Tehran's Hidden Hand
Iran's mounting threats in Iraq.

By Jonathan Schanzer
The State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report was issued earlier this month, complete with its usual hit parade of terrorist groups, state sponsors and emerging trends. Predictably, Iran was singled out for the "planning of and support for terrorist acts," as well as assistance to "a variety of groups that use terrorism to pursue their goals." The report also fingers Iran for pursuing "a variety of policies in Iraq aimed at securing Tehran's perceived interests there, some of which ran counter to those of the Coalition." A statement castigating Iran for such activities was long overdue. However, Washington must now challenge Iran over this growing list of nefarious activities in Iraq that have been plaguing coalition reconstruction efforts.
Conventional Fighting. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat ran this headline on March 16, 2004: "American and Iranian Forces Exchange Fire on the Border." American officials claimed that one Iranian border guard was killed, and other reports indicated that three Iranians were killed, but Tehran denied that any such incident took place. This was not the first time that open hostilities were reported. Coalition officials indicated in January and February that Abu al-Khasib, the port just below Basra on the Shatt al-Arab, has been the scene of Iranian violence against Iraqis. Iranian Revolutionary Guards have opened fire upon Iraqi water patrols along the estuary separating their two countries. Iranian fighters are also inside Iraq, and they may or may not be sanctioned by Tehran. On February 14, when a number of guerrillas attacked a police station in Fallujah, it was learned that two of the slain guerrillas were Iranian. An insurgency attack the week before, according to U.S. sources, was an attempt to free a number of Iranians who had only recently been arrested in Fallujah.
Hezbollah & IRGC. In February 2004, during a Washington Institute fact-finding mission to Iraq, one Coalition official reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) offices were spotted in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Moreover, officials noted an immense amount of Hezbollah activity in the city of Karbala. Most of the activity was "intimidation and threats of intimidation...Mafia-type stuff." During our delegation's one day in Basra, we spotted a building that openly advertised the offices of Hezbollah. Members of this organization insisted that their Hezbollah was not tied to Tehran, and that the name, which means "Party of God," is a common one. According to one report in the Arabic paper al-Hayat, Iran sent some 90 Hezbollah fighters into Iraq shortly after Saddam's Iraq fell. The group now receives financing, training and weapons from Iran, and has a rapidly growing presence in the Shi'a south. Western intelligence officials also allege that the man who planned the recent suicide attacks in Basra is Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah operative responsible for bombing the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the early 1980s.
Propaganda. Even before the U.S.-led war on Iraq, Iran had begun beaming in Arabic-language television programming in an effort to gain a strategic propaganda foothold in the country -- and it has not stopped. Indeed, American labors to win hearts and minds through the television station, al-Iraqiyya, and Radio Sawa have been steadily undermined by these efforts. In April 2003, an Iranian journalist reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guards brought into Iraq radio-transmission equipment, posters, and printed matter for the militia known as the Badr Corps. The Badr Corps is a militia that has not yet challenged the U.S., but it is run by SCIRI (the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq), which is known to have close ties to the Iranian regime.
Ansar al-Islam. Not enough attention has been given to the established ties between Iran and Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish al Qaeda affiliate. Before the war, Iran allowed Ansar al-Islam to operate openly along its borders in the extreme northeast mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, just shy of the Iranian border. Kurdish intelligence, with corroboration from imprisoned Ansar fighters, has established that Iran provided logistical support to the group by allowing the flow of goods and weapons. During periods of conflict with Kurdish militia units, the Peshmerga, Iran further provided a safe haven for these Islamist fighters. One Turkish newspaper also notes that Ansar al-Islam militants actually checked cars going into Iran (rather than coming into their stronghold), indicating close security coordination with the Islamic Republic. When the U.S. struck the Ansar al-Islam enclave in March 2003, Iran permitted many Kurdish fighters to flee across the border. They were later assisted back over the border -- with the help of Iran's Revolutionary Guards -- so that they could fight against American soldiers in the heart of Iraq. Kurdish intelligence has since intercepted between three and ten foreign fighters crossing Iranian border each week.
Moqtada al-Sadr. Iran sent a delegation to Iraq in mid-April to mediate between the rogue cleric and the U.S. administration. However, at the same time, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, an Iranian agent, has been supporting al-Sadr's anti-American efforts. A source from ash-Sharq al-Awsat estimates that Iran may have provided al-Sadr some $80 million in recent months. Further, Sadr's Mahdi army may now be getting training from Hezbollah, according to new intelligence reports. One Iranian source told ash-Sharq al-Awsat that Iran created three training camps along the Iran-Iraq border to train fighters from Sadr's militia.
In sum, Iran may be spending up to $70 million per month in Iraq. This pales in comparison to the billions spent by the U.S. Still, it is enough to undermine U.S. efforts. As such, Washington needs not only to better patrol the Iranian border, but also to confront clandestine Iranian activity within Iraq itself. Failure to do so will only encourage Iran to redouble its efforts to destabilize Iraq.
-- Jonathan Schanzer recently took part in a 12-day fact-finding mission to Iraq, sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/schanzer200405100900.asp
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London's Jihadists
The U.K. must crack down on resident Islamists.

By Rachel Ehrenfeld
While the world is busy denouncing the United States for the deplorable behavior of a few soldiers, it is oblivious to growing incitement by Islamist clerics against America and the West. Calling for jihad earlier this month in London, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad told his disciples: "All Muslims of the West will be obliged to become his sword" in a new battle. At the same time, another Islamist, Imam Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, is preaching in London that "it's okay to kill [those who] work against Islam, by slitting their throats, or by shooting them."
Such incitement is prohibited by law in the U.K. Under the heading of "Inciting Terrorism Overseas," section 59 1(a), the Terrorism Act of 2000 clearly states that "a person commits an offence if he incites another person to commit an act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the United Kingdom." Needless to say, such an act would also constitute an offense if committed in England. Yet these imams and their ilk are free to call for murder with impunity.
The British allowance of this "free speech" has already resulted in a suicide-bombing attack -- in April 2003 in Tel Aviv -- that cost the lives of three Israelis and wounded more than 50. According to the prosecution attorney at the Old Bailey last week, this attack was planned by Hamas, which recruited British citizens Asif Muhammad Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, whose family members are on trial in London for failing to inform the U.K. authorities. Considering this, and the fact that British law enforcement is busy exposing terrorist plots and arresting members of al Qaeda and other Islamist cells, while British soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.K.'s reluctance to go after advocates of terrorism is puzzling.
This disregard for the law extends to written incitement in the form of magazines and websites, originating from England, calling for jihad. Although Hamas was finally outlawed in the U.K. in September 2003, its publication, Filisteen Almuslima (Muslim Palestine), continued to be published in and distributed from London to the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. In fact, the cover of that September issue carried the horrifying picture of the bloody casualties from a dissevered bus in Jerusalem, as well as the glorified image of the suicide bomber who murdered 23 innocent civilians, many of them babies, and wounded 136.
Inside, the magazine praises and justifies the terrorist attack against Israelis and glorifies the terrorist, Raid Misk, as a heroic role model for potential suicide bombers against oppressors of Islam everywhere. It quotes the Koranic verse that, according to Hamas, gives Islamic religious justification for suicide bombings: "Among the believers, there are men who have been true to their covenant with Allah: Some of them [have already fulfilled their vows and] found their death [in battle]; and some still wait [their turn]. However, they have not in any way broken [their vows]" (Sura 33, verse 23).
And Filisteen Almuslima is not the only Islamist magazine published in and distributed from England, inciting hate, spreading anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Semitic messages, with pro-jihad, pro-terrorist propaganda and calls for suicide bombings.
Al-Sunnah, another Islamist fundamentalist magazine published in the U.K., called in February 2003 for suicide operations against the United States, saying, "There is no other way for the youth of this nation [Islam] other than suicide operations."
Risalat al-Ikhwan (Message of the Brotherhood) is also a London publication with Muslim subscribers worldwide. This magazine serves as center stage for spreading radical Islamist ideology in the best tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood. This Egyptian terrorist organization was outlawed by Gamal Abd al-Nasser in the 1950s, and despite its influence on Hamas and other internationally outlawed terrorist organizations, it is still out in the open in Western countries.
In October 2003, Risalat al-Ikhwan called for: "Active resistance (muqaawamah) to the occupation and the use of any available means to resist it are a religious Moslem duty, a national duty and a natural right anchored in both international law and the United Nations Charter." More of this can be found on Hamas's website.
Judging by the opposition Prime Minister Blair is facing, it seems that these publications influence, among others, former British diplomats, 50 of whom sent him a letter on April 26, 2004, protesting his support of U.S. Middle East policy, stating: "To describe the resistance [in Iraq] as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful." These diplomats, in the tradition of Islamist-Arab propaganda, continue to argue, like Lakhdar Brahimi, that Israel is the cause -- that it has for "decades poisoned relations between the West and the Islamic and Arab worlds." It is not surprising, therefore, that the resignation of Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge was not required after she condoned Palestinian suicide bombings, stating in parliament, "I would be a suicide bomber in Israel."
A police source in London, when asked why this incitement is allowed, responded that law-enforcement officials are "unhappy with the situation," but that they are unable to prosecute the instigators because "our hands are tied. It's a political decision." Political leaders ought to heed the warning sirens before the terrorists strike -- as promised.

-- Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed -- and How to Stop It, is director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/ehrenfeld200405100910.asp


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Study: Many Federal Sites Not Terror Risks

May 10, 1:52 PM (ET)
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN
WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal officials should consider reopening public access to about three dozen Web sites withdrawn from the Internet after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a government-financed study says, because the sites pose little or no risk to homeland security.
The Rand Corp. said the overwhelming majority of federal Web sites that reveal information about airports, power plants, military bases and other potential terrorist targets need not be censored because similar or better information is easily available elsewhere.
