Imperial Life in the Emerald City Read online

  When the White House approached Jerry about going to Iraq, Francie said that the couple “held hands and prayed about it.”

  In Baghdad, Bremer attended Mass every Sunday in the palace chapel, the vast room adorned with a mural of a Scud missile.

  Before departing for Baghdad, Bremer told an associate that he planned to “make some bold decisions.” He was coming to bail water from the foundering ship and set it on a new course.

  After accepting the job as CPA administrator, he spent a week in briefings and meetings at the Pentagon. He asked for proposals that could be put into action right away. He heard about plans to repair schools and power plants, but he knew Iraqis wouldn’t see the results immediately. Shooting looters on sight would be bold, and he even proposed this at his first staff meeting in Baghdad, but he eventually concluded that such an action would be too politically risky. Forming an interim government at once, as Garner was trying to do, would be significant, but Bremer feared that Iraqi political leaders weren’t ready. Then he heard about de-Baathification.

  Bremer had concluded on his own that senior members of Saddam’s Baath Party would have to be purged, and that lower-ranking members would have to renounce their affiliation. He compared it to the de-Nazification undertaken by the Allies after World War II. But he didn’t know much about the Baath Party’s structure and operations.

  Doug Feith’s office was armed with answers. In the months leading up to the war, there had been a vigorous debate between the Pentagon and the State Department over the scope of de-Baathification. State advocated a policy of “de-Saddamification,” which entailed purging two classes of Baathists: those who had committed crimes and those at the very top of the command structure. Defense had a more expansive view. Influenced by a paper on de-Nazification written by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, Feith’s office advocated a broader purge, as well as a prohibition on rank-and-file members holding senior government posts. The CIA agreed with State, while the vice president’s office weighed in with the Pentagon. The dispute eventually made its way to the White House, where the National Security Council tried to strike a compromise: Those in the highest ranks of the Baath Party—about 1 percent of the membership—would be fired from government jobs. Others would be subjected to a South Africa–style “truth and reconciliation process.” The plan was included in a PowerPoint presentation for President Bush and other members of his war cabinet—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice—on March 10. Frank Miller, who chaired the NSC steering group on Iraq, was the presenter. According to two people present in the room, Bush gave the nod.

  The decision lacked specificity. The NSC staff didn’t know how the top ranks were structured or how many people were at those levels, even though this information was available on the Internet and in academic papers. But “the thrust was clear: treat these people leniently and try to work with them,” one of the people at the meeting said.

  At the Pentagon, the mechanics of de-Baathification were handled by Feith’s Office of Special Plans, which took its cues from the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi and other INC officials argued passionately that a wholesale purge of the Baath Party was necessary to demonstrate America’s commitment to a new political order in Iraq. If the old guard were allowed to stick around, they maintained, there would be no way a democracy would bloom. The INC advocated extending the ban on government employment to the top four levels of the party to include the rank of udu firka, or group member. Below that rank were only regular members and cadets. To people in Feith’s office, including firkas in the ban comported with the president’s decision to fire top-ranking members.

  When Bremer held his first substantive discussions with Feith and his staff, de-Baathification was on the agenda. As soon as they outlined the policy as they saw it, Bremer seized on it. It was just the sort of bold decision he wanted to implement. He wrote a memo to Pentagon officials noting that he wanted his arrival in Iraq to be “marked by clear, public and decisive steps to reassure Iraqis that we are determined to eradicate Saddamism.”

  Feith’s office drafted a one-and-a-half-page executive order titled “De-Baathification of Iraqi Society.” Not only did it include a prohibition on employing firkas and above, but it also banned regular members from “holding positions in the top three layers of management in every national government ministry, affiliated corporations and other government institutions.” The document was shown to Pentagon lawyers and to Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld but not to Rice or Powell, who believed the policy drafted in Feith’s office did not represent the compromise forged at the March 10 war cabinet meeting. The final draft was printed in the Pentagon and carried to Baghdad by one of Bremer’s aides.

