Close-up
Array of problems hobbles handover in Iraq

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
The Washington Post

WATHIQ KHUZAIE / GETTY IMAGES U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer, center left, speaks with a Polish official during a visit to Hillah, Iraq, last week. During a daylong tour, Bremer met with Coalition Provisional Authority officials as well as religious and tribal leaders in three cities.

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They grabbed their possessions and ran home.

The militiamen were members of the al-Mahdi Army, an untrained but well-armed force inspired by Muqtada al-Sadr, a firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric deemed an outlaw by the U.S. military.

Incensed that U.S. troops had shut down his newspaper and arrested one of his top deputies the day before, al-Sadr's followers seized government buildings in Shiite holy cities south of Baghdad and in Sadr City, a Shiite slum in the capital.

The militiamen met surprisingly little resistance elsewhere. Rafidain, in central Sadr City, was no exception.

"To shoot those people would have been wrong," said Sgt. Falah Hassan, a lanky veteran whose uniform consists of rolled-up jeans and a rumpled blue shirt. "If a man comes with principles and I believe in those principles, I will not shoot him."

The collapse of police and civil-defense units in the face of the al-Sadr offensive stunned officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the U.S. entity in control of Iraq, who expected the police to put up a fight.

A few days later, the CPA was surprised again when a battalion of Iraq's new army mutinied rather than obey orders to help U.S. Marines fight Sunni Muslim insurgents in the streets of Fallujah.

June 30 handover The Coalition Provisional Authority will dissolve June 30, conferring sovereignty to Iraq's interim government. U.S.-led military forces will remain, free to conduct operations without the approval of the interim government. A new U.S. Embassy will handle reconstruction projects.

Though still almost three months from the scheduled June 30 handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis, the U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, and senior CPA officials concluded that the creation of new Iraqi security forces was in trouble.

The decision to hire back as many former policemen as possible, even without training, had been meant to reassure Iraqis by putting more officers on the street. But it also put thousands of ill-prepared men, some with ties to the insurgency, into uniform — a problem the CPA long feared but did not fully grasp until the al-Sadr rebellion.

"Quantity overrode quality," said Douglas Brand, a British police commander who has served as a senior CPA adviser to the Iraqi police force. "We scooped up a whole lot of people who didn't meet our criteria and put them into the police force."

	GETTY IMAGES Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, opposed by the U.S., has considerable support in Iraq.

Of nearly 90,000 police on duty now, more than 62,000 still have not received training.

But Iraqi political leaders and several CPA officials contend the problems with security were more fundamental than training police. The U.S. military came to Iraq with too few soldiers to maintain order and guard the country's borders from foreign terrorists, they said. "I don't know anyone who thinks there's enough troops here," a senior adviser to Bremer said.

These officials said the troop shortage was compounded by the decision to disband the Iraqi army. Not only did it deprive the U.S. military of tens of thousands of armed and uniformed men to help restore order, but scores of unemployed soldiers joined the ranks of insurgents fighting the occupation forces.

"We should have brought them back and vetted them over time instead of saying, 'We don't want you,' " a senior U.S. military officer in Baghdad said.

Bremer said that the army fell apart after Saddam's defeat and that it was not practical to order units back into service. And as with the police, there were questions about the soldiers' loyalty and competence.

Another major mistake, Iraqi and U.S. officials said, was the failure to provide enough equipment to the police and the Civil Defense Corps, a 40,000-member paramilitary force. At the Rafidain station, only half the 140 officers have handguns. There are only 10 AK-47 assault rifles in the armory, three pickup trucks in the parking lot and two radios in the control room. Body armor is nonexistent, save for a few U.S. military vests worn by guards at the front door.

"How can we defend ourselves if we don't have guns and radios and cars?" said Maj. Raed Kadhim, the senior officer at the station. "The Americans promised us all of these things. Where are they?"

The sympathy for al-Sadr today at the Rafidain station — on Fridays, officers pin his picture to their uniforms before going to the mosque — suggests that the odds of getting the police to resist the cleric's militia have not improved. The scope of the confrontation could have been smaller, according to several CPA officials, had U.S. forces moved against Sadr in August, when an Iraqi court issued an arrest warrant for him. Instead, they allowed him months to build support for his anti-occupation views.

