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Apocalypse now: Dispatch from Iraq
Let me tell you about Nadia, a friend and colleague in Iraq. From May 2003 until last April she worked for a newspaper in Baghdad. Then two of its reporters were killed and its editor, after receiving repeated threats, fled the country. So Nadia was out of a job. She tried to keep busy doing translation work for various foreigners, but one was assassinated and two were kidnapped. Almost all the others left the country or were afraid to leave their homes.

Nadia’s family is Christian—members of the Chaldean Catholic Church, one of the oldest churches in the world. In that they are a bit atypical, since most Iraqis are Muslims. But in many ways their story is representative of families in Iraq’s middle class. They knew better than anyone the evils of Saddam Hussein. They thought that things could only get better after he was removed from power—that the greatest superpower in the history of the world would leave behind a new Iraq.

But then they saw American soldiers stand by as Iraq was looted. They watched as Iraq become infested with criminal gangs, made up of prisoners released by Saddam and newly unemployed soldiers. Garbage collectors began looking through the trash to see who was rich enough to rob. Baghdad, like all great Middle Eastern cities, had been a night city. People ate lunch at 4 p.m., supper at midnight, and shopped and visited friends and family till early morning. Now they stay home and watch TV or play dominoes and backgammon.

“When is the future?” Nadia asked me. “Thirty-five years of Saddam waiting for the future. And they say the Iraqis must be patient. We were patient as our husbands and brothers and sons went to three wars. Our patience has expired.”...

... The U.S. started this lawless, anarchic, slow-burn civil war. It didn’t have to invade. When it did, the soldiers didn’t have to stand around watching as Iraq was looted in May and June. They did, and the looting caused the initial hopes to be replaced by fear. Insurgents soon capitalized on and extended the fear, looting public buildings, libraries, universities, schools, hospitals, museums, and taking everything, right down to the copper pipes and the electric wire.

The U.S. didn’t have to disband the Iraqi army, leaving 350,000 well-trained, well-armed young men unemployed, but when it did, it created an instant enemy class and security threat. The U.S. had no plan for repairing the electrical, water and sanitation systems. (Actually, the State Department had a plan. In one Senate office, an aide showed me 15 fat volumes called the “Future of Iraq” project, representing months of work done by a State Department team led by Thomas Warrick. Two months before the war, however, responsibility was transferred from the Department of State to the Pentagon. Warrick was fired by Donald Rumsfeld on orders from Dick Cheney.)

Iraqis don’t know if the disaster is due to American malice or American incompetence. An official at the State Department said, in all earnestness, “What do we have to do to convince Iraqis that we aren’t malicious? We’re just stupid.” I am not sure if that is true. The people behind this war are not stupid. In a similar situation during the Vietnam war, David Halberstam said of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his colleagues: “They were brilliant, but they were fools.”