‘Yee-haw is not a foreign policy.’
(Hand-written sign in the bar of the British compound of the Green Zone, Baghdad)

Why America invaded Iraq

In March 2003 the US Army, accompanied by forces from the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’, invaded Iraq with the aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. The architects of the invasion, US Secretary of State for Defence Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, persuaded all concerned that the Saddam needed to be overthrow because a) he was running programs to produce and launch weapons of mass destruction which presented a clear and present danger to America and other Western nations, and b) he supported Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, who had been responsible for the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

The neo-con sponsors of the Iraq War

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their chief supporter in the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their gofer at Defence, Douglas Feith, assured the President, the press and the sceptical military that the Army would be greeted as liberators, much like the Allies who liberated Italy and France from Nazi rule. They argued that the US need only deploy the minimum number of troops possible because the Iraqi army and police would quickly take over law and order duties. They didn’t work out a detailed post-invasion plan on how to reconstruct the country after a decade of sanctions and Saddam’s mismanagement had run it into the ground because they thought Iraqi civil servants would remain in place, the various ministries would continue to function smoothly, and that an interim Iraqi government would quickly be put in place. Whatever it cost would be covered by revenue from Iraq’s abundant oil reserves.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith were right-wing Republicans, also known as neo-conservatives or neo-cons (p.128). They had a long-standing, hawkish, interventionist view of foreign policy, believing the US should use its military superiority to every other country in order to reshape the world to suit American political and economic interests, and took advantage of the confused and hysterical atmosphere after 9/11 to:

• remove Saddam and solve the Iraq Problem once and for all
• rebuild Iraq as a model democracy which would be an example to the region
• rebuild not only the political system and infrastructure on a Western democratic model, but remake the economy as a model free market economy, privatising all the nationalised industries, setting up a properly run stock market, and opening the country to foreign investment
• ensure the new Iraqi government would be a friend and ally of Israel, a country to which all neo-con Republicans are fiercely attached

Backing Ahmad Chalabi

The neo-cons (especially Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans, p.216) put their faith in the smooth-talking Iraqi exile politician Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress who bolstered their thinking at every turn, assuring them Saddam was an immediate threat with his weapons of mass destruction, assuring them the US army would be greeted with flowers and celebrations, assuring them he could form a national government which would be friendly to America and Israel, assuring them the Iraqi economy, for decades a command economy consisting of state-supported industries, could easily be converted to a flourishing free market economy, and so on and so on. All lies and fantasy (p.30).

Anybody who expressed a negative opinion of this wonder-worker was liable to lose their job, such as Thomas Warrick, one of the few staff at ORHA who knew what they were doing but expressed a strong aversion to Chalabi who he regarded as a ‘smarmy opportunist’ (p.40). So Rumsfeld got him fired.

Military operations

The invasion phase of the war began on 19 March 2003 (air) and 20 March 2003 (ground) and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations. After 22 days Coalition forces captured the capital city Baghdad on 9 April 2003 after a 6-day battle. On 1 May US President George W. Bush declared the ‘end of major combat operations’.

The Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

The Americans had made some preparations for managing the country after it had been conquered but left it very late and never developed one authoritative, commonly agreed plan; different plans produced by different parts of the bureaucracy floated around, none of them complete in the necessary detail.

It was as late as 20 January i.e. just 2 months before the start of the invasion, that Rumsfeld got round to creating a body to act as a caretaker administration in Iraq until the creation of a democratically elected civilian government. This was the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). They appointed retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner as Director, based on Garner’s experience managing the relief effort for Iraqi Kurds in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War (p.31).

Garner quickly realised that the lack of a plan for the reconstruction of post-war Iraq was just one among a whole host of problems he faced These included a lack of qualified senior managers to take over every Iraqi ministry and a severe shortage of experienced civil servants to assist them. Senior staff were dumped on him purely because of their ideological commitment to the Republican party rather than any expertise or qualifications.

• Tim Carney was a retired ambassador. He was nominated to ORHA by Wolfowitz and assigned to run the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Carney had no knowledge whatsoever of industry or minerals. He was given no information and no briefing, no idea how many workers the industry employed, no idea how many factories or state-run companies there were, so he looked it up on the internet and busked it from there (p.38).
• A bureaucrat from the US Treasury was put in charge of the Iraqi Ministry of Education, despite having no knowledge whatsoever of education.
• A former ambassador with no experience of trade was put in charge of the Ministry of Trade.
• Stephen Browning from the Corps of Engineers was asked to head up four Iraqi ministries, of Transport and Communication, Housing and Construction, Irrigation, and Electricity (p.34).

