Imperial Life in the Emerald City Read online

  CENTCOM: What’s in the Assyrian vault?

  BODINE (thinking of the “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” line): Assyrian treasure.

  CENTCOM: What’s an Assyrian treasure?

  BODINE: Go read the early chapters of your Bible. It’s old stuff. It’s really, really valuable. We need to save it.

  CENTCOM: Okay. We’ll see what we can do.

  There were no apologies from the military. Rumsfeld’s war plan did not include enough troops to guard government installations in Baghdad and other major cities. Asked about the looting, he brushed it off with the now-famous phrase “Freedom’s untidy.”

  Because of the looting and bedlam in Baghdad, the military refused to allow Garner and his team to move into the Iraqi capital right away. Eight days after the fall of Baghdad, with the military still unwilling to budge, Garner flew to Qatar to see General Tommy Franks, the top military commander in the region.

  “I said, ‘Tommy, you have got to get my team to Baghdad,’” Garner recalled. “And he said, ‘Jay, I’m not going to do that. Hell, they’re still killing people there. I’m not going to send you there.’”

  Garner argued that opportunistic Iraqis were claiming leadership of Baghdad’s local government and police force. “Power vacuums are going to be filled with stuff you and I aren’t going to like, and it’s going to take a long time to get rid of that,” Garner insisted. Franks finally relented and allowed Garner to be flown into Baghdad on April 21, 2003—twelve days after U.S. troops took over the city.

  Carney and his fellow ORHA ministers set out from Kuwait three days later. He and a dozen other senior ORHA personnel waited three hours on the tarmac in Kuwait because the C-130 Hercules transport plane that had been assigned to them was commandeered by a rear-echelon general. Once the ORHA team arrived at Baghdad International Airport, they discovered that the convoy sent to pick them up had left. They had to wait some more.

  When they finally arrived at the Republican Palace, it was a marble tent: there were no lights, no windows, no working toilets or sinks. They had been given sleeping bags in Kuwait, but nobody thought to dole out mosquito nets or other camping supplies issued to soldiers. Nor did ORHA receive the satellite phones they had been promised by military communication specialists. Carney grew increasingly alarmed. It was one thing not to have all the documents he wanted in Kuwait. It was quite another to be in Baghdad without basic living quarters.

  Moving into the Republican Palace had never been the plan. The civilians wanted ORHA to take over a hotel in Baghdad. If the group squatted in a palace, they worried that Iraqis would see them as occupiers. Military personnel within ORHA opposed a hotel, arguing that it would not have a sufficient perimeter to guard against car bombs and small-arms fire, and instead proposed an Iraqi army base on the outskirts of the city, but the civilians insisted that that would be too far away from the ministry buildings they would have to visit every day. With no other good option, ORHA’s leaders agreed to a palace.

  The job of picking a palace fell to Major Peter Veale, an army reservist who was also an architect. During the first week of the war, he walked over to the villa at the Kuwait Hilton inhabited by ORHA’s intelligence team and asked them for information about all the palaces in Baghdad that had not been bombed by the military. When they told him that it would take a few days to respond to his request, Veale went on the Internet. On a Web site called DigitalGlobe, he pulled up images of a massive edifice with a blue dome—the Republican Palace. It seemed ideal. But when he received a list of standing palaces from the intelligence staff, that one wasn’t among the possibilities. He walked back to their villa with the DigitalGlobe printout. “Hey, you didn’t show me this one,” he said. A day later, they called Veale. “We have good news, Major Veale,” one of them said. “Yes, this is a palace and it does exist. But it got hit on the first night of shock-and-awe [bombing] and it’s been pretty much destroyed.” Veale was skeptical. His image of the palace had been taken within the past week. But the intelligence personnel were certain. “Take our word for it,” one analyst said. “These buildings have been pretty well destroyed.”

  So Veale had planned for ORHA to move into the Sijood Palace, a small structure down the river from the Republican Palace. He spent days diagramming the building, identifying where people would work, where cars would be parked, where helicopters would land. A few days after Baghdad fell, he headed up from Kuwait to begin preparations. But when he got to Sijood, he found it rubbled by an American cruise missile. He thought to himself, What am I going to do?

