Gandalf Grey
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 Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 9:21 pm Post subject: "Imperial Life in the Emerald City": Origins of the Iraq Di |
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"Imperial Life in the Emerald City": Origins of the Iraq Disaster
By Bernard Weiner
Created Mar 7 2007 - 9:19am
By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers
HardRight conservatives tend to downplay how the U.S. got into the Iraq War.
Why dive back into all that?, they say, our troops are there so let's just
finish the job.
But if the foundations for a war were faulty to begin with, and then in the
occupation mistake upon mistake is piled on top of that, the invading nation
will never get it right, no matter how many fixes and how many new generals
and how many escalations. It's the same pattern we witnessed in Vietnam
decades ago.
These observations became immeasurably strengthened for me by reading Rajiv
Chandrasekaran's recently-published "Imperial Life in the Emerald City:
Inside Iraq's Green Zone" (Knopf).
It should be quite apparent to all, with the Iraq War about to enter its
fifth year, just how badly the Bush Administration has screwed it up, from
even before its beginnings to its current escalation. Chandrasekaran's
volume -- plus Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco," Rory Stewart's "The Prince of the
Marshes," and many other recent books -- provide telling details to such an
extent that I almost couldn't bear to keep reading at times. At every step
of the way, the Bush Administration was making yet another ghastly error,
and the result was more slaughter, more troops and civilians killed and
maimed, more chaos and torture and hatred of the United States.
Short version of these books in military slang: SNAFU ("Situation Normal,
All F----- Up") doesn't even begin to describe the monumentality of the
ignorance and incompetence that accompanied the U.S. war and occupation. Try
FUBAR ("F------ Up Beyond All Recognition"), then quadruple the FUBAR and
you get closer to what actually happened, and apparently is still happening.
U.S. 'TUDE OF ARROGANT COLONIALISM
Chandrasekaran -- former Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo and
Southeast Asia -- begins his trenchant book by focusing on the mind-set that
underlies the U.S. military adventure in Iraq, and elsewhere in the greater
Middle East. It is the stereotypical attitude of arrogant colonialism: We
know what's best for these "ragheads" in Iraq, so just get out of our way
and let us do our job.
As we know from previous reportage, the Bush Administration placed great
faith in the neo-con ideology that underlay the U.S. attack on Iraq, and on
the assumption that the Iraqis would be grateful and passive acceptors of
the occupation authority. When reality showed up, the Bush Administration
had great trouble accepting and adapting, and still does.
Because it was based on lies, deceits, denials, and lack of adequate
planning, the foundation for the war was rotten at the core. As a result,
the CheneyRumsfeld militarist crew constantly found themselves trying to
play catch-up, often years too late, and were puzzled when their new tactics
didn't work.
DANGERS OF IGNORANCE & ISOLATION
Chandraserakan, who interviewed more than 100 U.S. governmental insiders in
Iraq, provides numerous examples of ignorance, ineptitude, and stubborn
denial of the facts on the ground inside the Coalition Provisional
Authority. (Note: All quotes that follow here are from his "Imperial Life in
the Emerald City.")
How could the U.S. get it so wrong? One example among many: The CPA was
there to nation-build, but started with a severe handicap: "Most of the CPA
staff had never worked outside the United States. More than half, according
to one estimate, had gotten their first passport in order to travel to
Iraq." In short, they found it difficult to be in the real world because
they had never left their own world, either physically or in their heads.
That deficient reality was evident in how they lived in Iraq:
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"From inside the Green Zone, the real Baghdad -- the checkpoints, the
bombed-out buildings, the paralyzing traffic jams -- could have been a
world away. The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin's call to prayer, never
drifted over the walls. The fear on the faces of American troops was
rarely seen by the denizens of the palace. The acrid smoke of a detonated
car bomb didn't fill the air. The sub-Saharan privation and Wild West
lawlessness that gripped one of the world's most ancient cities swirled
around the walls, but on the inside, the calm sterility of an American
subdivision prevailed. ... It was 130 degrees outside ... Inside the Green
Zone, air-conditioners chilled buildings to a crisp sixty-eight degrees."
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The first USA administrator in Iraq, Lt.-General (Ret.) Jay Garner, more
open to meeting and listening to key Iraqi leaders and ordinary folk, from
the get-go was deliberately kept ignorant of policy decisions by Washington.
He was booted out for not adhering closely enough to the CheneyBushRumsfeld
line, especially because of his desire to organize an early election and
transfer power back to the Iraqis.