Rand identified four Web pages that might merit the restrictions imposed after the attacks.
"It's a good time to take a closer look at the choices that they made at the time," said John Baker, principal author of the study, which was funded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the government's intelligence mapping agency.
Advocates of open government said the report shows the Bush administration acted rashly after the suicide attacks when it scrubbed numerous government Web sites.
"It was a gigantic mistake, and I hope the study brings some rationality back to this policy," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy. "Up to now, decisions have been made on a knee-jerk basis."
Rand's National Defense Research Institute identified 629 Internet-accessible federal databases that contain critical data about specific locations. Co-author Beth Lachman said they "appeared to be the most sensitive sites" among 5,000 federal Web pages the researchers checked.
The study, conducted between mid-2002 and mid-2003, found no federal Web sites that contained target information essential to a terrorist - in other words, information a terrorist would need to launch an attack.
It identified four databases - less than 1 percent of the 629 - where restricting access probably would enhance homeland security. None was available to the general public anymore. Those sites included two devoted to pipelines, one to nuclear reactors and one to dams.
Researchers recommended that officials evaluate 66 databases with some useful information, but they didn't anticipate restrictions would be needed because similar or better data probably could be easily obtained elsewhere.
The remaining 559 databases "are probably not significant for addressing attackers' information needs and do not warrant any type of public restriction," the report said. It said that any information they contain that could be useful to terrorists is easily obtained elsewhere, often by simple, legal observation in an open society.
The Rand researchers found that 30 federal agencies or departments make public, on paper or online, "geospatial information" about critical or symbolic locations and structures. That kind of data can be as simple as a telephone book or as complex as an Internet database that discloses how many people live near each of the nation's power plants or toxic chemical storage sites.
After Sept. 11, federal agencies scrambled to pull such data off the Internet. The Transportation Department removed pipeline maps. The Environmental Protection Agency deleted descriptions of risk management plans for chemicals stored at 15,000 sites. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission took down its Web site, although much of it is now back online.
Using Internet archives that preserve old Web pages or detailed written descriptions, researchers identified 39 federal geospatial databases taken off-line since Sept. 11.
Other than the four databases that posed some risk, "these restrictions need to be more thoroughly assessed," the researchers wrote.
"Under the circumstances, these officials took prudent steps but in a very piecemeal, patchwork way," Baker said.
The study proposed a framework for analyzing and possibly restoring such data to the Internet:
_How useful would it be to an attacker? Far more detailed information is needed to plan an attack than to pick a target, but most federal Web sites are too general to help with more than target selection.
_Is similar or better data readily available elsewhere? If so, "the net security benefits of restricting access ... may be minimal or nonexistent" and could "possibly lead ... to a false sense of security at worst."
_Does the gain in security from restrictions outweigh any harm to those using the data, such as police and fire departments, economic planners or private companies?
For instance, Rand advocated that an Environmental Protection Agency Web site that discloses where toxic chemicals are stored and in what quantity should not be restricted because its value to terrorists is outweighed by its value to communities preparing for emergencies.
Restricting the site would "diminish the public good that comes from providing local communities access to information that can significantly affect the well-being of citizens," the study said.
To demonstrate the futility of removing government data that isn't unique, Rand researchers picked out 300 non-federal Web sites that had similar or better information about critical U.S. targets than federal pages.
For instance, an online scuba magazine contains a divers' description of the ocean depths and currents around an oil-drilling platform off the southern California coast that would be more useful to terrorists than the federal sites that described the platform.

On the Net:
Rand Corp. study: http://www.rand.org/publications
Federation of American Scientists secrecy project: http://www.fas.org/main/content.jsp?formAction325&projectId5

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CHAIN OF COMMAND
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-17
Posted 2004-05-09
In his devastating report on conditions at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, Major General Antonio M. Taguba singled out only three military men for praise. One of them, Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, should be commended, Taguba wrote, because he "knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI"--military intelligence--"personnel at Abu Ghraib." Elsewhere in the report it became clear what Kimbro would not do: American soldiers, Taguba said, used "military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee."
Taguba's report was triggered by a soldier's decision to give Army investigators photographs of the sexual humiliation and abuse of prisoners. These images were first broadcast on "60 Minutes II" on April 28th. Seven enlisted members of the 372nd Military Police Company of the 320th Military Police Battalion, an Army reserve unit, are now facing prosecution, and six officers have been reprimanded. Last week, I was given another set of digital photographs, which had been in the possession of a member of the 320th. According to a time sequence embedded in the digital files, the photographs were taken by two different cameras over a twelve-minute period on the evening of December 12, 2003, two months after the military-police unit was assigned to Abu Ghraib.
An Iraqi prisoner and American military dog handlers. Other photographs show the Iraqi on the ground, bleeding.
One of the new photographs shows a young soldier, wearing a dark jacket over his uniform and smiling into the camera, in the corridor of the jail. In the background are two Army dog handlers, in full camouflage combat gear, restraining two German shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the camera's view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner, is naked. His hands are clasped behind his neck and he is leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away. Other photographs show the dogs straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner. In another, taken a few minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him, knee pressed to his back. Blood is streaming from the inmate's leg. Another photograph is a closeup of the naked prisoner, from his waist to his ankles, lying on the floor. On his right thigh is what appears to be a bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger wound on his left leg, covered in blood.
There is at least one other report of violence involving American soldiers, an Army dog, and Iraqi citizens, but it was not in Abu Ghraib. Cliff Kindy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a church-supported group that has been monitoring the situation in Iraq, told me that last November G.I.s unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah. At first, Kindy told me, "the soldiers went house to house, and arrested thirty people." (One of them was Saad al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, who told Kindy about the incident.) While the thirty detainees were being handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight broke out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into a house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then "turned the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten." (The Defense Department said that it was unable to comment about the incident before The New Yorker went to press.)
When I asked retired Major General Charles Hines, who was commandant of the Army's military-police school during a twenty-eight-year career in military law enforcement, about these reports, he reacted with dismay. "Turning a dog loose in a room of people? Loosing dogs on prisoners of war? I've never heard of it, and it would never have been tolerated," Hines said. He added that trained police dogs have long been a presence in Army prisons, where they are used for sniffing out narcotics and other contraband among the prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he said, "I would never have authorized it for interrogating or coercing prisoners. If I had, I'd have been put in jail or kicked out of the Army."
The International Red Cross and human-rights groups have repeatedly complained during the past year about the American military's treatment of Iraqi prisoners, with little success. In one case, disclosed last month by the Denver Post, three Army soldiers from a military-intelligence battalion were accused of assaulting a female Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib. After an administrative review, the three were fined "at least five hundred dollars and demoted in rank," the newspaper said.
Army commanders had a different response when, on January 13th, a military policeman presented Army investigators with a computer disk containing graphic photographs. The images were being swapped from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion. The Army's senior commanders immediately understood they had a problem--a looming political and public-relations disaster that would taint America and damage the war effort.
One of the first soldiers to be questioned was Ivan Frederick, the M.P. sergeant who was in charge of a night shift at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, who has been ordered to face a court-martial in Iraq for his role in the abuse, kept a running diary that began with a knock on his door by agents of the Army's Criminal Investigations Division (C.I.D.) at two-thirty in the morning on January 14th. "I was escorted . . . to the front door of our building, out of sight from my room," Frederick wrote, "while . . . two unidentified males stayed in my room. `Are they searching my room?'" He was told yes. Frederick later formally agreed to permit the agents to search for cameras, computers, and storage devices.
On January 16th, three days after the Army received the pictures, Central Command issued a blandly worded, five-sentence press release about an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that it was then that he learned of the allegations. At some point soon afterward, Rumsfeld informed President Bush. On January 19th, Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the officer in charge of American forces in Iraq, ordered a secret investigation into Abu Ghraib. Two weeks later, General Taguba was ordered to conduct his inquiry. He submitted his report on February 26th. By then, according to testimony before the Senate last week by General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, people "inside our building" had discussed the photographs. Myers, by his own account, had still not read the Taguba report or seen the photographs, yet he knew enough about the abuses to persuade "60 Minutes II" to delay its story.
At a Pentagon news conference last week, Rumsfeld and Marine General Peter Pace, the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the investigation into Abu Ghraib had moved routinely through the chain of command. If the Army had been slow, it was because of built-in safeguards. Pace told the journalists, "It's important to know that as investigations are completed they come up the chain of command in a very systematic way. So that the individual who reports in writing [sends it] up to the next level commander. But he or she takes time, a week or two weeks, three weeks, whatever it takes, to read all of the documentation, get legal advice [and] make the decisions that are appropriate at his or her level. . . . That way everyone's rights are protected and we have the opportunity systematically to take a look at the entire process."
In interviews, however, retired and active-duty officers and Pentagon officials said that the system had not worked. Knowledge of the nature of the abuses--and especially the politically toxic photographs--had been severely, and unusually, restricted. "Everybody I've talked to said, `We just didn't know'--not even in the J.C.S.," one well-informed former intelligence official told me, emphasizing that he was referring to senior officials with whom such allegations would normally be shared. "I haven't talked to anybody on the inside who knew--nowhere. It's got them scratching their heads." A senior Pentagon official said that many of the senior generals in the Army were similarly out of the loop on the Abu Ghraib allegations.
Within the Pentagon, there was a spate of fingerpointing last week. One top general complained to a colleague that the commanders in Iraq should have taken C4, a powerful explosive, and blown up Abu Ghraib last spring, with all of its "emotional baggage"--the prison was known for its brutality under Saddam Hussein--instead of turning it into an American facility. "This is beyond the pale in terms of lack of command attention," a retired major general told me, speaking of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. "Where were the flag officers? And I'm not just talking about a one-star," he added, referring to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander at Abu Ghraib who was relieved of duty. "This was a huge leadership failure."
The Pentagon official told me that many senior generals believe that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeld's office, General Sanchez and General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, had done their best to keep the issue quiet in the first months of the year. The official chain of command flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to Abizaid, and on to Rumsfeld and President Bush. "You've got to match action, or nonaction, with interests," the Pentagon official said. "What is the motive for not being forthcoming? They foresaw major diplomatic problems."
Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official said, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. "They always want to delay the release of bad news--in the hope that something good will break," he said. The habit of procrastination in the face of bad news led to disconnects between Rumsfeld and the Army staff officers who were assigned to planning for troop requirements in Iraq. A year ago, the Pentagon official told me, when it became clear that the Army would have to call up more reserve units to deal with the insurgency, "we had call-up orders that languished for thirty or forty days in the office of the Secretary of Defense." Rumsfeld's staff always seemed to be waiting for something to turn up--for the problem to take care of itself, without any additional troops. The official explained, "They were hoping that they wouldn't have to make a decision." The delay meant that soldiers in some units about to be deployed had only a few days to prepare wills and deal with other family and financial issues.
The same deliberate indifference to bad news was evident in the past year, the Pentagon official said, when the Army conducted a series of elaborate war games. Planners would present best-case, moderate-case, and worst-case scenarios, in an effort to assess where the Iraq war was headed and to estimate future troop needs. In every case, the number of troops actually required exceeded the worst-case analysis. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civilian officials in the Pentagon continued to insist that future planning be based on the most optimistic scenario. "The optimistic estimate was that at this point in time"--mid-2004--"the U.S. Army would need only a handful of combat brigades in Iraq," the Pentagon official said. "There are nearly twenty now, with the international coalition drying up. They were wildly off the mark." The official added, "From the beginning, the Army community was saying that the projections and estimates were unrealistic." Now, he said, "we're struggling to maintain a hundred and thirty-five thousand troops while allowing soldiers enough time back home."
In his news conference last Tuesday, Rumsfeld, when asked whether he thought the photographs and stories from Abu Ghraib were a setback for American policy in Iraq, still seemed to be in denial. "Oh, I'm not one for instant history," he responded. By Friday, however, with some members of Congress and with editorials calling for his resignation, Rumsfeld testified at length before House and Senate committees and apologized for what he said was "fundamentally un-American" wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. He also warned that more, and even uglier, disclosures were to come. Rumsfeld said that he had not actually looked at any of the Abu Ghraib photographs until some of them appeared in press accounts, and hadn't reviewed the Army's copies until the day before. When he did, they were "hard to believe," he said. "There are other photos that depict . . . acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman." Later, he said, "It's going to get still more terrible, I'm afraid." Rumsfeld added, "I failed to recognize how important it was."
NBC News later quoted U.S. military officials as saying that the unreleased photographs showed American soldiers "severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and `acting inappropriately with a dead body.' The officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys."
No amount of apologetic testimony or political spin last week could mask the fact that, since the attacks of September 11th, President Bush and his top aides have seen themselves as engaged in a war against terrorism in which the old rules did not apply. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of senior Pentagon generals and admirals to act aggressively. By mid-2002, he and his senior aides were exchanging secret memorandums on modifying the culture of the military leaders and finding ways to encourage them "to take greater risks." One memo spoke derisively of the generals in the Pentagon, and said, "Our prerequisite of perfection for `actionable intelligence' has paralyzed us. We must accept that we may have to take action before every question can be answered." The Defense Secretary was told that he should "break the `belt-and-suspenders' mindset within today's military . . . we `over-plan' for every contingency. . . . We must be willing to accept the risks." With operations involving the death of foreign enemies, the memo went on, the planning should not be carried out in the Pentagon: "The result will be decision by committee."
The Pentagon's impatience with military protocol extended to questions about the treatment of prisoners caught in the course of its military operations. Soon after 9/11, as the war on terror got under way, Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva conventions. Complaints about America's treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002, amounted to "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation."
The effort to determine what happened at Abu Ghraib has evolved into a sprawling set of related investigations, some of them hastily put together, including inquiries into twenty-five suspicious deaths. Investigators have become increasingly concerned with the role played not only by military and intelligence officials but also by C.I.A. agents and private-contract employees. In a statement, the C.I.A. acknowledged that its Inspector General had an investigation under way into abuses at Abu Ghraib, which extended to the death of a prisoner. A source familiar with one of the investigations told me that the victim was the man whose photograph, which shows his battered body packed in ice, has circulated around the world. A Justice Department prosecutor has been assigned to the case. The source also told me that an Army intelligence operative and a judge advocate general were seeking, through their lawyers, to negotiate immunity from prosecution in return for testimony.
The relationship between military policing and intelligence forces inside the Army prison system reached a turning point last fall in response to the insurgency against the Coalition Provisional Authority. "This is a fight for intelligence," Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, told a reporter at a Baghdad press briefing in November. "Do I have enough soldiers? The answer is absolutely yes. The larger issue is, how do I use them and on what basis? And the answer to that is intelligence . . . to try to figure out how to take all this human intelligence as it comes in to us [and] turn it into something that's actionable." The Army prison system would now be asked to play its part.
Two months earlier, Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the task force in charge of the prison at Guant?namo, had brought a team of experts to Iraq to review the Army program. His recommendation was radical: that Army prisons be geared, first and foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of information needed for the war effort. "Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation . . . to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence," Miller wrote. The military police on guard duty at the prisons should make support of military intelligence a priority.
General Sanchez agreed, and on November 19th his headquarters issued an order formally giving the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade tactical control over the prison. General Taguba fearlessly took issue with the Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report, "effectively made an MI Officer, rather than an MP officer, responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that facility. This is not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective specialties."
Taguba also criticized Miller's report, noting that "the intelligence value of detainees held at . . . Guant?namo is different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq. . . . There are a large number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are not believed to be international terrorists or members of Al Qaeda." Taguba noted that Miller's recommendations "appear to be in conflict" with other studies and with Army regulations that call for military-police units to have control of the prison system. By placing military-intelligence operatives in control instead, Miller's recommendations and Sanchez's change in policy undoubtedly played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Taguba concluded that certain military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib were "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the abuses, and urged that they be subjected to disciplinary action.
In late March, before the Abu Ghraib scandal became publicly known, Geoffrey Miller was transferred from Guant?namo and named head of prison operations in Iraq. "We have changed this--trust us," Miller told reporters in early May. "There were errors made. We have corrected those. We will make sure that they do not happen again."
Military-intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore "sterile," or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. "You couldn't tell them apart," the source familiar with the investigation said. The blurring of identities and organizations meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom, and who had the authority to give orders. Civilian employees at the prison were not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but they were bound by civilian law--though it is unclear whether American or Iraqi law would apply.
One of the employees involved in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, according to the Taguba report, was Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian working for CACI International, a Virginia-based company. Private companies like CACI and Titan Corp. could pay salaries of well over a hundred thousand dollars for the dangerous work in Iraq, far more than the Army pays, and were permitted, as never before in U.S. military history, to handle sensitive jobs. (In a briefing last week, General Miller confirmed that Stefanowicz had been reassigned to administrative duties. A CACI spokeswoman declined to comment on any employee in Iraq, citing safety concerns, but said that the company still had not heard anything directly from the government about Stefanowicz.)
Stefanowicz and his colleagues conducted most, if not all, of their interrogations in the Abu Ghraib facilities known to the soldiers as the Wood Building and the Steel Building. The interrogation centers were rarely visited by the M.P.s, a source familiar with the investigation said. The most important prisoners--the suspected insurgency members deemed to be High Value Detainees--were housed at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, but the pressure on soldiers to accede to requests from military intelligence was felt throughout the system.
Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police unit in Baghdad told me last week that he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking. "I said, `No, we will not do that,'" the captain said. "The M.I. commander comes to me and says, `What is the problem? We're stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.' I ask, `How? You've received training on that, but my soldiers don't know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn't know how to do it, he's going to get creative.'" The M.I. officer took the request to the captain's commander, but, the captain said, "he backed me up.
"It's all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were failed by their commanders--both low-ranking and high," the captain said. "The system is broken--no doubt about it. But the Army is made up of people, and we've got to depend on them to do the right thing."
In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was a link between the interrogation process in Afghanistan and the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A few months after General Miller's report, Taguba wrote, General Sanchez, apparently troubled by reports of wrongdoing in Army jails in Iraq, asked Army Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general, to carry out a study of military prisons. In the resulting study, which is still classified, Ryder identified a conflict between military policing and military intelligence dating back to the Afghan war. He wrote, "Recent intelligence collection in support of Operation Enduring Freedom posited a template whereby military police actively set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews."
One of the most prominent prisoners of the Afghan war was John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old Californian who was captured in December, 2001. Lindh was accused of training with Al Qaeda terrorists and conspiring to kill Americans. A few days after his arrest, according to a federal-court affidavit filed by his attorney, James Brosnahan, a group of armed American soldiers "blindfolded Mr. Lindh, and took several pictures of Mr. Lindh and themselves with Mr. Lindh. In one, the soldiers scrawled `shithead' across Mr. Lindh's blindfold and posed with him. . . . Another told Mr. Lindh that he was `going to hang' for his actions and that after he was dead, the soldiers would sell the photographs and give the money to a Christian organization." Some of the photographs later made their way to the American media. Lindh was later stripped naked, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, and placed in a windowless shipping container. Once again, the affidavit said, "military personnel photographed Mr. Lindh as he lay on the stretcher." On July 15, 2002, Lindh agreed to plead guilty to carrying a gun while serving in the Taliban and received a twenty-year jail term. During that process, Brosnahan told me, "the Department of Defense insisted that we state that there was `no deliberate' mistreatment of John." His client agreed to do so, but, the attorney noted, "Against that, you have that photograph of a naked John on that stretcher."
