Nir Rosen - Aftermath

In late December 2008 I visited an Iraqi Christian family in East Beirut that had fled Baghdad only two weeks earlier. A small Christmas tree was in the corner of the room. “My husband couldn’t go to his shop, the children were without school because of the bad situation,” the mother explained. There were less kidnappings in Baghdad now, she admitted, but there were still explosions. “It’s difficult to be away from my country,” she said, switching back and forth between the Lebanese and Iraqi dialect. I told her about the book I was working on, a project about Bush’s legacy in the Middle East. Bush had only brought them war, not freedom, she said bitterly. “Why should I thank Bush?” she asked. “For the war we experienced in Iraq? For our displacement from our homes? For the year we couldn’t send our children to school and the year my husband couldn’t go to his shop to work? Why will I thank him? We just now left Iraq. Where is the democracy? Where is the security?”

When the family moved into their small apartment in Beirut, they found a pencil drawing of Saddam Hussein on their wall, beneath which was written “the brave martyr.” The mother said she kissed it when she saw it. “I love him,” she said. “In Saddam’s time Iraq was safe. We could go to school and work safely—there was no displacement. We were Christians living with Sunnis and Shiites, one next to the other. Since Bush came, the Sunnis left their homes. We have not seen any changes in Iraq. We don’t expect change because of Obama. He’s American.”

I asked Saramand, another Iraqi Christian, the same questions. He had arrived in Beirut six months earlier and now worked in a local church whose congregation was made up entirely of Christian refugees. Two weeks earlier forty families had arrived, he told me. “Before, if there were five or six people in a house and one worked, they could live,” he said. “Here they all work just to survive. Work is not allowed, but people work.” He too blamed Bush for his plight: “What do you expect to happen in an occupation? The democracy that Bush sent us is killing, theft, settling of scores. Where is the democracy? Where is the freedom? Where are the promises he made? Garbage has reached up to our heads in Iraq. Children are dying every day in Iraq—for what? If there was no Bush, I would not be here. If you see a refugee laughing, it’s a lie. Inside, he is full of memories.”

IN MARCH 2007 the surge was still nascent, but the legal basis for the American occupation was expiring. United Nations resolutions effectively let American troops do whatever they wanted, but the Iraqis wanted that to end. The Americans needed a bilateral agreement to anchor their presence in Iraq. Bush wanted a policy to hand to his successor, knowing he would be under a lot of pressure to leave. In the spring of 2007 the Americans began to discuss their options. The U.S. military said it needed a Status of Forces Agreement, but civilians in the government were skeptical that a typical SOFA could be passed.

In the Middle East, most American SOFAs are secret, their terms hidden from the population, because the governments the Americans deal with are dictatorships. If citizens from these countries knew what was in a typical agreement, they would be outraged. But Iraq was sort of a democracy, and the SOFA would have to go through Parliament and be made public. The 1948 Treaty of Portsmouth, between Iraq and Britain, was on the minds of many Iraqi politicians. When the terms of Portsmouth became known in Baghdad, there were massive protests led by a movement known as Al Wathba (The Leap). The treaty was abandoned. President Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 treaty with the Shah of Iran was also on Iraqis’ minds, since Iranian anger at the treaty helped lead to the rise of Khomeini. Most SOFAs grant immunity to American military personnel. But the Iraqis were afraid that immunity could fuel the Mahdi Army and the resistance. It would look like the politicians were giving Iraq away.

The fall 2007 declaration of principles signed between Maliki and Bush set the atmosphere. It described cultural, economic, and diplomatic ties and laid out the terms of the partnership and security relationship. “It was very hard,” an American official told me. “Maliki didn’t want to sign. He was timid politically, and the other parties would stab him for it even if they agreed with it. Bush wanted him to sign it in the U.S., but he balked, so they signed it via video conference.” In February 2008 the State Department hired Ambassador Robert Loftis, a senior basing negotiator and an expert on drafting SOFAs, but who had no Iraq experience. His draft gave the Americans full authority and control. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and NSA’s Brett McGurk said it wouldn’t work, it was an impossible dream. The terms leaked, the Sadrists protested, and Maliki opposed it. This was not what he got on board for.

The Americans fired the entire SOFA team. McGurk arrived in Iraq in mid-May and worked directly with Maliki, meeting him twice a week and also working with Maliki’s close advisers. It was a small American team: McGurk, Crocker, and David Satterfield. They had a direct line to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and President Bush. The timelines set by the SOFA were very controversial within the U.S. military. It set a June 2009 withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities and a full American withdrawal by 2011.

The Iraqis were making maximalist demands, but the Americans assumed Maliki was just posturing because of domestic politics. The Iraqis rebranded it the Withdrawal Agreement because the original draft had so poisoned the atmosphere. Immunity for troops was the hardest issue, but eventually the two sides came up with a hypothetical situation that was impossible to imagine. Perhaps if an American soldier went to a bar and raped an Iraqi woman or committed some other unlikely but egregious act, then he would be prosecuted under Iraqi law. Otherwise the Americans would try him. “During the SOFA they played us like fiddles,” an American official told me. “The prime minister’s office got exactly what they wanted, a presence in the country that protects them and which they have oversight over and which they can use as a stick against opponents.”

Maliki’s Law and Order campaign against militias resonated with the middle class. His confrontation with Kurds galvanized Iraqi nationalist support, and the SOFA poured water on the Sadrist flames. There was now a timetable for withdrawal; it looked like the occupation would end. But a different iconic moment will be forever associated with the trip Bush took to Baghdad to sign the SOFA.

THE YEAR 2008 ended with Muntadhar al-Zeidi reminding President Bush and the world for only a moment about the Iraqi victims. During a press conference on Bush’s last visit to the country, Zeidi spoke for the masses in the Arab world and beyond when he shouted, “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!” as he threw his first shoe at the American president. Zeidi was a secular, left-leaning Shiite from Sadr City whose work as a reporter for Baghdadiya television had won him local acclaim because of his focus on the suffering of innocent Iraqis. He had been arrested twice by the American army and kidnapped once by a militia.

He remembered, as did all Iraqis, that the American occupation had not begun with the surge. The story of the American occupation was not one of smart officers contributing to the reduction of violence and increase in stability. That was only one chapter in a longer story of painful, humiliating, sanctions, wars, and bloody occupation. Those with short memories, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, might remember the American occupation as “a million acts of kindness.” But to Iraqis and anyone else sensitive enough to view them as humans, the occupation was one million acts of violence and humiliation or one million explosives. There was nothing for Bush to be triumphal about during his farewell press conference. Even the surge had exacted a costly toll on Iraqis. Thousands more had been killed, arrested, thrown into overcrowded prisons, and rarely put on trial, their families deprived of them. The surge was not about a victory. With a cost so high, there could be no victory. COIN is still violence, and the occupation persisted, imposing violence on an entire country. As Zeidi threw his second shoe in a last desperate act of defiance, he remembered these victims and shouted, “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq!”