Samantha Power: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008, Penguin Press)

The Jan. 7, 2008 issue of The New Yorker has a piece by Samantha Power called "The Envoy: The United Nations' doomed mission to Iraq." The article is presumably excerpted from Power's forthcoming book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. The following quotes are from the magazine article:

The introduction talks about how UN officials feared US success in the 2003 invasion of Iraq (p. 43):

On April 9, 2003, when a U.S. Marine tank helped topple the towering statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square, many officials at the headquarters of the United Nations, in New York, averted their eyes from the celebratory images unfolding on CNN. A few days later, when a wide-shot photograph revealed that relatively few Iraqis had participated in the statue demolition, U.N. employees rapidly disseminated the image through e-mail. "We didn't wish bad things for the Iraqis," a U.N. official recalls. "But we were terrified that if the Bush Administration got away with talking all over international law it would jeopardize everything we stood for."

The Security Council had withheld support for the invasion, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.N. diplomats had warned of the human suffering that it would cause; they were chastened by the ease with which the American-led Coalition had reached Baghdad, and by the relative bloodlessness of the battle. A swift victory, U.N. officials worried, would establish a dangerous precedent, emboldening member states to go to war even in the face of firm international opposition. Annan, speaking with colleagues, lamented the possibly irreparable loss of U.N. relevance.

Of course, that's what Bush's neocons were aiming for. But the UN had already sacrificed its relevance, starting in 1948 when it and the world powers who had launched it failed to their first major problem: Palestine. That continuing failure has reminded the world of their irrelevance ever since. Over the years the US has paid less and less lip service to the UN, under Bush only going to the UN for the most cynical political cover: e.g., 1483 (p.43):

Whatever the Europeans' aims, U.S. diplomats, who were still basking in their apparent victory, largely dictated the terms of Security Council Resolution 1483, offering other countries no say in how Iraq was governed, providing no timetable for departure, and handing the U.N. an ill-defined, subservient role. Although the U.N. resolution technically obliged the occupiers to abide by the Geneva Conventions -- which prohibit occupying authorities from exploiting a country's resources or making fundamental changes to its government -- the international norms of occupation were superseded. Resolution 1483 effectively granted the Americans and the British the legal authority to choose Iraq's political leaders, to spend its oil revenue, and to transform its legal, political, and economic structures. It also called on other U.N. member states to contribute personnel, equipment, and other resources to the Coalition's effort. For the first time in history, the Security Council was upholding the occupation of one U.N. member state by another. Mona Khalil, a lawyer at headquarters, set up a screen saver on her computer that read "The U.N. Charter has left the building."

Despite reservations, the UN took the crumbs given it, and sent veteran diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, against his better judgment, to Baghdad (p. 46):

When Vieira de Mello first arrived in East Timor, in 1999, the Timorese had been deeply grateful to the U.N. for having staged a referendum that had led to its independence from Indonesia. But in Iraq U.N. civil servants like Vieira de Mello were tarred by their association with the weapons inspectors whom the U.N. had sent into the country during Saddam's regime; they were equally resented for the sanctions that the U.N. member states had imposed on Saddam's regime, crippling the economy. Some Iraqis even saw officials working for the humanitarian Oil-for-Food program as agents of punishment. There were advantages, however, to having a history in Iraq. Whereas the Coalition relied disproportionately on Iraqi exiles for intelligence, the U.N. had three thousand Iraqi staff members who had remained in the country, even during the invasion. Vieira de Mello thought that it would be easier for him to get a read on the Iraqi street than it was for Bremer.

(pp. 46-47):

When Vieira de Mello and his U.N. team entered the former palace where Bremer had chosen to work, they saw Americans emerging from offices identified as various Iraqi ministries. Resolution 1483 had envisaged the Coalition as a temporary authority in Iraq; Vieira de Mello now realized that the Coalition considered itself an actual government. At the meeting, Bremer explained that he saw Phase One of the transition as the uprooting of the Baathist regime and the establishment of law, order, and basic services. Vieira de Mello worried that these goals were at cross-purposes: uprooting the old regime would undermine the state's power to provide the services and stability that Bremer recognized were essential. Yet Bremer seemed unconcerned. "We expect to turn the corner in the next month or so," he said. Phase Two, Bremer went on, included economic reconstruction, job creation, and the formation of democratic bodies. He intended to appoint a group of Iraqis that would select the drafters of a new constitution. Vieira de Mello winced at the idea that a constitution would be drafted before general elections were held, and it would seem like an illegitimate American charter. But he held back his views, characteristically reluctant to alienate somebody before he had first had the chance to win him over. (Douglas Stafford, the former Deputy U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, once described Vieira de Mello as "a man who doesn't know how to make an enemy.")

Vieira de Mello returned to the Canal Hotel, where he had a heated discussion with his top staff. Jamal Benomar, one of his Arab-speaking advisers, insisted that the U.S., by taking over the governing functions of Iraq, and acting as a full sovereign, had already violated Resolution 1483. He urged Vieira de Mello to press for the immediate creation of an Iraqi government. Otherwise, the U.N. would appear complicit in an occupation despised by Iraqis. Vieira de Mello countered that Bremer would respond badly to criticism. He believed that the U.N. had to work with the Americans in order to change their approach. "We can't just sit at the Canal Hotel and do nothing," he told his team. "You can't help people from a distance."

(p. 51):

Vieira de Mello liked to repeat what he had learned after years of frustration: "Soldiers make bad policemen." After the looting and chaos that followed the fall of Saddam's regime, the Justice Department had drawn up plans to deploy to Iraq more than six thousand police trainers. But only fifty trainers had arrived so far. Electricity, water, and other utilities operated intermittently at best. Vieira de Mello reminded Bremer that much of Kosovo and all of East Timor had been burned to the ground when the U.N. arrived but that the U.N. administrators had managed to mobilize international resources for recovery. Yet Bremer seemed unwilling to give the U.N. a substantive role; around this time, Vieira de Mello told George Packer, a reporter for this magazine, that the "neocon side of Bremer's personality" was emerging.

In meetings with Bremer and General Sanchez, Vieira de Mello asked about the thousands of prisoners being held at a U.S. base near the Baghdad airport who had been crammed into facilities without air-conditioning or sufficient oversight of guards. He argued that human rights were the cornerstone of all that had been wrong with Saddam's reign. He stressed the importance of creating a database for Iraqis in detention, and he asked that family members and lawyers be granted access to the detainees. He urged that the preventive-detention period be reduced from twenty-one days to seventy-two hours, that status review be instituted, and that something like a public-defender system be created. "I'm not accusing your soldiers of abuse," he told Sanchez. "I'm saying, 'You don't have the checks and balances in place to guard against abuse.'"

Vieira de Mello was careful to convey these complaints in private and without shrillness.

The latter is the critical point. By not criticizing the US occupation in public the UN failed to leverage its reputation either to change US policy or to gain good will from Iraqis; as such, the UN blended into the US occupation. The US could use the UN presence to enhance its legitimacy in the west, while the UN became just another occupation target in Iraq.

