Part 9 (1/2)

The convoy sped up and escaped without losing anyone. The next morning, Poirier woke up in Tikrit determined to do better. He began putting his troops through rehearsals for better responses to ambushes, most of them based on using armored vehicles to flank and kill the enemy. ”This was a turning point for me,” he recalled. A few weeks later another unit was. .h.i.t in the same spot by a bomb and RPGs, killing Command Sgt. Maj. James Blankenbecler, a forty-year-old senior NCO from Alexandria, Virginia, who had recently arrived in Iraq on a.s.signment as the new top enlisted soldier in the 1st Battalion, 44th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, based at Fort Hood, Texas.

When Bremer flew home to Was.h.i.+ngton for quick consultations at the end of July 2003, his message was that the situation was far better than it appeared in news coverage. ”When I got to Was.h.i.+ngton this was confirmed-that the people in the United States were not getting an accurate picture of the progress we had made here, the really very substantial progress we have made here,” he said later that summer in Baghdad. ”They were distracted, understandably, by the trickle of casualties coming in almost every day from Iraq, and not getting the stories, the other two hundred good news stories, about schools reopening, hospitals open- ing, health clinics opening, the lowest cholera rate in a decade this year in the south, in Basra--------- Those stories were not getting through.” In fact, the U.S. oc- cupation was about to be confronted by a full-blown counterinsurgency. But as the United States entered its first sustained ground combat in three decades, this was his story, and he and the entire Bush administration stuck to it.

THE CPA: ”CAN'T PRODUCE ANYTHING”.

I.

went to ORHA today to meet with their commo people,” Capt. Kipling wrote to her boyfriend in early June, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority by the acronym of its original name, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian a.s.sistance. ”They were not very helpful.”

She was far from alone in that conclusion. The U.S. civilian occupation organization was a house built on sand and inhabited by the wrong sort of people, according to many who worked there. ”No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes,” concluded retired Army Col. Ralph Hallenbeck, who worked at the CPA as a civilian contractor dealing with the Iraqi communications infrastructure. Personnel was an especially nettlesome issue. Hallenbeck said that in addition to being young and inexperienced, most of the young CPA people he met during his work as a contractor were ideologically minded Republicans whose only professional experience was working on election campaigns back in the United States. It was, as Zinni later commented, ”a pickup team.” Scott Erwin, a former intern for Vice President Cheney who worked on the budget for security forces, reported that his favorite job before that was ”my time as an ice cream truck driver.”

”The tour length for most civilians was initially a mere three months,” the British diplomat Hilary Synnott later recalled. ”This was far too brief to be effective.” Capt. Kipling also noticed this personnel problem on her forays into the Green Zone. ”Their turnover rate was too high to be effective,” she said. ”They'd get good people in, they'd get motivated, and then there would be a big bomb, and they'd all leave.”

It was more serious for Brig. Gen. Karpinski. She was regaling her superior with a list of all the problems she was having one day when, she recalled, ”he threw his pen down on the desk, and he said, 'We're running a prison system for an entire country by the seat of our pants. What's CPA doing?'”

She responded: ”There's two experts there, and they're leaving in about thirty days.”

The view from inside the zone was that of a small and beleaguered band, understaffed and underresourced. ”We all worked seventeen hours a day, seven days a week, for a year,” recalled Sherri Kraham, who was deputy director of the CPA budget office. To some it felt like trying to build and furnish a house while parts of it were on fire-and all the time getting advice and orders from officials thousands of miles away in Was.h.i.+ngton and London.

”The CPA was always a work in progress,” observed Andrew Rathmell, the British defense intellectual who served as a strategist for Bremer and later wrote a clear-eyed a.s.sessment of his time there. ”Badly flawed pre-war a.s.sumptions, which were not effectively challenged, left the coalition unprepared and under-resourced for the task it faced.... The CPA ended up creating nation-building inst.i.tutions on the run, governing Iraq at all levels, supporting a counter-insurgency campaign, reconstructing and reforming Iraqi state inst.i.tutions and implementing democratic and economic transformation.”

Yet it was far from clear what all that hard work was leading to. ”One of the things that struck me in the summer of 2003 was how hard people were working, but how little effect it was having,” said Gary Anderson.

