The soldiers get pulled in every direction, improvising every step of the way. “Within three blocks, we can be involved in high-intensity combat, low-intensity peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance,” says Col. Gregg Martin. With raised voices and salty language, the keyed-up soldiers bicker over prison conditions or some detail of the Geneva Convention, and try to keep up with the pro-Saddam graffiti that pops up faster than they can slather white paint over it. (GIs painted over one scrawl, your dead meat usa, but, trying for sensitivity, left up the word jihad.) “We don’t have a system,” said Lt. Col. Phil Battaglia, a caustic Jerseyan with a Tony Soprano accent. Battaglia finally came up with a simple solution. He ordered his officers: “Tell your people to tell these people: ‘If you put that [Saddam] picture back up I’m going to drive this vehicle through your house’.”
The soldiers in Tikrit have it easy compared to what their comrades face a hundred miles to the south in Al Fallujah. There, soldiers with the 82d Airborne Division, saying they had been fired upon as they occupied a school, began shooting into a crowd of protesters on two occasions last week, killing 17. “Don’t they claim that they are trying to restore human rights?” yelled Qasim Mohammed, a handyman who witnessed the incident. “They are thieves, the Americans are all thieves.” The town remains in a seething standoff. “The U.S. commanders said they didn’t want demonstrations. We told them that democracy allows people to demonstrate,” said Al Fallujah’s mayor, Tahab Bedawi Hamidi. “If they bring in international peacekeepers it would be better. What happened at the school was done in a cruel way, even if it was in self-defense.”
Two alternative versions of postwar Iraq bumped into each other in the news last week, then went their separate ways. One was expressed in the beaming face of President Bush as he stood on a sunlit carrier deck before cheering sailors beneath a sign proclaiming mission accomplished. The other was the hair-trigger reality on the ground in places like Al Fallujah and Tikrit, where little is yet accomplished. Someday Iraq may fulfill Bush’s vision as a democratic model for the Arab world. The question is whether the administration is prepared to do everything it takes to make that happen. Or whether the Bushies will cling stubbornly to the bedrock bias they came into office with–America does not do nation-building, and American troops don’t do peacekeeping. And here the administration remains at war with itself.
During the 2000 election campaign, Condoleezza Rice declared that the U.S. military, as the world’s stabilizing force, is meant only for war-fighting: it is “lethal,” said the woman who became Bush’s national-security adviser. “It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society.”
Today, the U.S. military finds itself, willy-nilly, doing all these things. But as the chaos in Tikrit and Al Fallujah suggests, it is not yet clear whether this administration has learned how to do them as well as it fights wars. Since 9-11, George W. Bush has transformed the American way of war. Pre-emption, precision “standoff” weapons, the use of special forces as global SWAT teams–these are the new tools of the American uber-power. But 9-11 should have also changed America’s notions of peacekeeping, nation-building and humanitarian intervention. As the Bush administration’s 2002 national-security strategy concluded: “America is now less threatened by conquering states than we are by failing ones.” And Iraq, like Afghanistan, will be a test case for whether American power is enough not just to win wars, but to fundamentally transform societies that have turned into harbors for terrorists or weapons of mass destruction.
Bush himself has clearly moved in that direction, at least rhetorically. In his carrier speech, he declared that America would stay in Iraq until it makes “the transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Yet the administration’s old “we don’t nation-build” ideology still seems to work against that goal. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is planning to dramatically pare down U.S. forces, and he has gone ahead with his pre-9-11 plans to disband the Army War College’s Peacekeeping Institute, which trains officers in post conflict issues. And the administration’s resistance to multilateral aid has held up needed backup like several thousand foreign carabinieri. The Defense chief’s focus is on U.S. control, efficiency and a fast handover to Iraqi self-government. “When foreigners come in with international solutions to local problems, it can create a dependency,” Rumsfeld explained in a February speech titled “Beyond Nation-Building.”
Unfortunately, the alternative to dependency is often anarchy. And when it comes to postwar rebuilding, efficiency is less a cardinal virtue than patience. Take Afghanistan. Rumsfeld, who took a victory lap through Kabul as well as Baghdad last week, talked up the wonders of the “self-reliance” that Washington has promoted there under America’s “modest footprint.” But he didn’t mention that many of the roads are still unpassable in that country because of bandit and warlord rule. Nor that the self-reliance is largely a veneer, and that the United Nations, its agencies and institutions like the World Bank are mainly what keep things running behind the scenes.
True, it’s early in the transformation of Iraq. Thirty years of totalitarian horrors don’t just lift like a dark cloud. And not since World War II has the U.S. military been in total control of a city of 5 million people, responsible for every lever of daily life from trash pickup to water treatment. Officials hope things will get better, especially as an interim Iraqi Congress convenes next month. “We’re still not in a real secure environment,” said Maj. Gen. Buford Blount. “But the airport is now open to NGOs and aid will be coming in soon. Nobody is starving, hospitals are working, power is coming on, there’s water.”
Yet inside the Bush administration the war over postwar Iraq–how many troops are needed and for how long, how much the United Nations and other nations should be involved, which Iraqis will take over–goes on and on, often paralyzing policy. State Department officials tend to want multilateral help and a drawn-out political process; Pentagon unilateralists tend to want an all-American effort, to install favorites like exile leader Ahmad Chalabi and to make a quick exit.
Bush soon plans to name a new civilian administrator for Iraq, career diplomat and Reagan conservative L. Paul Bremer, who may close the gap. Over at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA)–now the chief civilian authority–current administrator Jay Garner seems overwhelmed and undermanned, and officials say Bremer can’t get there soon enough. ORHA is now known as HAHA in Baghdad, and even Garner’s own staff acknowledges their unreadiness. The group had “no plan, no resources and –no experience,” said one official. “The U.N. at least has a structure.”
A key problem is personnel. Rumsfeld has criticized previous U.N.-led or NATO-led efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor; not surprisingly, Garner has fewer than a dozen specialists with experience in such prior nation-building exercises. The U.S. occupation also lacks peacekeepers trained in crowd-control techniques more subtle than firing live ammo or smoke grenades (like rubber bullets and tear gas). “There are literally hundreds of people who have done this before,” the ORHA official said. “We have Americans who have run cities like Pristina [in Kosovo]. We have Americans and Brits who have run police forces… and know all the things to watch out for, but where are they? Instead these guys are going to reinvent the wheel.”
A few administration officials concede they got carried away by the hopeful neoconservative vision of post-Saddam Iraq. The Bushies clearly expected more cheers than jeers in Iraq; an explosion of joy rather than a Shiite explosion (at least one against Americans). They thought they’d inherit a largely intact bureaucracy, police and professional military. Instead they found thousands of discarded uniforms by the roadside. “We only needed three divisions to win this war,” says one ORHA official, “but we’ll need seven or eight to really pacify the country.”
Now, undermanned and eager to get technocrats and experts back to work, U.S. officials are cutting corners–not bothering to investigate Baath Party affiliations, for instance. An OHRA official, reorganizing the 3,000-person staff of the Ministry of Planning, said “we’re not in the business of sacking people on the first day.”