A little hubris here, but the general point is likely true (p. 52):

Vieira de Mello's dealings with U.N. headquarters were making him especially tense. He had always been exasperated by the organization's delayed responses, the administrative hassles, the obliviousness to a field staff's daily trials. But in Iraq these problems were magnified. As devoted as he was to the U.N., he exploded in frustration. "The U.N. is unable to attract the best," Vieira de Mello complained to Salamé. "And on the rare occasion that the U.N. happens to find the best it doesn't have the slightest idea how to keep them. If the U.N. ever succeeds, it is by accident."

(p. 54):

Vieira de Mello began to see the growing insurgency as the consequence of an increasingly malignant occupation. Hemmed in by Resolution 1483, however, he concluded that the only way to improve security in Baghdad was to work even harder to get the Coalition to give up power. Coalition troops, he told a Brazilian journalist, had to "have greater sensitivity and respect for the customs of the people." They had to focus on the dignity of Iraqis, which was being trampled daily: Iraqis had lived under a barbarous regime; the war with Iran had killed hundreds of thousands; they had suffered years of devastating sanctions; their government had been overthrown by outsiders; and now, in "one of the most humiliating periods in the history of this people," they had almost no say on how they were being ruled.

Vieira de Mello began drafting an op-ed article. An occupation, he wrote, can be "grounded in nothing but good intentions. But morally, and practically, I doubt it can ever legitimate: its time, if it ever had one, has passed." He urged the Americans and the British to "aim openly and effectively at their own disappearance."

Article ends with Vieira de Mello dying, trapped for hours under rubble when the UN building in Baghdad was bombed. A second bombing finally drove the UN out of Iraq, leaving Bremer and the Americans to enjoy their tainted sovereignty.

Just as I was getting ready to post this, I noticed that Power was forced to resign from her perch advising the Obama campaign. Greg Mitchell reports:

Latest firestorm in campaign: Harvard prof and star author Samantha Power calls Hillary a "monster" . . . a little too late says that's off-the-record, gets in the paper. Problem: She is a top Obama foreign policy adviser, his "Condi," as some have said. She quickly apologizes, but today the Clinton team calls for her ouster. Andrew Sullivan, a big Obama backer, weighs in: "The good professor blurts out the truth. There is something monstrous about a couple so intoxicated with money, power and secrecy and so unencumbered by any ethical constraints that they will do anything, say anything, be anything in order to stay ahead." This comes the day after the Clinton team likened Obama to Ken Starr.

I'm not sure which of many angles to this semi-story is the most sordid. I wouldn't call Clinton a monster, but can't guarantee I'd be able to suppress a chuckle if someone else did. I don't exactly agree with what Sullivan said, but there's some truth to it. I'm not a fan of Power -- she strikes me as one of those "dangerous do-gooders" the Marine in Generation Kill refers to -- but she certainly knows more about the UN and how to work with it than 9 out of 10 foreign policy wonks in America these days, and I can see that as a useful resource (although hardly critical at this stage in the campaign). Most of all, I don't like the current vogue of summary execution for misspeaking, but Clinton's had to sack people in her organization for comparable gaffes. On the other hand, the media and much of the electorate seem to be so shallow at this point that elections can turn on this nonsense.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (2006; paperback, 2007, Vintage Books)

I came late to this book, largely because I was peeved by how readily Chandrasekaran would parrot any US propaganda line when he frequently appeared in PBS news reports from Baghdad. I suppose his payback was access to the inner workings of the CPA, and he payed them back impressively in his perfectly titled book. It focuses on what for most reporters should have been the easy part, covering Paul Bremer's CPA in Baghdad's safe, secluded Green Zone, showing what should have been obvious from the start: that the party hacks the Bush administration sent to Baghdad were the wrong people at the wrong time in the wrong place with the wrong ideas and skill sets.

Still, the biggest problem is that this ends when Bremer leaves. The CPA/Bremer period is by pretty well documented by now, at least compared to the much more secretive occupation command that followed, first under John Negroponte then under Zalmay Khalilzad. This was the period when it became unsafe for reporters to leave the Green Zone, so it's all the more disappointing that so few bothered to do some actual reporting on what was actually happening inside the palace.

Welcome to the Green Zone (p. 15):

It was Saddam who first decided to turn Baghdad's prime riverfront real estate into a gated city within a city, with posh villas, bungalows, government buildings, shops, and even a hospital. He didn't want his aides and bodyguards, who were given homes near his palace, to mingle with the masses. And he didn't want outsiders peering in. The homes were bigger, the trees greener, the streets wider than in the rest of Baghdad. There were more palms and fewer people. There were no street vendors and no beggars. No one other than members of Saddam's inner circle or his trusted cadre of guards and housekeepers had any idea what was inside. Those who loitered near the entrances sometimes landed in jail. Iraqis drove as fast as they could on roads near the compound lest they be accused of gawking.

It was the ideal place for the Americans to pitch their tents. Saddam had surrounded the area with a tall brick wall. There were only three points of entry. All the military had to do was park tanks at the gates.

The Americans expanded Saddam's neighborhood by a few blocks to encompass the gargantuam Convention Center and the al-Rasheed [hotel], a once-luxurious establishment made famous by CNN's live broadcasts during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They fortified the perimeter with seventeen-foot-high blast barriers made of foot-thick concrete topped with coils of razor wire.

Interviewing Iraq's proconsul, Paul Bremer shortly after arriving, Chandrasekaran asks what is his top priority? (p. 70):

Economic reform, he said. He had a three-step plan. The first was to restore electricity, water, and other basic services. The second was to put "liquidity in the hands of the people" -- reopening banks, offering loans, paying salaries. The third was to "corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises," and to "wean people from the idea the state supports everything." Saddam's government owned hundreds of factories. It subsidized the cost of gasoline, electricity, and fertilizer. Every family received monthly food rations. Bremer regarded all of that as unsustainable, as too socialist. "It's going to be a very wrenching, painful process, as it was in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall," he said.

"But won't that be very complicated and controversial?" I asked. "Why not leave it up to the Iraqis?"

Bremer had come to Iraq to build not just a democracy but a free market. He insisted that economic reform and political reform were intertwined. "If we don't get their economy right, no matter how fancy our political transformation, it won't work," he said.

(p. 78):

After accepting the job as CPA administrator, [Bremer] spent a week in briefings and meetings at the Pentagon. He asked for proposals that could be put into action right away. He heard about plans to repair schools and power plants, but he knew Iraqis wouldn't see the results immediately. Shooting looters on sight would be bold, and he even proposed this at his first staff meeting in Baghdad, but he eventually concluded that such an action would be too politically risky. Forming an interim government at once, as Garner was trying to do, would be significant, but Bremer feared that Iraqi political leaders weren't ready. Then he heard about de-Baathification.