By mid-August, when she left the CPA, recalled Amba.s.sador Robin Raphel, a career foreign service officer, ”it was very obvious to me that we couldn't do this, we could not run a country that we did not understand.... It was very much amateur hour to me, with all respect.”

In another end-of-tour report, one colonel a.s.signed to the CPA summarized his office's work: ”pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.”

It didn't take long to see what poor shape the organization was in, said Col. Sammons, the Special Forces officer attached to the CPA. ”I soon knew what CPA meant-Can't Produce Anything.” That became a standard gag among military officers dealing with the occupation authority.

By the time the CPA was done away with a year later, the U.S. effort in Iraq had suffered a severe and perhaps crippling setback.

CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer III Presiding over this mess was Bremer, by all accounts a smart and diligent man, but not the right person for the job-that is, someone who could provide strategic leaders.h.i.+p to inspire a diverse collection of people suddenly brought together to handle an ill-defined, difficult, and expanding mission. Hallenbeck said it was his impression that Bremer was ”reclusive” and wasn't comfortable with anyone. He recalled that on July 4,2003, there was a pool party to celebrate the American independence day. Looking for lunch, he walked out to the party and saw people cl.u.s.tering at one end of the pool around a visiting Army general, who was asking about their work on morale. Bremer appeared a half hour later. ”He looked totally alone-like he didn't recognize anybody. Alone.” Eventually, Bremer's spokesman, Dan Senor, took Bremer around to introduce him to people. ”That was Bremer's style,” Hallenbeck said.

Nor did Bremer lead his people in such a way as to help them confront the organization's flaws. His morning meetings in the summer and fall of 2003, as Iraq descended into guerrilla war, ”were bizarre,” recalled Gardner, one of the Army colonels at the CPA. ”You'd go around the table. He'd say, Anybody got anything?' Most of the time it was 'nope,' 'nope,' 'got nothing.'”

His own work style also tied their hands. ”He chose to micromanage,” said Dov Zakheim. ”Nothing could be done without his okay.” This was the biggest single problem in the financial pipeline from Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., to Iraq, he said. ”Bremer wanted to control the expenditure of money in the field, but he didn't have the people in the field to expend it.”

The very structure of the CPA also hurt Bremer, giving him great responsibility without commensurate power. Bremer was understaffed and underbudgeted. He was in the frustrating position of having authority over every aspect of the occupation except for security-the one essential element that was arguably the prerequisite for everything else. ”We had a proconsul model, but we didn't give Bremer the power to go with it,” said one State Department official, referring to the wide authority that the ancient Roman system gave to the governors of its provinces.

Life in the zone The CPA existed in a never-never land in Saddam's old palace complex behind high walls in downtown Baghdad. There was a sharp disconnect between its cool, quiet Green Zone and the real world beyond the miles of tall concrete Jersey security barriers that ringed the zone. Some in the U.S. military called the CPA's slice of central Baghdad Oz. To many within the CPA, the rest of Iraq was the Red Zone.

At first, life in the newly created American sector was rough. ”We were working 120-hour weeks in Baghdad,” recalled Hallenbeck. ”It wasn't like we could go home on the weekends.” Lacking rooms, he and his colleagues were sleeping on the palace lawn and living on MREs-the military's subsistence-level packaged rations. In the middle of all this, Pentagon auditors appeared and asked to see his company's timecards. But within a few weeks, the quality of life improved notably in the zone-in sharp contrast to the rest of Iraq, where conditions generally were deteriorating. It was a four-square-mile area that felt very different from the rest of Iraq, a novel mix of palm trees and third-rate Iraqi palaces interspersed with Bradley fighting vehicles and a few bombed-out buildings. It was isolated from the city's giant traffic jams and shaded by many more trees than grew elsewhere in Baghdad. It also was attuned to different realities than prevailed beyond its blast walls. Inside the zone, the telephones had a 914 area code, from New York's Westchester County, where the phone system was based. On one visit to the CPA's Office of Strategic Communications, all the televisions but one were tuned to Fox News. ”It's almost like being at Walt Disney's version of Arabian Nights,” Arabian Nights,” said Army Reserve Maj. Jay Bachar, who spent a year working on civil affairs issues in the zone. ”I lived in a villa that was originally owned by a Republican Guard colonel.” It featured six bedrooms, a hot tub on a balcony, and three Iraqi maids. ”We lived very large.” said Army Reserve Maj. Jay Bachar, who spent a year working on civil affairs issues in the zone. ”I lived in a villa that was originally owned by a Republican Guard colonel.” It featured six bedrooms, a hot tub on a balcony, and three Iraqi maids. ”We lived very large.”