The Great Looting

Then came the looting. While they awaited the end of the conflict in their Kuwaiti hotel rooms Garner and his staff watched on TV the astonishing level of looting which the under-manned US army allowed to happen in the immediate aftermath of the Battle for Baghdad (p.43). Because Rumsfeld had obstinately insisted on keeping the US force to a minimum, the occupying army simply lacked the manpower to protect key buildings and facilities. Day after day American soldiers stood by and let looting on an industrial scale devastate every administrative office in the capital and every factory, warehouse and industry, down to power stations and electricity substations. Everything that could be dismantled, taken away for personal use or for sale on the black market, was.

Tim Carney of ORHA was quickly to conclude that the looting did far more damage to Iraq’s infrastructure than the Allied bombing campaign (p.49). For example, all but one of the nation’s fire stations had been completely looted of all their equipment; the service would need to be rebuilt from scratch (p.100). All bank records of all businesses and municipalities disappeared (p.134). The countries’ universities were stripped of all moveable assets, computers, lab equipment, desks, chairs, even wiring (p.186). Hospitals were completely gutted of all valuables, equipment and medicines (p.235).

With the result that when they finally arrived in Baghdad, Garner and his team had nowhere to stay, no agreed plan, little or no budget, and inherited government buildings which had been ransacked and, in many cases, burned to the ground, with the loss of all the key information about the Iraqi economy, assets and businesses.

Little surprise, then, that ORHA began its work in an atmosphere of confusion and demoralisation which only got worse as the scale of the disaster and the challenge sank in. Its own staff quickly gave it the joke name ‘the Office of Really Hopeless Americans’ (p.32). Garner’s pessimistic reports back to Rumsfeld in Washington, and his insistence that power be handed over to the Iraqis themselves as soon as possible, quickly turned the neo-cons opinion against him.

ORHA replaced by the CPA

With the result that, to the surprise of Garner and his staff, he was relieved of the job after just one month (p.60). In fact it was announced that ORHA itself was being shut down and replaced by a new entity, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). This was to be assigned ‘executive, legislative, and judicial authority over the Iraqi government’ and headed up by staunch Republican, Lewis Paul Bremer III.

When he’d arrived in Baghdad Garner found no accommodation had been arranged for him or his staff. He’d had to scrounge help from spare military officials who had helped him find one of Saddam’s vacant palaces which had escaped bombing but had no water or electricity and so where his staff camped out while Halliburton, the government’s logistics supplier, put them on the long waiting list for camp beds, portable stoves and suchlike (p.55).

Setting up the Green Zone

Garner and ORHA were just one of several US administrative teams, the Army, the CIA and numerous private contractors who quickly realised that the palace area of Baghdad offered many advantages. Even in the first few weeks the general streets of Baghdad were lawless because the Iraqi civil administration had broken down, all the army and police stayed home and there weren’t enough American troops to enforce law and order. Baghdad’s big swish hotels (where the world’s press had stayed during the Gulf War) couldn’t be made secure enough by the insufficient numbers of soldiers and freelance security contractors (p.46).

Whereas, over a decade earlier, Saddam had begun work building palaces and reception buildings on a grand scale in an enclave of the city which fronted on the Tigris River. Here buildings were constructed on an epic scale, even the houses of the staff were luxurious, the roads were wider and shaded by trees. More to the point, Saddam had enclosed the whole thing in a solid, rocket-proof brick wall. The Americans quickly grasped this was a ready-made secure location for all their administrative staff and added 17-foot-high blast barriers topped with coils of razor wire. The precinct had just three entrances which were protected by concrete blast barriers, troops and tanks.

The Americans quickly named it the Green Zone, by contrast with the rest of Baghdad, and then of Iraq as a whole, which quickly degenerated into chaos and violence. Inside these walls, insulated from the privations of the entire Iraqi population which was going without fresh water, electricity and basic supplies, where the complete breakdown in law and order had resulted in burglary, theft, muggings, carjackings, shootings, murder and rapes, the thousand or so fresh-faced staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority, published reports festooned with statistics and graphs showing how the country was going from strength to strength, cooked up impressive project plans for restructuring the economy or turning Iraq into a Western-style democracy, in complete ignorance of the reality of the world outside their comfort zone.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

And it is this – the heroic, ironic, often hilarious and sometimes tragic disconnect between the pipe-dream rhetoric of the CPA and the steady descent into chaos of the country they claimed to be running – which is the subject of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s award-winning book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

It is ‘imperial’ life because Bremer was, in effect, the viceroy of the imperial power, America, which ran Iraqi affairs from Washington DC. And Chandrasekaran calls it ‘the Emerald City’ because of the happy colour coincidence between ‘Green Zone’ and the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz books, a handy overlap which also conveys the sense of never-never quality of most of the CPA’s fantasies of nation building.