Bremer had concluded on his own that senior members of Saddam's Baath Party would have to be purged, and that lower-ranking members would have to renounce their affiliation. He compared it to the de-Nazification undertaken by the Allies after World War II. But he didn't know much about the Baath Party's structure and operations.

Bremer evidently didn't know much about de-Nazification either. Immediately after the war, the Americans and Russians were scrambling to hire ex-Nazis, especially if they knew how to build rockets or might be useful spying on each other. As soon as the Germans could, they quietly abandoned the rest of the program.

(p. 80):

Feith's office drafted a one-and-a-half-page executive order titled "De-Baathification of Iraqi Society." Not only did it include a prohibition on employing firkas [the fourth level down in the Baath hierarchy: group members] and above, but it also banned regular members from "holding positions in the top three layers of management in every national government ministry, affiliated corporations and other government institutions." The document was shown to Pentagon lawyers and to Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld but not to Rice or Powell, who believed the policy drafted in Feith's office did not represent the compromise forged at the March 10 war cabinet meeting. The final draft was printed in the Pentagon and carried to Baghdad by one of Bremer's aides.

Bremer's first meeting with the exiled Iraqi political leaders: Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Ibrahim al-Jafari, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Jalal Talabani, Massoud Barzani, Adnan Pachachi (pp. 88-89):

After an opening round of pleasantries, Bremer got right to the point. There would be no interim government. The United States was not going to be ending its occupation anytime soon. He was the viceroy, and he was in charge. When one of the exiles interrupted him to say that Iraqis wanted Iraqis in charge, not Americans, he bristled. "You don't represent the country," he said.

It was a breathtaking volte-face in American policy. Bremer and his aides tried to fob the responsibility off on the White House, but it was the viceroy's decision. Before he left Washington, everyone had sought to influence his political plan. Doug Feith had urged him to form an exile-led interim government. Paul Wolfowitz had urged him to hold elections as soon as possible. State had urged him to convene caucuses aimed at promising internal candidates. Bush, however, har urged Bremer to take stock of the situation and make his own judgments. The president told Bremer to slow it down if he needed to. The goal, Bush said, was to create an interim administration that represented the Iraqi people.

(p. 95):

The Iraqi police were almost nonexistent. They had fled their stations as American troops converged on Baghdad. Most were at home. Some had even joined the orgy of looting. The few who had reported back to work were too scared to enforce the law. They had pistols. The criminals had AK-47s.

It didn't take long for the experts to conclude that more than 6,600 foreign police advisers should be sent to Iraq immediately.

The White House dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik.

(p. 131):

The neoconservative architects of the war -- Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, and Cheney -- regarded wholesale economic change in Iraq as an integral part of the American mission to remake the country. To them, a free economy and a free society went hand in hand. If the United States were serious about having democracy flourish in Iraq, it would have to teach Iraqis a whole new way of doing business -- the American way.

The CPA appointed Peter McPherson, president of Michigan State University and a Cheney friend, as economic policy director (pp. 135-137):

To McPherson, looting was a form of much-needed shrinkage. If the theft of government property promoted private enterprise -- such as when Baghdad's municipal bus drivers began driving their own routes and pocketing the fees -- it was a positive development in his view. "I thought the privatization that occurs sort of naturally when somebody took over their state vehicle, or began to drive a truck that the state used to own, was just fine," he said. Fellow CPA officials were aghast. Hundreds of police cars had been stolen and turned into private taxis -- good for the private sector but bad for law enforcement. The same problem plagued the Ministry of Trade's food-distribution system. Many of the trucks that had transported monthly rations were being used to haul private reconstruction supplies. "The Robin Hood philosophy might have sounded good to the economists inside the palace," one CPA ministry adviser said, "but when you looked at the real-world impact, it was lunacy."

McPherson also believed that his shrinkage strategy would help to address a vexing issue for his economic team. Nobody could be sure how much money various state-owned enterprises had in the bank -- or how big their debts were. Bank records had been destroyed, as well as files at the Ministry of Industry. How much did the state oil company owe the al-Faris Company for products that had been delivered before the war? How much did al-Faris, in turn, owe the State Company for Iron and Steel Products? And what did that firm owe the government mining company? Sorting through everyone's assets and obligations would require a battalion of accountants. Borrowing a term suggested by Walt Slocombe, the architect of the dissolution of the army, McPherson called that challenge a "hopeless entanglement." [ . . . ]

McPherson advocated a clean-slate approach. All debts and assets would be nullified. State-owned enterprises would start from scratch.

This decision effectively bankrupted all Iraqi state enterprises, even ones that had previously established their economic viability.

(pp. 140-141):

With privatization abandoned in favor of shrinkage, McPherson turned his attention to other policies designed to create a capitalist utopia in the Middle East. He persuaded Bremer, who shared his dream of a vibrant priate sector, to eliminate import duties. Saddam's government had charged taxes as much as 200 percent on some imported luxury products. With no more fees, truckloads of cars, televisions, and air conditioners were shipped into Iraq from every neighboring country. Baghdad's Karrada Street, the capital's main shopping boulevard, was lined with new vehicles and electronic appliances for sale. Curious Iraqis pawed the products. Wealthier ones removed the dollars they had been hiding under their mattresses and purchased the newly arrived goods, which had long been out of their reach. The scene was just what the press strategists at the White House had long sought: liberated Iraqis reveling in a free market.

Emboldened, McPherson became even more ambitious. He seized upon the tax code -- without waiting for the BearingPoint consultants -- and took an ax to it. He slashed Iraq's top tax rate for individuals and businesses from 45 percent to a flat 15 percent. It was the sort of tax overhaul that fiscal conservatives long dreamed of implementing in the United States. No matter that most Iraqis never bothered to pay taxes. The details would be worked out later by BearingPoint, whose contract required them to develop a program to assign Iraqis taxpayer identification numbers.

The centerpiece of McPherson's agenda was a new foreign-investment law. Iraq, like almost all of its neighbors, restricted the degree to which foreigners could participate in the local economy. In most cases, a foreigner could own no more than 49 percent of a business. The rule, designed to protect indigenous firms, was out of sync with the globalizing world economy, but it played to the Iraqi public's conspiratorial, xenophobic fears that investors from Israel would seek to take over Iraqi companies. To McPherson, though, foreign investment was key to economic recovery. The way to create jobs, he reasoned, was to lure multinational firms into Iraq with the promise of being able to own not just 49 percent, but 100 percent, of the businesses they established. He figured that they would set up factories that would employ thousands of Iraqis, obviating the need for the CPA to resuscitate many state-owned firms. He pitched his idea to Bremer, who became an early convert.

(pp. 143-144):

A month before McPherson left, Bremer told him he would no longer have to worry about private-sector development. That job would belong to Thomas Foley, an investment banker and a major Republican Party donor who had been President Bush's classmate at Harvard Business School.

A week after arriving, Foley told a contractor from BearingPoint that he intended to privatize all of Iraq's state-owned enterprises within thirty days.

