Inside the Green Zone

By Brian Bennett / Baghdad

Saturday night in Baghdad, and Heidi, the barmaid at the Baghdad Country Club, is worried about the beer. On a busy night, she might serve 800 cold ones to the diplomats, security guards and construction workers who frequent the Country Club, a white cinder-block house with blue trim on a residential street in the Green Zone. The BCC, as it's known, gets its alcohol from suppliers outside the walls, but insurgents are targeting the crossings on either side of the Tigris River. On this Saturday, a truck bomb on a bridge has locked up traffic on the west bank of the Tigris, delaying the delivery of the night's beer supply. Heidi, a recent college graduate from Florida, wonders whether the war will eventually collapse on the Green Zone, the way it did on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. But she doesn't let that occupy her for long. Looking down at the empty glass in her hand, she smiles and says, "Let's do a shot."

Since opening in October, the BCC has become the closest thing to a Western-style drinking establishment in Iraq, the place to go for Cuban cigars, fresh cuts of beef and a decent bottle of Bordeaux. On a clear April night, the white plastic tables in the garden fill up with an assortment of Green Zone archetypes: broad-shouldered security contractors walk in with dates in tight tops and high heels; a handful of diplomats mingle in blazers; a construction worker wearing a fishing vest that reads BAGHDADDY meets his friends at the end of a 12-hour shift. The guards at the gate require that patrons surrender their guns, ammunition, grenades and flash bangs before entering. You get your weapons back at the end of the night.

For those viewing the war in Iraq from afar, reports from inside the Green Zone can make this ravaged city look almost serene. Protected on two sides by the wide, caramel-colored waters of the Tigris and surrounded by high cement walls, the 4-sq.-mi. Green Zone (officially called the International Zone) sits in the middle of Baghdad and is home to thousands of people, including many members of the Iraqi government. Since the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the Green Zone has been the seat of U.S. power in Iraq, first in the form of the ill-fated Coalition Provisional Authority and now the 1,500-person U.S. embassy, the biggest in the world. To most visiting American dignitaries, the placid, palm-lined streets of the Green Zone are the only glimpse of Iraq they see; to Iraqis, it might as well be another continent. "Living here is like living in Europe," says Haider Hassan, a store clerk at the $280-a-night al-Rasheed Hotel inside the Green Zone. "You miss nothing, starting with electricity, power, water and security. Outside the gates is hell."

But these days hell is starting to feel a lot closer. Even as the U.S. boosts its military presence in Baghdad, violence across Iraq has remained implacable--evidenced most dramatically on Monday in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, when a suicide bomber killed nine U.S. soldiers, one of the deadliest attacks against the military since the war began. Since the start of the U.S. surge, those kinds of insurgent strikes have become more frequent in areas outside the capital. But anxiety is rising in the Green Zone too. Some U.S. soldiers have orders not to travel through the area alone for fear of kidnapping. On March 27, a rocket landed in the complex of housing trailers near the U.S. embassy, killing a U.S. soldier. Security forces were tipped off to the location of two suicide vests, and rumors floated that authorities were looking for a third. That missing vest may have been worn by the suicide bomber who killed one Iraqi politician and wounded 22 in the parliament cafeteria on April 12--an attack that shattered any remaining notion that life in the walled city could go untouched by the battles raging outside. After the bombing, Lieut. Colonel Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman, said, "The Green Zone is not safe."

In that assessment lies a portent of doom for the U.S. in Iraq. From the start, the occupation has been informed by illusions--about the strength of the insurgency, about the level of antagonism among Iraq's sects, about the very nature of Arab society and culture. Those illusions could be sustained as long as you stayed within the protected confines of the Green Zone. As much as any other indicator, the deterioration of security inside this ostensible fortress underscores the extent to which the war has spiraled out of the U.S.'s control.

In that sense, it's little surprise that business at the Baghdad Country Club has never been better. For many, it is the ultimate bubble. Escape is the club's most attractive offering. "It helps us forget what is out there," says a sheet-metal worker from Michigan named Alex Manikas, 63. "It is a place you go to keep you sane." On one hand, the popularity of the BCC is proof that a good time can still be found in the world's most dangerous city. But it also captures the contradiction of the Green Zone today: a place that has attained the feeling of permanence in a city where no one wants to be.

The Green Zone is guarded by a crazy quilt of security personnel--Georgian soldiers, Peruvian security guards, Iraqi army, Iraqi police and U.S. soldiers. Moving around the area requires learning a peculiar patois. Upon arriving at a routine checkpoint, you are typically greeted with a succession of questions and demands, issued in Georgian ("gamarjoba," or hello), Spanish ("amigo"), English ("badge"), Arabic ("silah," or weapon) and Iraqi slang ("mamnoon," or thank you). During the course of a recent day of meetings in the Green Zone, I was sniffed by dogs six times, sent my bags through four metal detectors, was photographed once by a body scanner that can see through my clothes and was patted down too many times to count.