The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. The Times published an interview last week with Hayder Sabbar Abd, who claimed, convincingly, to be one of the mistreated Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib photographs. Abd told Ian Fisher, the Times reporter, that his ordeal had been recorded, almost constantly, by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as soldiers told to him to masturbate and beat him when he refused.
One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted his review last fall, in the midst of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, without managing to catch it. (Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing last week that his trip to Iraq "was not an inspection or an investigation. . . . It was an assessment.") In his report to Sanchez, Ryder flatly declared that "there were no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices." Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as an agent of the C.I.D., told me that Ryder was in a bureaucratic bind. The Army had revised its command structure last fall, and Ryder, as provost marshal, was now the commanding general of all military-police units as well as of the C.I.D. He was, in essence, being asked to investigate himself. "What Ryder should have done was set up a C.I.D. task force headed by an 0-6"--full colonel--"with fifteen agents, and begin interviewing everybody and taking sworn statements," Rowell said. "He had to answer questions about the prisons in September, when Sanchez asked for an assessment." At the time, Rowell added, the Army prison system was unprepared for the demands the insurgency placed on it. "Ryder was a man in a no-win situation," Rowell said. "As provost marshal, if he'd turned a C.I.D. task force loose, he could be in harm's way--because he's also boss of the military police. He was being eaten alive."
Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not. "He's not regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon," a retired Army major general said of Taguba. "He's the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does not like to have people make bad news public."

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CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
by GEORGE PACKER
Will moderate Iraqis embrace democracy--or Islamist radicalism?
Issue of 2004-05-17
Posted 2004-05-10
On the March morning I visited the Baghdad morgue, which is in a decaying neighborhood near the Tigris River, a young forensic-medicine specialist named Dr. Bashir Shaker was on duty. It was the day after Ashura, one of the most important religious holidays on the Shiite calendar, which commemorates the murder of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and the massacre of his followers at Karbala, in 680 A.D. Thirteen hundred and twenty-four years later, Baghdad was festooned with the symbols of Shiite piety and penitence: the red flags of Hussein's blood, the green flags of Islam, the black flags of grief bearing messages such as "Hussein Taught Us to Become Victims in Order to Gain Victory." For the first time in decades, Iraqi Shiites felt free to observe the day of martyrdom and the forty days of full-throated mourning that follow. The chants, the parades, the beating of chests, and the flaying of backs in ceremonies of atonement also became displays of collective power.
The shrines of Baghdad and Karbala were therefore unusually crowded with black-clad Shiite pilgrims that day--and when suicide bombers in their midst detonated a series of explosions it was the worst civilian massacre since the start of the war. The death toll in the two cities was at least a hundred and eighty, and the Baghdad morgue became a charnel house filled with bodies, heads, limbs, and buckets of flesh. Outside the morgue, a man waited to enter and look for the corpse of an eleven-year-old boy, a neighbor, whose father lay wounded in the hospital. Others were leaving with rags still pressed to their faces, a response to the stench inside. The authorities were rushing to complete the process of identification. There would be no forensic autopsies of the victims, Shaker told me; these followers of Hussein were Shiite martyrs, and Islam forbade the violation of their bodies.
Before the American invasion of Iraq, Dr. Shaker said, only one murder victim arrived at the city morgue each month. This statistic underscores two conditions of Iraqi life under Saddam Hussein: the state had a near-monopoly on killing, and most of the victims of the state disappeared into unmarked mass graves. One unintended effect of Iraq's liberation from Baathist tyranny has been the widespread dispersal of violence. In occupied Iraq, between fifteen and twenty-five murder victims arrive at the Baghdad morgue daily, most of them with gunshot wounds. Shaker estimated that five cases a week involve Baathists executed in reprisal killings; their families typically retrieve the bodies without informing the police. With barely functioning courts, a weak, ill-trained, and often corrupt new police force, a foreign occupier that has failed to provide security, and a pervasive atmosphere of lawlessness, Iraqis don't expect the justice that was denied them during the reign of Saddam Hussein to materialize anytime soon.
The day I visited, Shaker said that he was reviewing "an interesting case," unrelated to the Ashura bombings. The body of a woman, forty-one years old and never married, had recently been discovered with six gunshot wounds in the chest. Shaker's initial examination had found that the woman appeared not to be a virgin, and the number of gunshots suggested that the murder was premeditated. These details cast suspicion on her family: Shaker said that such a crime was called "washing the shame." Honor killing is an old custom in Iraq, he said, though in this case there was a new element: before the war, the family would have burned or drowned the woman to disguise the murder. "Now you can kill and go," Shaker said. "No need to cover the crime." The standard sentence for "washing the shame" is six months.
The woman's case was referred to a committee of five doctors, including Iraq's leading hymen expert. To Shaker's surprise, the committee found that the woman's hymen was extremely thin but intact. Case closed: the family would not be investigated, and, without the means to find other clues, the police would seal the woman's file.
Down the hall from the morgue, which is in a squat, two-story yellow building called the Medico-Legal Institute, is an examination room with a reclining chair and stirrups. This is where virginity exams on living subjects take place--most of them on suspected prostitutes, but also on runaways, kidnapping victims, and girls who have suffered an accident and whose parents, for the sake of marriageability, want a medical certificate establishing their purity.
An entire subspecialty of forensic medicine in Iraq deals with virginity, Shaker said. In any criminal case involving a woman, it's the most important piece of information. "It rules our life," he added. The surprising thing about these details of his profession is their ordinariness. In the West, Iraqis developed a reputation for cosmopolitan modernity that is now decades out of date. In order to win the support of Iraq's clerics, Saddam obliged people to adopt a harsh form of traditional Islam. In private matters of religion, family, and the treatment of women, the vast majority of Iraqis are far more conservative than most outsiders understand.
In March, 2003, a week before the start of the war, a sixteen-year-old girl whom the Baathist police had found wandering disoriented through the streets was brought to the Medico-Legal Institute. Upon examining her, Shaker found that her virginity had been recently and violently taken. The girl, named Raghda, was beautiful, with pale skin and large, dark eyes, and she was so miserable she could hardly speak. Raghda seemed nothing like the teen-age prostitutes Shaker examined, and he gently persuaded her to tell him what had happened.
Raghda had gone to audition as a television announcer at the studio owned by Uday Hussein, Saddam's psychopathic older son. Along with the six other finalists, she was taken to a room where Uday--crippled from a 1996 assassination attempt--was seated in a chair, holding a pistol in his lap. He ordered the girls to undress and walk in a circle around his chair. When one girl begged to be excused, Uday shot her dead. After that, the other girls, including Raghda, did as they were told. In the following days, Uday (who was committing some of his last crimes in power, while an invasion force gathered along Iraq's southern border) raped the girls, then threw them out on the street, drugged, with a wad of cash, which was how Raghda was found by the police. When she told them her story, they gave her a beating and then took her to the Medico-Legal Institute.
"If you want to help me," Raghda told the doctor, "go tell my parents their daughter was found dead."
On March 18th, two days before the war started, Shaker completed Raghda's paperwork. "Notice that there is the appearance of complete hymen rupture from the top to the base," he wrote. "In conclusion, the hymen membrane was ruptured longer than two weeks ago; I cannot say how long. End of report." Raghda was returned to the police; Shaker never learned her fate.
Shaker served in the Iraqi Army and, a decade ago, took part in the occupation of Kuwait. Now he handles Baghdad's nightly traffic of violent death. One Friday brought thirty-two bodies, including two foreign engineers--one German, one Dutch--who had been gunned down by insurgents on a road south of Baghdad, and two Iraqi journalists shot to death by American soldiers as they drove away from a checkpoint. For Shaker, such cases are purely intellectual matters. He told me without emotion that his testimony in trials has sent homosexuals to execution. The effect of this dispassion shows in the cold, handsome gaze of his blue eyes; in his direct, uninflected manner of speaking; and in the way his smile turns almost automatically into a sneer. But he hadn't got over Raghda.
When I met him, Shaker said he was looking for a change in his life: "Any change, better or worse." He had a restless mind and hated boredom, and, since the Americans represented something new, he welcomed spending time with me. I assumed that this forward-thinking man of science--with a flat-top haircut and clean-shaven jaw--wanted a relatively secular, liberal Iraq. I kept waiting for him to catch my eye in the middle of one of his clinical descriptions and shake his head over the backwardness of a society obsessed with virginity and prostitution. It never happened.
Shaker was born in 1968, the year the Baath Party came to power. "For thirty-five years, I feel I was dead," he said. "Only these last weeks I'm beginning to live." The fall of Saddam and the arrival of foreign occupiers--who happened to be the makers of his favorite old movies--had, at last, brought the chance for a new life. Eager to obtain travel documents and venture outside Iraq, he sold his private dermatology practice and a piece of land he'd received as a former soldier. His first foreign trip was to Amman, Jordan, where he had arranged to meet an Iraqi girl who was living in exile in Amsterdam. They married after two days. "Like a movie," he said. His wife is still in Amsterdam, but the plan is for her to move to Baghdad, once the city returns to calm.
Though Shaker was initially grateful to the foreign occupiers, the disorder on Baghdad's streets disillusioned him. The morgue reflected that chaos--it had the improvised, filthy atmosphere of a front-line hospital. There were pools of blood on the floor, and empty stretchers attracted flies. In the hall, bodies lay uncovered on tables: a man with a broad mustache and a slashed throat, found naked under a pile of garbage in a middle-class district; a man with a gunshot wound in his head, his blue eyes open and filmy; the small, blackened corpse of a badly burned woman. Amid the gloomy chill of the refrigerated room, six other naked bodies lay sprawled on the floor, two women and four men. One of the women, believed to be a prostitute, had been shot through the nipple--by a relative, Shaker assumed.