"Tom, there are a couple of problems with that," the contractor said. "The first is an international law that prevents the sale of assets by an occupation government."

"I don't care about any of that stuff," Foley told the contractor, according to her recollection of the conversation. "I don't give a shit about international law. I made a commitment to the president that I'd privatize Iraq's businesses."

When the contractor tried to object again, Foley cut her off.

"Let's go have a drink," he said.

(p. 149):

SAIC had been contracted by the Pentagon to run the Iraqi Media Network (IMN), which would comprise the national television station, a national radio station, and a newspaper printed six times a week. SAIC had no experience running media operations in a post-conflict environment; it specialized in designing computer systems for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, the Pentagon offered the Iraqi media contract to SAIC without inviting other firms to bid. The contract was written by Doug Feith's office. Feith's deputy, Christopher Ryan Henry, had been a vice president at SAIC before joining the Pentagon. SAIC hired Robert Reilly, a former Voice of America director, to head the IMN project. During the Reagan administration, Reilly had headed a White House information operations campaign in Nicaragua to drum up support for the Contra rebels.

Don North's first task for SAIC was completed on American soil. He helped produce a documentary about Saddam's crimes against humanity that the U.S. government wanted to broadcast in Muslim nations to build support for the war. When it was finished, North asked his new bosses what he could do to prepare to run Iraq's television station. "But they said, 'Okay, Don, you can do whatever you want right now. We'll see you again in Baghdad, after the fall of Baghdad,'" he recalled. "I said, 'Yeah, isn't there something we can be doing? Planning? I mean, in my experience it takes years to plan programming and structure for a new TV and radio station.'

"'No. No. We got a few people that will be buying equipment. We're not quite sure what we'll find when we get to Baghdad, but don't worry about it.'"

When North arrived in Kuwait, he took stock of the equipment that SAIC had purchased. There were thirteen tripods, but all lacked a base plate upon which a camera could sit. The receiver for satellite transmissions didn't have a power cord. Nothing had instruction booklets. "It was like they bought everything from a flea market in London," North said.

(p. 185):

When it came to economic reform, Bremer and his policy planners weren't daunted by the challenges Glenn Corliss and Brad Jackson were facing with the Ministry of Industry. Privatization of state-owned enterprises was to begin by October. A trust fund modeled after one in the state of Alaska was to be established to provide Iraqis with annual cash rebates from oil sales. Monthly food rations were to be converted into cash payments by November. The food subsidies, along with below-market prices for gasoline and electricity, were to be eliminated after February. Iraq was to prepare to join the World Trade Organization, which meant the elimination of tariffs, the creation of new laws to protect businesses, and the entry of foreign-owned banks. "It's a full-scale economic overhaul," Bremer said. "We're going to create the first real free-market economy in the Arab world."

(p. 187):

John Agresto arrived in Iraq with two suitcases, a feather pillow, and a profusion of optimism. His title was senior adviser to the Ministry of Higher Education, but he envisioned the job in grander terms. It was not just to oversee but to overhaul the country's university system. He wanted to introduce the concept of academic freedom and to open liberal arts colleges. He hoped to restock libraries with the latest books and to wire classrooms with high-speed Internet connections. He regarded the postwar looting, which had eviscerated many campuses, as a benefit. It provided "the opportunity for a clean start" and was a chance to give Iraqis "the best modern equipment."

(p. 189):

Agresto knew next to nothing about Iraq's educational system. Even after he was selected, the former professor didn't read a single book about Iraq. "I wanted to come here with as open a mind as I could have," he said. "I'd much rather learn firsthand than have it filtered to me by an author."

Robert Blackwill was a State Department diplomat thrown into the planning for establishing some sort of Iraqi constitution and goverment, an issue where the CPA was at loggerheads with Ayatollah al-Sistani, who insisted on elections of Iraqis to write the constitution (p. 233):

With the caucus plan imploding, [Blackwill] viewed the United Nations as America's best hope in Iraq. He began lobbying Rice, Powell, and others in the administration to back al-Hakim's request.

The fight betwen Blackwill and the CPA over UN involvement was so acrimonious that when he returned to Baghdad in January, he no longer trusted aides in the palace to transmit his secure messages to Rice in Washington; he brought his own communications team from the White House. [ . . . ]

Blackwill's choice to lead the United Nations team was former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi. Bremer's political advisers regarded Brahimi as an anti-American Arab nationalist who might manipulate the process in ways that did not serve American interests. But Blackwill was insistent. He was impressed with the work Brahimi had done as the UN's point man in Afghanistan after the United States ousted the Taliban. He eventually invited Brahimi to the White House for meetings with Rice, Powell, and, finally, Bush.

(pp. 238-239):

The story of Yarmouk Hospital was the same as that of nearly every other public institution in Iraq. In the 1970s, it had been one of the best medical centers in the Arab world. Jordanians, Syrians, and Sudanese traveled to Baghdad for operations. That changed, of course, after the invasion of Kuwait and the imposition of sanctions. Although Saddam eventually won the right to sell his oil in exchange for food and humanitarian supplies, the hospital never had enough medicine. The government blamed the United Nations for screwing up the purchase orders. The United Nations blamed the government for ordering the wrong items and for steering contracts to cronies instead of to reputable suppliers. The Bush administration believed that Saddam's government, which was trying to generate international support to overturn the sanctions, was deliberately depriving Yarmouk and other hospitals of needed supplies.

However bad the place was before the Americans arrived, it got much, much worse when the U.S. Army rolled into the city.A tank shell struck the hospital the day Saddam's government fell, knocking out the generator and sending doctors fleeing home. With nobody to watch over the building, looters carted away not just all the beds, medicines, and operating room equipment, but also the CT and ultrasound scanners. When doctors returned to work, they struggled to provide basic first aid with makeshift implements.

(pp. 239-240):

Once the Americans arrived, the job of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system fell to Frederick M. Burkle, Jr., a physician with a master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Berkeley. Burkle was a naval reserve officer with two Bronze Stars and a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues. During the first Gulf War , he provided medical aid to Kurds in northern Iraq. He had worked in Kosovo and Somalia. And in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, he had been put in charge of organizing the American response to the expected public health crisis in Iraq. A USAID colleague called him the "single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government."

A week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed that he was being replaced. A senior official at USAID told him that the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job. Burkle had a wall of degrees, but he didn't have a picture of himself with the president.

Burkle's job was handed to James K. Haveman, Jr., a sixty-year-old social worker who was largely unknown among international health experts. He had no medical degree, but he had connections. He had been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to Wolfowitz. Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world. Prior to his stint in government, Havemanran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.

(p. 242):

[Haveman] approached problems the way a health-care administrator in America would: He focused on prevention measures to reduce the need for hospital treatment. He urged the Health Ministry to mount an antismoking campaign, and he assigned an American from the CPA team, who turned out to be a closet smoker, to lead the public-education effort. Several members of Haveman's team noted wryly that Iraqis faced far greater dangers in their daily life than a little tobacco. The CPA's limited resources, they argued, would be better used raising awareness about how to prevent childhood diarrhea and other fatal maladies. I was reminded of a comment made by my Information Ministry minder before the war, when I asked him why a pack of cigarettes cost only about thirty cents.

