Chronicles of disaster in Iraq foretold by experts

By Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

Nov. 3, 2006 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

ONE morning in March 2004, four Sunni suicide bombers blew themselves up in a crowd of Shiite pilgrims outside a shrine in northern Baghdad. The blasts, which killed dozens, were an ominous early sign of Iraq’s descent into civil war. But when Rajiv Chandrasekaran, then the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, mentioned the bombings over dinner that evening, the American officials he was dining with had barely registered the event. “Yeah, I saw something about it on the office television,” one said. “But I didn’t watch the full report. I was too busy working on my democracy project.”

That anecdote, which Chandrasekaran relates in “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” captures the myopia and arrogance that have undermined the U.S. adventure in Iraq, with willful idealists spinning high-minded visions as the country burns. His eloquent, finely textured account focuses on the Green Zone, the fortified enclave of palaces and villas that became the headquarters of the U.S. occupation. In this so-called Emerald City, the streets were safe and clean, the power was always on, the mess hall boasted “a bottomless barrel of pork,” and life for Iraqis was invariably said to be improving regardless of the bloody reality outside the bubble.

The 14 months from the fall of Saddam Hussein to the end of “Viceroy” L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority in late June 2004 were America’s “lost year” in Iraq. The folly of that lost year -- the discarded plans, the unheeded warnings, the bureaucratic infighting, the stingy troop deployments -- is by now well known. Chandrasekaran’s well-wrought anecdotes of the U.S. presence and what it meant for average Iraqis convey how those blunders grew out of the disconnect between the country U.S. officials thought they were occupying and the one they actually had occupied. While Bremer’s employees set about building what he called “the first real free-market economy in the Arab world,” Iraqi factory managers were being murdered for suggesting privatization. “How can we care about democracy now when we don’t even have electricity?” an unemployed engineer complained to Chandrasekaran during a blackout.

“Imperial Life” includes dozens of stories of tragicomic ineptitude and awesome corruption by U.S. officials and contractors in Iraq, many of whom had high-level connections to the Bush administration but little in the way of relevant skills. According to a Defense Department report, $8.8 billion cannot be accounted for. Many of the twentysomethings who managed Iraq’s government ministries had no qualification other than having applied for low-level jobs at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Still, as easy at it may be to mock this “Brat Pack” of adventurers and romantics, ideologues and hacks, the real blame lies closer to home -- with their Washington superiors, who sent them to Iraq with inadequate support, little direction and no idea what to do in a country emerging from decades of oppression and starting to come apart.

Such sustained incompetence is difficult to fathom -- so difficult that many observers assume that something sinister must lurk behind it. But sometimes incompetence is really just incompetence, which makes the Iraq debacle all the more mystifying. “The thoughtlessness described in this book is baffling,” James Fallows writes in the afterword to “Blind Into Baghdad,” a collection of his Atlantic Monthly articles on Iraq published over the last four years. “The people with the most at stake in a successful outcome in Iraq were those who had tied America’s welfare and their own reputations, now and into history, to the hope that Iraq could be transformed into an open, democratic, multiethnic, tolerant state.” Yet those same people, especially Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and former Undersecretary for Defense Policy Douglas J. Feith, seemed to go out of their way to undermine that noble goal’s already low odds of success.

In summer 2002, when an invasion seemed all but inevitable to anyone paying close attention, Fallows posed a question to several dozen “spies, Arabists, oil-company officials, diplomats, scholars, policy experts ... and soldiers”: What do we do after taking out Saddam Hussein? Their answers, presented in a clear-eyed and maddeningly prescient November 2002 article called “The Fifty-First State,” definitively refute the claim that the chaos of postwar Iraq was hard to anticipate and all but impossible to avoid -- that “freedom is untidy,” as Rumsfeld put it. They warned of looting, of sectarian violence, of exorbitant expenses, of the dangers of precipitously dissolving the Iraqi army. “The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq,” one report emphasized, “is real and serious.” That caution was offered by the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute one month before the 2003 invasion.