These days, the morgue overflows, but the examination room down the hall is usually empty. Before the war, it was the other way around; Shaker used to perform five or six virginity exams a day. Shaker is a Shiite Muslim, and he was appalled by this inversion of the normal order. In his view, a fragile moral relationship existed between the two sections of the Medico-Legal Institute--as if the social control of virginity offered a defense against the anarchy that led to murder. He noted that in Iran, an Islamist theocracy, prostitutes were publicly whipped. He thought the same practice should be instituted in Iraq--where the sex trade, he claimed, had reached epidemic proportions in the lawlessness of the occupation. "It's strict, it's horrible, but it has good results," he said of Islamic law. "Prostitution now is normal here." He blamed the Americans for the moral laxity in Baghdad, and especially L. Paul Bremer, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, for threatening, in February, to veto any interim constitution that declared Islam to be the principal basis of federal law. "When they give everybody their rights, it's causing bad things in society--it's corrupting us," Shaker said. "If Islam is the main source of law, none of these things would happen."
The doctor said that he belonged to "the middle level of mind" in Iraqi society, somewhere between the strictly religious masses and the secular ?lite. "There are many Iraqis like me," he said. In Iraq, there is nothing unusual about a doctor who loves Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant, desires the public whipping of prostitutes, and believes that executed homosexuals got what they deserved. Yet Shaker's mix of traditional and modern views causes him considerable inner conflict. "I hate Iraq," he said. "And I love it." He longs to live abroad, but fears the moral climate outside the country. He is wary of the Western images that appear on his television screen, though he installed a satellite dish on his roof when it was illegal, and dangerous, to own one. He adores his new wife, an independent-minded woman who wears low-cut shirts, but he wants her to start covering her hair and acting like a traditional Muslim woman when she moves to Baghdad. His work fascinates him, but he is concerned that his daily immersion in death will make him less spiritual. "The doctor of forensic medicine deals only with bodies," he said. "So maybe in the end I will become like you--an existentialist."
Dr. Shaker lives with his mother and his brothers and sisters on a tidy side street in Al Thawra, the heavily Shiite slum district in northeastern Baghdad. Last year, the neighborhood was renamed Sadr City, in honor of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, a revered Shiite leader known for his subversive sermons against Baathist tyranny; he was assassinated in 1999, almost certainly on Saddam's orders. His son, Moqtada al-Sadr, declared himself his successor. With the overthrow of Saddam, Moqtada began stridently fomenting dissent against the American occupation. Throughout Sadr City, young men in black uniforms guided traffic: these were members of the Mahdi Army, Moqtada's militia.
A round sticker was affixed to the wooden front door of Shaker's house; it bore an image of Ayatollah Sadr, along with a quotation, from one of his sermons, insisting that women be veiled. In the Shakers' living room hung a picture of Imam Hussein crossing a river on horseback by moonlight, like one of the Christian saints. Compact disks containing forty-five sermons by Ayatollah Sadr were stacked inside the family's TV cabinet, alongside a pile of back issues of Al Hawza, the fiercely anti-American newspaper published by Moqtada al-Sadr. Shaker told me that he got his television news from Al Jazeera and Iranian broadcasts--he never watched Iraq's American-run network. His main source of information from the non-Islamic world, I realized, was old Hollywood movies. That wouldn't offer him much help in parsing the truth of a story I noticed in Al Hawza. The newspaper had reprinted photographs of President Bush and President Clinton holding up their index and pinkie fingers; the accompanying article offered the images as evidence of a Zionist-Masonic conspiracy.
Shaker's younger brothers, Ali and Samir, joined us in the living room. Ali was a secondary-school math teacher, Samir an unemployed telecom repairman. Unlike their dirty-blond, fair-skinned older brother, they were dark and bearded--respectful, serious, slightly wary.
"Samir is closer to God than me," Shaker said. "Ali is like me--flexible." Ali and Samir were devoted followers of Moqtada; they shared his hostility toward the occupation. From time to time, someone knocked on the door, and one of the brothers would get up to receive a tray of food or beverages from the hands of an unseen woman.
Ali brought up the Ashura bombings. "Ninety-five per cent of Iraqis knew the main purpose of this was to start a religious war between Shia and Sunnis," he said. He was skeptical of the Americans' assertion that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist with ties to Al Qaeda, was responsible for the attacks. "This Zarqawi--it's only a game that the Americans use," Ali declared. "Before the election of Bush, they'll show Zarqawi on TV. Just like Saddam--they captured him months before they showed him."
The brothers told me a joke about the occupation: An American soldier is about to kill a Shiite, who cries, "Please, no, in the name of Imam Hussein!" The American asks who Imam Hussein was, and then decides to spare the man's life. A few weeks later, this same soldier is sent to Falluja, where he is cornered by a Sunni insurgent. The soldier thinks fast and cries, "Please, no, in the name of Imam Hussein!" The insurgent says, "What? You're an American and a Shiite?," and blows him away.
There was a moment of laughter in the living room.
Ali sat cross-legged on a rug against the wall, and looked directly at me. "Before this war, I was waiting for the Americans to come--and now I feel sort of cheated. All this talk about rebuilding Iraq, and all we see is a couple of light coats of paint. And they say they renovated Iraq."
Samir, the unemployed younger brother, spoke in darker tones, with a faint smile. He had never had any illusions. "No enemy loves his enemy. We know very well that the Americans don't intend us any good."
The Americans had at least got rid of Saddam, I observed. "That's not enough," Ali said. "Now things are worse. We can't go outside at four in the morning, as before."
If within a year there were free elections in Iraq, I asked, would they be satisfied?
"Yes," Samir said.
Ali disagreed. "I don't think the people will be satisfied. So what if we have a President? The mobile phones we have here don't work. Why can't it be like the Gulf countries? Maybe in generations after generations. But we won't be here then. It pisses me off."
Shaker also spoke of the urgent need for improved services. Then he asked to borrow my satellite phone and disappeared up on the roof, to call his new wife in Amsterdam.
One Friday not long after the Ashura bombings, I went with Shaker to hear prayers in Kadhimiya, an old Shiite neighborhood in the northwestern part of Baghdad that is famous for its gold shops. One of the bombs killed nearly sixty people at the local shrine, which holds the remains of two imams who came after the martyred Hussein. Along a broad pedestrian market street that ends in the square in front of the sixteenth-century mosque, cordons of grim-looking young Mahdi Army militiamen, carrying Kalashnikovs, searched the throngs of pilgrims for weapons.
There were no Iraqi policemen or American soldiers on the streets. One Mahdi soldier, who was eighteen years old, said that the Americans had prevented Moqtada's militia from carrying their weapons on Ashura. This was a foolish decision, he said: if the militia had been armed, it would have been able to hold back the surges of worshippers and catch the suicide bombers mingling in the crowd.
While Shaker went into a shop to wash himself before prayers, a local cleric named Sheikh Muhammad Kinani told me that the bombers were Wahhabi members of Al Qaeda, working in concert with an American soldier employed by the John Kerry campaign. "I believe John Kerry is behind this so Bush will lose his Presidency and look bad in front of the world," he said. "But it's the Iraqis who pay for it."
Such rumors proliferate on the streets of Iraq's cities these days. In fact, the traffic in conspiracy theories is so heavy that an American intelligence unit began putting out "The Baghdad Mosquito," a daily compendium of rumors currently in circulation. According to several Shiites I spoke with in Kadhimiya, Wahhabi men all have light-colored beards and are the enemies of true Muslims. A merchant on the pedestrian market street said, "We caught a Wahhabi from Ramadi an hour ago." The captive, he said, was wearing a short dishdasha, in the Wahhabi style; although his feet were dirty, his body was suspiciously clean. A search of the Wahhabi man turned up blank paper and a map. Local people took him to the police station, where he would be tortured until he confessed.
Prayers began beneath a hot noon sun. The shrine itself, with its splendid golden domes and minarets, was closed because of bomb damage. Men filled the square; holding black signs and pictures of Shiite martyrs, and shaking their fists, they chanted, "Pray to Muhammad and the followers of Muhammad and hurry the damning of our enemies. Give victory to Moqtada! We follow Moq-ta-da!" Shaker knelt in the front row and prayed. He seemed alone in the crowd, the only worshipper who wasn't chanting.
One of Moqtada's aides, Hazem al-Araji, delivered the sermon. He is a thirty-five-year-old sayyid with a salt-and-pepper beard who spent two years in exile in Vancouver before the war. Later, in a conversation at his office, he proved to be a smooth, smiling politician who Googles himself several times a day to keep up with his press, and who made a theocratic Islamic state sound not very different from a parliamentary democracy. But, in front of the crowd of worshippers outside the shrine, Araji let loose an incendiary and conspiracy-laced analysis of the violence in Iraq. The attacks came from four sources, he declared, none of them Iraqi or Muslim: it was the Jews, the Americans, the British, and the Wahhabi. The Jews--who had been warned to stay away from the World Trade Center on September 11th, so that not one Jew died--"want Iraqis to die." America, the devil, allows the violence in order to have an excuse to continue occupying Iraq. The British, America's partners, are more directly responsible, since they invented Wahhabism and, therefore, Al Qaeda, which have "nothing to do with Islam."
Shaker knelt, slump-shouldered, and gazed down at his clasped hands, muttering prayers. He looked puzzled, as if he were trying to figure something out. I wondered if the cleric's ranting embarrassed him.
"If you read the modern books of history," Araji proclaimed, "you know that Wahhabism started in 1870 by the good graces of the British government in order to go against Islam, to make Islam look bad, to make Muslims fight each other. Those who know--good. Those who don't--know now."