"Ali, your government keeps complaining that it doesn't have enough money," I said. "Why don't they tax cigarettes like they do in America?"

"In our country," Ali said, "it would not be wise to tax a tranquilizer."

(p. 258):

The CPA's economic team had no shortage of ambition. They began studying the feasibility of giving each family a debit card loaded with the cash value of all the rations they were due. The cards would be automatically replenished each month. Otwell was aghast. Nobody in Iraq used credit cards. There were no automated teller machines. Phone service and electrical power were unavailable for much of the day. How did the CPA expect merchants to process debit cards? Who would purchase the processing equipment? To Otwell, it was another crazy ivory-tower scheme invented in the Emerald City.

Bremer agreed to implement this scheme by the sovereignty handover date. The scheme wasn't implemented. It was killed by the US military, stretched thin enough without having to face food riots.

(p. 312):

Some of [the CPA staffers] began to question the management of Iraq outside the walls of the Green Zone. Taking on al-Sadr at the same time the marines were attacking Fallujah seemed ill-conceived. "Did we have to go after him right now?" one senior CPA official told me at the time. "It should have been delayed. Dealing with both these problems at one time is crazy, if not suicidal."

(p. 326):

But where the CPA saw progress, Iraqis saw broken promises. As Bremer prepared to depart, electricity generation remained stuck at around 4,000 megawatts -- resulting in less than nine hours of power a day to most Baghdad homes -- instead of the 6,000 megawatts he had pledged to provide. The new army had fewer than 4,000 trained soldiers, a third of what he had promised. Only 15,000 Iraqis had been hired to work on reconstructions projects funded with the Supplemental, rather than the 250,000 that had been touted. Seventy percent of police officers on the street had not received any CPA-funded training. Attacks on American forces and foreign civilians averaged more than forty a day, a threefold increase sine January. Assassinations of political leaders and sabotage of the country's oil and electricity infrastructure occurred almost daily. In a CPA-sponsored poll of Iraqis taken a few weeks before the handover of sovereignty, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in Bremer's occupation administration.

Because of bureaucratic delays, only 2 percent of the $18.4 billion Supplemental had been spent. Nothing had been expended on construction, health care, sanitation, or the provision of clean water, and more money had been devoted to administration than all projects related to education, human rights, democracy, and governance combined. At the same time, the CPA had managed to dole out almost all of a $20 billion development fund fed by Iraq's oil sales, more than $1.6 billion of which had been used to pay Halliburton, primarily for trucking fuel into Iraq.

(p. 328):

The day after my interview with Bremer, I met Adel Abdel-Mahdi for breakfast in the front courtyard of his modest house. As we nibbled from a plate of dates and pastries, I asked him what the CPA's biggest mistake had been. He didn't hesitate: "The biggest mistake of the occupation," he said, "was the occupation itself."

He, of course, had wanted the United States to anoint exiled politicians as Iraq's new rulers in April 2003. But his self-interest aside, what he said was true. Freed from the grip of their dictator, the Iraqis believed that they should have been free to chart their own destiny, to select their own interim government, and to manage the reconstruction of their shattered nation. Their country wasn't Germany or Japan, a thoroughly defeated World War II aggressor to be ruled by the victorious. Iraqis needed help -- good advice and ample resources -- from a support corps of well-meaning foreigners, not a full-scale occupation with imperial Americans cloistered in a palace of the tyrant, eating bacon and drinking beer, surrounded by Gurkhas and blast walls.

This is the first of several posts on Iraq books. For more, an indication of what I've read on the subject, see here.

Evan Wright: Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (2004; paperback, 2005, Berkeley)

Wright was embedded with the Marines, First Reconnaissance Battalion during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. First Recon led what turned out to be a feint up the middle of the Tigris-Euphrates valley to Al-Kut while the main Marines force moved up further west. Wright's book covers what he saw with First Recon all the way to Baghdad, plus a further detour to Baqubah in the "Sunni Triangle" northeast of Baghdad. The time framework is roughly up to Bush's "Mission Accomplished" milestone event, which is to say he only covers the "feel good" days of the war, not the long rot that followed.

I previously read Cobra II by Michael Gordon and Gen. Bernard Trainor, which covered the military campaign as a whole from the far distant headquarters where Gordon was embedded. Wright's book offers a tiny piece of that story, but it's far more realistic in terms of what the war looked like on the ground. There have been hundreds of battlefield memoirs from the war campaign -- in fact there is another memoir of this same campaign, by Nathaniel Fick, a Lieutenant in First Recon, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. I never had much interest in this level of reporting, not least because my sympathy level for US soldiers is zero, but Michael Massing wrote a detailed review of Wright's and Fick's books in The New York Review of Books (Dec. 20, 2007), and that piqued my interest. While Wright bonds with these Marines, he casts a sharp view on what they're up to.

I marked a quote from Massing's review (p. 86):

Wright's account of this attack is exceptional. In the thousands of reports written about the invasion, few dwelled on the enormous destruction it caused. Even most of the retrospective analyses downplay this aspect of the war. A good example is Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by New York Times reporter Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor. The authors meticulously and convincingly document many "grievous errors" that the Bush administration and the Pentagon committed in planning and executing the war. Yet when it comes to describing the invasion itself, their writing is oddly bloodless. Attacks tend to be referred to in a fleeting blur of acronym-laden aircraft and tanks, armored vehicles and munitions, with acts of destruction sequestered in brief euphemistic phrases. Here are some examples from the book (with emphases added):

• As Sanderson's battalion prepared to advance up Highway 1, it came under Iraqi artillery fire. Within minutes, Lieutenant Colonel Doug Harding unleashed a barrage of lethal counterfire. This was the first significant artillery duel of the war. The Americans got the better of the exchange, suppressing Iraqi fire for the time being.

• McElhiney realized he would have to fight in close quarters and destroy the Iraqi air defenses one at a time. Using 30mm guns and rockets, he took out the mosque.

• The regiment's 2nd LAR and Recon moved on the town border, which was skillfully and tenaciously defended. Covered by Cobras, the Marines headed north to the town from the western side of the Gharraf River, paralleling Highway 7. Craparotta's 3/1 moved up and . . . cleared the town.

The town referred to in this last passage is Muwaffaqiyah -- the same place Wright describes as having been partly flattened by Marines. The brief, bald description in Cobra II of Muwaffaqiyah as being "cleared" conveys none of the horror, devastation, and death that, according to Generation Kill, accompanied the attack. Unlike Wright, Gordon and Trainor were not present for the attack. In seeking to reconstruct it, they relied heavily on interviews with the soldiers who carried it out and who had little incentive to dwell on the unarmed Iraqis who might have died as a result of their actions. Written from the perspective of those planning and executing the invasion, Cobra II -- like so many other accounts -- tells us little of what it was like to be on the receiving end of the violence.

