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But that's getting ahead of the story. First, and now famously, when the lid came off Iraq in April of 2003, Baghdad fell completely apart. The failures of the ideologues in Washington, D.C., to anticipate this should stand for years as a warning against political arrogance and the dangers of formulaic world views, but in fairness, on the streets of Baghdad the thinking was no better and the surprise was equally complete. After years of strong government, suddenly pure anarchy reigned, and Iraqis were introduced to the most elemental forms of survival and predation. An acquaintance of mine witnessed a typical attack on a crowded sidewalk in the central city: a middle-aged man was walking home from the market with two bags of groceries in his arms when he was accosted by a knife-wielding youth demanding his food and money. Pedestrians passing by saw this, and did not intervene. The middle-aged man put down his groceries and reached into his pocket, but instead of coming up with a wallet, came up with a gun. He did not use it to chase his assailant away, but without a word thumbed off the safety and shot the would-be thief dead in the head. An approving crowd then gathered and urged the man to flee, not before the Americans galloped onto the scene (there was no risk of that) but before someone from the dead youth's family arrived to exact vengeance. The man pocketed the gun, picked up his groceries, and calmly walked away. Over the year and a half since the invasion, Baghdad has been filled with such robberies and killings without consequencegrave disorders that continue to present dangers today.
There is something to be said in favor of anarchy nonetheless. However brutal and unjust it may be, on the level of the street it offers the ultimate in market freedomsomething like a shopkeeper's paradise. It is significant, for instance, that the man who was attacked was not merely out strolling but was heading home carrying a full load of groceries, including, probably, the superbly fresh vegetables and fruits that have been widely available in the city, and at a good price. Personally, I've found this to be one of the more striking details of life in Baghdad: even during the toughest weeks of the insurrection last spring, when American supply lines from Kuwait were interrupted and quantities at the meals in the Green Zone were temporarily reduced, there was abundant food in the rest of the city, which as usual included bananasbeautiful, perfectly ripe, unblemished Ecuadorian bananas, of a quality hard to find in Paris or New York, hanging in bunches in front of every little grocery store.
More recently, last June during the tense run-up to Iraqi sovereignty, when Americans in the Green Zone were formally locked down and required to walk around carrying flak jackets and helmets, Iraqis seemed bewildered by the overwrought advice being disseminated by U.S. officials, that those of us living out in the city should stock up on food and bottled wateras if the outbreak of civil war might somehow cause the shops to close, or the supplies to dry up. The point is that the Iraqis' recent experience has been exactly the opposite. Would you prefer beef, fish, or free-range chicken? Chinese, Lebanese, or American cuisine? Cool, watery cucumbers? Fresh greens, or carrots, or tomatoes with actual taste? Do you prefer red or green apples, Pepsi or Coke? And how about Scottish malts, Iranian caviar, Cuban cigars, or, better yet, a wide variety of weapons and explosives at discount prices? You can buy a new AK-47 with a folding stock, never fired and fresh out of the crate, for $170. A top-end Iraqi pistol costs about three times as much. But you need only about $15 for enough C-4 to waste an armored car, and hand grenades are cheaper still. You can also buy three sizes of mortars, and different kinds of rockets, too. I've heard that the problem with shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles is that the batteries go bad, and are hard to replace. I've also heard of a Russian tank for sale, and I only half doubt it. Of course there are security and logistical problems for Westerners who want to go shopping in Iraq these daysfor potato chips, let alone weaponryand you've got to have friends, as well as cash in hand. But with a bit of patience, in Baghdad you can find almost anything you could want.