  Three days after he arrived in Iraq, Bremer dispatched an aide to Jay Garner’s office with a copy of the de-Baathification policy. It was going to be the viceroy’s first executive order. He planned to issue it the next day.

  Garner read it. Holy Christ, he thought to himself. We can’t do this.

  He contacted the CIA station chief and asked him to meet him in front of Bremer’s office right away. As Garner walked down the hall to the viceroy’s suite, he ran into one of the State Department ambassadors and explained what was happening.

  “We’ve got to put a stop to this one,” Garner said. “It’s too hard, too harsh.”

  Garner and the station chief barged into Bremer’s office.

  “Jerry, this is too harsh,” Garner said. “Let’s get Rumsfeld on the phone and see if we can’t soften it.”

  “Absolutely not,” Bremer said. “I’m going to issue this today.”

  Garner asked the station chief what would happen if the order were issued.

  “You’re going to drive fifty thousand Baathists underground before nightfall,” he said. “Don’t do this.”

  Bremer politely ended the discussion. That night, he summoned all of the CPA’s senior advisers to a meeting to outline the order. Several senior CPA staffers knew about the proposed de-Baathification policy and they held out hope of softening it. One of them, Meghan O’Sullivan, who would later become a top political adviser to Bremer, wrote a memo recommending a narrower purge.

  After Bremer summarized the order, Steve Browning, the army engineer who by this time was running five ministries, said that Baathists were “the brains of the government… the ones with a lot of information and knowledge and understanding.” If you sent them home, he said, the CPA would have “a major problem” running most ministries.

  Bremer responded tersely that the subject was not open for discussion.

  Another CPA staffer, who had been seconded from USAID, asked Bremer if he understood the impact of the policy, her face growing redder as she spoke. Browning thought she was going to burst.

  Bremer cut her off. The subject was not open for discussion.

  Then he walked out.

  Browning didn’t have to fire anyone. The day after the order was announced, senior Baathists in the Health Ministry stopped coming to work. Eight of the ministry’s dozen top posts were now empty. A third of the staff was gone. This is crazy, Browning thought as he walked through the ministry’s offices. This is a huge mistake.

  David Nummy, a Treasury Department specialist who was an adviser to the Finance Ministry, told one of Bremer’s aides, “If you want me to enforce this, I’m leaving on the next plane out of the country, because it’s ill-advised, and you have no idea how far you’re gonna set us back. If those people disappear, we don’t have the tools to find the next generation.”

  Nummy held on for a month, until he left. Then his successors handed out the pink slips.

  Tim Carney, the senior adviser to the Ministry of Industry, played the role of dutiful bureaucrat. A few weeks earlier, he had told ministry employees that de-Baathification would be an Iraqi-led process. Now he had to tell them the rules had changed.

  From that moment on, most of his work with the ministry was devoted to de-Baathification. He held interminable meetings with the ministry
’s management, first to explain the policy and then to comb through employment records to identify firkas and those above. He eventually removed twelve of forty-eight directors of state-owned companies. The interim minister also had to go. He had been a regular Baath Party member.

  “It was a terrible waste of time,” Carney said later. “There were so many more important things we should have been doing, like starting factories and paying salaries.”

  A few weeks into the purge, two travel-weary men in their late thirties came to see him. They introduced themselves as shop floor workers at a fertilizer plant in Bayji. They said they were former soldiers who had been captured by Iranian forces in 1981, the second year of the Iran-Iraq War, and held as prisoners of war for seventeen years. Upon their release, Saddam promoted both men, who had been Baath cadets, to firka. They said they didn’t care about the rank, but you couldn’t turn down a promotion in Saddam’s Iraq, not unless you were willing to do another seventeen years in an Iraqi prison. Besides, they said, the promotion had resulted in a monthly bonus of about twenty-five dollars.

