Can Anyone Govern This Place?

By Daniel Eisenberg

Paul Bremer strode into the sweltering Iraqi capital of Baghdad last week, sounding to all the world like the new sheriff in town--albeit one wearing a suit and tie. For a city racked by instability and violence, President Bush's newly appointed civilian chief promised a new, no-nonsense approach to law and order. Referring to the thousands of criminals Saddam Hussein freed before the war, the seasoned diplomat and counterterrorism expert declared, "It's time we put these people back in jail."

But after the first month of U.S. occupation of Iraq, it's clear that bringing security--to say nothing of democracy--to a broken country is more easily pledged than done. Bremer's predecessor, retired Lieut. General Jay Garner, fared so poorly from the start that one of his own underlings in Iraq, career diplomat Barbara Bodine, sounded the alarm. She dashed off scathing reports to colleagues back in Washington warning that he was in danger of losing the peace, according to officials at the State Department and the Baghdad-based Office of Humanitarian and Reconstruction Assistance (OHRA). (Bodine declined to comment for this article.) The inability of Garner to get his arms around Baghdad's troubles not only cost him his job but has also lost the U.S. considerable goodwill among the Iraqi population, damaged American credibility abroad and raised the prospect of prolonged turmoil in the country. Now, as a senior U.S. official starkly puts it, "we have a month to [turn things around]" before the people's frustration could turn into full-blown rage.

The city is on edge. Bremer is putting a good spin on things, talking about hundreds of new arrests, longer detentions and stepped-up night patrols. "This is not a country in anarchy," he says. "People are going about their business. Across most of Iraq, life is clearly getting better." But Baghdad's beleaguered residents might beg to differ. Running water and electricity are rare to come by; the wait for gasoline can last two days; and in many neighborhoods, malnourished children play in streets that are flooded with raw sewage and piled with garbage.

The Pentagon contends that most of these conditions predate the war. But there has been a fearsome jump in crime. Carjackings, lootings, robberies, arson and rapes have become the order of the day--and night. Automatic gunfire provides an unsettling sound track for daily life. The threat of violence makes parents afraid to send their kids to school, merchants wary of opening their stores and law-abiding Iraqis nervous about going out after dark. The Americans have tried to blame pro-Saddam saboteurs for the collapse of order. Lieut. General David McKiernan, head of the U.S. land forces in Iraq, said last week that Baghdad's breakdown was largely the result of an organized resistance engineered by Saddam loyalists. But other military officials say this is secondary to the main issue: restoring the minimum quality of life for ordinary Iraqis--a job, electricity, proper sewage, safe streets. An American intelligence official says he believes that the amount of politically inspired armed resistance is "remarkably low."

Either way, there are not nearly enough police to make a difference, and some of the few in uniform aren't even the real thing. The Iraqi Red Crescent learned that lesson when thieves posing as traffic cops held up one of the organization's workers and made off with his car. Automobile theft has become such a recurring problem that the relief organization CARE has ordered workers to use taxis to get around the city. "We half expected the police force to still be functional, but they were not," Army Major General Buford Blount, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said last week. Although more than half of Baghdad's regular policemen--about 1,700--have returned to work, few have cars, all need to be retrained and their looted station houses are not open around the clock.

Few had expected the U.S. to have this much trouble bringing order to Iraq. "It's difficult to imagine how this could have happened," says a British government official. "But it appears that there was no planning whatsoever."

From the outset, the Bush Administration was overly optimistic and in many ways unprepared for the myriad, messy challenges of rebuilding Iraq. The Pentagon had expected the postwar transition in Iraq to be orderly and quick, without requiring a major, long-term commitment of U.S. forces and other resources. Washington, it now seems, spent too much time thinking about how to reform institutions and not enough time on how to provide people with basic security or infrastructure such as electrical grids, oil-refining equipment, hospitals and museums.

The situation wasn't helped by the fact that Garner and his team at OHRA tried so hard to avoid looking like an occupying power. Holed up in headquarters at one of Saddam's opulent palaces, where their satellite-phone communications were spotty at best, they rarely ventured out. All too often, the American overseers found themselves relying on Western journalists to tell them what was happening in the city. When reconstruction officials did try to make their way around town, they went in a convoy of armed humvees, which was not exactly the friendly image that the U.S. wanted to project.

The challenge of turning things around now falls to Bremer, a consummate Washington operator who worked for Henry Kissinger's consulting firm for more than a decade after 23 years in the State Department. His record as a tough, capable administrator somehow manages to satisfy both Pentagon hard-liners and State Department moderates. "He takes no prisoners," says a U.S. official, who nonetheless wonders whether Bremer can truly make a difference as long as Washington remains reluctant to conduct what the official calls a "proper" occupation, which means enough men, resources and commitment for the long, hard job of rebuilding.

Still, even the Pentagon realized that the U.S. had to start doing better fast and plainly hoped that a new boss would give the reconstruction effort a much needed makeover. Bremer began by making it clear that Saddam's loyalists from his now outlawed Baath Party would no longer be given key positions at government ministries. Many Iraqis had bitterly criticized Garner for the haphazard way Baathists had been let back into authority. Bremer won approval from Pentagon hard-liners in part, a Defense official says, because he was willing to "get in there and de-Baathify" Iraq. On Friday Bremer formally barred as many as 30,000 Baath members from government jobs. To show that the U.S. cares about ordinary Iraqis, soldiers are going into a different section of town every day to help with garbage collection and medical care. The U.S. had unwittingly ceded such basic services to Shi'ite organizations that opposed the American presence. Fuel deliveries are being speeded up, and mid-level Iraqi government workers, who haven't seen a paycheck in two months, have been told they will soon be paid and perhaps even be given a raise.

Bremer's tenure quickly raised eyebrows amid media reports that he had ordered military commanders to shoot a few looters. He has denied drawing up any such plan. But the U.S. policing presence is being heightened. Some 20,000 additional troops are bound for the region, and the number of U.S. military police patrolling Baghdad will soon double, to 4,000.

As for the political transformation, the Pentagon's desire to turn national leadership back to Iraqis by the end of the month has hit a roadblock. Although opposition figures told Bremer that the timetable for installing a transitional authority should not change, he quickly realized that neither they nor the U.S. was ready. American reconstruction officials have not been able to weld Iraq's rival opposition leaders into a unified, reliable body capable of rule. The U.S. will lose the peace if it leaves Iraq with a weak, ineffectual government. In the current state of disarray, no matter how tough Paul Bremer talks, he can't afford to take that kind of gamble. --Reported by Paul Quinn-Judge and Joshua Kucera/Baghdad, J.F.O. McAllister/London and Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Paul Quinn-Judge and Joshua Kucera/Baghdad, J.F.O. McAllister/London and Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington