Occupational Hazards

By Michael Elliott

You have to be patient," says Paul Bremer, the de facto American Governor of Iraq, sitting in his small office in the cavernous Republican Palace in Baghdad. "None of us has any experience in this," he says, referring to the reconstruction task ahead of him. "Those who do are over 90. We have not done it since Germany."

The analogy is both apt and troubling. Like Germany at the end of World War II, Iraq is an urbanized but ravaged society living in the shadow of a vile dictatorship. As in Germany, the systems for providing essential services like water and power have been wrecked. As in Germany, basic conditions of order and security are lacking in much of Iraq; there are too many weapons in the hands of too many people prepared to use them to settle old scores or redress new grievances. For American troops, Iraq is still a dangerous place. In the three weeks of war before U.S. soldiers penetrated Baghdad and hauled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, 123 Americans died at the hands of the enemy or in accidents. In the weeks since April 9, an additional 55 have been killed, 15 of them by hostile fire. "The war has not ended, Madam," said Lieut. General David McKiernan last week, when asked at a press conference how many U.S. troops had been injured "since the end of the war." As if to confirm his observation, the Pentagon is delaying planned withdrawals of some of the 150,000 troops stationed in Iraq, including the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, some of whose soldiers have not been home for nine months. Under the original blueprint for a postwar Iraq, says a Pentagon official, the U.S. was supposed to have no more than 75,000 troops in the country by September. That's still three months away, but the official already says, "We're not so sure that's going to happen."

The state of postwar Iraq seems to have caught the Administration off guard, and its lack of preparedness has opened it to criticism in Congress. In time, American soldiers can come home. In time, electricity will be restored, potable water made to flow, guns taken off the streets and all the other hurdles to peace and prosperity overcome, as they were in Germany. Indeed, Bremer and his aides at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs (ORHA) insist this is happening. Each week, they say, power is on a bit longer, more police cars are in the streets, more clean water is available. But time is the key. Two years after the end of World War II, Germany's cities and economy were still wrecked. It was another two years before West German politics had matured enough to establish a new constitution, six more before the Allied powers' legal authority over the German government ended. Which raises the question: Does the U.S. have the stomach for an occupation of Iraq that could require a commitment of as long as a decade? And if so, does it have the skills to handle such an undertaking without breeding the sort of resentment that perpetually places young Americans in uniform at deadly risk?

Articulate, energetic, with the kind of Kennedyesque profile to which men of a certain age aspire, Bremer has the look of a man used to success. But he has inherited a mess. His predecessor, retired General Jay Garner, is leaving Baghdad only 40 days after arriving. Garner insists that he always knew he would be replaced rapidly--he had told his wife that he would be home for his family's annual Fourth of July picnic--but everyone understands that the switch was accelerated because the first month went badly. Officials acknowledge that America's postwar planners made a central mistake, though an understandable one: they assumed that Garner's most pressing task would be to ameliorate a humanitarian catastrophe, perhaps one in which millions of refugees fled chemical and biological weapons. But no such weapons were used; flows of displaced persons were relatively small. "Jay was the absolutely perfect man for a job that wasn't needed," says a civilian adviser to the Pentagon team. Says Garner himself: "If only Iraqis were dying of starvation and disease, and there were TV reports showing Americans giving food and shots to suffering children, the American public would have been pleased insofar as what they expected."

Maybe so. What the American public can hardly be pleased about is that a month after President George W. Bush said that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended," American soldiers are still getting killed on a regular basis. As an officer from the Garner team said, "That many deaths if you multiply 15 a week by 52, that's unacceptable, politically, that's unacceptable." Given the dangers from remnants of the Iraqi army, irregular forces loyal to Saddam Hussein and gangsters on the streets of Baghdad and other towns, American forces are far from being secure. The Iraqi army was supposed to have been disbanded last week--at least an edict to that effect was issued by Bremer. But saying an army no longer exists is different from disarming it. Iraq has half a million unemployed soldiers, many of them expected to care for extended families, many of them having received no pay for two months and many of them with weapons. That's a combustible combination. On the road to Baghdad from the international airport last week, a twisted heap that had once been an Army humvee sat on the highway. Crouched behind a metal guardrail, an Iraqi had triggered a trip wire, detonating a charge. One American was killed. "The only person who knows how to do that is the Iraqi Baathist army," concludes a U.S. naval intelligence officer attached to ORHA. "And they are thinking right now, F___ the Americans; we'll gravitate toward the radicals."