By April, with the CPA's polling showing 80 percent of Iraqis holding positive views of al-Sadr, the CPA should have sought a political solution, the officials contend. At the very least, they argue, CPA strategists and military commanders should have realized that many Iraqi security officers would side with the cleric.

"The Americans misunderstood us," Kadhim said. "We will fight for Iraq. We will not fight for them."

Long-term effects

From the start of the occupation, the American effort to transform Iraq's political system was challenged by another Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, a cleric far more established than al-Sadr. The CPA's inability to deal with him forced a series of compromises that will affect Iraq long after Bremer departs.

	GETTY IMAGES The U.S. has had conflicts with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani.

Al-Sistani is a man in his 70s with a snowy beard who has lived in isolation for the past six years in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. With millions of followers, he is seen as the most influential leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, a man whom Shiite politicians do not want to cross.

Al-Sistani's position was straightforward: Iraqis, not Americans, should determine the country's political future. In June 2003, he issued a religious edict calling for Iraq's constitution to be written by elected representatives — a demand that was in conflict with the Bush administration's political-transition plan.

Bremer and his staff initially underestimated the influence of his edict, assuming that Shiite political leaders would be able to persuade al-Sistani to change his position. It was not until November that Bremer concluded there was no way to sway al-Sistani — whom Bremer has never met — and that the Bush administration's plan to have a group of appointed Iraqis write a constitution would have to be scrapped.

After hurried meetings at the White House, Bremer unveiled a new transition plan Nov. 15 that abandoned the goal of a permanent constitution and general elections before a handover of sovereignty. Instead, the Iraqi Governing Council, the 25-member body picked by Bremer, was assigned to produce a temporary constitution. An interim government would be selected through caucuses.

Nobody bothered to run the details by al-Sistani first. He objected a few days later, forcing another series of changes, leading President Bush to ask U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to select the interim government.

In the end, Bremer did not get the president he wanted: His favored candidate, Adnan Pachachi, withdrew after Shiite politicians threatened not to work with him, leading Brahimi to choose Ghazi al-Yawer, a tribal sheik with no experience in government before serving on the Governing Council.

Al-Sistani also objected to the temporary constitution. Ethnic Kurds, whose region in northern Iraq had been given autonomy in 1991, had insisted on a clause that would protect their rights with veto power over the language in a permanent constitution. But because Shiites are about 60 percent of Iraq's population and Kurds make up only 20 percent, al-Sistani was concerned that a minority not be allowed to overrule the wishes of the majority.

Bremer did not want to budge. If the provision were expunged, the Kurds would bolt. He persuaded Shiite members of the Governing Council to sign the interim constitution, leaving al-Sistani's basic objections unaddressed.

Then, earlier this month, the Bush administration proposed having the U.N. Security Council include an endorsement of the interim constitution in a resolution on Iraq's future. Al-Sistani quickly issued a statement: The interim constitution, he said, "was written by a nonelected council under occupation" and is "rejected by the majority of the Iraqi people."

But when the administration expunged the reference to the interim constitution, Kurdish leaders were incensed. Iraq's two top Kurdish officials sent a letter to Bush threatening to pull out of the interim government formed earlier this month.

The dispute means Shiites and Kurds will have to hash out their differences on their own. Among the options Shiite leaders favor is dispensing with the interim constitution and writing a new version, a potentially embarrassing outcome for the administration, which has held up the document as one of the CPA's most significant achievements.

Iraqi leaders and foreign diplomats fault the CPA for not grasping al-Sistani's clout soon enough. Senior CPA officials said Bremer did recognize al-Sistani's power, but the problem was communicating with the cleric: Because al-Sistani refused to meet anyone from the CPA, messages were conveyed by Shiite politicians who skewed statements to suit their interests.

Although some in the CPA say they think it is better to let Iraqis resolve the dispute over the interim constitution after June 30, others contend the occupation authority should have ensured it had a document supported by al-Sistani.

"We were supposed to leave them with a permanent constitution," a senior CPA official said. "Then we decided to leave them with a temporary constitution. Now we're leaving them with a temporary constitution that the majority dislikes."