The zone was at the center of one of the most important cities in the Arab world, but inside CPA headquarters the food resembled that of an American high school. Busy staffers would line up at lunchtime for paper plates of hot dogs and baked beans, and would wash them down with cold cans of Coca-Cola. Oddly for being in a Muslim country, ”it seemed like seventy-five percent of the entrees were pork, or pork based-pork rings, pork chops, fish-shaped pork, I guess. Pork in our salads, pork stew,” said Alex Dehgan, who worked on a special nonprolif-eration project aimed at gainfully employing Iraqi weapons scientists. ”I think Halliburton must have gotten a great deal on pork somewhere.”

Nighttime offered just a few choices-more work, exercise, or drinking. ”Time off for me was going to the gym,” recalled Larry Diamond, who worked for the CPA a few months later, when it was better established. The gym, he wrote, was ”a state-of-the-art facility with dozens of weight machines, free weights, floor mats, running machines, bikes, and elliptical trainers, packed almost constantly with sweating civilians and trim, muscular soldiers.”

Another evening pursuit was television. ”Television in the Green Zone had some of the strangest TV channels,” said Dehgan. Out of just fifteen channels, two were dedicated to fas.h.i.+on, and another after 11:00 at night showed only Germans playing video games.

Then there was alcohol. Eventually the zone boasted seven bars, including one for security contractors and another, more exclusive one operated by the CIA called the Babylon. The biggest one was the disco at the al Rasheed Hotel, which was, Dehgan said, ”mainly staffed with intoxicated security contractors--------------------------- There were maybe four hundred intoxicated men and three women in the middle of it.”

Soldiers arriving from austere, dusty bases elsewhere in Iraq sometimes were shocked by what they saw in the zone, recalled one officer. Thursday and Friday nights in the zone's bars, he said, had a wide-open feel to them. ”Everyone was drunk, and the mission was to hook up. Military guys would walk in there, and their eyes would get big.”

Nor were some of the zone's inhabitants much connected to the country they were ostensibly remaking. ”There was just a level of ignorance” that was surprising, Hallenbeck said. ”There were maybe seven thousand people in the Green Zone, and very few spoke Arabic or ever got out.” Even if they had wanted to get outside the confines of their protected area, CPA rules made it difficult: ”If you had to go outside the Green Zone, you'd have to have two military vehicles and four armed guys. You'd go in and apply for that, and get your name on the list for escort support. You'd go in at eleven at night and make sure you were good to go, and come back in the morning and find you had been superseded by a higher priority project.”

The isolation deepened as the security situation worsened in the summer and fall of 2003. ”A lot of people in the Green Zone, in the bubble, never got out to speak with Iraqis,” recalled Peter Khalil, an Australian who worked at the CPA on national security policy. ”It was easier at first, but then a fortress mentality developed.” This was the political effect of the rise of the insurgency: It was driving a wedge between the occupation authority and the Iraqi people.

The result was that all some CPA officials knew of Iraq was what they saw on TV or heard in the mess hall. As a State Department official put it, ”You had this odd situation where the journalists knew more about the situation than the briefers did, because the journalists moved around and the briefers generally didn't get out of the Green Zone much.”

Richard Armitage said that the State Department grew increasingly worried by the tone of life inside the zone. ”I defined it as the bar scene from Star Wars” Star Wars” he said in 2005. ”The people running to and fro, young people in very heady positions, they didn't have a clue what they were doing.” State was so alarmed that one of the orders given to John Negroponte and his aides when they were sent out to replace Bremer in 2004 was, ”Clean up that G.o.dd.a.m.n Green Zone.” Armitage's instructions to Amba.s.sador James Jeffrey, the number-two American diplomat in Iraq, were, ”I don't want to see people running around with arms out there drinking beer; I don't want to see people I don't know who they are carrying weapons; clean up this freaking place; send people home.” he said in 2005. ”The people running to and fro, young people in very heady positions, they didn't have a clue what they were doing.” State was so alarmed that one of the orders given to John Negroponte and his aides when they were sent out to replace Bremer in 2004 was, ”Clean up that G.o.dd.a.m.n Green Zone.” Armitage's instructions to Amba.s.sador James Jeffrey, the number-two American diplomat in Iraq, were, ”I don't want to see people running around with arms out there drinking beer; I don't want to see people I don't know who they are carrying weapons; clean up this freaking place; send people home.”