  As he sat outside the palace, a few Special Forces soldiers stopped to talk. Veale recounted his plight. One soldier encouraged him to keep looking. “Hey, man, you have to go down the road,” he said. “There’s a palace that’s fully intact.” When Veale got there, he discovered that it was the same palace he had seen on the DigitalGlobe Web site.

  With Garner due to arrive in less than a week, Veale set about trying to get the lights on and the water running. The American military had bombed the outbuilding that housed the air-conditioning and power-generating units. Getting the water to flow was difficult because he could not find any schematic drawings indicating where the pipes were buried. Trolling through the labyrinthine basement to look for pipes and wiring was harrowing. “We didn’t know if it was booby-trapped,” Veale recalled.

  As Veale conducted his inspections, he was accompanied by a CIA operative searching for weapons of mass destruction. All they found were a few hard-core looters and two bewildered Republican Guard soldiers who had failed to join their buddies in fleeing home a week earlier. Then Veale heard a rumor that one of Uday’s tigers had escaped from its cage and was prowling the palace grounds. Veale soon grew more afraid of running into a feline than a former regime fighter. For the better part of a week, he walked around at night with a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other.

  Tim Carney had hunted elephants, cape buffalo, giraffes, warthogs, and two species of zebra. He owned an elephant gun—a double-barreled, double-triggered weapon whose bullets are almost a half inch in diameter, nearly the size of the largest rifle used by the U.S. Army—and he ate what he shot. The list of exotic animals Carney had bagged was rivaled only by the list of exotic places he had been stationed as a diplomat: Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge converged, Mogadishu in the throes of civil war, Port-au-Prince when American marines waded ashore.

  Carney was tall, soft-spoken, and exceedingly polite. But he also could be blunt and clear-eyed about the failings of American foreign policy. (The chatty American diplomat played by Spalding Gray in the film The Killing Fields was based largely on Carney.) By the time he retired in 2000, he had more experience in hostile places than almost anyone else in the State Department.

  Nine days before the first bombs and cruise missiles pummeled Baghdad, Paul Wolfowitz called Carney. The two men had known each other since the late 1980s, when Wolfowitz was ambassador to Indonesia and Carney was his top political officer. It was a short phone call, with none of the usual reminiscing. Wolfowitz asked Carney to join the team being assembled to handle postwar reconstruction and governance. Carney, always a sucker for adventure, agreed.

  Before he hung up, Wolfowitz expressed unhappiness with the inclusion of State Department personnel on the postwar team. Many of the department’s veteran Middle East hands had been openly skeptical of transforming Iraq into a democracy, as Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives had been advocating. Carney was no neocon, but he defined his politics as “center right,” instead of the center-left label that applies to many in America’s diplomatic corps. Wolfowitz suggested that his old friend call things as he saw them. It was a message that Carney would take to heart—just not as Wolfowitz had intended.

  On his first full day in Baghdad, Carney discovered that the military had assigned so few soldiers to ORHA that only two or three staffers could travel out of the palace at one time. He and his fellow ministerial advisers decided th
at the top priority should go to the American Treasury Department team that wanted to inspect the Central Bank. The bank was atop ORHA’s ignored list of places to protect.

  As three Treasury specialists headed out the door, wearing their flak vests and helmets, senior ORHA staffers assembled for a morning meeting. Ten minutes later, the Treasury staffers returned, walked up to Carney, and asked to borrow the tourist map of Baghdad he had purchased from a Washington travel store before his departure. “The military doesn’t know where it’s going, either,” one of them said. For the next several days, referring to Carney’s map was the only way ORHA staff could identify government buildings in the capital.

  When the Treasury officials finally arrived at the site of the Central Bank, they found the building burned to the ground. No one knew the fate of the Assyrian gold in the underground vaults.

