This book about Iraq from the 2003 American
invasion to the early months of 2005 should be required reading for every American. Through almost two years of many long visits and countless days and nights spent with both coalition forces and with all kinds of Iraqis, George Packer gathered and here presents as detailed a picture of the facts on the ground as one could get without having been there an equal amount of time.
Two years after the invasion, daily life in non-Kurdish Iraq was a different but even worse nightmare than the one under Saddam. There were, if anything, even fewer public services and employment opportunities. The streets were hardly safe for anyone, but women particularly were not safe outside their homes unless in conservative Islamic garb and accompanied by a male protector. Outside of religious gatherings, almost noone
concerned with their personal survival would go to any sort of public civic meeting, much less even dream of speaking their mind publicly. Conditions are the same or worse right now three years after the invasion. Clearly democracy cannot develop in these conditions, and we are spending young men’s lives and our treasure in a
lost cause.
Did the cause have to be lost? George Packer is not quite sure. He is only sure that it is easy to understand how it was lost, and this he describes very well.
The two most visible leaders of the whole effort were Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush. Neither of them knew or cared much about the Iraqi people, their history, culture, makeup and existing circumstances. They were driven by two ideologies they couldn’t and wouldn’t see beyond. Rumsfeld’s was the unstoppable power of the streamlined high-tech military to accomplish virtually anything, and Bush’s was the absolute rightness and inevitability of American style democracy and capitalism.
They completely closed their ears to the voices of the many experienced diplomats, and intelligence and state department analysts who tried first to point out the great difficulty of dealing with nation-building in Iraq, and then, failing to dissuade on the idea of invasion, tried to point out the need for a well-thought-out and detailed plan for restoring order and civic institutions after invasion. Instead, with Bush’s blessing, Rumsfeld’s military just rushed to Baghdad, completely failing to secure the country on the way, with no post invasion plan whatsoever. Fools rush in.
Thus the military arrived in Baghdad having no idea what to do next, whether to stop the looting and vandalism or not, whether to keep the army on the payroll and use them for security or disband them, who to turn to to get electric power back on, or water running, or sewage drains unclogged or anything else. And noone finally sent to take charge of all this, from Garner to Bremer and his underlings, had any real knowledge of Iraq or qualifications for the job. They just had the right Republican party connections in the U.S.
Mr. Packer details their most disastrous mistakes; The list goes on and on. I will mention only one, namely Bremer and/or Bush’s completely feckless failure to immediately arrest Moqtada al-Sadr for the murder of Ayatollah Abdul-Majid al-Khoei in the spring of 2003. Khoei, the son of a grand ayatollah who had been Sistani"s predecessor as Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric until his death in 1992, had run a human rights foundation in London, and returned to Iraq to guide Iraq’s Shiite population in a democratic direction. He had the blessing of the American authorities. But when he entered his hometown of Najaf he was murdered on orders of the Iranian-backed young religious fanatic al-Sadr.
An investigation was conducted, there was overwhelming eye-witness and forensic evidence of al-Sadr’s role, and Iraqi Judge Raed Juhi issued arrest warrants against Sadr and two dozen others. But Bremer placed Sadr’s warrant under seal and he was never arrested for this. What was the message? Obviously it was that the Americans will not protect anyone from the lawlessness of the fanatics, who were thus tremendously emboldened. Equally obviously, Bush was much more concerned about the political ramifications at home of short-term violence by Sadr’s gangs than he was concerned about enforcing law and order in Iraq and eliminating an important danger to any hopes of democracy in Iraq.
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