Homeland, p.30
Homeland, page 30
Chapter 7
Our Little, Imaginary World
They tell you it’s the oil but I know it is not the oil, I just can’t figure out what the hell it is we are here for.
—American soldier in Baghdad, August 2003[1]
The first leader of post-Saddam Iraq was a white American in khaki chinos, a navy-blue blazer, and combat boots. Paul Bremer—or “Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III,” as his name appears on the cover of his memoir—grew up in Connecticut. His father was the president of Christian Dior Perfumes, and his mother taught art history at a university. His education was about as elite as it gets: elementary schooling at New Canaan Country School, which as of 2023 charged more than $45,000 in tuition for kindergarten;[2] high school at Phillips Academy Andover; and college at Yale University. After college, he studied business at Harvard and politics in Paris. He began his career in the Foreign Service in 1966, then moved over to the State Department. In 1989, he joined Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm, advising multinational corporations on which countries were too unstable to invest in and which were just unstable enough. By 2003, Bremer had spent nearly four decades in diplomacy and international relations, and he still looked the part of an energetic Ivy Leaguer with a spot on the squash team and a can-do spirit. He had a boyish face, bright eyes, and hair like a Kennedy. He favored conservative tailoring and spoke with a reedy but confident voice. He was six feet four inches tall.
Bush appointed Bremer as presidential envoy to Iraq on May 6, 2003. He arrived in Baghdad six days later. It was the first time he had ever set foot in the country. “I did read as much Iraqi history as I could in the very brief time before I went, which was only a couple of weeks,” he said years later. “Would it have mattered greatly if I had known more? Perhaps….I have never seen a convincing argument that my lack of deep Iraqi experience actually made a difference.”[3] By June, he was the head of the newly formed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the country’s chief executive. The provisional government was fully established by mid-July. In his memoir, Bremer wrote that he was “the only paramount authority figure—other than dictator Saddam Hussein—that most Iraqis had ever known.” This claim suggests that his “lack of deep Iraqi experience” did matter after all, because there were in fact millions of living Iraqis (as in, everyone over the age of about thirty) whose memories would have stretched back to before Saddam’s 1979 assumption of the presidency.[4] Bremer’s mandate was to oversee both the reconstruction of a devastated country and the birth of a new democratic government. He held the job for fourteen months and basically answered to no one. He liked to wake up at 5:00 a.m. and go for a run through the gardens of Saddam’s presidential palace,[5] and he accessorized his suits with a pair of Timberland boots his son had given to him on the eve of his departure, along with a note reading, “Go kick some butt, Dad.”[6]
Bremer did not kick some butt. He spent a bit more than a year in Iraq, and when he left in June 2004, basic services were still unreliable, the temporary Iraqi Governing Council was a hornet’s nest of competing agendas, and popular discontent was in the process of developing into civil war. It would take a further three years for the military to bring the violence under any semblance of control. Bush awarded Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom several months after his return, but even back then he was generally seen as a failure.
Today, a similar judgment is often made about the war on terror as a whole. Despite the political benefits of rallying Americans around the flag in fits of nationalist enthusiasm, both parties found the war to be an enormous headache. George W. Bush had to mount an expensive and elaborate propaganda campaign to convince voters that Iraq was worth invading, and even with all that time and effort, the public remained on his side for little more than two years. By July 2005, a majority of Americans recognized that Bush had misled them about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction,[7] and during the awful summer of 2008, Bush had the lowest approval ratings of any president since Harry Truman, with just 24 percent of Americans believing he’d done anything resembling a good job.[8] His successor’s enthusiasm for the war is even harder to understand in terms of politics. Obama’s decision to increase America’s troop levels in Afghanistan alienated the base of his popular support and did nothing to appease his conservative antagonists. When he took office, just a quarter of Americans thought that invading Afghanistan had been a mistake. When he left, that figure was almost 50 percent.[9] The larger war continued to strain America’s relationships with many of its most important allies, boosted Iran’s influence in the region thanks to the Shia takeover of Iraqi politics, and seeded outbreaks of violence and social unrest across the Middle East. In 2008, a Nobel laureate in economics and a former CFO for the Department of Commerce calculated that the Iraq War alone had cost America more than $3 trillion, more than a fifth of the country’s GDP for that year.[10] And in addition to the political and financial costs, a 2021 report found that roughly fifteen thousand American service members and private contractors lost their lives fighting the war, a figure that doesn’t even begin to reflect the real human cost to the United States. Add in the veterans who came home permanently disabled, or who took their own lives following their deployments, and you get a number in the hundreds of thousands.[11] For most of its existence, the war on terror was unpopular at home and counterproductive abroad, diminishing rather than enhancing America’s standing and influence around the world.
