WAR AFTER THE WAR
by GEORGE PACKER
What Washington doesn't see in Iraq.

With the old order overthrown, the Baath Party authorities purged, and the ministries stripped bare by looters, most Iraqis don't know where to take their grievances and petitions, where to unload the burden of their personal histories. So, like supplicants to the Caliph of ancient Baghdad, they bring them directly to the front gate of the occupation. But few Iraqis have the credentials to enter the Green Zone, and there are few, if any, interpreters at the gate. The Iraqis stand on one side of coils of concertina wire, gesturing and trying to explain why they must get in; on the other side stand American soldiers in body armor, doing twelve-hour shifts of checkpoint duty, keeping them out.

One day in July, a tiny woman in a salmon-colored veil stepped out of the crowd and thrust a handwritten letter at me. She was a schoolteacher, about thirty, with glasses and thick white face powder and an expression so pointedly solemn that she might have been a mime performing grief. Her letter, which was eighteen pages long, requested an audience with "Mister respectable, merciful American ambassador Pawal Bramar." It contained a great deal of detailed advice on the need to arm the Iraqi people so that they could help fight against the guerrilla resistance. The teacher, who was well under five feet tall, wanted permission to carry an AK-47 and work alongside American soldiers against "the beasts" who were trying to restore Saddam or bring Iranian-style oppression. She had drawn up a fake gun permit to illustrate her desire. She was having trouble sleeping, she said, and had all but stopped eating.

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Erdmann's view that rebuilding Iraq would require a significant, sustained effort was echoed by the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Throughout 2002, sixteen groups of Iraqi exiles, coordinated by a bureau official named Thomas S. Warrick, researched potential problems in postwar Iraq, from the electricity grid to the justice system. The thousands of pages that emerged from this effort, which became known as the Future of Iraq Project, presented a sobering view of the country's physical and human infrastructure--and suggested the need for a long-term, expensive commitment.

The Pentagon also spent time developing a postwar scenario, but, because of Rumsfeld's battle with Powell over foreign policy, it didn't coordinate its ideas with the State Department. The planning was directed, in an atmosphere of near-total secrecy, by Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and William Luti, his deputy. According to a Defense Department official, Feith's team pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar reconstructions. The fear, the official said, was that such people would offer pessimistic scenarios, which would challenge Rumsfeld's aversion to using troops as peacekeepers; if leaked, these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war. "You got the impression in this exercise that we didn't harness the best and brightest minds in a concerted effort," Thomas E. White, the Secretary of the Army during this period, told me.
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Bremer's C.P.A., like any government, tries to control news coverage--I received five separate official e-mails alerting me to the arrival of a shipment of fifty-four thousand soccer balls at Baghdad International Airport--and officials complain that the press has failed to present the positive side of the Iraq story. There is some truth to the charge that journalists focus on bad news in Iraq (as they do everywhere), covering the rising daily death toll and street protests more energetically than sewer repairs.

At the same time, the C.P.A.'s good news doesn't always bear scrutiny. The health figures that Bremer cited at the Diwaniyah hospital were undercut by a chance conversation I had the next day with Dr. Jean-Bernard Bouvier, then of the British medical charity Merlin. The Ministry of Health had become an empty shell, without central control, Bouvier told me. Nobody had any information about inventory at the warehouses of the central pharmacy. "They said they've put out six hundred tons--of what?" he asked. "If it's twelve trucks of I.V. fluid, I don't give a damn." According to Bouvier, sixteen tons of drugs were dumped on a single clinic, and the stacks of boxes left no room for patients.

Two months earlier, Bouvier had drawn up an Emergency National Distribution Plan for Drugs; he had heard no response from the coalition. (His suggestions, which were supported by the World Health Organization, were eventually rejected.) A veteran of many disasters, he found that the expertise of organizations like his kept falling into a void at the C.P.A. "They don't see the fragility of the system," he said. "It's not that children are starving yet, but it's a structure that is slowly crumbling. You can degrade a society bit by bit, but then you reach a point where you just crash."

In the view of many critics, Bremer's decision to abolish the Iraqi Army and purge high-level Baathists from the civil administration only added to the tumult in Iraq. As Jay Garner put it, the immediate result of the May 16th order was the creation of "four hundred thousand new enemies." Even some of Bremer's advisers now acknowledge that cutting loose an army with guns and without pay was a serious mistake. The C.P.A. reinstated salaries on a six-month basis after deadly demonstrations outside the Assassin's Gate, but the damage to security and pride was already done. One of Garner's lieutenants, who had been working closely with Iraqi officers, was shocked by Bremer's dissolution order. "From the Iraqi viewpoint, that simple action took away the one symbol of sovereignty the Iraqi people still had," he said. "That's when we stopped being liberators and became occupiers."
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Before we parted, I asked Erdmann how he would define success in Iraq. His answer was humbler than the official "End State" declaration that had been affixed to his office wall in Baghdad. Still, given the concrete realities of what is now happening in Iraq, it was enormously ambitious.

"Success will be if there's a private sphere where they have some real choice in what they do with their lives, and a public sphere where they can have some control over their destiny and the state doesn't visit arbitrary violence on them," he said. "This means some type of democracy. It won't be Jeffersonian democracy, with farmers plowing the godforsaken sands outside of Nasiriya. Some would say, 'That's modest.' But it isn't. It will be huge. And it'll be something uniquely Iraqi. They don't have to love us, or even like us--why should they? We liberated them, but the fact that we had to do it adds to the trauma of coming out of decades of totalitarian rule. It's difficult for us. We look at ourselves and say, 'We have really good motives and try to do the right thing and why don't people appreciate it?' That's an American thing. Few Iraqis are ever going to step forward and say, 'I really love the C.P.A.' They'll have to live here long after we're gone. They have legitimate interests, and we shouldn't treat them as children--they're not. If in five or ten years they can look back on this period and believe that they're better off, then things will be O.K. We'll be able to move beyond this period to where things are normal between the United States and Iraq." He paused and shrugged. "In a way, success will be if the Iraqis don't hate us."

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