Moment of Truth
With an interim constitution, Iraqis inch closer to gaining control of their shattered nation. What happens after that is anyone's guess
BAGHDAD--For Iraq, it shall be "freedom at midnight" on June 30: Ready or not, Iraqis will have to lay claim to the sovereignty of their country. Paul Bremer, the de facto high commissioner of the land, will have left that day. There shall be an American military presence in Baghdad, but it will be deployed in eight big bases outside the city. There may or may not be a "status of forces agreement" between the Americans and the Iraqis, but the restoration of sovereignty will have been well underway. The scapegoating onto America and its soldiers and administrators of everything under the Iraqi sun would have to begin to yield. Iraqis will have a chance to show what the wages of freedom shall be.
Men and women are never given overmuch to foresight. There is no sure way of knowing whether the American leaders who prosecuted this Iraqi war would have still done it had they known what awaited them in that difficult land. As Year 2 of the American interlude in Iraq approaches, it is too late for such second thoughts, and it is idle to debate whether this is a war of necessity or of choice. A kind of "imperial burden" came with this war. The pride of the Iraqis and the political correctness of the Americans often come together to paper over this uncomfortable fact, for the age of empire is done and over with. But venture into Iraq, and the facts of this Iraqi dependence are everywhere. "Rifle in one hand, wrench in the other," is the way Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, described his mission and that of his soldiers during a briefing at his headquarters in Mosul early last month. There was combat to begin with, and there were insurgents from the ranks of the old regime and jihadists who crossed into Iraq eager to strike at Americans, but the men and women of the 101st Airborne had repaired potholes and painted school walls and opened clinics. Their commander, a Renaissance man with a Ph.D. in international relations from
Princeton University, had even done his own call-in show, and the local politicians had begun to emulate him. On the outskirts of the city, this command had built a small housing compound with a very American name, the Village of Hope.
Petraeus was particularly proud of this project. As his tour of duty was drawing to a close, he took Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and a group of reporters traveling with him to that village. It was a cluster of 18 homes, given to a group of lucky families drawn from all Mosul's communities. The gift was given with the justice of Solomon: Of the 18 families, eight were Arabs, six were Kurds, two were Turkmen, one was Chaldean, and the other Assyrian. For Petraeus and Wolfowitz, the ribbon-cutting ceremony was something they clearly savored. The Iraqis receiving certificates to their homes were earnest and grateful, dressed in their best: Their children shook hands with the American dignitaries with the shyness and the good manners of the traditional culture of this world. Granted, this was a small patch of peace, and this command had lost 60 of its people in Mosul and its outskirts. But in Petraeus, this place had a benevolent foreign ruler: Think of him as David Pasha of Mosul. He moved about the municipality and the police station with ease and good humor--an approachable symbol of power. But the outsider's justice is always burdened with its foreignness. A people in need take it and bemoan it at the same time.
There is no better place to see Iraq's "complications" than Kirkuk, a city of 800,000 people southeast of Mosul. Here, oil and ethnicity and a brutal "Arabization" program pushed by Saddam Hussein have created a volatile brew. The 4th Infantry Division, under Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, held sway in Kirkuk, and so did the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade under the command of Col. William Mayville. The colonel appeared to have mastered the ethnicities of this place. It was this command that had captured Saddam last December. But potholes and libraries and job creation for the Iraqis have been central preoccupations as well. The Kirkukis are glad for the protection. At a roundtable assembled for Wolfowitz, it was clear that this was a contested city. The Kurds have come into considerable power here--the demographics have worked in their favor. But the old Turkmen community believes that the history of this city had been Turkic through and through, and the Arabs brought here from other parts of the country--the "10,000 dinar" Arabs they are called, after the subsidy given them by the old despotism to settle in this city atop huge reserves of oil--have their anxieties to match. Away from the agitated street and the false pride, a Sunni-Arab notable told Wolfowitz that the Americans will have to stay. In a clear reference to the Kurds, this notable, Sheik Khalid al-Assi, of one of the great tribes, the Ubaydas, said that "the oppressed have become oppressors" and that the new democracy has become a whip in the hands of one community. This man was removed from the Sunni triangle. Here, the American presence was, for him, a balance to the greater power of the Kurds. The scenarios of doom have not materialized in Kirkuk, Wolfowitz told the notables who had been pulled together for him. But it was their country, he said, and they had to make it work. There had always been deep reformism at the heart of Wolfowitz's worldview, a belief that American power can advance social and political reform in lands that need it. He had come to oversee the rotation and the "relief in place" of the forces in Iraq. On this tour, he was a witness to some of the saving graces of this war.