To be blunt about it, governments do not often spend trillions of dollars doing something that is both politically unpopular and seemingly harmful to their global interests. So what was the point? Why did the war on terror continue for so long?
Over the past twenty years, there have generally been two answers to that question. Those who supported the war saw the project as a kind of crusade, an effort to rid the world of evil, make the Middle East safe for political and economic liberalism, and cement the United States atop the world order for at least the rest of the twenty-first century. After that project failed, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan, these supporters changed their account of the war’s meaning without giving up their belief in its righteousness. Now they gilded the war with the nobility of a doomed quest. America’s soldiers had not failed, they said—failure was impossible by definition. American troops were the greatest fighters in history, and if they had come home without completing their mission, the correct place to lay blame was at the feet of the officers, politicians, journalists, and protesters who lacked the fortitude required to see the task through. By this logic, the war persisted for so long because the men and women who fought it refused to give up even as the society they defended turned its back on them.
The best distillation of this worldview can be found in the 2013 film Lone Survivor. Mark Wahlberg, a man who once had to apologize for saying that September 11 would have gone down differently if he had been on one of the planes that day, took the lead role as the real-life Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell.[12] In 2005, Luttrell led a small group of fellow SEALs on a disastrous mission in search of a small-time military leader named Ahmad Shah. Stumbling around in the mountainous landscapes of Afghanistan’s Kunar province, Luttrell’s team was quickly located by Afghan fighters, who pinned them down with gunfire and then relentlessly pursued them down the mountain. Luttrell’s three fellow team members were all killed, as were ten SEALs who were shot down in a helicopter while trying to execute a rescue operation. Luttrell himself appeared in the movie as an extra, playing one of the SEALs who dies in the helicopter, and he also delivered the film’s final lines in a voice-over monologue: “No matter how much it hurts, how dark it gets, or how far you fall, you are never out of the fight.”[13] That’s probably not the most accurate way to sum up a badly planned operation of negligible strategic importance that left everybody dead except for Mark Wahlberg, but the film’s harrowing action scenes, appealing cast, and heart-swelling post-rock soundtrack made it a hit. Lone Survivor did so well on its opening weekend that one Texas movie theater canceled screenings of Anchorman 2 and The Wolf of Wall Street in order to accommodate the extra demand.[14]
Those who opposed the war told a different story: America did it for oil. The slogan “No blood for oil” could be seen and heard everywhere at protest marches during late 2002 and early 2003. It sought an explanation for the war in the field of economics, envisioning the conflict as part of a zero-sum competition for access to industrial resources. At the time of the invasion, Iraq was believed to have at least the fifth-largest oil reserves of any country on the planet, and that was a conservative estimate. No one would really know what Iraq had until Western oil companies were allowed to fly in with their equipment and expertise and start looking around. In a report published two months after the invasion, a writer at the Brookings Institution noted that while the consensus put Iraq’s known and commercially viable reserves at 112 billion barrels, other estimates by The Petroleum Economist magazine and the Federation of American Scientists had the number closer to 200 billion barrels, and another study had gone as high as 300 billion. If the high-end estimate was correct, then Iraq was home to a quarter of all the drillable oil on earth.[15]
Despite halfhearted demonstrations of indifference, Dick Cheney’s office was not very successful in concealing its interest in these oil fields. Even before September 11, the vice president instructed the National Security Council to work with the Energy Task Force he had established shortly after taking office. As Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker, Cheney wanted the two groups to work on combining “two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: ‘the review of operational policies towards rogue states,’ such as Iraq, and ‘actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.’ ”[16] This was before technological advances in horizontal well bores made hydraulic fracturing, better known today as fracking, profitable on a large scale. Fracking eventually turned the United States into one of the largest fossil fuel producers in the world, but the technology wasn’t yet commercially viable in 2001, and pundits and think tank researchers often warned of an impending oil supply crunch and its attendant high prices (the U.S. government knows very well that its car-dependent citizenry will not tolerate expensive gasoline for any sustained period of time). As the antiwar collective Retort observed, one private intelligence firm wrote in a report that invading Iraq would constitute “a ‘sublime’ opportunity to ‘scoop up cheap assets.’ ”[17] What you had in 2003, then, was (1) a country gripped by anxiety about oil shortages, which (2) invaded Iraq, a country home to (3) perhaps the largest unexplored and unexploited oil reserves in the world. It’s not unreasonable to put those facts together and conclude that the explanation for the Iraq War is obvious.