Chandrasekaran and Thomas E. Ricks

In Fiasco, his extraordinary account of the Iraq War, Thomas E. Ricks gives a high-level and highly analytical account which focuses on all aspects of the military involvement of the war, giving extraordinary insight into just how such a war is conceived and planned, with quotes and comments from an awesome cast of senior military figures, active and retired. Ricks sheds light on the huge amount of bureaucratic in-fighting which accompanies such a huge undertaking, not least between the conservative and sceptical diplomats at the State Department, run by former General Colin Powell (p.34), and the far more gung-ho, hawkish neo-conservatives at the Department of Defence (also referred to as the Pentagon) led by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who despised the former:

Veteran Middle East hands were regarded as insufficiently committed to the goal of democratising the region. (p.95)

Although Chandrasekaran also covers some of the same territory as Ricks (he shows us Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz making the same mistakes as Ricks does, and Powell and other experts expressing the same reservations), by and large he is more firmly in the Green Zone, meeting numerous staffers, describing their everyday life of hamburgers and American movies, working out at the gym, and producing fantasy plans and utopian policies (their ‘crazy ivory tower schemes’, p.254) to please their ideological masters back in Washington which had no possibility of ever being carried out in Iraq. If Ricks is all about the Army, Chandrasekaran is all about the CPA and its people.

Ordinary people and amateurs

For the first part of the book Chandrasekaran is interested in people and their stories, generally the lower echelon staff, who populated the Green Zone. These guys were flown in to staff the CPA, often at very short notice, and generally with little or no expertise in the jobs they were expected to do.

Half had never been abroad before and for many it was their first full-time job (p.15). What comes over loud and clear is that all that mattered was ideological purity and commitment to the Bush Republican Party, that they be ‘the right kind of Republican’ (p.59). Ideology trumped both experience and expertise, as the whole world was able to tell, from the results.

Take John Agresto. He was 58 when Chandrasekaran met him. John had been assigned the daunting task of rehabilitating Iraq’s university system, comprising some 375,000 students located at 22 campuses which had all been trashed in the post-conquest looting. John had no experience of post-conflict reconstruction. He had no experience of the Middle East. His job back in the States was running a small college in Santa Fe with under 500 students. So what the devil was he doing in charge of rebuilding Iraq’s entire higher education system? Well, on the board of that little college back in Santa Fe just happened to be Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s wife and, when John had a stint working on the National Endowment for the Humanities, he had got to know Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, too, and they both told their husbands about him.

Getting a job at the CPA really was a case of not what you knew, or even who you knew but who knew you. However, once you were in post, none of your fancy contacts from back home in the States helped with getting the actual job done. After 8 months of assiduous research, John had concluded that he needed more than $1 billion to rebuild Iraq’s higher education facilities. When Chandrasekaran met him, he’d received just $8 million from the CPA. Neoconservative Republican nation-building…on the cheap (p.3).

At least Agresto had some experience of what he was charged with. Michael Cole was just 22 and barely out of college when he found himself employed by the ubiquitous contracting corporation, Halliburton, as ‘customer service liaison’ for the catering and canteen laid on for the CPA’s 1,000 or so staff. Did he have any experience of catering, of working with the military or in a warzone? Of course not. He had been working as a junior aide to a Republican congressman from Virginia when the Halliburton vice president overheard him talking to friends in a bar about handling irate constituents. She (the vice president) introduced herself, gave him her card, three weeks later Halliburton rang him up and offered him a job in Baghdad. That simple, that random.

Chandrasekaran’s book is about the extraordinary alternative reality which developed inside the enchanted city, populated as it was by young, fresh-faced American college kids who knew nothing about the real world, and less than nothing about Iraqi culture and society, but who carried on churning out PowerPoints and spreadsheets showing US policies transforming the country for the better, improving Iraq according to all kinds of gee-whizz metrics while, in the real world outside their bubble, the country was collapsing into hyper-violent sectarianism.

Another example is Mark Schroeder. This keen young fellow was employed to produce PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets with graphs showing how everything was getting better and better in liberated Iraq. He had never been outside the Green Zone and had no real idea what conditions were like. He didn’t even interview or talk to the thousand or more Iraqis who had the menial service jobs inside the Zone. He had no interaction with any of the population of the country he was reporting on whatsoever. Instead Mark got all his information from Fox News which, of course, promoted George Bush’s agenda, so he thought everything in Iraq was just dandy (p.25).