  The next day it was Carney’s turn to visit the Ministry of Industry. He carpooled with Robin Raphel, the adviser to the Trade Ministry. The building was only a half mile across the Tigris River from the palace, but it took them almost half an hour to make the trip. With no policemen at work and no electricity to power the traffic lights, Baghdad’s streets had become a free-for-all. Before the day was over, Carney and Raphel had reached two conclusions: the looting had caused far more damage to Iraq’s infrastructure than the bombing campaign, and the failure to restore order was creating a climate of near-total impunity. Once government buildings had been stripped bare, miscreants began stealing from fellow Iraqis. When electricity was restored—for no more than a few hours at a time—home-owners began tapping distribution lines so they would not have to pay for service. My driver, an English-speaking law student who had not dared to flout a traffic rule before the war, now coolly drove on the wrong side of the street, into opposing traffic at times, to avoid traffic jams. When I asked him what he was doing, he turned to me, smiled, and said, “Mr. Rajiv, democracy is wonderful. Now we can do whatever we want.”

  When Carney got to the Ministry of Industry site, he found pretty much what he had expected: a giant, charred honeycomb. He asked the few ministry employees loitering uncertainly in the parking lot to return with their bosses the next day. They did, along with eight senior ministry officials dressed in blazers and ties. Their first order of business was to find someplace other than the parking lot to meet. They quickly determined that most of the ministry’s other buildings in Baghdad had also been looted. Finally, someone mentioned the State Company for Batteries, whose factory and adjoining offices on a quiet side street in northern Baghdad had not been ransacked. When Americans inquired why the factory had been spared, ministry officials laughed and said that the batteries were so poorly made, even the looters didn’t want them.

  In those chaotic weeks after the war, most phones in Baghdad didn’t have a dial tone. The Americans had bombed the major telephone exchanges and hit the phone company’s headquarters with so many precision-guided bombs that it resembled a giant block of Swiss cheese. Most ORHA members didn’t have satellite phones—and none of them had e-mail at the time—which made it almost impossible for them to communicate with fellow ORHA staffers (or with their families in America). Carney resorted to slipping handwritten notes under his colleagues’ office doors.

  Among Iraqis, the lack of modern technology was no big deal. They had been through this before, in the months after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Baghdad had been shattered by weeks of coalition bombardment. They simply passed messages by word of mouth. And it worked. Within three days, most of the ministry’s managers had reported for duty at the battery factory. Rank-and-file employees showed up too—with banners calling for a purge of the old guard.

  I was on my way to another appointment when I saw the commotion outside the factory. As I walked to the front gate, I met a clean-cut, thirty-year-old laboratory technician named Mohammed Sabah who was holding a cloth banner that read WE DEMAND NEW MANAGEMENT FREE FROM THE PAST REGIME’S THUGS. Sabah, who worked for the al-Sawari Chemical Manufacturing Company, one of forty-eight enterprises owned by the ministry, said that he and seventy fellow employees were protesting the reinstatement of the company’s director, a man who Sabah said was corrupt and deeply involved in Saddam’s Baath Party. “We want an independent, non-Baathist, honest administrator who will look into the welfare of the employees,” Sabah declared to the applause of his obstreperous co-workers.

  Inside the factory’s gate, the mood was no less tense. Dozens of senior ministry officials milled in front of the director’s office. The men said that the office had been taken over by Ahmed Rashid Gailani, the Baathist deputy minister of industry in Saddam’s government. He, with the apparent support of several factory directors, had anointed himself as the new minister. At that moment, the men said, Gailani was meeting with his first official visitor: a tall American man with a straw hat named Mister Carney.

  Although Carney had introduced himself as the “senior adviser” to the ministry, the men assembled outside the director’s office knew he was the new boss. He had arrived with gun-toting soldiers and a leather portfolio. He had the demeanor of a man who had been around and wasn’t about to put up with any nonsense.

  The men wondered if Carney would let Gailani stay on as minister, and if the protesters would get what they wanted. But more significantly, they wondered how Carney would deal with people who had been affiliated with the Baath Party. Would it be an automatic disqualification as the protesters wanted, or would it be a nonissue?

  A stocky man in an olive safari suit introduced himself to me as Jabbar Kadhim, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the ministry. He was the director of the ministry’s technical section. He said his division was responsible for repairing equipment in state-run factories. He also said he was a “sectional” member—one of the top three levels—of the Baath Party.

