Issue 1.5
Tailgate party Iraq
By Ray LemoinePhotos By JB Forbes
To most people, day-to-day life in Iraq is unfathomable. Such was the case for me before I went there last January. A car bomb greeted my arrival, leaving 26 dead. Mortars rained down on the airport as I waited to leave.
Even so, the three months I spent in Iraq represented a period of relative calm before the storm. It was the last chance to travel around the country without fear of getting kidnapped, killed, or caught in a battle. We traveled freely on what is now called the “Highway of Death,” stretching from Amman, Jordan to Baghdad. We walked the streets after dark and hung out in Sadr City on a daily basis.
I lived in the Republican Palace, the former seat of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. While I was there, it was being used as the main administrative building of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the American-led post-war transitional government. The building is located in a part of central Baghdad known as the Green Zone, encompassing many of Saddam’s old palaces and Baath party buildings.
I was working for the CPA as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Coordinator, and became immersed in a post-war social landscape of soldiers, contractors, mercenaries, journalists, diplomats, and Iraqis. The shared opinion was that the US was failing. Yet, every person I met believed they were there for the right reasons, from the British peace activists who formed a circus to help children cope with the horrors of war to the Arab-hating Serbian mercenaries hired to provide security. Through the chaos, a unique community emerged. And with it came a semblance of normal life. People tried to do normal things, like play poker and drink beer. Thursday night was the big night in town. And here is the story of my last one. It was April 1st, and I was enjoying an early evening adult beverage with some friends. A nail clipping of a moon hung above the unlit, electricity-free street that led to the Green Zone. An M-1 Abrams tank thundered down the road, sandwiched by two military Humvees, each sprouting a big machine gun manned by a masked soldier. The frenzied game of dominoes around us halted as the patrol passed. A few Iraqis scowled. Most just looked annoyed. As soon as the rumble of freedom passed, the clickityclack of dominoes returned.
At my side sat Jeff Neumann, my good friend and co-worker. Across the table was Charles “Chucky” Crain, a freelance journalist. All three of us were greasy, unshaven, and wearing the same clothes we had worn the day before. We were all in our mid-twenties, and among the youngest civilians in Iraq. Each of us sucked the hose of a hookah as if it contained life-saving oxygen.
This smoke shop, or diwana, served us nearly every afternoon, after a day of work at the Convention Center inside the Green Zone. The shop was centrally located between the Assassin’s Gate and the al-Rasheed gate, two of the five points of entry to the fortified CPA hub.
It was a bare bones place, with scuffed tile floors and plastic chairs. Sleazy framed prints of Turkish mosques lined the walls. A young boy served chai tea and apple-flavored tobacco in a hookah. It was handily located next to two booze shops, which sold extra-strength, triple malt beers for 50 cents each. We weren’t the only people who drank in the diwana. Quite a few Iraqis enjoyed getting sauced, despite the risk of incurring Allah’s wrath.
A neighboring pharmacy sold a variety of painkillers and anti-anxiety meds for a few cents a pop. There were even bottles of liquid Valium, which provided a nice way to relax after a mortar/rocket attack. The pharmacy also served as Baghdad’s BALCO, a steroid depot for soldiers. Jeff received a call on his Iraqi cell phone. “There’s a poker game at the Washington Post,” he said. “Let’s go.” It was still early, about 8 pm, an hour before the unofficial curfew after which the streets usually emptied and the lawlessness increased even more. Still, even at this hour traffic was constant. Nearly every car in Baghdad is a part time cab. Gas is subsidized in Iraq: at only a few cents per gallon, it’s cheaper than water. And with unemployment running at 60 percent, people are left to find any hustle they can. That night we were picked up by an old Peugeot. Our cabbie spoke a little English. “My baby in London,” he said. “You know London?”We told him we lived there, lying as usual. Hearing we were not American infidels excited him. In a thick Arabic accent he proclaimed “Amerikee no good! Saddam no good!” It seemed to be the motto of Iraq. He told us he was a trained engineer. We didn’t find it surprising, considering Iraq is an educated society, but with so little work, you often find doctors and scientists driving cabs.
Jeff and I were dropped at a walled compound that surrounds a group of hotels, including the city’s two biggest, the Sheraton and the Palestine. Legions of foreign journalists and contractors call this area home. Across the street is a blue-domed mosque, the most popular backdrop for TV broadcasts. Fox, ABC, and CNN are all based at the Sheraton.