If you were a typical Iraqi man, what you would want most of all, after a weapon and a woman, is a car. This became obvious soon after the lid came off. Early during the occupation, the U.S. Army reacted with typical expediency to the corruption among the traffic police, and to other problems perceived in the lawby formally suspending enforcement of the Iraqi traffic code. The police did not exactly lose their jobs, but they were left with nothing to do. This worked well enough as long as traffic was light. Simultaneously, however, a long-repressed market sprang to life, and with no vehicle registration or driver's licensing required, no taxes to be paid, and indeed no controls of any kind, torrents of used cars began flowing down the highways toward Baghdad, from across the borders with Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Those torrents continue largely unabated today. Though most of the new arrivals are lightweight Toyotas, Hyundais, or sagging Chevrolets, the market has developed a strong preference for German luxury sedans, many apparently stolen in Europe and whisked away with the original license plates still in place. These are not grandmas' hand-me-downs but late-model cars with powerful motors, the bigger the better in an oil-rich country where you can still fill your tank for a dollar. They sell for about a fourth of what they would bring in the West. So many have flooded in by now that the best way to move inconspicuously through Iraq is in a freshly battered BMW, perhaps burning a little oil, but with an engine still strong enough for quick getaways.
The fresh battering comes naturally, as does the engine wear. Quick getaways, on the other hand, require maneuvering room, which inside the city has become increasingly rare. In fact, so many cars of so many descriptions arrived so fast that by the end of the summer of 2003 the streets of Baghdad were filled to the point of gridlock. It did not help that they were also filled with untrained and unidentifiable drivers, whose inexperience in no sense diminished their assertiveness and taste for speed. With the traffic police now sidelined, the only workable technique for negotiating busy intersections was to assume the right-of-way and to keep moving if at all possible, swerving at close quarters to avoid crashing. A Kurdish friend of mine witnessed an argument between two drivers after one of the innumerable smashups, during which one man shouted, "What kind of driving was that?!" and the other shouted back, "This is a democracy now, and I can drive as I please!"
Add to that the complications of an expanding guerrilla war, and the presence of U.S. military patrolsgenerally groups of machine-gun-equipped Humvees, operated by tense and frustrated GIs who swung their weapons at the surrounding traffic and were more than ready to shoot. If there was one remaining road rule in Iraq, it was to stay well behind those patrols, because of the understandable tendency of American soldiers to fire back indiscriminately when attacked. There are many stories, glossed over in official reports, of innocent Iraqis who were shredded in their cars because they happened to drive too close to a patrol that had been bombed or fired upon. Sometimes entire families died that way. Iraqis blamed the soldiers, but the soldiers were not really the ones at fault: they had been plucked from home by the highest councils of the United States, flown to a bewildering place, and plopped into a fight without front lines. They were draped with lethal devices and dressed like battle robots in body armor, boots, and wraparound ballistic sunglasses, but beneath their stony façades they were just regular young American guys, many of them peering out at the world for the first time. One in ten seemed to be a Californian with ties to the beach. Only the most exceptional of them could have made sense of this city, or distinguished between acts of aggression and normal driving on these newly anarchic streets.
The soldiers themselves did not always handle their vehicles well. They stopped traffic rudely, jumped the medians of divided boulevards, forced cars off the road, sideswiped passing motorcycles, drove on the sidewalks, and busted through intersections shouting profanities and brandishing their guns. This was loosely called "tactical driving," and on a battlefield where traffic jams pose a deadly threat, it certainly helped some soldiers to survive. But the soldiers also drove that way simply because they could, because to be at war and overseas, despite the hardship involved, is in some manner to feel free. They had imitators, too, who tended to be less disciplined and more extreme. These were the commercial bodyguardsmostly British, American, and South Africanwho formed heavily armed units known as personal-security details, or PSDs. There were thousands of these civilian warriors in Iraq, providing protection for everyone from the American proconsul Paul Bremer to the technicians out working on the electric grid. The best of them were former soldiers of their national special forces, and they were serious and discreet. But plenty were cowboys, too, and upon emerging from the Green Zone they drove in showy clusters of SUVs, nose to tail, cutting off traffic and careening down the streets as if they were taking fire. I thought they were rather too pumped up. But many young Iraqis were impressed and thought that their driving was to be admired.