The CPA vs. the media Relations between the occupation authority and the foreign press corps rapidly deteriorated. By the summer of 2003, Pamela Hess, a veteran defense reporter for the UPI wire service, recalled, ”The media operation at CPA was abominable. The mechanics of it were ridiculous.” Requests for interviews were filed on slips of paper to a military office, which would then deliver them to the CPA. Arriving in Baghdad for a one-month reporting tour, Hess submitted a series of requests in writing on her first day in the city. ”Four weeks later, when I left Baghdad, my requests had never even been formally acknowledged-although a CPA spokesman confirmed they had been received-and none were ever acted upon.”

The CPA press office seemed to see itself more as a monitor of the media than as a provider of information. One opportunity the CPA offered up was covering the new garbage collection service in Baghdad. For lack of any other story one August day, Carol Williams of the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times dutifully decided to do it. As frequently happens in journalism, she found more than she'd expected: Many of the trash crews were small children who were being shaken down by their bosses for a third of their wages, which amounted to three dollars a day. Iraqis she interviewed were upset by the situation and eager to discuss it, in part because the legal minimum age for such work was supposed to be fifteen. dutifully decided to do it. As frequently happens in journalism, she found more than she'd expected: Many of the trash crews were small children who were being shaken down by their bosses for a third of their wages, which amounted to three dollars a day. Iraqis she interviewed were upset by the situation and eager to discuss it, in part because the legal minimum age for such work was supposed to be fifteen.

CPA officials weren't pleased by her coverage. The next time Williams was at a press briefing, she checked in with a press officer about another article she was pursuing on the provision of clean water-there was a local angle for her paper because some of the engineers were from California. She was informed that interviews she had been promised might not occur because of her handling of the trash story. In fact, she recalled, ”I never did get access to the water engineers.”

In Hess's view, the CPA's relations.h.i.+p with the press soured fundamentally because of the insistence by officials that all was going well, and the consequent determination of reporters to disprove that contention. ”Had they been more willing to admit that things were bad instead of putting lipstick on the pig, I think reporters would have been kinder,” she said. ”I think we felt compelled to rub their noses in it, to try to make them admit it, and maybe do something about it.”

Meanwhile, the CPA ceded the playing field in other, more important ways. Charles Krohn, a veteran of Army public affairs, was surprised when he served in Baghdad to see that the CPA early on lifted the ban on TV satellite receivers, but failed to begin satellite broadcasting until months later, in January 2004, leaving a gap in which Iraqis got all their news from Arab stations essentially hostile to the U.S. presence. ”What this means is that for the first nine months, we essentially forfeited the contest for hearts and minds to the compet.i.tion,” he wrote later.

The CPA vs. the U.S. military Underneath the poor image was a poor reality: The CPA was ineptly organized and frequently incompetent, working badly not only with Iraqis and the media, but even with the U.S. military, its partner in the occupation. There are different points of view on almost any issue in Iraq, but there is surprising unanimity, from both sides of the fence, that the relations.h.i.+p between the CPA and the military began badly and deteriorated further with time.

Sherri Kraham said the CPA-military relations.h.i.+p was ”very poor.” She explained, ”I don't think we spoke the same language.”

”The CPA-what a dysfunctional arrangement that was!” exclaimed Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-5. ”It was nuts!”

”We would have been better off if CPA hadn't shown up,” said Col. Clarke Lethin, the chief of operations for the 1st Marine Division, which fought in Iraq first in the 2003 invasion and then in the 2004 occupation. ”We just built friction into the system.”

A general who served in Iraq went even further, saying that the occupation authority ”was the single greatest a.s.set the enemy had.”