And yet, as Retort wrote, “it is one thing for an explanation to be vivid, another for it to be crushingly obvious. We tire of detectives solving crimes the criminals have never bothered to conceal.”[18] Though persuasive at first glance, the blood-for-oil thesis loses much of its explanatory power the closer one looks. The idea that the government worried only about the price of oil going too high forgets that the oil market includes sellers as well as buyers. Oil companies are constituents, too, and the more prevalent worry within the industry was that a supply glut would drive prices so low as to make their operations unprofitable. That’s the whole purpose of the OPEC+ cartel: to allow industry players to regulate prices and keep profits stable by coordinating the opening and closing of their respective spigots, a mechanism used just as often to set a floor beneath which prices may not fall as to keep a lid on any spiraling price increase. Second, while the oil companies would have been pleased to learn that America’s military had made enormous new reserves available for exploitation, it is not obvious that those same companies would weigh the benefits against the risks and come out in favor of invasion. Investment in oil production is very capital-intensive, and it requires years, even decades, to turn a profit. Risk is a normal part of doing business, but invading Iraq was not a normal risk. Designed as it was to remake the political order of the entire region, invading Iraq threatened to upend a fifth of global supply. It’s hard to make confident investments in new wells or exploration when you don’t know whether some armed group is going to storm the halls of government next month. Finally, the blood-for-oil thesis paid too much attention to Iraq and not enough to all the other countries the United States bombed, invaded, or surveilled as part of the war on terror, to say nothing about all the money America sent to its allies to fund counterterrorism training and operations. Whatever oil might be able to explain about the Iraq War in particular, it cannot do the same for a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan, drones over Pakistan or Yemen, or a quiet but persistent campaign of special operations exercises and training across Somalia, Niger, and much of the Sahel.
This is not to deny that oil helped to shape America’s cost-benefit analysis; as one of the most important commodities in the world, it could hardly do otherwise. But proponents of the blood-for-oil thesis erred in treating oil as the Bush administration’s primary motivating force rather than as one part of a larger economic project. This chapter, along with the two that follow, is about that larger economic project.
In trying to look at the economic forces underlying the war from a sufficient altitude, one needs to remember the part of the war’s official name that is often omitted in conversation (as well as books like this one): global war on terror. The United States didn’t become the world’s most powerful country solely on the strength of its national economy after World War II, even if that economic strength was staggering (in 1960, the United States accounted for 40 percent of the world’s economic activity).[19] What made the United States so powerful was its ability to superintend the global economy as a whole, to shepherd twentieth-century capitalism through its decades-long conflict with the Soviet Union, write the rules of global trade and finance, and enforce those rules when some malcontent got out of line. This enforcement often took place at gunpoint, as in the cases of Korea, Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, or any number of other countries in which the United States decided that legitimate governments needed to be replaced with rulers who would more readily accommodate America’s requirements and preferences. But the United States also won countries over to its side by spreading around the wealth generated by its manufacturing prowess, with the reconstruction of Europe under the Marshall Plan as the most famous example. It shared the wealth at home as well, to a certain extent, permitting the growth of the powerful industrial unions whose labor advocacy created the vaunted American middle class and turning Americans into the most voracious consumers in world history.