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By the fall of 2003 the vehicular anarchy was full-blown. On the large divided highways leading into town drivers routinely hit 100 miles an hour, and more if they could, swerving among creeping tanker trucks and nearly stationary donkey carts, passing on the shoulders, ignoring scurrying pedestrians, and blowing through the cross traffic with abandon. Actually there was a lot to be said for this sort of driving, once you accepted that a seat belt wouldn't matter even if you bothered to put it on. But there were frustrations, too. They came in the slow lines at the nearly worthless checkpoints, and more maddeningly behind the plodding U.S. military convoys, particularly those carrying supplies. The convoys could delay you for a hundred miles or for ten. At the tail end there was always a Bradley or a Humvee with a machine gunner looking backward, whose job was to keep the following traffic at a safe distance, about a hundred yards behind. The traffic would jockey madly for position (why I don't know, given the risk of getting shot) until some brave driver would swerve across the median to pass the convoy on the opposite side of the highway, now moving the wrong way against high-speed oncoming traffic. If the soldiers were in a sporting mood and allowed the maneuver to succeed, a herd of other cars would go bumping across the median and string out single file behind the leader, accelerating to keep close behind. Now came the catch: once established on the wrong side of the road, and having passed the U.S. convoy, the drivers could not return to the right side of the road, because the oncoming traffic, having split apart to avoid head-on collision, was now either driving on the inside shoulder or had itself crossed the median, and was locked into its own high-speed file on the wrong side of the road. Further divisions of the traffic flow were then possible. I was once embedded in one of seven columns that were passing one another in alternate strings of high-speed flows along both sides of a four-lane divided highway, and with a symmetry that was quite beautiful to behold.
But then came Baghdad itself, with its helter-skelter intersections where all the symmetry crumbled and gridlock set in. The gridlock posed threats to Westerners and their Iraqi friends, who become stationary targets, vulnerable to attack. The streets then had the feel of a hunting ground where you were the quarry with no room to run. It helped to carry weapons, but the mood could be tense. Unless of course you qualified to escape into the peace and space of the Green Zone.
Living in isolation was not what the American administrators had in mind when they first came to the Green Zone on the heels of the invasion, in April of 2003. The original team was known as the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or ORHA. It was headed by a retired general named Jay Garner, who was assisted by a group of former officers and ambassadors, all of whom were high-powered and competent people. They were an affable, self-deprecating bunch, given to calling themselves "space cowboys," in reference not to their state of mind but to a Clint Eastwood comedy in which a group of aging astronauts are called out of retirement to make one final flight. After weeks impatiently waiting in a five-star hotel in Kuwait, they established their administration in the vandalized and looted Republican Palace, where they slept on cots, and gladly endured the heat and dust and confusion of the time. People later came to name them Orhanians. They were folksy and unafraid. They were also on a wildly optimistic mission. Washington had decided that war is like surgery, and that all that was needed now was to fill in for the top Baathists who had been excised. According to that model (which included the Iraqi public's adoring acceptance of their liberators), the Iraqi government would continue to function, and society would remain intact. With that in mind, the Orhanians were utterly unprepared to handle the dual reality of governmental disintegration and catastrophic social collapse.
And so in came the Cpathians. Paul Bremer arrived on May 12, 2003, with instruction to assume full governmental control. Bremer seemed made for this task. He was a tough, shrewd operative with strong conservative credentials, who had initially risen through the State Department, but was certainly no diplomatic pansy. In Washington he was considered to be an expert on terrorism. With his own people he was severe. His attitude, one of them said to me, was "You're here for the mission. Get the job done. If you can't cut it, fuck off." Fine. Bremer was not big on compliments. He was smart, flexible, and very hard-working. He called Washington, D.C., "the squirrel cage" and detested getting caught up in it. Even those who bore the brunt of his scorn admired him for his style. He was the Dude exuding power, the Anointed One. He would fly around Iraq in the early days, dressed in a business suit and combat boots, responding to the immediate problems that he encountered, and snapping out orders to make things right. This was not necessarily the best way to go about running a nation ("I want a law prohibiting potholes" is how someone described it to me), and follow-up turned out to be a problem, but Bremer was confident and decisive, and so, therefore, was his newly formed CPA.