Sketchy Iraqis sold booze and cigarettes in front of each hotel. Neither hotel had a full bar, so people congregated across the street at the bar in the al- Fanar Hotel. Nick Berg, the American whose beheading was broadcast over the Internet, stayed at the al-Fanar. Lots of our friends stayed there, including Andrew Robert Duke, the legendary war profiteer and man about town. The Duke was a portly, middle-aged “businessman” from Colorado who always looked like he was ready to play golf. He was Berg’s best friend and the last person to see him alive. The Duke held court in the Al-Fanar Bar every night without fail, usually with a cast of characters straight out of a spy novel.
We’d walk into the bar and The Duke would stand up to greet us like an expert concierge. Then in a hushed, gloating tone he would inform us who was in his party. “We have a Romanian senator talking to an English security provider over here. And there we have a Lebanese contractor speaking with an OTI rep (OTI is one of the main U.S. State Department contractors) setting up a deal for schools. Here I am with Dieter from Die Welt, talking about these 15 palates of juice I got my hands on.
By the way, do you want them?” The Duke was a maestro, conducting a symphony of backdoor deals and oddball connections. Our love and fascination with The Duke and his band of merry profiteers was reciprocal. He got us into the al-Jiweya Club, Iraq’s oldest gentlemen’s club. Opened in 1924, the club was a leftover from colonial Britain, complete with wood paneling, snooker tables, and suited bartenders. The owner’s sons were young guys who shared our love for the sweet stylings of American rap music.
One evening, we took a bottle of Scotch from the club and jumped into their car for a tear through Kerrada, Baghdad’s equivalent of Greenwich Village. A mix-tape featuring 50 Cent, Biggie and DMX blared as we sped through Ali Baba Circle, drinking and thinking. They took us to Ghost Music, the best record shop in Baghdad, which had a better selection of music than any Wal-Mart: strictly bootlegs for $2 a pop. Bon Jovi was the biggest band in Iraq. I must have heard 50 Iraqis say, “I want to go to America to see Bon Jovi!”
But there was more fun to Baghdad than just hookahs, The Duke, and drunk driving. On Saturday nights, the al-Hamra hotel had epic poolside parties. They even had themes, like “California Night” or “South African Disco.” Fox News seemed good for a big blowout once a month, and just about every journalist in town would show up to steal their booze.
At an NBC party, a UPI correspondent was rolling endless joints before a network producer came up to us and said, “We’re a responsible network, please don’t do that here.” NBC’s parent company is General Electric, which stands to make some $600 million from the post-war reconstruction.
Anyway, back to our last poker game in Iraq, which took place inside a corner suite of the Sheraton. The Washington Post’s Karl Vick had set up a nice spread. It was just like Vegas, complete with a buffet of great Middle Eastern food and free booze. The game had a low limit, two to four dollars. Still, Jeff and I had to get bankrolled by a friend. We were dead broke. Getting money in Baghdad is impossible, as there are no banks and no wire services. Unlike journalists, who always had cash flow, CPA officials were limited to one withdrawal per month.
Taking part in the game were three other Post correspondents, including 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Shadid. During the game he kept answering his cell phone and firing off rapid Arabic conversations. He was considered by many, like Jon Lee Anderson of the New Yorker, to be the pulse-keeper of Iraq. No American journalist had penetrated Iraqi culture deeper than Shadid. “This is the first time I have been scared here,” he said during the game. All week he had been going to Mosques and, for the first time, he was getting bad vibes. “It is definitely getting worse,” he said. The Washington Post journalists knew how bad things were getting. During the game, I got the feeling that they had given up hope for Iraq a long time ago.
To Sewell Chan, a young correspondent who covered the CPA press conferences every day, the CPA was a joke, an embarrassment. Every afternoon at 5 pm, the CPA would hold a press conference, or “gaggle,” in the convention center where I worked. I’d attend from time to time, and straight answers were a rarity from either Dan Senor, advisor to the U.S. Presidential envoy in Iraq and a Scott McClellan wannabe, or his Rumsfeldian cohort General Kimmet, deputy director of operations for the coalition military. It is no wonder that the US public was blind to the day-to-day failures in Iraq. The Bush White House has taken the art of disinformation to new heights, and the Senor/Kimmet duo were examples of it. A reporter would ask a good question and they would talk circles around it. Sometimes they would simply restate the question with bigger words and more of them.