When, after some delay, Bremer and his deputies realised the extraordinary power wielded by Iraq’s most influential Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, they sent an emissary to him and who did they choose for this crucial mission? An Iraqi-American who knew nothing about politics or diplomacy but was a wealthy urologist from Florida who had developed a penile implant for impotent men (p.88).

The spirit is summed up by the comment of one unnamed staffer: ‘I’m not here for the Iraqis, I’m here for George Bush.’ (p.90) Not many of these staffers had voted Democrat and those who had quickly found out it was a secret best kept to themselves in this overwhelmingly partisan and zealously Republican environment.

Chandrasekaran has a section on how the vetting was carried out by pro-Bush partisans. According to Frederick Smith who served as deputy director of the CPA’s Washington office:

‘The criterion for sending people over there was that they had to have the right political credentials.’ (p.101)

People with much-needed expertise were rejected if they lacked commitment to Bush-type neo-conservatism. Rather than questions about the Middle East, Arabic or Iraq, applicants were questioned about their attitude to the Republican shibboleths of abortion and gun control. So they got an administration of people who voted the right way but had no qualifications for the job.

Bremer’s office advertised for 10 young gofers. The 10 who were hired were all vouched-for solid Republicans. Six of them were put in charge of Iraq’s $13 billion budget although none of them had financial management experience.

Bremer had hugely ambitious plans to completely remodel Iraq’s centrally planned command economy into a free market, neo-liberal, capitalist economy. When the first nominee to this role, Thomas Foley, proved too zealous for the post, Bremer replaced him with Michael Fleischer. Fleischer had no experience whatsoever of creating free enterprise in a formerly socialist economy but…his brother was White House press secretary Ari Fleischman. It was all about contacts and connections, not expertise (p.251). That’s why billions and billions and billions of dollars were completely wasted.

L. Paul Bremer

Chandrasekaran describes the personality and working practices of the CPA’s chief executive, L. Paul Bremer, appointed on 11 May 2003, in chapter titled ‘Control Freak’. (This is not as rude as it sounds. It is how Bremer was described by Henry Kissinger, who he at one point worked for as a special assistant, as described on pages 70, 75 and 215).

Chandrasekaran travels with Bremer to ministries and schools and interviews him en route. Bremer talks a good game. He works long hours, incredibly hard. He insists on seeing every memo, signing off every document. And yet, as the Wikipedia article on the CPA pithily puts it:

At the CPA, Bremer moved quickly to install opaque and corruption-prone methods for the withdrawal and transportation of extremely large amounts of cash often transported from the US to Iraq by C-17 transport plane…The CPA was strongly criticised for its mismanagement of funds allocated to the reconstruction of Iraq, with over $8 billion of these unaccounted for, including over $1.6 billion in cash that emerged in a basement in Lebanon.

American valules. Bremer is, of course, remembered for his first two major acts as ‘viceroy’ of occupied Iraq, which plunged the country into chaos and condemned America to an 8-year occupation, the loss of some 5,000 US troops, an equal number of civilian contractors and a truly awesome amount of money, at least $757 million. Wikipedia again:

The first act of the CPA under Bremer, Coalition Provisional Authority Order 1, was to order the de-Ba’athification of Iraqi society. On 23 May, CPA Order Number 2 formally disbanded the Iraqi army as well as other public servants including nurses and doctors and eventually led to the direct unemployment of more than 500,000 Iraqi citizens.

Chandrasekaran discusses the background to the debaathification order on pages 76 to 81, and to scrapping the Iraqi army on pages 81 to 86. He goes out of his way to play devil’s advocate, to explain Bremer’s thinking, and point out that he wasn’t alone.

Nonetheless, lots of experts, his colleagues in the CPA, State Department officials and senior army generals, Bremer’s predecessor, Jay Garner, Steve Browning the man running five ministries – all warned that these orders would be catastrophic (p.78). They would create at a stroke over half a million angry, humiliated men and women, rendered jobless and aimless in a society awash with weapons. (Thanks to Donald Rumsfeld’s obstinate refusal to send enough US troops to adequately police the hundreds of military barracks and arms depots these were left unguarded and promptly looted, keeping insurgents and militia groups happily armed and provisioned for the best part of the next decade).

But Bremer went ahead despite all the advice to the contrary and all the critics and warners were proved correct.