Those were heady times. People in the Green Zone talked about democracy, and they believed in it in the long run, but for many of them the more immediate operative belief was that the potential for personal wealth and comfort could be made to prevail over all other forces in Iraqi society. The handouts would end, and business opportunity would win the peace: Iraq would be remade into the American ideal of a free-market state. Because Iraq had had a socialist economy for generations, dominated by large state-owned enterprises, this was a radical goaland certainly far beyond the mandate of the U.S.-led invasion. However, the CPA had essentially unlimited resources to spend preparing the ground, and the assistance of the contractors who were arriving in force; there seemed to be no limit to what could be achieved. The assumption was that the United States would maintain full and formal control for several years, and that the political environment would be benign. The United States, in other words, was going to found a whole new nation, and worry about the political structure and the transition to sovereignty later on. Moreover, there would be no need to negotiate with stubborn constituencies like those that fetter business back home. In Iraq things were going to get done, simply because no one would say no. Of course, the Iraqis then turned out to be the most stubborn constituents of all. But those troubles were still to come. For the first few months the country was relatively docile, and Iraq seemed almost like a blank slate. For people at the CPA that was the thrilling side of the breakdown that had occurred. In the Green Zone you could make a mark on history.
There were excesses, as might be imagined. The hiring of the senior CPA staff was steered by Donald Rumsfeld and his conservative deputies at the Pentagon, who, by insisting on rigid agendas, effectively ruled out some of the more worldly officials and diplomats who might otherwise have been willing to intervene. In their place came zealous amateurs, often from the private sector, whose chief qualifications seemed to be their Republican credentials and their eagerness to get involved. To their credit, most of them eased off the ideology once they faced the practical realities of Iraq. They muddled through and sometimes got something done before getting out; they left no marks.
A few of the most zealous, however, refused to back down, and, indeed, upon arriving in the Green Zone seemed to think of Iraq as a living laboratory, a testing ground for their ideas. A high-ranking military officer with deep experience in the turmoil of the Third World, and who had worked closely with these people, later described them to me with a mixture of wonder and amusement. One of the characters was a cigar-chewing banker, who at that time was the president of Michigan State. He was a Republican partisan named Peter McPherson, whose obsession for a while seemed to be to keep the French out. The officer laughed hard remembering this. He said, "He was so fucking paranoid about the French! He was absolutely rabid! He wanted to make sure they didn't get a look into anything. We went through this discussion about the mobile phones, the networks, because you know the French are big in the region in mobile phones. McPherson wanted to find a way to construct a public tender that would"he laughed again"that would somehow exclude the French." If so, apparently he did not entirely succeed: The Egyptians won the contract for central Iraq, but awarded a large contract in turn to the French communications company Alcatel. So much for lofty thoughts. McPherson eventually returned to Michigan State.
Then there was a businessman from Connecticut named Thomas Foley, who was an old friend of George W. Bush's, and a major contributor to the Republican Party. Officially Foley was the CPA's director of private-sector development. In translation, according to the high-ranking officer, this meant "he was a wealthy guy who came in to play with Iraq." I asked the officer what Foley had in mind. He said, "These incredible ideas of what to do with the state-owned enterprises, and various things that never happened, thankfully ... His idea with the state-owned enterprises was just shut them down, trash them, and throw everyone onto the street. With no safety net at all. Just a sharp shock thing. Get rid of them, and let private industry take over in the void. We'd already had a disaster with the decision to disband the Iraqi army in the early days here." That decision, which was made in Washington and forced onto Bremer in May of
2003, is generally acknowledged to have been the worst of the American occupation, directly related to the competence and intensity of the insurrection that followed. The officer, who had been there at the time, said, "That was just so stupid. They had no duty-out plan. No demobilization plan. It was a mistake."