CPA in disrepute

On the eve of its dissolution, the Coalition Provisional Authority has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA.

The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staff members who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.

Life inside the high-security Green Zone — what some CPA staff members jokingly call the Emerald City — bears little resemblance to that in the rest of Baghdad. The power is always on. Shiny shuttle buses zip passengers around. Outdoor cafes stay open late into the night.

There is little effort to comply with Islamic traditions. Beer flows freely at restaurants. Women walk around in shorts. Bacon cheeseburgers are on the CPA's lunch menu.

"It's like a different planet," said an Iraqi American who has a senior position in the CPA and lives in the Green Zone but regularly ventures out to see relatives. "It's cut off from the real Iraq."

Because the earth-toned GMC Suburbans used by CPA personnel and foreign contractors have become a favored target of insurgents, traveling outside the Green Zone — into the Red Zone that defines the rest of Iraq — requires armored vehicles and armed escorts, which are limited to senior officials. Lower-ranking employees either must remain within the compound or sneak out without a security detail.

Although the CPA has tried to bring Iraqis into the CPA headquarters for meetings and other events — there even has been an "Iraqi Culture Night" in the Green Zone — the inability to mingle with Iraqis has isolated the Americans. "We don't know the outside," the senior adviser to Bremer said. "How many of us have gone out to buy a bottle of milk or a pair of socks?"

Instead of building contacts at social events in the city, CIA operatives in Baghdad drink in their own rattan-furnished bar in the Green Zone. Instead of prowling local markets, CPA employees go to the Green Zone Shopping Bazaar, where the most popular items are Saddam Hussein memorabilia.

Limited contact with Iraqis outside the Green Zone has made CPA officials reliant on the views of those chosen by Bremer to serve on the Governing Council. When Brahimi, the U.N. envoy, asked the CPA for details about several Iraqis he was considering for positions in the interim government, he told associates he was "shocked to find how little information they really had," according to an official who was present.

The CPA official who got around the most was Bremer, who travels with an entourage of private guards, most of them former Navy SEALs, equipped with their own helicopters and fleet of armored vehicles.

Bremer's willingness to travel and work 18-hour days has won him respect within the CPA. The chief criticism of his tenure within the former Saddam palace that serves as CPA headquarters was that he didn't recruit enough seasoned diplomats with experience in the Middle East.

In the final days of the CPA, many officials are bitter. Some blame military commanders for not asking for more troops. "They had enough soldiers to ensure that Saddam's men didn't come back to power, but there were nowhere near enough to make the country safe enough for us to do our work," a CPA reconstruction specialist said.

Military officials contend CPA personnel spend too much time in the 258-room headquarters. "Nobody has any idea what they do back in that palace," a senior Marine commander in Fallujah said. "We certainly don't see any results."

Several veterans of other postwar reconstruction operations characterized civilian-military relations in Iraq as the worst they have encountered. "It has been poisonous," the reconstruction specialist said.

The other major conflict within the occupation bureaucracy has set the legions of young staff members chosen for their loyalty to the Bush administration against older, more liberal diplomats from the State Department and the British Foreign Office. Several diplomats said they regarded the young staff members as inexperienced and eager to pad their résumés during three-month tours.

These diplomats singled out the Office of Strategic Communications as unsuccessful in its efforts to disseminate information to Iraqis. Instead of creating an all-news television station that would compete with other Arab broadcasters that the CPA deemed anti-occupation, the communications office, with many employees straight from Republican staff jobs on Capitol Hill, set up a channel that aired children's programs and Egyptian cooking shows.

"It didn't put any effort into communicating with the Iraqi people," a British CPA official said. "Stratcom viewed its job as helping Bush to win his next election."

But even within the communications office, there is a sense that the occupation has not gone as well as everyone hoped. "It's a time of introspection," one press officer said.

Elsewhere in the palace, the sense of regret is far more pronounced. The senior adviser to Bremer said he felt "a sense of opportunity that slipped away."

"The ambition for us was a grand one. We had great things in mind for them. We believed we could do it," he said. "But we didn't keep our promises."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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