Challenges of rebuilding a country

Initially I thought the whole book would be a kind of freeflowing satire of the hapless American’s incompetence as demonstrated by the youth and inexperience of so many staffers. But around page 100 of this 330-page book the narrative becomes a lot more structured. Henceforward each chapter deals in some detail with one particular challenge the CPA faced, namely:

Privatising the economy

Describes the woeful state of the Iraqi economy and CPA officials various plans to convert its socialist command economy into an America-style free enterprise, capitalist economy. This implied a raft of changes which included:

• privatising the many industries managed entirely by the state
• changing Iraqi laws to allow foreign companies to invest in Iraqi businesses
• letting the Iraqi dinar float on international currency markets
• setting up a stock market according to best international standards of transparency
• abolishing the complex system by which state industries were subsidised and kept uncompetitive
• reducing personal taxes to encourage initiative and entrepreneurship

Managing all this was handed over to Bremer’s economics czar, Peter McPherson. Unfortunately, the only difference everyday Iraqis noticed was that a) a lot of them lost their jobs in uncompetitive industries which were closed down; the Iraqi dinar plummeted on international markets so everything became more expensive. An unintended consequence of deleting the complex system of cross-subsidies between state-run industries was that the most efficient of them saw all their capital held in state banks wiped out.

The single most risky change was that, under Saddam, all Iraqi families received free food baskets. The CPA Republicans were strongly against this, wanting at the very least to replace the system with a monthly sum in cash or vouchers, and so they disappeared into evermore complicated and impractical ideas to replace it.

This kind of thing turned out to be very interesting. It was fascinating to learn how 40 or so years of Ba’ath Party rule had created a particular kind of command economy, and fascinating to get into the details of what the CPA wanted to change, and why, and why it was so often impractical.

And the issue of political contacts trumping expertise occurs here as everywhere else. Brought into oversee the privatisation program was Thomas Foley who had no experience of working in a command economy or post-conflict situation, but he was a major Republican Party donor and had been Bush’s classmate at Harvard Business School (p.140)

Crooked contractors

There’s a chapter devoted to a couple of chancers who set up a service supplier company which, initially, bid to provide security at Baghdad Airport, despite having hardly any security guards on their books and little or no experience of such a large project. But Chandrasekaran shows how, in the Wild West environment of post-war Iraq, lack of experience and expertise didn’t stop the companies risk-taking owners from accumulating over $100 million in government contracts before they were revealed as overcharging and scamming. Chandrasekaran doesn’t say as much but the implication is that many of the suppliers of services to a panic-stricken CPA also milked them for millions.

Electricity

A fascinating explanation of why the world’s number one superpower couldn’t get the power working again in a country sitting on one of the biggest reserves of oil and natural gas in the world, thus creating ‘overnight nostalgia for Saddam among people who had cheered his fall (p.170).

Lieutenant General John Comparetto turns the challenge over to Steve Browning, clever and resourceful, who begs electrical engineers from the army, sends them to assess the state of Iraq’s power stations, and uses the information to pull together a national plan (p.173).

I found the technical explanations of why the power grid was in such poor shape fascinating. Basically, ever since he decided to attack Iran in September 1980, Saddam had wasted his nation’s oil income on weapons and war and let its once admirable infrastructure rot. The infrastructure had been further degraded when during the brief Gulf War of 1991 when a few choice American missiles obliterated key parts of the power generating and distribution system. This was followed by 12 long years of sanctions, when the country’s engineers were prevented from getting the spare parts they needed to repair anything. And then, of course, came the brief 2003 war which had just ended:

American bombing during the war damaged about 75% of the country’s power-generating capacity. (p.167)

So that when Browning did his assessment he discovered most of the biggest power stations were held together by string and sellotape and were on their last legs. In other words, to crank electricity generation back up to first world levels would costs billions and billions of dollars of investment (the World Bank eventually calculated it would require $55 billion over 4 years to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, p.175).

Trouble is, almost all the other policies of the CPA depended on the whole notion of having a good, reliable power supply. Take privatising Iraq’s industries: who wants to buy a factory which has no electric power. In fact most elements of a modern society, starting with a police service providing law and order, rely on power for computers and even lights in buildings.

Chandrasekaran explains a further bad decision which exacerbated things. Knowing he had far less power than his country needed Saddam took the cynical decision to channel as much as possible of it to Baghdad, home of most of the citizens and also his biggest possible rivals, the army generals. But when he learned about this Bremer, like a good American democrat, decided this was wildly unfair and that the limited power should be distributed fairly around the country. This had the effect of alienating everyone – the entire citizenry of Baghdad who now struggled to have power for even half of the day, thus rendering all kinds of businesses nearly impossible to run, specially anything connected with processing and storing food; but it didn’t please people in provincial towns and cities that much because they, also, only had intermittent power.