Fundamentally, the CPA and the military had different conceptions of what the United States was doing in Iraq. The civilians, more in line with Bush administration thinking about transforming Iraq and the region, implemented policies that set out to change the politics, economy, and even the culture of Iraq. The military, less culturally sympathetic to the administration's revolutionary goals, thought of its mission as almost the opposite, calling it ”stability and security operations.” ”The military was there to win the conflict, find Saddam and then keep the peace,” retired Rear Adm. David Oliver, a veteran submarine officer and an astute a.n.a.lyst of the politics of defense, wrote later in a short memoir of his time devising the CPA's budget. After the war, the military sought to keep the population quiet, while the CPA ”focused on change,” which meant that it was bound to provoke vocal and violent reactions from some Iraqis opposed to those changes. For example, Oliver noted, as the CPA was seeking to normalize commerce by opening banks, which would rea.s.sure merchants that they could conduct business without fear of being robbed of the cash they had to keep on hand, some U.S. commanders were walking into banks and demanding piles of cash from government payrolls to pay for local cleanup projects.

CPA officials were aware of the military's pervasive unhappiness with them. ”The 101st and 4th ID are beginning to get frustrated by the lack of progress in key reconstruction work,” stated the occupation authority's internal situation report of June 18,2003. ”Recent negative developments in Mosul indicate growing frustrations over perceived inaction by CPA over re-employment of former military officers.”

Outfitting Iraqi police was another of those points of friction that emerged in the following weeks. ”They were useless,” Lt. Col. Poirier, who was trying to set up police forces in Tikrit and Samarra, recalled. ”The guidance from them changed daily-'Get the police white uniforms,' then, 'No, get blue uniforms.'”

In al Anbar province, Gen. Swannack was growing increasingly frustrated as he tried to get local police outfitted. In August he put in a requisition request for flak vests, communications equipment, and vehicles for the Iraq security forces working with his troops. There was a clear and pressing requirement, he said: ”You need the comms so they can call you when they got in trouble. You need vehicles to get to the battle. You need flak vests so you can fight.” First he was told the gear would be delivered by November 1. Then he was told it would be delayed until December. When that month came and went, he called on January 1 to inquire again, only to be told that the CPA official in charge of that contract had gone home on Christmas vacation and had decided not to return. In February he finally went public with his frustration, mentioning it at a press conference-and then the equipment began to arrive.

The CPA and the military also diverged on the PR campaign. In October 2003, as the White House was launching a public relations campaign to emphasize how well things were going in Iraq, Sanchez began to go out of his way in briefings to warn that there would be more insurgent attacks that could inflict many casualties on U.S. forces. For example, on October 2, Rumsfeld and Myers used a Pentagon news conference to chastise the media for not covering all the good news out of Iraq. ”Today is D plus 198 in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and while there is no question we have faced some challenges and we've got some ahead of us, we have really achieved numerous successes and expect the situation to continue to improve,” said Myers, always one to accentuate the positive.

Rumsfeld even hinted at troop drawdowns, saying that his message to Congress at this time was that he needed supplemental funds to ”finish the job in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that we're able to bring the U.S. forces back.”

A few days later, President Bush offered a similarly upbeat a.s.sessment. ”Listen, we're making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it's hard to tell it when you listen to the filter,” he said at a news conference. ”The situation is improving on a daily basis inside Iraq. People are freer, the security situation is getting better.”

During this same period, Sanchez's public statements were decidedly darker than those of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Myers. ”The enemy has evolved,” he said at his own October 2 press conference. ”It is a little bit more lethal, little bit more complex, little bit more sophisticated, and, in some cases, a little bit more tenacious.” And, he added, ”as long as we are here, the coalition needs to be prepared to take casualties.” He also said that it would be ”a few years” before the security situation in Iraq stabilized sufficiently to permit a major drawdown of U.S. troops.

Such statements reflected a fundamental disagreement over communications strategy. ”The military guys said that their key audience was Iraq, and emanating out from there,” said a public affairs officer at the CPA. ”The CPA view was that the center of gravity was the U.S. public.”

The CPA public affairs operation also underwhelmed some colleagues. At one meeting, ”I was awestruck by the superficiality of the insights that they brought to the table, absolutely awestruck,” recalled Larry Crandall, a CPA official involved in reconstruction financing.