  “We are poor and the money is important to us,” one of the men said.

  “Take the firka bonus away,” the other said. “But just let us keep our jobs. We are not important people. We are just ordinary men.”

  Carney was so moved by their story that he sent a request to Bremer for a humanitarian exemption for the men. Bremer granted it—six months later.

  Around the time Carney submitted his petition, the CPA began to receive reports that ten thousand to fifteen thousand teachers had been fired. They were firkas who had joined the party because they were told to do so by the Ministry of Education. The CPA’s education advisers were worried. As a result of de-Baathification, entire schools were left with just one or two teachers in some Sunni-dominated areas.

  Bremer said that an Iraqi-led de-Baathification commission would handle appeals from the teachers. Then he allowed Ahmed Chalabi to take charge of that commission.

  “It was like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,” one CPA official told me. Chalabi sat on the appeals. If the Ministry of Education needed more teachers, they should hire new ones, he said. When CPA officials complained to Bremer, he downplayed the problem and trumpeted the overall importance of de-Baathification.

  “It’s the single most important thing we’ve done here,” he said. “And it’s the most popular thing too.”

  A few days before the war began, Doug Feith called his predecessor, Walter Slocombe, a centrist Democrat who’d had the job for six years under President Clinton and was well known in the Pentagon. “We’d like you to be the civilian in charge of the Iraqi military,” Feith said. “Are you interested?”

  Slocombe, who was practicing law in Washington, said yes. During his years at the Pentagon, he had spent countless hours on Iraq policy. Now he had the chance to get in on the action.

  He went to the Pentagon for a briefing. The U.S. military hoped that the Iraqi military would sit out the fight but expected a mixed bag. The Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard, along with the Fedayeen Saddam paramilitary forces, would probably fight, the Pentagon officials said, but the regular army could be persuaded to stand aside. That assessment was shared by the CIA, which had made contact with several Iraqi commanders.

  The plan, as Slocombe and Feith envisioned it, was to disband the Republican Guard and the Fedayeen. The four-hundred-thousand-strong regular army would be vetted. Top commanders, who were assumed to be high-ranking Baathists, would be sent home, but midlevel officers and below would be allowed to stay. At the outset, they would be used to clear debris, rebuild infrastructure, and perform basic security functions, such as guarding buildings. Reconstituting them as an army was debated. Some in the Pentagon argued, based on reports from Chalabi and other exiles, that the army was too corrupt and bloated. They proposed forming a new corps.

  The plan to disband the Republican Guard but retain the regular army was approved by President Bush and his war cabinet on March 12, two days after de-Baathification was discussed. One of the PowerPoint slides shown to Bush, which he endorsed, stipulated “maintain current status” of the army as one component of the postwar plan. The United States “cannot immediately demobilize 250K–300K personnel and put them on the street,” the same slide said. Feith told the president that the army would be used as “a national reconstruction force during the transitional phase.”

  Everyone seemed to be on board. Feith’s office hired two consulting firms with experience in military demobilization to draw up plans to vet and redeploy Iraqi forces. The Central Command dispatched planes over Iraq to drop leaflets imploring soldiers not to fight. One depicted a couple and their five children sitting at a meal. “Stay home in safety with your families,” the leaflet stated. “Please do not attempt to interfere with coalition operations or you will become a target.”

  The Iraqis, by and large, complied. Although several Republican Guard units did put up a fight, many members of the regular army changed into civilian clothes and went home. That’s where they were when American tanks rolled into Baghdad, and that’s where they were when Bremer landed.

  “We’re waiting for our orders,” Mustafa Duleimi, a rangy lieutenant colonel, told me a few days before Bremer’s arrival. “We are ready to help our country.”

  To Slocombe and Feith, the Iraqi army appeared to have vanished. The bases were empty. Many had been looted by fleeing soldiers or by civilians. A month after the liberation of Baghdad, General John Abizaid, who would become the overall American military commander in the Middle East, reported in a videoconference that not a single Iraqi military unit remained intact.