Many of the recent attacks on U.S. forces have taken place in a triangle stretching west from Baghdad to Hit, and then northeast to Tikrit. At least some of the attacks there seem to have been organized. "The combat actions that we have been engaged in over the past few days in that area," said McKiernan last week, "probably have some local cohesion to them, some local command and control." The dangerous triangle, perhaps not coincidentally, is also the area where informed speculation reckons Saddam and his sons Uday and Qusay are hiding. In Baghdad itself, money is being distributed to the needy in Saddam's name, and in both Baghdad and Tikrit--Saddam's hometown--graffiti, some of it new, celebrates the Iraqi dictator: SADDAM WILL STAY FOREVER. BUSH IS A DOG, BLAIR IS A PROSTITUTE, says a scrawling in Tikrit. "I think it's important that we capture or kill Saddam," Bremer tells TIME, "because it affects the political psychology of the place." Failure to collar the fallen dictator, he says, is "one of the reasons that we are now seeing a renaissance of the Baathists in small groups." So where is Saddam? The problem, says Bremer, is that "we are not getting actionable--timely and accurate--intelligence. It's a hard job."

But if some of the continuing fire fights in Iraq are the work of those still loyal to Saddam, others seem to result from a slow-burning resentment of the American occupation. That, at least, is the view of Sheik Barakat Alefan, chief of the 100,000-strong al-Boesa tribe, one of whose strongholds is the town of Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad. Alefan insists he saw the Americans as "liberators, not occupiers." But he's starting to revise that view. Fallujah has seen more than its share of bloodshed. In late April, U.S. forces based in a local school opened fire on a demonstration, killing 15 Iraqis. A month later, U.S. soldiers killed two locals after an American tank was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. A group of Iraqis last week opened fire on U.S. troops at a checkpoint. Two Americans and two Iraqis died in a fire fight that lasted half an hour.

Alefan doesn't believe the Iraqi fighters were holdouts from the old regime. "The Baathists who live here are cowards," he says. He figures, rather, that these are unemployed young men who are angry about the occupation. The Americans, he says, have a "total misunderstanding of this place and our culture. Some people here have been insulted and feel a need to retaliate." Alefan says the Americans are using too much force, shouting commands in English at locals who don't understand and then pointing guns at them when they don't respond. In particular, he complains, the Americans trample on local sensitivities by body-searching women. "We cannot allow this," he says. "You can touch me all you want, but you cannot touch my wife."

And then there are the cases of what--at least to Iraqi eyes--are just tragic misunderstandings. In Samarra last week three Iraqi teenagers were killed and 10 injured in what the U.S. describes as a fire fight with American troops. But staff members at the local hospital say the Americans responded to innocent firing from a wedding party. (The U.S. military is investigating.) ORHA had already announced plans to ban celebratory firing, but communications in central Iraq are so poor--there is effectively no functioning TV or radio--that it is doubtful whether anyone in Samarra had heard of them. "Hell," says a senior official at ORHA, "we don't even get copies of Bremer's decrees."

It's an age-old problem. Young men in uniform, eager to get home, dismissive or just plain ignorant of local customs and unable to express themselves with anything more than a vein-popping scream and a brandished machine gun. "You are f_____g around. Just f___ off!" a soldier yelled at an Iraqi who was trying to visit the regional governor's residence in Kirkuk last week. (Every Iraqi, sadly, already knows the F word.) "The American soldier is, please excuse the word, very high-handed," says Abu Mousa, a veteran Iraqi journalist. Much more worrisome: some Iraqis believe the U.S. troops are light-fingered too. "They raid houses and take any money they can find," says Abufawaz Khazal, a former government scientist. "It's clear that [U.S. soldiers] are working with the local black marketeers," says a businessman in Baghdad. "They take guns from people on the streets and pass them to their fences." Sheik Khalid Alefan, cousin of Sheik Barakat Alefan, says that a young American soldier recently took his satellite phone and spent half an hour making calls on it.