Of course the sign of real stupidity is the repetition of mistakes, and the CPA proved to be sufficiently smart to avoid that, most of the time. When eventually I spoke to Foley he appeared to be mostly unaffected by the American experience in Iraq, and as convinced as ever about what he described as the inevitable progression of world history toward a future of free-market capitalismbut he admitted that his plans to hurry Iraq along that path had so far not amounted to a single privatization. I asked the officer how successful in the end the ideologues had been, and he answered not very. They had managed to get a flat tax put into law (in an oil-rich country with no tradition of income taxesand leaving aside the problem of collection). But most of their initiatives were blocked within the CPA. The officer said, "We went down the road of trying to turn them down by consulting with the Iraqis. We hosed them off, or tried to."
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Foley went home early. He was replaced by Michael Fleisher, the brother of the former White House spokesman Ari Fleisher. Michael Fleisher said that he wanted to teach the Iraqis the concept of competitive bidding for government contracts, and he explained, "The only paradigm they know is cronyism." Back in the United States, in May of 2004, Foley addressed the Chamber of Commerce of Naples, Florida, where he responded to press reports of the Iraqi insurrection by saying, "The Iraq I came to know is the exact opposite of that. It's an Iraq that is very grateful to the Americans who are there." There is no reason to doubt that Foley was sincere.
But those were the standout cases. Even from within the Green Zone few of the Americans fooled themselves about the growing hostility of the Iraqi populationand indeed, they were if anything too concerned about it. Moreover, the idea, which was widespread among the Baghdad press corps, that the CPA was nothing but a radical neoconservative construct turned out to be operationally wrong. In practice the CPA was a broad American construct, and for better or worse it functioned as a piece of ourselves. It is true that most of the rank and file had supported the invasion, and continued to believe that they were contributing to the struggle against terrorism, but they were not ideologues so much as ordinary, overconfident, mildly presumptuous college graduatesfreshly scrubbed Americans of the sort who inhabit Washington, D.C., nestling up to power.
A man from the inner circles of the Republican Palace, who was known to be a wise and experienced observer, told me I had it wrong when I said that there was something about the CPA staff that reminded me of student utopians. He said, "It wasn't that idealistic. You're right that there were a lot of young people who came in, particularly in the governance and policy area. Very nice, very personable peoplenothing against them. But they had no knowledge whatsoever of Iraq, very very little of the region, and absolutely no prior experience in post-conflict operations. They were not so much idealistic as on a tripa power trip. I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but they wanted to be Machiavellian, in the sense of 'How do we shape the politics in this country? How do we get the result of having a government friendly to the United States?' And every step that they took to try and achieve that achieved the opposite."
"Why?"
"Because it was manipulative. Because it was not transparent. Because it was done in every possible way calculable that would make the Shiites suspicious."
If anything the maneuvers were not Machiavellian enough. In his description of an effective prince, Machiavelli wrote, "He should appear to be compassionate, faithful to his word, kind, guileless, and devout. And indeed he should be so. But his disposition should be such that if he needs to be the opposite, he knows how." And to know how, the prince needs to understand, and never to underestimate, the people he would rule.
The introduction of a new traffic code for Iraq was hardly a page from that book. I heard elements of the story from many sources, Iraqi and American, inside the Green Zone and outside. The story began with an Army captain, a reserve officer in civil affairs. In civilian life he was a personal-injury lawyer in Maryland, some said from the suburbs, some said from a rural part of the state. I later learned his name and spoke with him, but only after his role had come to an end. He had fought his way north with the invasion, had enjoyed the period of apparent welcome that followed, and finally had been assigned to work at the CPA. True to form, he lived in the Green Zone and worked in the Palace, walking the long hallways past endless office doors, among a cast of thousands. People remember him as a good man, intense and rather humorless, but very sincere. One day, in response to Army orders, he set out to reform the native driving. This was going to be his contribution: what Iraq needed was a traffic code.