These are quotes from Wright's book. Most of the names are soldiers in First Recon (p. 2):

Get some! is the unofficial Marine Corps cheer. It's shouted when a brother Marine is struggling to beat his personal best in a fitness run. It punctuates stories told at night about getting laid in whorehouses in Thailand and Australia. It's the cry of exhilaration after firing a burst from a .50-caliber machine gun. Get some! expresses, in two simple words, the excitement, the fear, the feelings of power and the erotic-tinged thrill that come from confronting the extreme physical and emotional challenges posed by death, which is, of course, what war is all about. Nearly every Marine I've met is hoping this war with Iraq will be his chance to get some.

(p. 5):

Culturally, these Marines would be virtually unrecognizable to their forebears in the "Greatest Generation." They are kids raised on hip-hop, Marilyn Manson and Jerry Springer. For them, "motherfucker" is a term of endearment. For some, slain rapper Tupac is an American patriot whose writings are better known than the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. There are tough guys among them who pray to Buddha and quote Eastern philosophiesand New Age precepts gleaned from watching Oprah and old kung fu movies. There are former gangbangers, a sprinkling of born-again Christians and quite a few guys who before entering the Corps were daily dope smokers; many of them dream of the day when they get out and are once again united with their beloved bud.

These young men represent what is more or less America's first generation of disposable children. More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows, and Internet porn than they are with their own parents. Before the "War on Terrorism" began, not a whole lot was expected of this generation other than the hope that those in it would squeak through high school without pulling too many mass shootings in the manner of Columbine.

(p. 24):

What unites them is an almost reckless desire to test themselves in the most extreme circumstances. In many respects the life they have chosen is a complete rejection of the hyped, consumerist American dream as it is dished out in reality TV shows and pop-song lyrics. They've chosen asceticism over consumption. Instead of celebrating their individualism, they've subjugated theirs to the collective will of an institution. Their highest aspiration is self-sacrifice over self-preservation.

There is idealism about their endeavor, but at the same time the whole point of their training is to commit the ultimate taboo: to kill. Their culture revels in this. At the end of team briefings, Marines put their hands together and shout, "Kill!" In keeping with the spirit of transgression, they also mock some of the most delicate social conventions in America. The Hispanics in the platoon refer to the white guys as "cracker-ass fucks," the white refer to them as "muds" and to Spanish as "dirty spic talk," and they are the best of friends.

(pp. 66-67):

Several of the men [Iraqi prisoners] claim they worked in special units in charge of launching chemical-filled missiles. They say they were moving their missiles just a few days ago, getting ready to launch them. These men have atropine injectors, used to counteract nerve agents, which normally would be carried by those handling such chemicals. One of the more baffling aspects of the invasion is that the Marines will encounter numerous Iraqis, both soldiers and civilians, who claim to have firsthand knowledge of chemical weapons. At times, Marines will speculate that Iraqis are fabricating these stories in an attempt to curry favor by telling the Americans what they want to hear. But farther north, they will encounter village elders who seem quite sincere, pleading with the Marines to remove weapons stocks they believe Saddam's military buried near their farms, which they fear are poisoning their water. Given the fact that no such weapons have been found, you get the idea Saddam or someone in his government created the myth to keep the people and the military in awe of his power.

On the road to Nasiriyah (p. 78):

Within an hour Colbert's team is mired in a massive traffic jam. We stop about twenty kilometers south of Nasiriyah, amidst several thousand Marine vehicles bunched up on the highway. We are parked beside approximately 200 tractor-trailers hauling bulldozers, pontoon sections and other equipment for building bridges. Among these are numerous dump trucks hauling gravel. One has to marvel at the might -- or hubris -- of a military force that invades a sand- and rock-strewn country but brings its own gravel.

(p. 81):

There are nearly 10,000 Marines parked on the road, as well as a sprinkling of British troops who appear to be lost. Everyone defecates and pisses out in the open beside the highway. Taking a shit is always a big production in a war zone. There's the MOPP suit [protecting against chemical weapons] to contend with, and no one wants to walk too far from the road for fear of stepping on a land mine, since these are known to be scattered haphazardly beside Iraqi highways. In the civilian world, of course, utmost care is taken to perform bodily functions in private. Public defecation is an act of shame, or even insanity. In a war zone, it's the opposite. You don't want to wander off by yourself. You could get shot by enemy snipers, or by Marines when you're coming back into friendly lines. So everyone just squats in the open a few meters from the road, often perching on empty wooden grenade crates used as portable "shitters." Trash from thousands of discarded MRE [meals ready to eat] packs litters the area. With everyone lounging around, eating, sleeping, sunning, pooping, it looks like some weird combat version of an outdoor rock festival.

(pp. 112-113):

For some reason reporters and antiwar groups concerned about collateral damage in war seldom pay much attention to artillery. The beauty of aircraft, coupled with their high-tech destructive power, captures the imagination. From a news standpoint, jets flying through the sky make for much more dramatic footage than images of cannons parked in the mud, intermittently belching puffs of smoke.

But the fact is, the Marines rely much more on artillery bombardment than on aircraft dropping precision-guided munitions. During our thirty-six hours outside Nasiriyah, they have already lobbed an estimated 2,000 rounds into the city. The impact of this shelling on its 400,000 residents must be devastating.

It's not the first time the citizens of Nasiriyah have been screwed by the Americans. On February 15, 1991, during the first Gulf War, George H.W. Bush gave a speech at the UN in which he urged "the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." The U.S. military also dropped thousands of leaflets on the country, urging the same. Few heeded this call more than the citizens of Nasiriyah. While the Iraqi army was routed in Kuwait, the mostly Shia populace of Nasiriyah led a coup against Baathist leaders controlling the city. When Saddam's armed forces subsequently came in to put down the uprising, they did so with the tacit approval of the Americans, who allowed them to use helicopters against the rebels. (The American administration at the time didn't want to see Iraq torn apart by rebellion; Bush's call for an overthrow of the government had merely been a ploy to tie up Iraq's armed forces while the U.S. military prepared to battle them in Kuwait.) After the resistance was quashed in Nasiriyah, months of bloody reprisals followed, in which thousands of its citizens are believed to have been killed.

In this war Marine intelligence analysts will later estimate that their advance into Nasiriyah was stopped by between 3,000 and 5,000 Saddam loyalists. Despite America's dazzling high-tech capabilities -- the Marines move through Nasiriyah by blasting it to hell.

(p. 135):

What sticks out in his mind is not the intermittent enemy fire but something which is, in the scheme of things, almost trivial. Shoup sees an Arab standing in a doorway near where his vehicle is passing. The man is tall, well dressed in a brown suit, and has a close-cropped bears. He's smiling. Then Shoup sees a Marine officer he knows stick the barrel of his Benelli twelve-gauge automatic shotgun out the window of his vehicle and blast away at the man in the brown suit. Shoup can't be sure it wasn't a legitimate kill -- perhaps he failed to notice a weapon on the Arab -- but all he recalls seeing is the man's smile before he was gunned down.