Araji was referring to "Confessions of a British Spy," an apocryphal memoir attributed to a British colonial officer of the early eighteenth century named Hempher. (Araji was off by a hundred and fifty years.) Going undercover, Hempher befriends a gullible, hotheaded Iraqi in Basra named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and tempts him into founding a heretical sect of Islam that will bring disrepute to other Muslims and turn them against one another: "We, the English people, have to make mischief and arouse schism in all our colonies in order that we may live in welfare and luxury." Hempher cannot conceal his admiration for the spiritual grandeur of Islam, which more than once nearly causes him to abandon his mission. "Confessions of a British Spy" reads like an Anglophobic variation on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; it is probably the labor of a Sunni Muslim author whose intent is to present Muslims as both too holy and too weak to organize anything as destructive as Wahhabism (or, Araji's listeners could deduce, to pull off a crime as appalling as the Ashura bombings, which took place two centuries after Wahhabis, on the same holiday, sacked the Shiite shrine at Karbala, slaughtering two thousand citizens). With its subtext of powerlessness, the "memoir" is ultimately a confession of Muslim humiliation--a text that was bound to find an audience in occupied Iraq, where the name Hempher has begun to circulate among militant Shiites.
"America, England, Israel, do whatever you have to do, build more missiles, more explosives, more terrorism all over the world," Araji said. "But it's not going to stop us."
The crowd chanted, "Yes, yes to Islam!"
"Just a speech," Shaker scoffed as we drove out of Kadhimiya. "If I knew this man is going to deliver the Friday prayers, I would not go." He would have preferred to hear Moqtada himself. If Moqtada had come, he said, there would have been less talk and more action.
It is one measure of America's inability to achieve its goals in Iraq that a man of "the middle level of mind" like Bashir Shaker--who had everything to gain from the overthrow of Saddam and the opportunities it opened up--feels himself pulled toward a harsher brand of Islam in reaction to the pervasive insecurity of the occupation. Many flaws of the occupation have by now been exhaustively documented: the lack of significant international support at the outset; the catastrophic looting that followed the fall of Baghdad; the commitment of a grossly insufficient number of American troops to provide security, rebuild infrastructure, and fight a widening insurgency; the decisions to abolish the Iraqi Army and purge higher-level Baathists from government jobs, which turned several hundred thousand mostly Sunni Arabs, who might have become partners, into jobless, well-armed, and well-funded potential enemies; the slipshod planning in Washington and political mistakes in Baghdad that have forced the occupation authority to toss out one road map for Iraq's future after another.
Yet perhaps the greatest mistake made by the architects of the war was to assume that their vision of a liberal state would be eagerly embraced by an ethnically divided, overwhelmingly Islamic country with a long history of dictatorship. The Coalition Provisional Authority managed the occupation as if benevolent American intentions guaranteed success. Giving Iraqis a chance to experience and participate in democracy became less important than achieving a desired outcome. As a result, Paul Bremer and his colleagues failed to anticipate the level of resistance that would emanate from Iraq's various factions--in particular, the Shia.
The C.P.A. has been consistently slow to respond to the simmering frustrations of ordinary Iraqis. Since conditions in Iraq were already unravelling when Bremer arrived, last May, his primary focus has been on establishing his authority. "One thing that the C.P.A. couldn't make a mistake about was showing that it was in control," Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British envoy to Iraq, told me at the end of March, just before returning to London. "This place has to be controlled, and I think this is an area where Bremer has got it exactly right, has shown that he's boss. The Iraqis wanted a boss." But, Greenstock admitted, "we could have been more consultative."
Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, who served as a C.P.A. adviser on democracy, put it more bluntly: "There has always been a tension in our occupation between control and legitimacy. And the more we've sought control, the less legitimacy we've had. I think we have erred in general, from the start, much too heavily in the direction of control at the expense of legitimacy, and that has come back to haunt us."
This is a dilemma that Bremer has never been able to resolve. In January and February, he oversaw the drafting of an interim Iraqi constitution by the Governing Council, the Iraqi body appointed by the Coalition. If Bremer had encouraged widespread public discussion of the emerging document's main points, in order to make educated participants of Iraqis, he would have risked seeing the inevitable controversies fought out in the streets. Instead, the interim constitution was written under tremendous time pressure, in small, secretive committee meetings during all-night negotiating sessions inside the Green Zone, the impenetrable fortified area in the center of Baghdad. The signing ceremony, on March 5th, was elaborately planned for the cameras: twenty-five pens were laid out on a table, one for each council member, and a chamber ensemble provided music. At the last minute, however, five Shiite members who had agreed to sign the document ruined Bremer's script by failing to show up.
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most respected Shiite cleric, had belatedly expressed his opposition to Article 61c of the interim constitution. The article, which soon became notorious, essentially gave Iraq's minority Kurds and Sunnis veto power over any element of the permanent constitution. For the Kurds, who were long oppressed by Iraq's central government, Article 61c was a guarantee of minority rights in a federal republic. In January, Bremer had sent a young and inexperienced team of advisers to negotiate with the senior Kurdish leaders, who refused to back off heavy demands. Even after Bremer personally intervened, the Kurds got almost everything they wanted, including an autonomous region in the north. To the Shiite religious leadership, which apparently learned of the article's language only at the last hour, the same Article 61c appeared to stand in the way of majority rule.
On March 8th, after three days of persuasion, the five Shiite holdouts on the council signed the document. The interim constitution is a real achievement--the only one the Governing Council can claim. It represents political compromise and a broad consensus about individual rights. During the final day and night of negotiations, Bremer yielded control--a rare moment for an official who has been described as a micromanager--and for eight hours became a silent observer, allowing the Iraqis to work out the unavoidable conflicts between majority rule and minority rights. But, because the C.P.A. and the council had failed to build any support for the interim constitution outside the Green Zone, its unveiling inspired street demonstrations, mass confusion over its contents, and a sharp increase in tension between the Shia and the Kurds. At a meeting of the district council in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood, I listened to Governing Council representatives patiently explaining the interim constitution to a roomful of increasingly agitated citizens who, confronted with a fait accompli, accused the council of dismembering the country.
Even as it became clear that the key article risked undermining the entire document's legitimacy in the eyes of Iraq's majority, Bremer refused to consider any changes. An official involved in the process said that Bremer wanted the interim constitution to be sold to the Iraqi public in a one-way conversation: "He has a tremendous investment in this as one of his prized accomplishments."
Other than the June 30th deadline for the transfer of sovereignty, the interim constitution is just about all that remains of the November 15th agreement between the C.P.A. and the Governing Council--the agreement that outlined Iraq's political future, replacing Bremer's original plan. Throughout the year of its existence, the C.P.A. has seen its blueprints overrun by events beyond the Green Zone that were to some degree predictable--and were caused partly by its own deep isolation.
One crucial example has been the fate of Moqtada al-Sadr. Last summer, Hume Horan, the C.P.A.'s senior liaison to the Shia religious community, spoke with me about the dilemma posed by Moqtada. On the day after the fall of Baghdad, an American-backed liberal cleric, Abdel Majid al-Khoei, was killed by a mob of Moqtada's followers outside the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf. (Eyewitnesses have said that Moqtada himself refused to save his rival when Khoei was dragged bleeding to his door.) The murder was a power grab by Iraq's most radical Shiite faction. Later, Al Hawza, Moqtada's newspaper, published a blacklist with the names of Iraqi "collaborators," at least one of whom was subsequently killed. As a result, Horan told me, Moqtada's paper could be shut down and he could be arrested. Then again, putting Moqtada in jail might make him a martyr and, therefore, more dangerous.
During our conversation, Horan sounded as if he were inclined to let the establishment Shiite clerics of Najaf deal with the demagogic young upstart who had planted himself in their midst. "His father would be so distressed if he'd seen his son," Horan said of Moqtada. "Here's this unchurched son of one of the great churchmen, who fills the role without any of the qualifications. What is he lashing out at? Is it his own sense of inadequacy that is being projected?"
Last August, an Iraqi judge issued a warrant charging Moqtada with having ordered the killing of Khoei, but the C.P.A. kept the warrant a secret while it deliberated. One Coalition official said that the C.P.A. prepared to seize Moqtada on two occasions. "The word was `Lock your doors, bring everybody in. We're going to snatch Moqtada,'" he said. Both operations were abruptly called off. "The decisions had to have occurred somewhere up the Defense Department chain," the official said. (A C.P.A. spokesman said that its plans to capture Moqtada were not that definitive.)
During this same period, the C.P.A. found itself in a series of protracted battles with Ayatollah Sistani, the Shiite leader. The first was over Bremer's decision to have the permanent constitution written by unelected Iraqis. That plan was finally scrapped, in favor of the November 15th agreement, which put the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty ahead of elections and a constitution. Then another dispute arose: Sistani objected to the C.P.A.'s proposal to hold regional caucuses for the selection of Iraq's interim government. Months went by before Bremer, having steadily misjudged Sistani's power, threw out the plan.
While the C.P.A. and Sistani took each other's measure in private, there was no political progress in Iraq. The local and provincial councils set up by the C.P.A.--which should have been seedbeds of Iraq's future leadership, offering the best hope for the emergence of moderate indigenous alternatives to the sectarian parties, with their armed militias and foreign backers--never received the means to exercise real power and show their constituents concrete results. For months, members went unpaid; I was told that a draft of the government order delineating the councils' powers was prepared in October--but it wasn't issued until April 6th. The councils' reconstruction efforts were constantly hindered by bureaucratic clots that kept money from flowing to local military commanders and civil authorities.
The absence of healthier politics created a dangerous vacuum, which was filled by the most extreme tendencies in Iraq: the Sunni resistance, made up of Baathist, Islamist, and nationalist elements; and the Shiite street politics of Moqtada al-Sadr. Sistani and Moqtada are natural foes, for personal and ideological reasons, and Sistani, because of his immensely greater religious authority, commands a much larger following among Iraqi Shiites. But after Sistani declared his opposition to the interim constitution the balance of power shifted. "As long as the Coalition had Sistani's tacit support, it didn't need to worry too much about Moqtada al-Sadr," Amatzia Baram, an Iraq scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace, in Washington, told me. "But when Sistani announced his objection to the interim constitution the Coalition lost him." Article 61c placed Sistani, who was born in Iran, in a terrible position: he couldn't seem to be selling out Arab interests to the Kurds, nor could he afford to give Shiite radicals the chance to accuse him of selling out Islam. "That was a watershed moment," Baram said. "Because, from now on, every crazy Shiite could claim that he was fighting the Americans in Sistani's name. The moment radicals could present themselves as fighting for Sistani's causes, that united the Shia community against the Americans and the Governing Council. They were using Sistani's slogans against Sistani. Sistani became marginalized in his own name."
Moqtada's amplified significance was lost on Coalition officials. In late March, I asked Greenstock about the size of his following. "Tiny--and with no political impact," he said. "Go around Sadr City again now and you will find fewer Moqtada al-Sadr followers than you would have done five months ago." He added, "We thought he had an opportunity to bubble up and grow--he hasn't done it. Partly because he knows that if he moves anywhere he'll be picked up."
A week later, on March 28th, Bremer ordered the closing of Al Hawza; within days, American soldiers had arrested an aide to Moqtada. Urged on by Moqtada's vitriolic speeches, the Mahdi Army responded with demonstrations that quickly escalated into armed confrontations with Coalition troops in Baghdad and a number of southern cities, several of which fell under the militia's control. The uprising seriously damaged the C.P.A.'s authority and undermined the occupation's legitimacy in the eyes of many Shiites who otherwise have no love for the erratic Moqtada and his violent followers. In early May, after a month of fighting, the Americans acted to end the uprising, confronting the Mahdi Army in Najaf and Karbala.
The timing of the C.P.A.'s move against Al Hawza was baffling, coming in the middle of the mourning period that follows Ashura. A senior official in Washington suggested to me that the Administration had been caught off guard: "Was there a series of decisions that seemed idiotic to those of us back here? Yes. Is one of them that, during a major Muslim holiday, Moqtada al-Sadr is suddenly a persona non grata? Yes." Worse, the C.P.A. seemed not to have prepared for the reaction from Moqtada's militia, betraying a serious miscalculation of the young cleric's strength. The Mahdi Army had been acquiring money and guns since last summer, and continued to intimidate townspeople in Najaf and elsewhere; at one point in January, militiamen occupied the shrine of Imam Ali.
Amatzia Baram faulted Bremer for the clumsy manner of the March crackdown on Moqtada, but not for the effort itself. As with so many other C.P.A. decisions, he said, "You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. That's the main problem in Iraq these days."
Moqtada's newfound power was in part a result of the failed communications effort by the C.P.A. Its Iraqi Media Network has been ineptly run, featuring vapid programming and Coalition-friendly news briefs. The Pentagon, which is in charge of the occupation of Iraq, kept tight control over the flow of news for domestic political reasons. It was a self-defeating effort, however: American propaganda was no match for Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya--and Moqtada's newspaper.
The C.P.A., having sacrificed legitimacy for control, has ended up with neither. A former Coalition official traced the failures in Baghdad directly back to Washington, and he identified the central irony of the occupation: "A lot of this is the unwillingness of the Bush Administration to rock the boat before the election. And it's laughable that it's pursued this policy. Because of the failure to confront Moqtada, because of the failure to disarm the militias, because of the lack of troops on the ground, Bush may well lose the election."
In March, during the standoff over the interim constitution, I went to see Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurd on the Governing Council. A small man with a large nose and an unblinking stare, Othman was for many years the personal doctor of Mustafa Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas who fought the Iraqi central government. Before the American invasion, Othman was living in London, and, like most Kurdish politicians, he shares the Americans' vision of a relatively secular and liberal Iraq. But, much to the annoyance of the C.P.A., he has proved to be the Governing Council's in-house critic. When most of its other members were jockeying to perpetuate their positions beyond the June 30th transfer of sovereignty, Othman was calling flatly for the council to be dissolved, saying that it hadn't worked. He placed the blame for the debacle over Article 61c squarely on Bremer--who, Othman claimed, had coddled the council's Shiite bloc early on, encouraging its members to become intransigent. "It's a humiliation to him," he told me, with faint satisfaction. "He gave them that leverage, coming and going, and it was very bad."
I asked Othman if the occupation was a failure. "It's not a success, either security-wise or media-wise or economic-wise," he said. "But I can't say it's a failure." He believed that most Iraqis still hoped for a decent life and a better society. In fact, Othman declared, going further than most observers would, "if things are set right, I think liberalism and secularism have the majority in this country always. But are the people now free to express their points of view? They are not. Because the country now is ruled by militias, mullahs, and warlords. The simple citizen is not allowed to have his own rights, to say freely what he wants." In one way, he added, the Americans were like Saddam: "They are not caring much for a simple Iraqi citizen. They care for a chief of a tribe here, a mullah there, a religious man here, a militiaman here, head of a party there."
As the June 30th deadline approaches, with no Iraqi interim government in sight, the United States has turned reluctantly to the United Nations. Until recently, Washington consistently prevented the U.N. from establishing any real authority in Iraq (the words "United Nations" appear nowhere in the November 15th agreement). But the Administration now finds that the C.P.A. and the Governing Council have so little legitimacy in the eyes of most Iraqis--including Ayatollah Sistani--that the transfer of sovereignty can't occur without outside help. Enter Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N.'s envoy to Iraq, and an Algerian diplomat who was Secretary-General Kofi Annan's representative in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. In April, Brahimi and his team travelled to Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra to meet with groups of Iraqis and begin preparations for an interim government. The senior Administration official told me, "Brahimi has identified--unlike the ivory-tower C.P.A.--a lot of passionate, talented Iraqis who want the same things we want: freedom, democracy, liberty."
Fairly quickly, Brahimi concluded that the Governing Council should not be part of the new Iraqi government. "The Governing Council in its current constitution doesn't have the confidence of most Iraqis," his spokesman, Ahmed Fawzi, told me. At the end of April, Brahimi briefed the U.N. Security Council, in New York; he called for a caretaker government of technocrats, whose main purpose will be to prepare the country for elections by January, 2005. "We are reaching out to the professional associations, the trade unions, the universities, and asking them to give us the best of their crop," Fawzi said. "The best five lawyers, the best five doctors, the best five accountants, the best five engineers, to form a short list acceptable to all for a short-term interim government." A Prime Minister and a cabinet will be chosen by Brahimi, Bremer, and the Governing Council by the end of May. It seems inevitable that some of Iraq's leading politicians, including members of the Governing Council, will end up with positions in the interim government, though this will surely be the subject of intense negotiations between rival factions. Brahimi, who oversaw Afghanistan's loya jirga, imagines Iraqis from all sectors of society gathering in a national conference soon after June 30th to choose an advisory body, or rump parliament. The conference could be the first chance for ordinary Iraqis to feel that they have a stake in the country's political future.
It's not clear that a U.S. Administration with a history of pronounced hostility to the U.N. will relinquish real authority in Iraq to it, even now. The senior official said, "There are people in this Administration who have led me to believe that the U.N. is a greater clear and present danger to the United States than any foreign enemy, including Osama bin Laden." Robert Blackwill, a director at the National Security Council, will be Washington's point man in the process; according to the senior official, Blackwill will keep the pressure on Bremer to accept Brahimi's recommendations. Will the U.N., for its part, having been so badly undermined by the Administration on Iraq, return in force now, when things are going so poorly? "Kofi's going to have a really hard time looking at this and saying, `Do I want a piece of this?'" the senior official said.
Annan and Brahimi, perhaps sensing that the U.N. is being set up to take the fall for what is bound to be an unstable, tumultuous period before elections, have tried to lower expectations about the organization's role in Iraq. Brahimi cannot answer some of the most important questions about the transition--such as how extensive Iraqi sovereignty will be, and what the relationship will be between the interim government and the U.S. military. Ahmed Fawzi expressed the hope that a sovereign Iraqi government will take the steam out of the insurgency. In the meantime, another U.N. official told me, the security situation in Iraq is so perilous that "it's going to be very difficult for any full-scale engagement of the U.N. in Iraq for the next couple of months." He added, "We're expected to take the lead--and we're not the lead. We're helping to do what we can. But the political reality is that the Americans are the biggest player in Iraq, and they're going to be before and after June 30th."
The only good reason left for the invasion of Iraq, and for an ongoing war involving a hundred and thirty-five thousand American troops, is the creation of a decent Iraqi government. The National Democratic Institute is an organization funded largely by the U.S. government and affiliated with the Democratic Party; it operates with relative independence, under the direction of the National Endowment for Democracy. The institute's purpose is to find what Mahmoud Othman called "the simple citizens" in a place like Iraq, and help them to participate in democratic political life. This tends to be obscure, poorly funded work--but the Bush Administration wants to pour half a billion dollars into Iraq for "democracy-building" programs before the transfer of sovereignty and national elections. The effort is floundering, however, because the escalation of violence has made it hard to spend the money.
Early one morning in mid-March, I drove to Hilla, which is ninety minutes south of Baghdad, with a group of Iraqis and Americans working for N.D.I. We travelled in non-armored vehicles, without guards. In the back seat of one of the sedans, wearing a navy-blue suit, a salmon-colored tie, and glasses, was David Dettman, a pale, chain-smoking political consultant from Ohio. For many years, Dettman, who is thirty-three and has the nervous, self-deprecating sense of humor of a Jack Lemmon character, worked successfully as a campaign consultant in Washington. Then he ran for the Ohio state legislature as a Democrat, got creamed, and had an epiphany. "What got me charged up is that I really believed in the process," he told me. He decided to leave his job, and he became one of N.D.I.'s democratization missionaries, posted in Ukraine. To the dismay of his wife, his mother, and his boss, Dettman had come to Iraq for two weeks to train groups of aspiring political-party activists in Baghdad, Tikrit, and Hilla.