At times, it seems this American presence is challenged by its very successes: There are nightmarish gasoline lines in this country of oil, and this has become a convenient symbol and target for those at odds with the American stewardship. But the gasoline shortages have come about as a result of some 1 million new cars being brought into Iraq in the aftermath of its liberation. It is the same with electricity: The shortages are due in part to the satellite dishes flooding the place, to the consumer durables denied the Iraqis by the old regime but now in plentiful supply. In his office at the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Bremer speaks of the introduction of a new currency: It had taken only three months, in the face of a deadly insurgency, to do so. Some 9,000 tons of new currency had been brought onto the market and 13,000 tons of old paper had been withdrawn and hauled away. It is the burden of success: We had, with ease, toppled an entrenched despotism. It stood to reason that we would be miracle workers, and that with a magic wand we would dispose of this country's age-old troubles.
"Infidel." "Feed the stomach, you embarrass the eye," a former major in the Iraqi armed forces said to me on the grounds of what had been Uday Hussein's "water palace." The kitsch of the place, and its gaudy, bad taste had driven me outdoors to the morning sun. The Iraqi, a man in his early 40s, most likely a Sunni Muslim, now a "minder" and a driver for foreigners working in the country, had no kind words for the Americans. We are "occupiers" and we had disturbed the "peace" of the country, we had handed it over to the Kurds and the Shiites, we had empowered a group of "hustlers" and outsiders keen on dispossessing the country of its wealth. There was no way of conciliating this kind of opinion. We had overthrown a system of privilege, and this man had been one of its beneficiaries. But days later, I read that Sheik Abdul Mahdi Karbalai, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in the shrine city of Karbala, objected to a visit to the city by Bremer. "He is an infidel and an occupier and has no right to visit Karbala," this Shiite cleric said. The man no doubt lived through the terrors that the Baathist regime had inflicted on the scholars and seminarians of Najaf and Karbala. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, the terror squads of the regime and the informers had the run of these holy cities. The number of seminarians had shrunk to historic lows. Scores of religious scholars fell to assassins. Deep down, it must be guessed that Karbalai knows the extent of his community's debt to American power.
It should be recalled that when "freedom at midnight" came to British India on Aug. 15, 1947, there was partition, and there was bloodshed, and the undoing of centuries of communal life on the fault lines. War, it is said, now stalks Iraq. The Kurds, for more than a decade outside Iraq's circle of terror, now want federalism, recognition of their language, and a share of the oil wealth proportional to their share of the country's population. They were America's friends when they were needed, they remind us, and both their weight on the ground and a moral debt owed them for that friendship entitle them to our support. For their part, the Shiites fall back on the weight of their numbers, while the Sunnis alternate between anti-American terror and a sullen sense that the Americans are bent on remaking Iraq, "de-Arabizing" it, as it were. American power had interposed itself between these two communities. It is the norm in Iraq for the Sunnis and Shiites to say that the country is above sectarianism and its plagues, that it is a place beyond the atavistic loyalties of the religious sect. That way of describing history is defective. In an Iraq that would go beyond the native tyranny and the foreign occupier, a more honest depiction of things will have to be put forth. Year 1 in Iraq yields no simple audit: the mayhem and the accomplishments side by side. On March 2, on Shiism's holiest day, commemo-rating the death of the prophet Mohammed's grandson, Imam Hussein, terror was unleashed in Baghdad and Karbala as the Shiite faithful were conducting their religious ceremonies. Suicide bombers and other attackers struck. The exact toll may never be known, but by one count, it was more than 170 lives. In the usual fashion, some Iraqis blamed American forces, but the terrors emanate from Iraq's own sectarian troubles and from the schemes of jihadists in neighboring lands. In the week that followed--as if to balance the heartbreak--Iraqi leaders stepped forth to embrace a constitution as modern and pluralistic as those authoritarian lands in the Arab world could imagine. There were guarantees for the minorities and liberal protections and assurance to the Kurds that theirs would be a safer fate now in the new Iraq.
From the very beginning of this war, this was a campaign fought under--and for--Arab eyes. Its aim was to take the fight against Arab radicalism to the heart of the Arab world. As the prospects of finding weapons of mass destruction recede in Iraq, that wider war against Arab terror comes increasingly to the fore. We have to remember that war as our soldiers press on in a war without clear front lines, and in a country where the gratitude for services rendered is often drowned out by Iraqis for whom liberty has come to mean steady volleys of abuse directed at those who provided the liberty to begin with. A cruel paradox comes with this war: We had swept into Iraq to strike against Arab malignancies--the radicalism, the unreason, a culture of terror, the abdication of responsibility on the part of the rulers for the deeds of the young and the embittered, the anti-Americanism. We had hoped to find Iraqis who had had their fill with all that and who were ready for a new dawn. We found those people to be sure. But there were echoes of Ramallah and Cairo in Fallujah and Ramadi. There are Gordian knots, it turns out, that no foreign sword can cut.
This story appears in the March 22, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.