Reading Chandrasekaran’s descriptions of the genuinely complicated technical, engineering, managerial, budgetary and political problems thrown up by every single aspect of rebuilding Iraq, for the first time made me start to sympathise with Bremer. It was an impossible job.

Constitutional wrangles

Compared with rebuilding the entire national grid and trying to reboot the economy, the challenge of writing a new constitution should have been easy. it’s not as if the world is short of national constitutions, even if some account had to be taken of Iraq’s heritage, its multi-ethnic make-up and its Islamic faith: after all, there are plenty of Arab states and they all have constitutions.

But in a complicated chapter Chandrasekaran describes how the precise process of how this constitution was going to be written hit insuperable obstacles. To be honest I got lost in the maze of discussions but I think Bremer wanted to convene a cohort of leaders of different communities who would draft a constitution, whereupon some kind of national election would be held about just the constitution alone, which would then be installed or adopted and only then would actual elections be held for the first government.

But there were problems every step of the way, starting with the highly contentious choice of who would be the members of the convention who would produce a draft constitution, given the requirement to take account of the country’s three main groups, the Sunni and Shia Arabs and the Kurds. Another cause of disagreement the issue of exiles and remainers i.e. the animosity between leaders who’d lived in exile for decades and often lost touch with life under Saddam but had the ear of people in Washington such as Cheney and Rumsfeld; and those leaders who’d remained in the country and, by necessity, made compromises with Saddam and the Ba’ath Party.

Then there was the simple question of whether any of these so-called ‘leaders’ had any actual followings in the country at large or were just chancers who’d floated to the surface and succeeded in sucking up to the Americans. `The only way to find out was to hold elections. But elections couldn’t be held until you had a constitution. But what kind of mandate did these politicians hand-picked by the Americans have if none of them had been elected?

And this is where Bremer’s plans ran into Iraq’s most influential Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani who intervened to publish a fatwah or holy ruling which is that no constitution should be accepted unless it was drawn up by elected representatives, not Bremer’s hand-picked crew. (It is very characteristic that key CPA staff involved in the constitution building were seeking to establish an entirely Western separation of church and state and therefore thought al-Sistani not only could be ignored but should be ignored, p.183).

All these forces interacted to produce a situation of mind-boggling complexity which Chandrasekaran explains at great length and made me feel even more sorry for Bremer, working 12 hour days and getting nowhere.

Other reforms

Only somewhere in this sequence of issue-based chapters did I begin to realise that the book amounts to a history of the CPA and its long list of utopian fantasy reforms. There are entire chapters or long passages devoted to other major issues, including:

• rebuilding the entire medical system which had been damaged in the war and then trashed beyond repair in the national looting, a huge project with multiple aspects which was handled by a succession of appointees (Frederick M. Burkle Jr, Steve Browning, James K. Haveman Jr) who developed complicated multi-faceted plans, fought valiantly to get adequate funding, up against the shrinking deadlines imposed by the evershifting constitutional arguments and all of whom, in the end, failed (pages 232 to 244)
• setting up a media service to compete with the anti-American messages of all the Arab TV and radio stations Iraq’s citizens tuned into
• rewriting Iraq’s entire highway code: this task was handed to John Smathers who was a personal injury lawyer from Maryland; lacking any other sources he based his new Iraqi highway code on the  highway code of his home state, Maryland, which he downloaded from the internet and tweaked to local conditions; in the event his code was merged with the eccentric and often irrational one proposed by Iraqi officials and both, in any case, carried on being ignored by both police and drivers; Smathers was seriously injured in an insurgent ambush and flown back to the States before his ineffective, mongrel code was finally signed into Iraqi law by Bremer (pages 263 to 268)
• persuading Iraq’s scientists, especially involved in weapons programmes, to come out of hiding and join a new science centre where they could make peaceful and positive contributions to the country, assorted out by unconventional State Department nominee Alex Dehgan

And, of course, all this was being attempted in a country which was becoming more violent and lawless by the day. For most of the period Chandrasekaran covers the Green Zone was an oasis of well-lit, well-fed calm in a city racked with violence. But then he gives a harrowing description of a rocket attack on the al-Raschid Hotel on the edge of the Zone and the severe injuries sustained by Colonel Elias Nimmer whose hotel room was directly hit by a rocket, 26 October 2003. The atmosphere deteriorated. Many staffers decided they had to leave.

The Sadr Revolt

By page 200 I’d realised that the book amounts to a history of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ended with the muted ceremony whereby Bremer formally handed power over to the Interim Iraqi Government on 28 June 2004 ad flew home.