Of course Iraq already had a traffic code: the one that had been suspended by the Americans at the start of the occupation. The captain knew of the Iraqi code's existence, but he believed that the previous system was rotten to the core. When he set out to reform the streets, he did not consult with the legal advisers at the CPA, let alone with the specialists in the Iraqi traffic police, but dug up a former traffic court judge and consulted with him. Primarily, though, he seized on a model that in his own experience had worked back homethat shining artifact of evolved self-government, the Maryland state traffic code. The code required some improvements, but the captain willingly put in the time, and by January of 2004 he had come up with a tidy package, written in English, of coursea gift from the people of Maryland to those of Iraq. There were some Palace procedures that had to be gone through: like all such initiatives generated by the occupation authority, the package would have to be approved by the appropriate American "Ministry"in this case of Justiceand it would have to be vetted by the Office of the General Counsel, but then it could be taken to Paul Bremer, who alone had the power to sign it into law. The captain had no doubt that this would be done.
The CPA Ministry of Justice was staffed by a handful of American lawyers. Like other such ministries in the Palace, it was supposed to oversee (read "run" ) the corresponding Iraqi ministry until Iraq could be given nominal sovereignty. The CPA Justice people were also involved in a special effort necessarily disassociated from any Iraqi ministry, to establish an honest and independent judiciary throughout Iraq. This was a lofty project, crucial to the legacy of the American occupation of Iraq, and of particular interest to such substantial legal figures as U.S. Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor. It is hardly surprising therefore that when this uninvited initiativethis traffic codearrived unexpectedly in the office it was shunted off and delayed.
But there were real problems with it as well. First, it suffered from a fundamental structural problem: how was this all-American package, based on the Anglo-Saxon system of common law, and therefore dependent on administrative regulations and judicial history (case law), supposed to fit into a system of civil law like Iraq's, where every detail has to be spelled out in legislation, for purposes of both criminal enforcement and civil litigation? Second, even if one was willing to ignore the conceptual misfit, in Iraqi practice a common-law code would by its very omissions implicitly legalize some of the wildest local driving. And third, what was all this about anyway? Didn't Iraq already have a traffic code? The officials at CPA Justice told the captain that they could not just sign off on his initiative, and that as a start they would call a meeting with the Iraqi traffic police. The captain went away disappointed. He saw this as a case of bureaucratic interference, and all too typical of the CPA. He believed in military occupations, and thought that had the Army been in charge things would have gotten done.
The CPA was indeed a bureaucracy. Because it was a temporary organization, cobbled together from various agencies to whom many of its officials still owed allegiance, it was crippled from the start by pre-existing turf fights. At the same time, paradoxically, it was infused with the Bush Administration's disdain for governmental process and procedurethe same attitude that led to the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and that later laid the CPA open to accusations of financial impropriety. Be that as it may, on the matter of the traffic code, the CPA lawyers were not being bureaucratic so much as diligent. The code was translated into Arabic, and an American adviser who was assigned to the traffic police arranged for some high-ranking Iraqi traffic officers to come to the Palace for a meeting.
The captain dutifully showed up, as did the Iraqi officers, who were a little late because they had to be escorted in by American MPs. The Arabic translation that was given to them was poor (a perennial problem at the CPA), but it was good enough for them to understand the gist of the American initiative. They were perplexed, I was later toldastonished by what they believed was the stupidity of the document that had been handed to them. They exchanged glances as if to ask the standard Iraqi question when first encountering the CPA: could it truly be that these were the same people who had put men on the moon? As officials of high rank, they were also quite simply insulted. "Why are you rewriting our code?" they wanted to know. Since the answer couldn't very well be "Because we invaded you and won the war," or "Because the captain here got orders to," as the meeting continued, they gradually gained the high ground. They admitted there were improvements that needed to be made to the former traffic code, largely by including references to new safety equipment, and purging the old law of the exceptions it allowed for Baath Party members. The Iraqis proposed that they return to their headquarters and write a new code themselves. They promised to get back to the Americans with their own product within two weeks. The Americans agreed.
