it lacked, for instance, a feasible blueprint for how to form a new Iraqi government—it nevertheless was the most ambitious initiative to identify what needed to be done upon liberation.

  The task of organizing the project fell to Thomas Warrick, an international lawyer who had left a lucrative private practice five years earlier to work on war crimes at State. The war crimes job had led him to Saddam’s villainy and, eventually, to the Iraqi opposition. Warrick spoke in rapid-fire sentences and always seemed to be in the middle of a crisis. He had the pudginess of a man who spent too much time at the office. His fans and detractors—of whom there were many—agreed that he was both whip-smart and overbearing; they disagreed on which trait was more dominant.

  The first that Garner heard of the Future of Iraq Project was on February 21—a little more than a month after he was hired—at a predeployment rock drill he convened at the National Defense University in Washington. He knew that others in government had been thinking about postwar Iraq and he wanted to pick their brains. When he entered the conference room, he was amazed that there were more than a hundred people in attendance. As the meeting got under way, Garner noticed that a man in the front row kept asking questions and making comments. At first, Garner was annoyed. But as the session continued, it became clear that the man was asking the right questions and providing insightful comments. At a break, Garner walked up to him.

  “You seem to know a hell of a lot about this stuff,” Garner said.

  “I’ve been studying it for a year and a half.”

  “Have you now?” Garner said. “What’s your name?”

  “Tom Warrick.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “The State Department.”

  “Well, you don’t need to be sitting here. You need to be working for me.”

  Warrick joined Garner’s team within two days. A week later, Rumsfeld approached Garner.

  “Hey, Jay, do you have anyone in your organization named Warrick?” Rumsfeld asked. When Garner said he did, Rumsfeld told him to remove Warrick from ORHA.

  “Why?” Garner replied. “Warrick has a difficult personality, but he’s probably the smartest guy I’ve got.”

  “Look, I got this request from above me,” the defense secretary said. “I can’t defer it. You’re just going to have to do what I ask.”

  Garner said he was told later that Dick Cheney had objected to Warrick’s involvement in ORHA. The reason, like so many foolish decisions before the war, had to do with Ahmad Chalabi. Warrick regarded Chalabi as a smarmy opportunist who believed in democracy only so long as it suited his own interests. The vice president’s office, which wanted Chalabi to lead a liberated Iraq, deemed Warrick a threat to its man.

  Upon leaving Rumsfeld’s office, Garner told one of his aides to inform Warrick that he’d have to return to the State Department. With Warrick gone, Garner never got to see any of the Future of Iraq reports.

  THE GREEN ZONE, SCENE I

  As I stepped out of the Republican Palace, Lieutenant Peppers called after me. “Hey, you want to see the animals?”

  We headed to a neighboring palace in a Humvee, driving along the banks of the Tigris where, just two days earlier, Peppers’s battalion had fought against soldiers from Saddam’s Special Republican Guard. When we arrived, Peppers led the way through knee-high weeds to a fenced enclosure. “Let’s see,” he said. “We have seven lions, two cheetahs, and one brown bear.” The adorable lions were not quite cubs, but not yet full grown. (Before the war, I heard that Uday, Saddam’s elder son, would drive around Baghdad in a Rolls-Royce with lion cubs on his lap.) The bear cowered in the shade. The temperature was already in the nineties—and it was only April. I wondered how he’d survive the summer. And the cheetahs… where were they? I called out to Peppers. He couldn’t see them, either. Alarmed, he grabbed his radio and summoned his men from the Humvee. “Be ready with your guns,” he barked. “We may have two cheetahs on the loose.”

  A dozen soldiers swooped around Uday’s menagerie, switching off the safeties on their M16 rifles. Then we saw the two spotted adolescent cheetahs skulking out of a small shed inside the enclosure. Everyone chuckled. Rifles were clicked back into safe mode and slung over shoulders.

  When the soldiers had arrived at the palace, the animals appeared to be dying of hunger and thirst. The groundskeepers who fed them had apparently fled. The soldiers brought the animals water but they didn’t know what to do for food. Then one sergeant found a bunch of sheep in a pen, and he tossed one into the enclosure. It was mealtime.

  But the supply of sheep was running low. A conversation about the Geneva Convention ensued. What obligation does an occupying military power have to care for animals? Nobody knew. Peppers didn’t want the animals to starve. He figured he could sneak some military rations to them for a few days, until help arrived. He’d heard that hundreds of American civilians were coming to run the country.

  “They’ll have the answers,” he said.

  3

  You’re in Charge!

  A FEW HOURS AFTER the American tank toppled the statue of Saddam in front of the Palestine Hotel, the looters arrived at the Ministry of Industry’s ten-story headquarters. Seeing no troops there, the first bands of thieves set upon the concrete-and-glass building like wild animals on a carcass. First to go were computers, telephones, and other easy-to-pilfer items. Next came the furniture and file cabinets. Then the hard-core scavengers pulled out wiring and metal ducting from the walls. Over the following hours, Iraqis arrived with pickup trucks and even ten-ton government dump trucks, which themselves had been stolen. After two days, the building was torched, sending a plume of smoke billowing into the sky.

  Tim Carney watched the looting of Baghdad on CNN, in his beachfront villa in Kuwait. He couldn’t make out which ministry was his—nobody had given him a picture of the Ministry of Industry or even the geographic coordinates—but he felt certain th
at it was among those being ransacked and burned. The prospect of running his ministry without a building, without inventory records or balance sheets, made him feel ill.

  Other ORHA ministers-to-be shared Carney’s dread. When the looting began, several of them gathered around a television and played a macabre parlor game: They tried to guess which of the buildings they saw being pillaged might be theirs. “It was like, ‘There goes your ministry!’ ‘There goes mine!’” recalled Robin Raphel, the interim trade minister. They assumed that soldiers were on the way.

  Their dismay turned to anger after they realized that no troops had been assigned to protect their ministries, and that there were no immediate plans to commit forces to guard “static sites.” At the time, the only government building protected by American troops, other than the Republican Palace, was the Ministry of Oil. Two weeks earlier, the ORHA ministers had worked up a list of sites in Baghdad that needed security. Atop the list was the Central Bank. Then came the National Museum. The Oil Ministry was at the bottom. Weeks later, ORHA personnel discovered that the military had failed to transmit the list to ground commanders in Baghdad.

  Even as the impact of the looting was becoming clear, ORHA could not prod the military into action. When Barbara Bodine, a veteran diplomat and Arabic speaker who was to become the interim mayor of Baghdad, got word from an Iraqi contact that looters were perilously close to breaking into a vault under the Central Bank that housed a priceless collection of Assyrian gold, she fired off an e-mail to the U.S. Central Command. The exchange, as she and a State Department official in Washington who was copied on the messages remember it, went something like this:

  BODINE: The Assyrian vault under the Central Bank is in immediate danger of being looted. We need to get on this.