(pp. 147-148):

We leave the outskirts of Al Gharraf at about nine in the morning. Two men standing by the road outside the shattered town grin and give us the thumbs-up. "This place gives me the creeps," Colbert says.

The pattern that's emerged -- being greeted with enthusiastic cheers and waves by the people you see beside the roads, then shot at by people you don't see behind walls and berms -- is beginning to wear on the Marines. "These guys waving at us are probably the same ones who were trying to kill us yesterday," Person says.

(p. 149):

We pass dead bodies in the road again, men with RPG tubes by their sides, then more than a dozen trucks and cars burned and smoking. You find most torched vehicles have charred corpses nearby, occupants who crawled out and made it a few meters before expiring, with their grasping hands still smoldering. We pass another car with a small, mangled body outside it. It's another child, facedown, and the clothes are too ripped to determine the gender. Seeing this is almost no longer a big deal. Since the shooting started in Nasiriyah forty-eight hours ago, firing weapons and seeing dead people has become almost routine.

(p. 176):

However admirable the military's attempts are to create ROE [Rules of Engagement], they basically create an illusion of moral order where there is none. The Marines operate in chaos. It doesn't matter if a Marine is following orders and ROE, or disregarding them. The fact is, as soon as a Marine pulls the trigger on his rifle, he's on his own. He's entered a game of moral chance. When it's over, he's as likely to go down as a hero or as a baby killer. The only difference between Trombley and any number of other Marines who've shot or killed people they shouldn't have is that he got caught. And this only happened because the battalion stopped moving long enough for the innocent victims to catch up with it.

Much complaining about an officer in the squadron nicknamed Captain America -- for one thing, he has a thing for bayonetting prisoners; here he's collecting war porn (p. 197):

Now, sitting around waiting to begin their hunt for ambushes on the route north, Carazales brings up the subject of Captain America. "Driving for that motherfucker was jacked. Every time we'd come across more of them fucked-up civilians -- he had to jump around getting pictures, worried my driving was too fast for his Canon stabilization system to work right."

"Man, I'm glad I didn't see any dead little children," Garza says.

"How do you think we would feel if someone came into our country and lit us up like this?" Carazales says. "South of Al Gharraf I know I shot a building with a bunch of civilians in it. Everyone else was lighting it up. Then we found out there were civilians in there. It's fucked up." Carazales works himself into a rage. "I think it's bullshit how these fucking civilians are dying! They're worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don't even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this -- all these women and children we're killing? Fuck no. Back home they're glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you. Saying our president is a fucking hero for getting us into this bitch. He ain't even a real Texan."

Carazales slumps back in the dirt. No one says anything. Then he brightens. "I just thought of a tight angle. All the pictures Captain America's taking of shot-up, dead Iraqi kids? I'll get my hands on those. I'm going to go back home and put them in Seven-Elevens and collect money for my own adopt-an-Iraqi-kid program. Shit, I'll be rolling in int. A war veteran helping out the kids. I ought to run for office."

(p. 227):

After dark Patterson gets the clearest confirmation yet that the Baath Party and Iraqi military forces have abandoned the town. Through his NVGs [night vision gear] he observes hundreds of people streaming in and out of government buildings "like ants, carting off everything they can carry -- desks, chairs, mattresses."

Iraqis aren't the only ones looting. Inside the water-purification plant Fawcett watches fellow Marines "rape the buildings -- smashing things up, pissing everywhere, hunting for souvenirs." The water-purification plant must have been some sort of exemplary public-works project. Much of the equipment is new. Many of the trucks parked inside the buildings haven't even been driven; they still have plastic on the seats. Marines use Ka-Bar knives to rip apart their interiors for material to reupholster their Humvees and trucks.

After their exciting night at the water plant, the Marines leave Ash Shatrah early in the morning. Locals cheer. To one of Patterson's officers, "the change in the town was dramatic, like someone pulled a thumb off their backs. We liberated them."

While the CIA mission failed, the liberation of Ash Shatrah proves to be precedent-setting in another sense. The Marines pull out of the town, leaving behind little or no civil authority, hordes of looters roaming through blown-up, trashed buildings and a scattered army of Baathists, soldiers and other loyalists, many of them still armed and all of them completely unaccounted for. The type of liberation seen at Ash Shatrah will play itself out again and again in other towns across Iraq until the U.S. military reaches Baghdad, where it will do pretty much the same, resulting in a much grander scale of anarchy.

(p. 274):

Colbert now wears an expression that I've come to see more frequently. He looks helpless. When confronted with these small human tragedies up close, some Marines shut down. Their faces go blank. Despite his Iceman reputation, Colbert doesn't hide his feelings very well. In combat he looks almost ecstatic; now he appears overwhelmed, though still trying to deal with this situation. He hands the baby back to the mother, along with a water bottle. "Put water on the little one," he says, speaking English into the mother's uncomprehending face. She nods gratefully, perhaps thinking he's done more than he actually has to help. Despite the water the Marines hand out, Doc Bryan estimates that a quarter of the infants may die in the next twenty-four hours.

(pp. 287-288):

Several Marines in the platoon are suffering from the fever and dysentery that has plagued the unit since leaving Nasiriyah. But spirits are high as they load their vehicles. "I'm scared as fuck," Lilley tells me. "But I started getting anxious here in this camp. It's weird. I feel better knowing we're going to go shoot things again and fuck shit up again."

"Fuck, yeah!" Person says. "It beats sitting around doing nothing while everybody else gets to have fun attacking Baghdad."

One thing the Marine Corps can bank on is the low tolerance for boredom among American youth. They need constant stimulation, more than late-night bull sessions, ravioli fiestas and Colbert's now shredded, dog-eared copy of Juggs can provide. They need more war.

The corrollary to this is that whenever they go out, they turn whatever they find into war. On patrol in Baghdad (p. 325):

Marines rifle through everything, looking for souvenirs, but all they find are colored pens and coffee mugs. "It's all stupid crap," one of them says, slamming his wrench into a computer screen.

The Marines kick down the door to what looks like the boss's office in the corner. One of them sits behind the expansive wooden desk, punches buttons on the speakerphone and plays boss. "Have my secretary send in my next appointment," he says in an obnoxiously official voice.

Then he starts smashing th phone and the desk apart with his wrench. The Marines destroy the boss's office with gleeful vengeance, throwing stuff at the walls, pissing in the corner, all of them maniacally laughing. In a weird way, they're living out the fantasy Carazales often talks about -- in which one day a year the blue-collar man gets to go into rich neighborhoods and smash apart expensive homes.

(pp. 326-327):

Residents assail him with a list of other problems -- lack of electricity, running water, broken phone lines, ransacked hospitals, bandits coming in at night and robbing homes, even the dearth of jobs. They expect the Americans, who so handily beat Saddam, will take care of everything. The Marines shake their hands, promise to see them again soon, and drive off, heroes for the day.