After the meeting, the captain remained unconvinced. Someone familiar with aspects of the saga explained, "This was his baby ... And he had started out like many people do here, with an assumption that was wrong. Which was that all the traffic police were corrupt, and that no one in Iraq was educated enough to write the law or to understand the problem." Speaking not of the captain, but of the Americans in general, the observer continued, "People just made assumptions about the level of sophistication and knowledge here. One of the Iraqi police told me a story of going to a training session given by the military, where some guy is explaining the Internet. Like, 'This is a phone.' And the Iraqi said, 'You know, we're not complete morons.' People came to the CPA, never spoke to an Iraqi, and just launched these projects." For related reasons, once the projects were launched there was a tendency within the Green Zone to believe that therefore progress had been madeoften despite strong evidence on the outside that it had not.
The captain continued to push for his project, though by now it was clear to others that the Maryland code did not have a chance. Because the captain was a decent man, reasonably smart and well intentioned, people ended up feeling a little sorry for himall the more so when late last February he was wounded in an ambush south of the city, and sent home early to heal. He had hoped to leave a legacy behind, and had worked hard and selflessly to achieve it. He had even won a slew of medals for his well demonstrated bravery and dedication. But he had been largely thwarted during his stay in Iraq. To make matters worse, an increasing number of skeptics in the Green Zone suspected that his story was the story of the American occupation itself.
Meanwhile, after two weeks of hard work the Iraqi police produced their draft, in Arabic, and the Americans had it translated in a rush. Again the two sides sat down for a meeting in the Palace. What the Americans saw before them was an unusual document, a traffic code that was apparently compatible with a civil law system, and that had been cleaned of references to the Baath Party, but that seemed at times to be too eager, if not completely nuts. It included, for instance, a provision against standing on the seats while a car is under way, and another against talking to the driver. Even more strangely, given the habits of Iraqis, it banned smoking in cars. One of the Americans there remembers thinking, "Well, it's not our country ... And it's true, after all, that smoking is not good for people's health."
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The Americans, in other words, were trying hard to be sensitive, and they were determined to accommodate the Iraqi perspective. Entering into the spirit of things, one of them brought up a relatively recent stateside harassmenthow about a nicely progressive provision against the use of cell phones while driving? When this was translated for the Iraqis, the commanding general answered that he was against it. Cell phones had been outlawed by the Baath regime, along with satellite dishes and even street maps. The general did not explain the history, but said, "You know, the Iraqi people are just getting some freedom, so I don't want to include that at this time." By now the Americans were thoroughly confused: in this new society being cooked up, drivers could use their cell phones, but they would not have the freedom to smoke? What was the logic here? A long and typically American discussion ensued, in English, pertaining to which of these various behaviors might be considered to be most dangerous. The Iraqis followed the discussion as best they could through the summaries of one of their officers, a colonel who understood English, but they were bewildered. One might expect that their confusion had something to do with the distance between such deliberations and the realities on the violent streets outside, where danger took the form of guerrilla attacks and high-speed anarchic driving. But their problem was more procedural than that: a smoking ban? Again they exchanged glances. They assumed that this was another strange American initiative, because they themselves had never written any such prohibition into the driving code. And so the Americans kept talking on.
It took most of the meeting to sort things out. The problem lay in the translation. As it turned out, while converting the Arabic document into English the CPA staff had somehow jumbled the categories, so that some of the laws meant to regulate public transportno standing on the seats, no talking to the driver, and no smoking while riding the bushad been mixed in to the sections pertaining to the operation of private cars. Further modifications were made to the proposed traffic code, particularly one that attempted to reduce corruption by eliminating the collection of fines in cash on the spotin a place still essentially without banks, checks, or credit cards. One of the paradoxes of the story is that in this and other details of the emerging law, the new Iraqi code was often quite similar to what the captain had originally proposed. This was civil law versus common law, yes, but history rarely presents such simple oppositions.