For twenty-five years after World War II, America’s leadership of the world economy was a success, at least from the perspective of Americans and other inhabitants of the affluent north. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the world’s economic engine began to sputter. Global growth slowed down, and the mutually beneficial ties of trade and exchange that held together the American-led world system started to fray. By the end of the twentieth century, these ties had frayed to such an extent that a number of structural adjustments had to be made in order to sustain the American project through the twenty-first. To begin seeing the contours of that project, it will be helpful to look at what Paul Bremer tried to do with Iraq after Saddam was gone.
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• • •
During his time in Baghdad, Bremer lived in what came to be known as the Green Zone, a fortified, ten-square-kilometer compound nestled into a bend in the Tigris River. Completely surrounded by blast walls and barbed wire, the Green Zone was the safest place in the city, home to soldiers, private contractors and mercenaries, civilian administrators, translators, and other Iraqi support staff. Except for the al-Rashid Hotel and the Baghdad Convention Center, Iraqis not employed by the occupation were excluded from the Green Zone.[20] Its inhabitants were young and overwhelmingly male—one journalist estimated the ratio at ten to one, and also characterized the atmosphere there as verging on “rampant sexual harassment”—a group of inexperienced and ambitious twentysomethings looking to make a name for themselves in Iraq and kick-start Washington careers back in the States.[21]
Many of them never set foot outside the Green Zone while in Iraq. Why would they? Outside its walls, the streets were choked with traffic and debris, the brutal heat was inescapable, and the risk of being kidnapped or caught in some firefight was high. Inside, however, were all the amenities of home: air-conditioning, swimming pools, movie nights, laundry service, bars, a dance club, and boxes of sugary Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes at the breakfast table. The cafeteria, operated by Halliburton, was managed by a “rail-thin twenty-two-year-old” with pimples on his forehead.[22] In the middle of a Muslim-majority city in which almost nobody ever ate pork, the Green Zone cafeteria menu often featured bacon, sausage, and spare ribs. Bible study happened on Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m. The “Hash House Harriers” organized group runs around the compound.[23] On Freedom Radio, 107.7 FM, an Army DJ played classic rock from a playlist approved by military higher-ups (hip-hop and country were forbidden).[24] Women deployed to the Green Zone sometimes packed hot pants and heels for dancing at the al-Rashid on weekends.[25]
Hermetically sealed off from life in the city around them, Bremer and the young guns who worked for him found it easy to move fast and dream big. Bremer’s first official act as head of the CPA, known as Order 1: De-Ba’athification of Iraqi Society, eliminated at the stroke of a pen what had been for decades the most important political entity in the country. All senior members of the former dictator’s Ba’ath Party were “hereby removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector.” In addition, all senior-level managers holding positions in any government ministry, Iraqi corporation, university, or hospital would be questioned regarding “possible affiliation with the Ba’ath Party.” If investigators found any such affiliations, those questioned would be fired as well.[26] Former party members would also be investigated and possibly prosecuted for past criminal activity. CPA Order 2, “Dissolution of Entities,” disbanded the Iraqi Army along with all other regular military organizations.[27] As Thomas Ricks pointed out in his account of the occupation’s first two years, Fiasco, Orders 1 and 2 “threw out of work more than half a million people and alienated many more dependent on those lost incomes. Just as important, in a country…possessing few unifying national institutions, Bremer had done away with two of the most important ones.”[28] One in fifty Iraqis lost their jobs, which caused exactly the kind of anger you would expect if someone flew into America, outlawed both the Democratic and Republican Parties, and fired six and a half million of the country’s most experienced officials. While there certainly were some Saddam loyalists within the Ba’ath Party ranks, a situation made ominous by the fact that the United States had no idea where the dictator was at the time, Bremer did not opt for a targeted approach. Instead, he carpet bombed Iraqi civil society, effectively destroying the foundation of the country’s ability to govern and defend itself. This made America’s already formidable task that much harder. Now the CPA would have to build new foundations from scratch.