  Despite the leaflets instructing them to go home, Slocombe had expected Iraqi soldiers to stay in their garrisons. Now he figured that calling them back would cause even more problems. The bases had been looted, so there was no place for them to live. And he assumed that most of the army’s rank and file, who were Shiite conscripts, wouldn’t want to come back anyway. If there had been proper barracks, only corrupt Sunni officers keen to regain their positions of authority would have returned. As far as Slocombe and Feith were concerned, the Iraqi army had dissolved itself; formalizing the dissolution wouldn’t contradict Bush’s directive.

  Many in the American military and the State Department would later disagree with that assessment, saying that a voluntary callback would have provided a chance to identify and vet promising leaders. And it would have mollified the soldiers, providing them with money and military training. The soldiers could have lived in tent camps while they rebuilt their barracks. Perhaps there would have been a disproportionate number of Sunnis, particularly in the ranks of general officers, but thousands of Shiites, eager for a paycheck, likely would have returned as well.

  By the time Bremer was briefed at the Pentagon prior to his departure for Baghdad, Slocombe was receiving reports that Iraqi army officers were trying to claim control of government institutions. Perhaps, Slocombe said to Bremer, you should issue an order formally dissolving the whole structure of the security system, including Saddam’s dreaded intelligence agencies. It was a chance for Bremer to make another bold decision.

  He told Slocombe to work up a draft order dismantling the security forces. Before he left the United States, Bremer sent a copy of that draft to Rumsfeld with a message saying that this was what he was thinking of doing.

  Bremer didn’t ask State what it thought, or the CIA, and he didn’t consult with Rice or Hadley at the NSC. Most CPA staffers were in the dark too. He did mention it to Iraqi politicians who had returned from exile—Shiites and Kurds who had been victimized by the army. Dissolving the security forces sounded like a great idea to them. If he had queried more Americans and Iraqis, however, perhaps he would have heard the sentiments of people such as Lieutenant Colonel Duleimi, who was ready to return to work in the service of his nation. The army, Duleimi said to me repeatedly, did not exist to serve Saddam. “The army was formed long be
fore Saddam became president. We are loyal not to one man, but to our country.”

  Eleven days after he arrived in Iraq, Bremer issued CPA Order Number 2, which dissolved not just the army but the air force, the navy, the Ministry of Defense, and the Iraqi Intelligence Service. With the scrawl of his signature, he created legions of new enemies. Many were conscripts, eager for their freedom, but they would be forced to find jobs in a country where 40 percent of the adult population was already unemployed. Tens of thousands of those affected by the order were career soldiers like Mustafa, who knew nothing but military life. They’d get a onetime severance payment, but then they, too, would have to look for work in a land bereft of jobs.

  If Bremer had asked the American military for its opinion, he would have heard what Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the first commander of ground forces in Iraq, said the day the order was issued: “There are a large number of Iraqi soldiers now unemployed. That is a huge concern.”

  Within a week, thousands of angry soldiers converged on the Assassin’s Gate to protest Bremer’s decision. “We want our jobs back,” many of them shouted. Some of the demonstrators carried signs that read WHERE ARE YOUR PROMISES, COALITION FORCES? or RESTUDY THE DECISION OF THE IRAQI ARMY. American troops pushed the crowd back.

  “We don’t want to be treated this way,” Major Saad Omri, the sole breadwinner for a family of six, told me. “If the Americans don’t change this policy, there will be trouble. The Iraqis will not tolerate this.”

  Bremer eventually announced that army officers who were not senior Baathists would receive monthly stipends. He also unveiled plans for a new army. It would consist initially of forty thousand soldiers, all of them infantrymen. There would be no tanks or artillery, and the army would be limited to guarding Iraq’s borders. Former soldiers were not guaranteed positions. They’d have to go to boot camp.