These allegations may be false. They may even have been planted--some U.S. officials believe that the speed with which a particular story makes the rounds is a good indication of the strength of the local Baath underground. But in a part of the world where rumor is a hard currency, the truth or falsehood of any specific incident hardly matters. What counts is what Iraqis believe. And they will continue to believe the worst of the Americans as long as communications between occupier and occupied remain terrible. In the office of the regional governor in Kirkuk, there are just four or five interpreters mediating between U.S. troops stationed there and the governor's approximately 200 local staff. "We don't speak English, and they don't speak Arabic," says Alefan, the Fallujah tribal chief. Because few TVs work, it's hard to disseminate official decrees. When the U.S. Army first entered Iraq, says an ORHA official, it had state-of-the-art links to everything that moved in the air or on the ground. Now Iraqi ministries rely on part-time couriers--that means someone's cousin on a motorbike--to deliver official mail outside Baghdad. "I admit I don't think our communications with average Iraqis have been good," says Bremer, whose frequent travel around the country seems to be an attempt to compensate.

So far his message doesn't appear to be getting through, although ORHA has some good stories to tell. In cities in the north, like Kirkuk, and the south, like Basra, conditions are much better than they are in Baghdad, in part because they are smaller and more manageable and in part because they are areas that were less sympathetic to Saddam and the Baath. There has been some progress in Baghdad too. Iraq's patchwork power grid last week managed to pump more than 1,000 MW of electricity into the city for the first time since the main fighting ended--though that was still less than half of prewar levels. But disorder still prevails in the capital. "There's no doubt in my mind that crime is increasing," says Major Loy Majeed, the assistant chief of the Bayaa police station in southwest Baghdad. "Now we get reports of five, six, seven killings in a night, and all we can do is write it down." Police officers complain that patrol cars have been stolen in broad daylight and that their small-caliber pistols are no match for the heavy weapons toted by criminals. The city coroner in Baghdad says he has seen 15 to 25 corpses a day since April, most from gunshot wounds. (Last week three schoolgirls were killed, a rarity in Baghdad; two had been raped.) To be sure, before the war, the coroner never saw the bodies of those whom Saddam's thugs had murdered; but back then, he reckons he saw only five murder victims a month.

In the inevitable effort to assign blame, some ORHA staff members criticize the Pentagon's top brass for America's postwar effort. In Washington too, some insiders grumble that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his allies made a critical error by not--as the military saying goes--hoping for the best while planning for the worst. Civilians in the Defense Department seemed to have believed that Iraqis would be so grateful to the U.S. that the number of troops needed after the war could be relatively modest.

Rumsfeld himself rejects the idea that more troops would necessarily have made the task of rebuilding a traumatized land a snap. Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, now overseeing Iraq's police force, similarly doesn't think that more soldiers would make his job any easier. In Kerik's view, it's the quality of decision making, not the quantity of officers, that determines how well a job is done. Alefan, the sheik in Fallujah, wouldn't disagree. He doesn't want more U.S. troops, just better behavior. If Americans want to maintain security, they just need to understand a few simple things, he says: "Don't search our women, don't insult us, hire an interpreter, show us respect. If they do all that, one humvee will be enough."

Perhaps. But even so, prepare for the humvee to stay parked down the street for some time. "Pardon me, speaking frankly," said a leading Shi'ite cleric to Garner last week. "Do not abandon your work too soon. If you say you will stay here for two years, I say stay for four." Like the man said, you have to be patient. --Reported by Malcolm MacPherson/Arbil, Paul Quinn-Judge, Romesh Ratnesar and Nir Rosen/Baghdad and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Malcolm MacPherson/Arbil, Paul Quinn-Judge, Romesh Ratnesar and Nir Rosen/Baghdad and Mark Thompson/Washington