I’d begun to formulate a mild criticism that Chandrasekaran’s narrative focuses entirely on the history of the civilian CPA with almost no mention let alone analysis of the deteriorating military and security situation outside the walls of the Emerald City (much more the subject of Ricks’s Fiasco) – but then, at this point, the narrative suddenly switched into full battle mode.

The penultimate chapter starts innocuously by describing another day in the life of Sergeant Jerry Swope as he drives his team of Humvees into the tightly packed slum quarter of Baghdad known as Sadr City on their regular, boring but very smelly mission to drain the open sewers which overflow into the streets as part of the general decay of all Iraq’s infrastructure. The whole area was the stomping ground of radical young Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who had organised his followers into what was loosely described as ‘the Mahdi Army’. Jerry saw disaffected young men hanging round on the streets but they’d never caused trouble before.

What Jerry didn’t know was that five days earlier, on 28 March, Bremer had decided to take Sadr on. First he closed Sadr’s al-Howza newspaper for an article which likened Bremer to Saddam Hussein. Then the day before, Bremer had Sadr’s main man in Najaf, Mustafa Yaqoubi, arrested for an alleged murder.

Before they knew it Jerry’s patrol came under attack, for pistol, AK47 and RPG fire. When they tried to accelerate out of danger they found the road blocked. When he reversed he discovered two of his four Humvees had been rendered immobile. So he gathered his men and ran down the nearest alleyway till they found a 3-story house, stormed into it, set up machine guns on the roof and became seriously besieged. He radioed headquarters who sent out relief vehicles and, when these ran into trouble, seven tanks. Jerry and his men were besieged till after dark and ammunition was running low when they were finally rescued. In this one encounter the army suffered eight soldiers dead and 50 wounded.

It was the start of the 10-week-long Shia Uprising which made not just parts of Baghdad into no-go warzones but spread to other towns and cities across the predominantly Shiite south. Later, Army generals were scathing of Bremer’s behaviour; he had taken on the leader of up to 10,000 heavily armed militiamen with no military plan whatsoever. Bremer though al-Sadr would meekly back down like the editor of some local paper in America. Instead he triggered a major insurrection across the country.

The First Battle of Fallujah 4 April to 1 May 2004

What made it nearly catastrophic was it occurred as the same time as the Battle of Fallujah. This city is 70 kilometres west of Baghdad and a Sunni stronghold. Ever since the occupation there had been a series of very violent incidents, with American troops shooting and killing unarmed protesters, and a steady flow of fatal attacks on US soldiers.

On 31 March 2004 Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah ambushed a convoy containing four American private military contractors from Blackwater USA. All four were shot dead, their bodies mutilated, burned and strung up from a nearby suspension bridge. Footage of the bodies and local civilians shouting and cheering were given to Arab news stations and beamed round the world.

Inevitably this caused outrage etc in Washington but, in Chandrasekaran’s account, the key fact is that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured President Bush that Fallujah could be taken and pacified by US Marines with few if any casualties, and the guilty parties brought to justice. He claimed the good inhabitants of the city would willingly hand over the murderers to the authorities (p.306).

This was just the latest in a long line of ignorant, arrogant, wishful thinking and profoundly wrong opinions delivered by Rumsfeld, a man who emerges from both Ricks’ and Chandrasekaran’s books as a dangerous moron.

Because when Rumsfeld persuaded Bush to send in the Marines, it turned out they met far stiffer resistance than anybody anticipated, with American troops dying on the first day and numbers steadily escalating, not to mention the many innocent civilians killed. Meeting resistance, the Americans increased their firepower, raining death from helicopter gunships. Footage of all this was also beamed round the Arab world and helped crystallise the image of the Americans as trigger-happy murderers of unarmed women and children.

Not easy to be an imperial power, is it?

But the massive assault, which threatened to drag on for days, was unpopular not only around the Arab world, but with America’s nominal allies. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair rang up from Britain saying it must stop, President Bush reluctantly stopped it in mid-flow. The Marines commanding officer was livid. He estimated they were two days away from fighting their way to the city centre and securing the whole city. Don’t start a military offensive if you’re not prepared to carry it through. But in a way that’s the moral of the entire invasion and occupancy; wishing a fantasy goal (convert Iraq to a lovely liberal democracy) without willing the means (huge numbers of troops, a comprehensive political, engineering and economic plan, and a huge amount of money).

Impact on the CPA

The impact on the CPA was simple: all reconstruction shut down. The fighting dragged into early May and the CPA was due to hand over power to the Iraqi Provisional Government in June. What was the point?