Responsibility for coordinating this Tower of Babel still lies with the coalition forces. But in the coming year, more territory within the Green Zone, as in the rest of Iraq, is slated to be turned over to Iraqi government control. Manikas is part of the crew logging 12-hour days to build the new $592 million U.S. embassy, a small city of low-slung, thick concrete buildings with small windows on the banks of the Tigris. When it's finished this fall, the new compound will be the largest embassy ever built. Nearly all U.S. personnel will move out of the Saddam-era Republican Palace and a nearby warren of temporary trailers, where they currently live. In making the move, the U.S. aims to shrink its massive security cordon and hand the marble-floored halls of the palace back to the Iraqis.

It's a bittersweet gift. Under Saddam, the apartment buildings down the road from the Republican Palace were limited to the dictator's henchmen and their families. Today it houses many of those trying to build a new Iraq, including members of parliament and the families of officials who work in the office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. One afternoon, officials from the government's judicial branch squared off in a soccer game against employees of the executive branch. It was the kind of scene you almost never see on the evening news: teenagers from the neighborhood playing freely while men at a nearby outdoor cafe talked politics over sheesha and sweet amber-colored Iraqi tea. Some played barefoot; those with shoes traded them off when they substituted out. The center forward for the executive branch, a close adviser to al-Maliki, was the only one wearing cleats.

And yet like everything else here, the game had the aura of unreality. The players all knew it could never happen outside the walls of the Green Zone since many of them are on insurgent hit lists. After the cafeteria bombing, it's doubtful that any of the same officials would take part in such an exposed activity. Baghdad's sectarian hatreds have seeped inside the walls as well. Fuad Saeed, the Sunni imam of the biggest mosque in the Green Zone, has made gestures of religious unity, handing out to Shi'ite worshippers the coin-size holy clay tablets used by Shi'ites when they pray. He once even prayed with his hands straight down, a distinction the Shi'ites made from the Sunnis more than 1,000 years ago, in front of his congregation. "The words are not important," he says. "I care about the heart." And yet for his magnanimity, Saeed has been shunned by most of his fellow clerics. He now rarely leaves the mosque compound, let alone the Green Zone.

Fear permeates the lives of the Iraqis who remain inside the walls. Some have long since lost their jobs working for contractors or the Army but won't leave the Green Zone because too many of their neighbors and relatives know they worked for the U.S., and they are afraid of being killed. The Iraqis who live here have a simple word, barra, that they use over and over again to refer to the rest of Baghdad outside the Green Zone. It means "out there." If they were anywhere but Iraq, their stories would sound like paranoid delusions. All the gates are watched, they say. Their names are on hit lists. One woman, who used to do laundry for a British security firm and now lives in an abandoned market stall with her three children, has received messages on her cell phone telling her "Your blood will wash all over your body." She's afraid to go out of the Green Zone because of the threats, and since she lost her job and handed in her ID badge, she wouldn't be able to get back in without an escort.

Pretty soon, the choice may be made for her. The al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq claimed in an April 13 statement to have had "support troops" that infiltrated the Green Zone to launch the attack on the parliament cafeteria. As a result, squatters who continue to live in the Green Zone without official permission are now considered an unacceptable security risk. A family that fled the first battle of Fallujah in 2004 was told last week by U.S. military police that by June 1 they will have to leave the hallway they converted into an apartment or they'll be kicked out.

By ratcheting up security measures and evicting all nonofficial personnel, the U.S. and Iraqi authorities may be able to restore some of the Green Zone's former impregnability. But there's no guarantee that will last, and it comes at a cost. With the new security restrictions being erected and a bunker mentality increasingly taking hold, the U.S. civilian presence is likely to retreat inward, behind the walls of its new embassy--and even further away from the reality of Iraq's dysfunction.

That's why the Baghdad Country Club is digging in. If the U.S. military fails to pacify Baghdad and disengagement from Iraq's problems becomes the unspoken U.S. policy, the BCC may just become the last refuge in Iraq. The liquor store, called the Winery, is doing a booming business. In preparation for the holy month of Ramadan, when alcohol is particularly hard to get in Iraq, the club stockpiled so many cases of beer and wine on its roof that it began to bow inward. They managed to sell it all. The club also sells merchandise such as polo shirts, golf balls and golf towels. "If there wasn't demand for it, I wouldn't sell it," says James Thornett, 33, the Brit who owns the club. "It's not set up to make money off of misery. I'm providing a place for people to go and take their minds off what is happening."

At a table in the bar, Manikas is describing his daily routine. He wakes up at 4 a.m. in the company's villa down the street, has coffee, eats breakfast and is on a bus at 6, headed for the new embassy. After his shift he comes back, and if there has been a big bombing in Baghdad that day, he calls home. "Every time the media shows something on TV," he says, "I have to call my wife and say it wasn't near me." He feels safe in the Green Zone. "It is written in my karma where I am going to die," he says, "and it's not here."