The workshop in Hilla took place in the city's former secret-police headquarters, which has become a human-rights center. Forty Iraqis--including a political-science professor and an unemployed sports instructor--had travelled at some risk to attend the class. They listened intently and took careful notes as Dettman stood before a flip chart and presented a ten-step program on message development and voter contact. Mayasa al-Naimy, an Iraqi staff member of N.D.I., gamely translated the exotic campaign terminology: "earned media," "communications strategy," "wedge and base issues." (Dettman had told me earlier, "Politics is the art of getting people to vote for you. It's applicable all over the world. If it wasn't, I wouldn't have a job.")
After two hours of discussion, an Iraqi raised his hand. "This shows me we're making a transition from dictatorship to democracy," he said. "That makes me feel good. But this is the question: Will the American Administration leave it to us? Or just throw someone on us? Will all these efforts be lost?"
Outside, in the distance, there was an explosion--mortar fire--and then a second, closer one, which was followed by gunfire. Dettman glanced out the window and grinned with alarm.
"Does that answer your question?" someone asked.
"I'm not the government," Dettman said. "I'm N.D.I. We have to eat lunch. Can we talk about this later?"
After lunch, Dettman returned to the question. "My opinion is if America invaded Iraq for nothing other than to have a friendly dictator, then all of the American and Iraqi lives that were lost will have been wasted," he said. "I supported the invasion because I'm in the democratization business. I don't know anything about W.M.D.--I don't know if anyone was telling the truth or not--but I do know the Iraqi people deserve freedom. I can't say the Americans won't do anything wrong, because they already have done many things wrong in this occupation. And I'm sorry. But there's a reason N.D.I. is here now, and there's a reason we didn't bring a tank. We're the least armed Americans in Hilla. We're here trusting your hospitality. Because democracy is good and right." He went on, "If this traumatic war was fought for anything other than that, I'm gonna be mad. Here's the problem: I can't do much. I'm just the arrogant American in a suit standing up in front of you. I haven't suffered as much as you have. Only you can build democracy here. But if I just thought America was going to steal the freedom we fought for I would have stayed home with my wife and had a lovely time."
"Aren't you having a lovely time here?" someone asked.
"I am having a lovely time. But I miss my wife."
It was a heartfelt speech, and it was received with scattered applause. Then a man sitting near me muttered to himself, "A British guy named Hempher laid plans decades ago for Presidents to take turns ruling Iraq."
The people in the room belonged to Shaker's "middle level of mind." They were neither mullahs nor militiamen, and some of the parties they belonged to counted no more than several hundred members. One of the participants was Jawdet al-Obeidi, a former Army officer from Hilla. He fled Iraq after taking part in the Shiite uprising in 1991, and ended up in Portland, Oregon. He started a small limousine company there, and last year he sold it and returned to Iraq, as a member of a militia aligned with the U.S. invasion force. Since then, Obeidi has poured a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of his savings into building a coalition of almost two hundred small political parties that can challenge the larger parties in parliamentary elections. (Already, there are some three hundred political parties in Iraq.) The coalition's platform combines a moderate Muslim agenda with Iraqi nationalism and a respect for individual rights--a deliberately mild mixture that seems designed to have broad support. Obeidi, a balding, middle-aged man with a salesman's cheerfulness, has received death threats, and his brother-in-law survived three bullets in the head.
Also at the meeting was a married couple from Mahawil, a village of dirt roads and salt marshes near Hilla: Emad Dawood, who worked in a shop selling construction materials, and his wife, Saad, who had received a business degree in Baghdad but was unable to find work, and was now raising their three children. She was one of only three women at the meeting; like the others, she wore a hijab.
Her husband explained to me, "We go everywhere together."
"Any educated couple would do this," Saad said.
"Of course, we have religion, and we go by the rules," Emad added. "The Islamic religion doesn't say women can't mix with other men, but everything has to do with limits."
Saad pointed out that Islam doesn't deny women the right to participate in politics: "They should have a role in everything."
In Hilla, the repression of the 1991 Shiite uprising was particularly brutal, and, last year, mass graves containing thousands of victims were uncovered on the periphery of the town. Saad and Emad had each lost a brother, and many friends. The couple had only the vaguest notion of what was in Iraq's new interim constitution, but they knew very well what it was like to live under Saddam. "It's like a hammer on your head every day," Emad said, "and then they take it away."
The Dawoods had once seen the Americans as heroic liberators, but the feeling was short-lived. According to Emad, as the occupation ground on, with constant power outages and rampant crime, ordinary unhappiness was turning into a kind of insanity. "Things are just getting worse here," Saad added. "Of course, if there was democracy things would change."
"But democracy needs a long period of time, because we've been living so long under Saddam," Emad said.
"Most people do not get the idea of democracy," Saad said. "Ask anybody about democracy, and you'd find most people would say, `What am I going to do with democracy? Give me security first.'"
Emad told me, "I know a guy who shot two bullets at random. He said, `Isn't this freedom?'"
As for Dettman's presentation, it clearly meant something to this couple that Americans had come to meet with them in Hilla. Dettman had given them a lot of helpful information, they felt. Their only complaint was that there was no exam at the end, to test how much they'd learned about democracy.
The failures of the occupation and the violence of the insurgency have stranded moderate Iraqis like those who attended the meeting in Hilla. Lakhdar Brahimi wants to bring such Iraqis onto the national political stage, but, considering the disproportionate power of groups represented on the Governing Council and backed by foreign states, the chances for success are poor. Marina Ottaway, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that, after the fall of dictatorships, "you always have a lot of political parties forming, and they never get anywhere." N.D.I., she concluded, is "bravely doing something that is completely futile."
Of course, electoral success isn't the only measure of what organizations like N.D.I. are trying to do. In Hilla, it felt like an achievement simply to hold a discussion, amid gunfire, about democracy, in which there was a genuine give-and-take between Iraqis and foreigners. The fact that Hempher, the supposed British spy blamed for so much trouble in the Muslim world, was invoked at the Hilla workshop was a less hopeful sign. The Americans' mistakes in Iraq have been only part of the story of disappointment. Many Iraqis--damaged beyond imagining by the cruelty of Saddam's rule, and afflicted with outsized expectations and suspicions of America--have fallen back on aspects of their culture and faith that offer a blind resistance to the new world that has been thrown open before them. In the past year, Iraq has undergone not just a war but a revolution. It's no wonder that Iraqis have responded not only with hope but with confusion, rage, and despair; the wonder is that Americans expected anything else.
We left Hilla just before dark, and set out for Baghdad. An hour later, on a nearby road, three people--an American woman working with Iraqi women's groups, a C.P.A. press officer, and their Iraqi translator--were ambushed and shot to death by men wearing Iraqi police uniforms. It was the start of a wave of attacks on foreign civilians and the Iraqis who worked with them. The violence had still not subsided by early May, and most of the non-governmental groups and contractors working for democracy in Iraq had evacuated their foreign employees. Les Campbell, the Middle East director of N.D.I., recently told me that the organization's foreign staff was in Amman, Jordan, waiting for the violence to diminish before returning to Baghdad, where the Iraqi staff continues to work. Meanwhile, Campbell is talking with private security firms, and looking for the right armored car.
He has not lost his optimism altogether. "Even with all the problems in Iraq, there is already far more civil-society space and party organizing than in any other Arab country," he said. He described how N.D.I.'s Iraqi staff members, such as Mayasa al-Naimy, have begun to blossom intellectually. "Even in the midst of the killings, which are terrible, and even though the planning and administration continue to be a joke, something interesting is going on here," Campbell said. "It makes me sort of sick to think it might not work."
Three days after the trip to Hilla, I paid another visit to Dr. Shaker at his house in Sadr City. His brother Samir had just come back from a demonstration against the interim constitution, led by one of Moqtada al-Sadr's top aides, in Firdus Square, the same spot where Saddam's statue was pulled down a year ago. "The Kurds have more rights than the others," Samir said. "They can veto anything we decide, but we don't have the right to veto."
Ali had watched a Shiite politician on television who said that Arabs could refuse the Kurds' demands for federalism. "We don't know anything about the constitution," Ali said. "It was written, handed over to the Governing Council to sign, and then shown to the people, who never saw it before."
As for Shaker, the controversy filled him with foreboding. He doubted that Iraq would remain intact. The Shia, the Kurds, and the Sunnis had agendas that could never be reconciled. "The story will be like Lebanon," Shaker told me. "A civil war."
Arab against Kurd? "A strong possibility." Shiite against Sunni? "It's a possibility," he said. "The constitution will be the starting point, and then the event will be gradually increased." I asked if he envisioned rival armies fighting each other. "That is how I imagine it," he said. But, the likeliest scenario of all, he added, was a civil war among his own people, the Shia.
It was my last visit to the house. Afterward, neighbors belonging to Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army warned Shaker against having any more American visitors.
It was a few weeks later, on March 28th, that Moqtada's uprising began, and Sadr City exploded in days and nights of firefights between militiamen and American soldiers. I spoke with the doctor by phone. He had spent days trapped at home, unable to go to the morgue, while the uprising continued. Twelve of his friends in the neighborhood had died in crossfire. His brothers, Ali and Samir, wanted to join the Mahdi Army and fight the Americans, but he had stopped them. The scale of the violence shocked him, but not its outbreak, which he had seen coming. The bravery of the young militiamen, standing up to tanks with small arms, impressed him, and though he deplored their tactics, he sympathized with their goal--"real Islamic democracy."
Shaker said, "My idea of the situation now: the Americans are at the high level and Moqtada is down at the bottom, and they can't understand each other. They should be in the middle." He added, "The Americans have to use the political way. Bremer must be more diplomatic, more flexible. He needs to go through the middle level of mind--as I told you. He must speak to people like me."