In the last few pages Chandrasekaran describes the last-ditch attempts of committed CPA staff to push through at least some reforms, notably the heroic attempts of John Agresto to screw funding out of the elephantine US bureaucracy for his cherished restoration of Iraq’s universities.

But he also quotes quite a few staffers reflecting on their achievements. It was a failure. Ignorant of conditions in wider Iraq, ignorant of Iraq’s history, social economic make-up, unable to a man to speak the local language, cocooned in their bubble, highly educated staffers fretted about rewriting the Iraqi highway code or the precise medicines to be placed on a national formulary or fantasising about giving every home in the country broadband access while beyond their walls, hundreds of thousands of angry young men, deprived of their jobs in the army or police or fired because they’d been Ba’ath Party members, plotted their revenge, which exploded that spring of 2004 in insurrection and insurgency right across the country.

It’s not about democracy, it’s about civic society

One guy puts his finger on it. It’s a piece of cake to ‘build’ a democracy, to write a spiffy new constitution, hold a census, draw constituencies on a map and arrange a day when everyone puts an X next to a candidate. That’s easy.

Whereas it’s almost impossible to build a deeply rooted civil society of the type which exists in the advanced West. Our liberal democracies are hundreds of years old, with their roots in even older values of Protestantism with its emphasis on individual human rights, the primacy of the individual conscience and so on. It’s taken at least 300 years, since the time of Locke and the post-English Civil War theorists, to combine a secular philosophy of individualism with the panoply of complicated fiscal and economic policies (the establishment of the Bank of England, the development of banking law, the invention of the limited company) which enabled the rise of industrial capitalism in the West – and these developments were not without all kinds of wars and civil wars, continental conflagrations and atrocities even in the so-called ‘civilised’ West.

To think that the products of this deep, rich and complicated history can be imposed on a country with a completely different history, culture and religion shows a moronic lack of self awareness. Chandrasekaran focuses on Agresto because it’s his summary that the book ends with:

The problem with democracy building is that we think democracy is easy – get rid of the bad guys, call for elections, encourage ‘power sharing’, and see to it that somebody writes a bill of rights. The truth is the exact opposite – government of the few or government by one person is what’s easy to build; even putting together good autocratic rule doesn’t seem to be that hard. It’s good, stable and free democracies that are the hardest thing. America’s been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule [but it isn’t]…We as a country don’t have a clue what has made our country work… (p.320)

My interpretation is that the key component to successful Western democracy is none of the apparatus of democracy itself, nor the details of a particular economic model (free market capitalism). What makes them work is a very deep-seated commitment among most of the population to civic spirit and civic responsibility. We abide by the rules, we abide by the law, no matter how grudgingly, because our parents did and they brought us up in these traditions, in this culture.

The evidence from Chandrasekaran’s book is the Iraqis had absolutely none of this. Every Iraqi in any position of power demanded a bribe to carry out even the slightest duty. The Iraqi police demanded bribes to let malefactors off. Iraqi civil servants demanded bribes before they would process your claim.

The objective rule of law does not exist. Iraqi culture relies entirely on family, clan and religion, elements of personal identity it gives vastly more importance than most socially atomised Westerners can grasp. Rather than be loyal to some remote state or its officials who are corrupt to a man, for generations people have put their family, their clan, their tribe, and their religious allegiance first.

Handing out a spiffy new constitution along with a whole set of ridiculous documents like a westernised highway code, while the actual population was suffering from power shortages, food shortages, water shortages and anarchy on the streets, was the height of fatuousness.

Summary

Thomas E. Ricks’s book, Fiasco, is the irreplaceable, definitive account of the comprehensive lack of planning by Washington politicians and the military for the post-conquest situation which led to catastrophe in Iraq.

Chandrasekaran’s book perfectly complements it by showing you what the lack of a plan meant on the ground, in practice, when the badly conceived, badly organised and badly staffed Coalition Provisional Authority tried to rebuild and remodel Iraq’s economy, infrastructure and political system, and why it was always doomed to abject failure.

Read together these two books amount to a crushing indictment of the American political class, in particular the ideologically driven fantasy world of the Republican Party, and above all the unbelievably stupid, ignorant, short-sighted and disastrous policies promoted by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Paul Bremer I came to pity for the impossibility of the task he was handed, but he too was blinded to reality by his ideological Republicanism and made a series of awesomely bad decisions which helped plunge an entire country into murderous chaos.

Credit

Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2006. Page references are to the 2008 Bloomsbury paperback edition.

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