  Surprised by his candor (most Iraqis I had met until then had disavowed any association with the party), I asked if his membership would disqualify him from serving in a senior ministry job. Kadhim launched into a tirade.

  “There’s no Iraqi who was not in the party,” he insisted. He claimed that there were seven million members, which I took to be an outlandish exaggeration. Most reliable estimates put party membership at somewhere between one million and two million.

  “Most of them are highly educated and technical,” he continued. “In the past, if you weren’t a Baathist, you wouldn’t be able to rise in the hierarchy.”

  That was true. While the party did have plenty of thugs, many of Iraq’s most capable scientists, engineers, and other professionals also belonged. To gain admission to the best colleges and graduate schools, to get a coveted government job, to get a promotion, you had to be a member. If you excelled at your job, you might be promoted into the party’s upper ranks, even if that was not something you sought. Turning down a promotion could get you fired or sent to jail.

  Soon I was able to walk inside the director’s office, where Gailani announced that he and Carney had made a decision about the chemical company. The protesters would get what they wanted. The director, who was deemed to be a high-ranking party member, would be dismissed. Carney said he would obtain an order to that effect from Jay Garner.

  I asked Gailani about his own association with the party. As a former deputy minister, I noted, he certainly had to be a member. He insisted he was only “in a very low rank.”

  “I went to a meeting once every three months,” he said. “I said I was very busy in the ministry.”

  I couldn’t determine just then if he was telling the truth.

  When Carney left the room, I followed him and asked how he was addressing the issue of past party involvement. There was no clear directive, he said. He and the other senior advisers were relying on their judgment. “Among the Iraqis, everyone knows who was either too bad or too Baath,” he said. “The bottom line is the ultimate triage is going to be with the future Iraqi authority. If we are introduced to someone who was either active in the production or
development of weapons of mass destruction or in terrorism or a major human rights violator, we will remove those people as we become aware of them. Others will be subjected more to an Iraqi process than a coalition process.”

  Kadhim, the senior party member in the safari suit, didn’t hear what Carney told me. All he knew was that the chemical company director was getting the boot. As I walked out of the building, he stopped me with a finger-wagging admonition: “If the [Baath] party members are treated in a normal manner and they are given their rights, there will be no more party,” he said. “If not, the Baath Party will rise again.”

  Back at the palace, Carney was becoming increasingly dispirited. ORHA seemed to be a mess.

  Part of the problem was that the military did not appear to care about helping ORHA, whose civilian staffers needed more amenities than the average grunt. Carney and other veteran diplomats deemed showers and laundry facilities essential. They had to meet Iraqi government workers who, despite the privation of postwar Baghdad, were showing up at ministries dressed in suits and ties. But water was not always flowing in the palace. Clothes handed over to the military’s laundry service, run by Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, were returned after two weeks, if at all. Instead of finding a laundry in Baghdad or hiring Iraqis to wash items by hand, KBR sent the garments to Kuwait. Cell phone service, which the army had promised to start within weeks of liberation, was nonexistent. So, too, were computers. Getting basic supplies from the military was equally frustrating. Metal-frame canvas cots, which the army brought to Baghdad by the truckload, were not issued to civilians in ORHA. Most galling to Carney was the lack of transportation. There were only about ten military police escort convoys for the more than three dozen ORHA personnel who needed to leave the palace every day.

  Unwilling to remain sequestered in the palace, Carney disregarded rules requiring travel in two-vehicle convoys with at least two long-barreled weapons. He tucked a borrowed nine-millimeter Beretta handgun into his waistband, donned his straw hat, and drove his Halliburton-issued GMC Suburban out of the palace grounds by himself. He soon learned his way around Baghdad so well that he stopped consulting his maps. He found Baghdad’s best restaurant, a Lebanese place called Nabil’s, and became a regular at lunch. In the palace, there was no alcohol in the dining hall. At Nabil’s, lunch for Carney included at least one well-chilled, sixteen-ounce can—two if it was a rough day at the ministry—of Efes pilsner from Turkey.