Neo-con Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's point-man on post-war Iraq, expected that
"without a clear blueprint for the political transition, Garner would turn
to Chalabi and his band of exiles. Feith would get the outcome he wanted
without provoking a fight ahead of time with State and the CIA, both of
which regarded Chalabi as a fraud." (Note: Both agencies, often along with
the National Security Council, were invariably frozen out of the
informational loop by the Pentagon/White House hardliners. What a way to run
a war!)
The picture painted of Garner's replacement, L. Paul ("Jerry") Bremer, is
that of an imperious, micro-managing, ideological viceroy in the old
colonial tradition. Many of his aides were young GOP HardRightists, who had
little or no expertise in government at home or in nation-building abroad.
They were appointed because they knew somebody with conservative clout or as
a payoff for their work for the GOP or the BushCheney election committee.
This self-defeating patronage system led to such dangerous absurdities as
this: A 24-year-old GOP real-estate agent, with no training or education in
financial matters, was put in charge of resurrecting the Baghdad Stock
Exchange. Or: "Six of the gofers were assigned to manage Iraq's $13 billion
budget, though they had no previous financial-management experience." No
need to wonder how millions and billions of U.S dollars went missing.
THE VICEROY OF OCCUPIED IRAQ
Clearly, as Chandrasekaran notes, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz
and the others back in Washington were the overall policy makers who
disastrously took the U.S. into an unnecessary war and occupation, but if
there is a master of arrogance and stubborn in-theater incompetency in the
author's narrative, Bremer fits the bill.
Basically operating on his own, it was Bremer who made the early decisions
that guaranteed the rapid rise of the insurgency in Iraq: He disbanded the
Iraqi army, thus putting hundreds of thousands of young, armed men out into
the streets, jobless (unemployment ranged from 40-60%; "the USAID-Treasury
document outlined no program to create jobs."). He did little or nothing
about the massive tortures and abuses at Abu Ghraib and in other Iraqi
prisons.
Bremer instituted a much too draconian anti-Baathification program, which
meant there were too few teachers to teach, too few civil servants to run
the ministries, and the Americans appointed to do so were overworked and/or
lacking the requisite skills, contacts, and ability to speak Arabic. At
least one appointed administrator was reduced to begging for help from
anyone out there on the internet.
Bremer accepted Rumsfeld's small-army concept until much too late and then
begged for more troops to be sent, only to be turned down without comment
(instead, private "contractors," such as Blackwater, were employed, making
up about 10% of the American force). He denied contracts and jobs to Iraqis,
and handed out no-bid contracts to large, greedy American concerns like
Bechtel, Halliburton, et al. He tried to graft a democratic and
free-market-capitalistic system overnight onto the existing Iraqi social,
economic and political structure. He had no concept of who Grand Ayatollah
al-Sistani was in the Iraqi power structure and his commanding authority as
a political/spiritual leader. He decimated the Iraqi educational and
medical-care systems. He never really dealt with the looting issue and with
guarding the abandoned ammo dumps. He had MPs involved in civilian
law-enforcement. He never was able to provide the Iraqi population a
consistent supply of electric power or clean water ("The CPA seemed to be
treating the problem of restoring power as an afterthought"). And on and on.
THE GRAND DUCHY OF BREMER-STAN
Iraq became Bremer's own duchy and he ruled with an iron fist and in
near-total isolation. "He didn't share a draft [of his transition plan to
Iraqi sovereignty] with the State Department, the National Security Council,
or the CIA. The first time Colin Powell saw the plan, Chandraserakan writes,
was on the editorial pages of the Washington Post, which published an op-ed
by Bremer entitled 'Iraq's Plan to Sovereignty'."
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"The viceroy was adamant that his plan was the best. He rejected the idea
of holding early elections, he said, because voter rolls and elections
laws didn't exist. But the real reason was that he feared Baathists or
religious extremists might triumph. ... He continued to brush off Grand
Ayatollah al-Sistanti's fatwa stating that Iraq's constitution had to be
written by elected representatives. ... Inside the Emerald City,
al-Sistanti was just another old man in a black turban."
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Bremer eventually gave in to the extent of forming a Governing Council of
Iraqi leaders, but he made sure they had no power. He "viewed them as
lackeys. ... frontmen, and he needed their imprimatur on big decisions so it
would appear that the Iraqis concurred with their occupiers."
UTOPIAN GOALS CRASH INTO REALITY
The goals of the CPA were utopian, unrealistic, and, given its untrained
administrators, destined for failure. For example, an Office of Private
Sector Development was established, the mission being to "privatize all of
Iraq's state-owned enterprises within thirty days." Lunatic? Yes, but these
were the kinds of crackpot neo-con ideas energizing the CPA. When the first
director of that office was forced out for non-performance, a new guy was
moved in, "someone with no previous experience in promoting free enterprise
in a socialist economy. But he had connections: His brother Ari Fleischer
was Bush's press secretary."
