The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

497 Pages·2006·2 MB·English

by  George Packer

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Contents T P
ITLE AGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
1. AN UNFINISHED WAR
2. FEVERED MINDS
3. EXILES
4. SPECIAL PLANS
5. PSYCHOLOGICAL DEMOLITION
6. THE PALACE
7. THE CAPTAIN
8. OCCUPIED IRAQIS
9. INSURGENCIES
10. CIVIL WAR?
11. MEMORIAL DAY
12. SIMPLE CITIZENS
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
NOTE ON SOURCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
READING GROUP GUIDE
ALSO BY GEORGE PACKER
PRAISE FOR THE ASSASSINS’ GATE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
For Laura
Dive into the sea, or stay away.
—Nizar Qabbani
P
ROLOGUE
IN THE SHADE of a high sandstone arch, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and a platoon
of American soldiers from the First Armored Division guarded the main point of
entry into the vast and heavily fortified Green Zone along the west bank of the
Tigris River, where the Coalition Provisional Authority governed occupied Iraq.
When I arrived in Baghdad in the summer of 2003 and first saw the arch, I
mistook it for one of the city’s antique gates, built during the time of the caliphs
to keep out Persian invaders. The American soldiers referred to it by a name that
seemed to have come straight out of the Thousand and One Nights. They called
it the Assassins’ Gate.
Early every morning, before the sun grew dangerous, crowds of Iraqis
gathered at the Assassins’ Gate. Some were job seekers; others were protesters
carrying banners—“Please Re-open Our Factories,” “We Wish to See Mr.
Frawley.” Demonstrators brought their causes here and sometimes turned into
rioters. A man handed out copies of a table printed in English and Arabic and
titled “The Names of Victims of execution of my family.” Many people carried
letters addressed to L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq.
With the old order overthrown, the Baath Party authorities purged, and the
ministries stripped bare by looters, most Iraqis didn’t know where to take their
grievances and petitions, where to unload the burden of their personal histories.
So, like supplicants to the caliph of ancient Baghdad, they brought them directly
to the front gate of the occupation. But few Iraqis had the credentials to enter the
Green Zone, and interpreters at the gate were rare. The Iraqis stood on one side
of coils of concertina wire, gesturing and trying to explain why they needed to
get in; on the other side stood Americans doing twelve-hour shifts of checkpoint
duty in body armor, keeping them out.
One day in July, a tiny woman in a salmon-colored veil stepped out of the
crowd and thrust a handwritten letter up at me. She was a schoolteacher, about
thirty, with glasses and thick white face powder and an expression so
exaggeratedly solemn that she might have been a mime performing grief. The
letter, which was eighteen pages long, requested an audience with “Mister
respectable, merciful American ambassador Pawal Bramar.” It contained a great
deal of detailed advice on the need to arm the Iraqi people so they could help
fight against the guerrilla resistance. The teacher, who was well under five feet
tall, wanted permission to carry an AK-47 and work alongside American soldiers
against the beasts who were trying to restore the tyrant or bring Iranian-style
oppression. She showed me the fake gun permit drawn up to illustrate her desire.
She had left her position teaching English at a girls’ school in the Shiite slum
called Sadr City, rather than submit to the dictates of the radical Muslims who
had taken charge after the overthrow of Saddam and ordered the staff to poison
the girls’ minds against the Americans.
“In the beginning, the Americans treat Iraqi people well,” the teacher said.
“But later, because Iraqis are beasts, they attack Americans and kill them, and
this will affect Americans’ psychology badly and so they live in more isolation
from Iraqi people.” She had information—it came from the most reliable source
in Baghdad, she said, the children in the street—that the tyrant and his followers
were cutting off the heads of Americans (this was almost a year before the first
known beheading in Iraq). The stories had made her ill. She was having trouble
sleeping, she said, and had all but stopped eating.
A man with a cane hobbled over from the line. His left hand, wrapped in a
bandage, was missing the thumb. He explained to the teacher in Arabic that his
father had been killed by a missile in the Iran-Iraq War, that he had been
paralyzed in a car accident while fleeing Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War, and
that at some point he had lost the piece of paper entitling him to hospital care.
Now that the Americans were in charge, he felt emboldened to ask for another
copy—and so he had come to the Assassins’ Gate. The man, unshaven and
wretched looking, began to cry. The teacher told him not to be sad, to trust in
God, and to speak with the American soldiers at the checkpoint. He shuffled
back into line.
“Please, sir, can you help me?” she continued. “I must work with Americans,
because my psychology is demolished by Saddam Hussein. Not just me. All
Iraqis. Psychological demolition.”
Our conversation was brief, and it would have been briefer if my driver and
translator, both of whom thought the woman completely insane, had succeeded
in pulling me away at the start. Months later I saw her again: Somehow she had
landed a job translating for the American soldiers who inspected IDs and
searched people entering the Green Zone through another checkpoint. She had
grown fat and acquired a pair of designer sunglasses.
I seldom think about Iraq without remembering the schoolteacher standing
outside the Assassins’ Gate, the abrupt intensity of her stare and speech, the
sense that there was madness and truth in her all at once. That first summer after
the Americans arrived, Iraq had the heightened, vivid, confused quality of a
dream, washed in the relentless yellow sunlight. The hesitations and niceties of
normal life dropped away. Something extraordinary was happening. No one
knew what it was or how it would go, but it mattered more than anything and
there wasn’t much time.
Later on I learned that I’d been wrong about the Assassins’ Gate. It wasn’t
ancient; Saddam built it some years ago in grandiose imitation of Baghdad’s
classical entrances. It wasn’t even the Assassins’ Gate—not to the Iraqis. The
name drew blank looks from them, and then annoyance. They called it, more
prosaically, Bab al-Qasr, the Palace Gate, because the road that passed under the
arch led to Saddam’s Republican Palace, a mile or so away, where the
occupation authority had its headquarters. “Assassins’ Gate” came from the
nickname of the soldiers positioned there, who belonged to Alpha Company: A
for Assassins, like “Kilroy was here.” It was an American invention for an ersatz
Iraqi monument, a misnomer for a mirage. Iraqis complained about the way the
U.S. military renamed their highways and buildings and redrew their district
lines. It reminded them that something alien and powerful had been imposed on
them without their consent, and that this thing did not fit easily with the lives