Subsequent articles in “Blind Into Baghdad” catalog the devastating consequences in Iraq, and for American national security more generally, that ensued after all that good advice was ignored. The basic approach is the same: Fallows talks with as many experts and on-the-ground practitioners as possible, then distills their recommendations into a brisk, comprehensive briefing. What is most striking about these follow-up analyses is that even the predictions that Fallows recorded before the invasion have proved too optimistic. Many of his interlocutors in 2002 suggested, for example, that a viable occupation force would need 50,000 to 75,000 troops; 3 1/2 years after the invasion, there are still close to 150,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- a number that most military experts now consider too low.

Fallows surmises that most Bush administration hawks avoided talking or thinking too seriously about the occupation -- about “nation-building” in Iraq -- because they knew that a serious reckoning of the costs and commitment would undermine their case for a war of choice. But if promoting democracy and transforming the Middle East have since become the chief rationales for the war, they were rarely mentioned in the run-up to war. The White House tried to prove it wasn’t a war of choice at all -- that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (or, for some, murky links to terrorist groups) made him an imminent threat.

In “Hubris,” Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and the Nation’s David Corn authoritatively detail how, not why, that case was made. They dissect the White House’s primary “evidence” of Saddam’s weapons programs -- the aluminum tubes supposedly intended for uranium centrifuges, an Iraqi emissary’s supposed attempt to purchase nuclear material in Niger, aerial photographs of supposed mobile weapons labs -- and then exhaustively reconstruct how administration officials offered those exhibits as incontrovertible proof (while ignoring or marginalizing dissenting voices).

There was, to be sure, much that was dishonest in the hawks’ marketing campaign. But Isikoff and Corn are especially adept at showing how the positive feedback loop of politics, policy and personality produced such a massive deception without any one official setting out to perpetrate it. As weapons inspector David Kay said of the top leaders at the Central Intelligence Agency, “I think they understood how weak the available evidence was. They understood the holes.... But the evidence didn’t matter because the weapons [of mass destruction] would be found. They were confident the WMDs would be there.” White House officials were impervious to criticism or contrary evidence because they were -- and, in many cases, still are -- certain that the history would prove them right.

The second half of “Hubris” is dominated by “the Valerie Plame affair.” Isikoff and Corn provide the most detailed account yet of the casual outing of the undercover CIA agent after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly questioned the White House’s Niger claims. But this turns out to be mostly tedious rather than scintillating: the fact that the leak originated with a State Department moderate, Richard L. Armitage, and not a White House apparatchik deflates a scandal that the authors clearly hoped would embody the general sordidness of the administration’s case for war.

A leader among the senior administration officials who designed that marketing strategy was, predictably enough, Bush political advisor Karl Rove. “Rove and company blurred the line between politics and policy in myriad ways, but none as important to Bush’s reelection as the war in Iraq,” write James Slater and Wayne Moore in “The Architect,” a stitched-together sequel to their 2003 Rove-bashing bestseller, “Bush’s Brain.” If you believe the longtime Texas political reporters, Rove is also behind every other putative sin, major and minor, allegedly committed by the Bush White House. Tort reform, Social Security privatization, anti-gay marriage amendments, preventive war -- all, in their telling, sprang from the machinations of Rove’s evil-genius mind as he plotted to cobble together “a permanent Republican majority.”

That phrase, repeated like an incantation throughout “The Architect,” sounds silly given the recent shifts in the political winds. Moore and Slater portray Rove as a master of the “politics of deception” who will stoop as low as he must to tar his opponents and resort to craven demagoguery to motivate the conservative base. “I’ll be honest with you that I wish we had a Rove on our side,” one Democratic strategist tells them. “He understands the stakes, and he knows how to win.” But ultimately, the real lesson of “The Architect” is not that Rove is a political visionary but that all the political genius in the world can’t, in the end, salvage policies that are fundamentally flawed.

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Inside Iraq’s Green Zone

Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Alfred A. Knopf: 336 pp., $25.95

---

Blind Into Baghdad

America’s War in Iraq

James Fallows

Vintage: 230 pp., $13.95

---

Hubris