Part of the envisioned privatization scheme was going to depend on the CPA
giving each family a debit card loaded with the cash value of all the
rations they were due. They neglected to notice that "nobody in Iraq used
credit cards. There were no automated teller machines. Phone service and
electrical power were unavailable for much of the day."
In short, the CPA was an ongoing disaster, run by bunglers who couldn't
shoot or think straight. And so, in 2004 expectations shifted. "What was
best for Iraq was no longer the standard. What was best for Washington was
the new calculus. ... The only election that mattered was the one in
November -- in the United States."
"WE WILL FIGHT FOR IRAQ, NOT AMERICA"
Just before Bremer departed for the States, after post-election
"sovereignty" was granted to the Iraqis, he signed a hundred orders. "Many
in the Emerald City assumed that if you wanted to change something, you
changed the law, just like in the United States. But Iraq didn't work that
way," especially since "laws promulgated under the occupation were suspect."
Iraqis just ignored the ones that didn't fit their reality. (Actually,
international law apparently makes it illegal for an occupying power to
impose post-occupation "laws" on the occupied country.)
As for training up Iraqi police and army units: "The Americans misunderstood
us," said Major Rad Kadhim, the senior officer at the Rafidain station. "We
will fight for Iraq. We will not fight for [the Americans]."
Even when the U.S. worked with local Iraqis in developing joint projects,
the Americans would invariably get it wrong. "A team from the State
University of New York at Stony Brook won a $4 million grant to 'modernize
curricula in archeology' at four of Iraq's largest universities -- schools
where students were sitting on the floor because they lacked desks and
chairs. 'It was like going into a war zone and saying, Oh, let's cure
halitosis'."
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
Could things have turned out more positively? Chandrasekaran quotes a
leading U.S. administrator: "We should have been less ambitious. Our goal
should have been to build a free, safe, and prosperous Iraq -- with the
emphasis on 'safe.' Democratic institutions could be developed over time.
Instead, we keep talking about democratic elections. If you asked an
ordinary Iraqi what they want, the first thing they would say wouldn't be
democracy or elections, it would be safety. They want to be able to walk
outside their homes at night."
Chandraserakan writes:
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"Where the CPA saw progress, Iraqis saw broken promises. ... Only 15,000
Iraqis had been hired to work on reconstruction projects funded with the
Supplemental [appropriation], rather than the 250,000 that had been
touted. Seventy percent of police officers on the street had not received
any CPA-funded training. ... More money had been devoted to administration
than all projects related to educations, human rights, democracy, and
governance combined."
"'The biggest mistake of the occupation,' [said a respected moderate Iraqi
leader] 'was the occupation itself.' ... Freed from the grip of their
dictator, the Iraqis believed that they should have been free to chart
their own destiny, to select their own interim government, and to manage
the reconstruction of their shattered nation. ... Iraqis needed help --
good advice and ample resources -- from a support corps of well-meaning
foreigners, not a full-scale occupation with imperial Americans cloistered
in a palace of the tyrant, eating bacon and drinking beer, surrounded by
Gurkhas and blast walls.
"The compromise between their desire for self-rule and the absence of a
leader with broad appeal could have taken many forms, as the State
Department's Arabists pointed out over the months after the invasion: a
temporary governor appointed by the United Nations, an interim ruling
council, or even a big-tent meeting -- similar to the 'loya jirga'
convened after the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan -- to select a
crop of national leaders. ... Would that have made a difference? We'll
never know for sure, but doing a better job of governance and
reconstruction almost certainly would have kept many Iraqis from taking up
arms against their new leaders and the Americans. There still would have
been an insurgency, led by zealots who saw no room for compromise, but
perhaps it would have been smaller and more containable.
"'If this place succeeds,' a CPA friend told me before he left, 'it will
be in spite of what we did, not because of it'."
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Chandrasekaran's book ends in mid-2005 with an epilogue suggesting that
things were even worse than they were before, as civil-war slaughter broke
out big time. And, in 2007, things are even worse still. No minimalist
"surge" of U.S. troops will be able to alter the essential situation,
especially given that the Sadrists essentially have gone to ground until the
U.S. leaves.
That day when the American troops leave can't come too soon, for all
concerned. #
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at
universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the
San Francisco Chronicle, and currently is co-editor of The Crisis Papers
(www.crisispapers.org [1]). To comment:
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson |
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