In any case, the weeks and months went by. Fighting broke out in Fallujah and beyond, and the police went through various upheavals. As Iraq grew wilder, the vehicular anarchy grew in kind. The U.S. Army weighed in, saying that gridlock was posing a serious security threat to its patrols, and that something had to be done about it. Now the Iraqis were in a hurry too, because they hoped somehow to levy fines. As a result the traffic code was "fast-tracked," meaning that unlike other CPA laws, it did not have to wait for comment from Canberra, London, and Washington, D.C. Late last May, Paul Bremer signed a new Iraqi traffic code into law. One month later, when the CPA's existence was nearing its end, it was possible to imagine, if you squinted hard, that the traffic in Baghdad was becoming a little more orderly. Frankly, however, the traffic code was less of a factor in the improvement than was the heavy presence of Iraqi police at the city center in those days leading up to the birth of a nominally independent Iraqi state.
Misreadings much larger than confusion over traffic were at play in the Green Zone. One point made to me by an insider was that Americans had approached Iraq with Algerian and Iranian models in mind. They believed that given the chance, the Shiites, who constitute a majority in Iraq, would vote themselves into power and then install a fundamentalist theocracy, which would become a puppet of Iran. The insider said, "And, uh, wrong on both counts. Because ninety-five percent of the Shiite population did not want a theocracy. And they hated Iran ... But the Americans were looking at Iraq through all these incorrect prisms. They expected to be here for a while, and to manage the whole process, and shape how the politics developed, and neutralize the Shiites, and promote their own people. So they set up this 'Iraqi Governing Council' that promoted guyslike Ahmed Chalabithey had worked with outside of Iraq, which was completely the wrong way to go. I mean, we knew that Chalabi was less popular in Iraq than Saddam Hussein. And the Iraqi Governing Council was detested by everybody in the country. It was seen as a CPA creature, seen as undemocratic, and seen as a group of outsidersfeatherbedders who were only interested in themselves. It never got any acceptability. All it did was drag us down." But the CPA was visibly afraid of democracy, he said, and it was distracted by the pet theories of economic reforms. "That's where we went off the rails," he said. "Badly."
As train wrecks go, this one was barely perceptible at first. During the summer of 2003, even as the frequency of Iraqi attacks began to grow, the most noticeable change for foreign residents of the Green Zone was that life had taken a turn for the better. Gone was the Spartan existence of the first few months, when even good drinking water could be hard to find. By now the contractors had settled their crews into compounds and expropriated residences, and they were making the places comfortable. As the CPA and the contractors staffed up, thousands of new arrivals and replacements came onto the scene, including a good number of women, and people began to take the time to socialize. It was a particularly hot summer all through Europe and the Middle East, but the air-conditioning now functioned in the Palace and elsewhere, and enough generators had been brought in to avoid the power outages that afflicted the city. At the center of the operation, the CPA employees still slept in the Palace, on cots scattered all about. They worked there, too, in little offices crammed with desks and a growing number of computers, for the various ministries that made up the occupation government. In alphabetical order the ministries included Agriculture, Communication, Construction & Housing, Culture, Education, Electricity, Environment, Expatriates & Immigrants, Finance, Foreign Affairs, Health, Higher Education, Human Rights, Industry & Minerals, Interior, Irrigation, Justice, Labor & Social Affairs, Oil, Planning, Public Works, Science & Technology, Trade, Transport, and Youth & Sports. Clearly, some of these were more important than others, and some were more demanding, but even in offices where there was not much to do, people arrived by 8:00 A.M. and often stayed through the evening, if only sometimes to watch DVDs; they had nowhere to go home to anyway.
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Message édité par wildtestbody le 07-11-2004 à 10:00:46
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