They never return to the neighborhood.

(pp. 327-328):

The basic problem with the American occupation of liberated Baghdad is that the fighting is so heavy at night, most U.S. forces decide not to go out after dark. On their third day in Baghdad, Fick tells his men, "We're not going out at night. There are too many revenge killings going on in the city. Mostly it's Shias doing a lot of dirty work, taking out Fedayeen and Sunni Baathists."

Lt. Col. Ferrando takes this even further, telling his senior men that the Shias are wiping out paramilitary forces through "a sort of an agreement" with the American occupiers. "We have to be careful about nighttime operations," he tells his men, "because the Shias will be out doing the same things you are. They might want to engage you."

An internal Marine intelligence report I come across, dated April 12, confidently predicts that the ability of hostile forces in Baghdad "to successfully and continually engage out forces will be complicated by the local Shias' intolerance for regime paramilitary forces hiding out in their neighborhoods."

The Americans' assumption seems to be that all they need to do in Baghdad is sit back and let the Shias clean house. Not only do the Americans tolerate this bloodshed, but at least one Marine commander in an infantry unit working in Saddam City allegedly distributes stocks of confiscated AKs to Shia leaders who promise to use them to rout out the "bad guys."

Sadi Ali Hossein is a translator working with Lt. Fick (pp. 328-329):

With his help as a translator today, Fick tries to find out what the neighborhood requires. Initially, elders who emerge from the mob tell Fick they need just two things: water and statues of George Bush, which they plan to erect up and down the streets as soon as the Americans help them pump out the sewage currently flowing in them.

Fick turns to the translator with a puzzled expression on his face. Hossein explains, "They think Bush is a ruler like Saddam. They don't understand the idea of a president who maybe the next year will go out."

The streets below not only run with sewage but are filled with uncollected garbage. In the midst of this, there are pools of stagnant rainwater. Somehow, locals differentiate between pools of stagnant rainwater and sewage, since they dip buckets into the former and drink it.

They say they haven't had water or electricity in the neighborhood for a few years now. What the elders urgently need help with is security at night. All of them have the same story: As soon as the sun goes down, bandits roam the streets, robbing people and carrying out home invasions. Residents in the neighborhood have set up barricades on the streets to keep them out. Everyone is armed. The locals claim that since armories and police stations were overrun at the end of the war, an AK now costs about the same as a couple of packs of cigarettes.

"They kill our houses," one of the men says.

"The Americans have let Ali Baba into Baghdad," his friend adds.

Another man claims enemies from an outlying neighborhood have set up a mortar position behind a mosque and are randomly shelling them at night.

Even late in the morning, you can still smell cordite in the streets from all the gunfire of the previous night. What's striking about the residents' complaints is the fact that the Marine commanders have been claiming that all the gunfire at night is a result of Shias removing Fedayeen and other enemies they share with the Americans. But this is a 100-percent Shia neighborhood, and these people are clearly distraught by the violence. They ask Fick if his Marines will stay for the night.

He tells them that is not possible, but that his men will try to bring water some other day.

Hossein tells me he has a grim view of Iraq's future. "You have taken this country apart," he says. "And you are not putting it together." He believes that the violence the Americans are allowing to go on at night will only fuel conflicts between the Sunni and Shia factions. "Letting vigilantes and thieves out at night will not correct the problems of Saddam's rule," he says. He gestures toward the crowded slum below, teeming with people. "This is a bomb," he says. "If it explodes, it will be bigger than the war."

(p. 333):

Fick's talk a week earlier at the cigarette factory of giving his men a purpose by restoring order in Iraq seems like ancient history. Fick appears to have lost his belief in his mission here. The problem is not so much that the city has unraveled before his eyes in the past week -- he pretty much expected Baghdad to be in total chaos. Instead, what's come undone is his belief that the Americans have any kind of occupation plan to remedy the situation. "Our impact on establishing order is just about zero," he says. "As far as I can see, there's no American plan for Baghdad. Maybe it's coming, but I don't see any signs of it." But he adds, leaving room for optimism, "A platoon commander's situational awareness doesn't extend very far."

(pp. 335-336):

Colbert despairs when he hears reports of other units accidentally firing on civilians. One episode reported on the BBC enrages him. U.S. soldiers, newly arrived in Iraq to begin the occupation, accidentally slaughtered several Iraqi children playing on abandoned tanks. Under the ROE, the children were technically "armed" since they were on tanks, so the GIs opened fire. Maj. Gen. Mattis would later call this shooting "the most calamitous engagement of the war." After he hears of it, Colbert rails, "They are screwing this up. Those fucking idiots. Don't they realize the world already hates us?"

Espera tries to console him by sharing some wisdom he learned on the streets of L.A. Espera explains that if he were writing a memoir of his days as a car repo man before joining the Marines, he would title it Nobody Gives a Fuck. According to Espera, the ideal place and time to repossess or steal an automobile is a crowded parking lot in the middle of the afternoon. "Jump in, drive that bitch off with the car alarm going -- nobody's going to stop you, nobody's going to even look at you," he says. "You know why? Nobody gives a fuck. In my line of work, that was the key to everything. The only people that will fuck you up are do-gooders. I can't stand go-gooders."

As Colbert continues to fulminate over mounting civilian casualties and their effect on undermining the American victory, Espera throws his arm over his shoulder. "Relax, Devil Dog," Espera says. "The only thing we have to worry about are the fucking do-gooders. Luckily, there's not too many of those.

(p. 346):

Up until now, no one has known the name of the war they've been fighting. Gunny Wynn passes on the rumor that he thinks they might be calling it "Iraqi Freedom." Hearing the news, Carazales scoffs. "Fuck that. I'll tell you what 'freedom' was, Phase Three Iraq," he says, referring to the military's term for the combat-operations phase of the invasion. "That was fucking Iraqi freedom. Rip through this bitch shooting anything that moves from your window. That's what I call freedom."

Massing's review quotes a later interview with Wright where Wright says:

For the past decade, we've been steeped in the lore of The Greatest Generation, the title of Tom Brokaw's book about the men who fought World War II, and a lot of people have developed this romanticism about that war. They tend to remember it from the Life magazine images of the sailor coming home and kissing his fiancée. They've forgotten that war is about killing. I really think it's important as a society to be reminded of this, because you now have a generation of baby boomers, a lot of whom didn't serve in Viet Nam. Many of them protested it. But now they've grown up, and as they've gotten older I think many of them have grown tired of the ambiguities and the lack of moral clarity of Viet Nam, and they've started to cling to this myth of World War II, the good war.

I never read Tom Brokaw's book, but if you go back and look at the actual greatest generation writers, people like Kurt Vonnegut -- who wrote Slaughterhouse Five -- and Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and their contemporaries, who actually fought in World War II and wrote about it, there's no romance at all. In fact, a lot of their work is very anti-war.