I’d often see Dan Senor at the nightly palace buffets. Wearing combat boots, khaki pants, and a blue blazer ala Lord Bremer, he was the embodiment of the Washington element of CPA: young, inexperienced, career-minded, Aryan-looking, conservative, and with very little knowledge of the Middle East and Iraq. Dan Senor was the king of Bush Youth, and his arrogance was broadcast to the world every day on CNN, al-Jazeera, and the BBC. This was the guy the Arab world saw as the voice of the Coalition and young America.
With so much more to rebuild than imagined and so few people willing to do it, the CPA filled positions with whomever they could find. A house of cards was being erected on the banks of the Tigris River, and a culture of failure spread like SARS through each ministry. There is no college degree for nationbuilding, and it showed.
Whole new Iraqi ministries seemed to revolve around one Iraqi family and its cronies. The Ministry of Planning was rumored to be a bribe factory. All sorts of Army Reservists, anyone with white-collar private sector experience, were thrown into highlevel positions. Some were in charge of entire city councils. Just like in Abu Ghraib, where former chicken slaughterhouse workers were in charge of P.O.W.’s, the CPA had salesmen selling democracy.
With its first taste of capitalism, Iraq had turned into a fascinating free-for-all, and Baghdad was its Dodge City Beyond Thunderdome, the Wild West crossed with a Mad Max movie.
The Iraqi black market was awesome. You could go to a police station and buy AK-47s for $200; pistols were around $60. Can you imagine if the L.A.P.D. Sold machine guns? A photographer from Getty Images ordered a pound of hash off the Internet. Bootleg porno DVDs were sold anywhere there were troops.
There was a place called “Thieves Market” where the tag line was “All things looted.” It was a huge, open-air Arab bazaar where you could buy anything on Earth, be it a wife, a Saddam portrait, a car engine, or a four-dollar hand grenade. It was also dangerous: an American had his neck sliced there for wearing shorts, something viewed as an affront to Allah. Jeff was probably the only American to make friends there. He’d walk through the bazaar to a barrage of greetings – “Hello Mistah Jeff!”
The Iraqis’ carefree attitude proved to be one of the bright spots of their culture, as well as a dividing point with their occupiers. In a welfare state like Iraq, the American staples of stress and competition were an unfamiliar part of society. “America may well be the most competitive society the world has ever seen,” Andrew Hacker said recently in the New York Review of Books. In Saddam-era Iraq, stress and competition were replaced by fear and terror.
As bad as stress is, it is, of course, better than constant fear. These days in America, we get it all: stress, competition, terror, and fear. Sadly, the liberation of Iraq from the grips of the Baath Party had not eliminated the fear and terror. The country was a cesspool of violence. Gunfire and explosions were constant. Spires of black smoke dominated any view.
On March 7th, we came under rocket attack while eating dinner at the al-Rasheed Hotel, inside the Green Zone. The blast of six rockets shook the huge concrete building. It was like a fire drill: everyone stopped, dropped, and rolled. Huddled in the basement sports bar that doubled as a bomb shelter, a few hundred of us watched CNN’s images of our building as it burned and smoked. After a few minutes, the bartender changed the channel to a more pressing program, an Australian rugby game.
The Iraqi rumor mill was a force of nature. In their tribal society, word traveled at light speed, mutating along the way. Car bombs were often rumored to be U.S. Missiles. Some said Mexican illegal immigrants had been stationed along the American front line as cannon fodder. My personal favorite was that American troops had contaminated all Iraqi women with AIDS. Saddam used to make all foreigners take AIDS tests prior to entering Iraq, claiming Iraq did not have the “American” disease. I heard many Iraqis complain, “Amerikee bring AIDEZZ!”
The poker game broke up at around 11 pm. It was Thursday night, and that meant the al-Rasheed disco was open for business. Located at the al-Rasheed Hotel inside the Green Zone, it was where Uday Hussein used to throw coke ragers, and the only place where CPA hacks could let it all hang out.
One could boogie to KC and the Sunshine Band in a leisure suit while ripping lines of Republican Guard marching powder, complete with a flashing Baath Party star on the dance floor. Jeff, Adam, and I borrowed a Washington Post driver and his black BMW 7 series to give us a lift back across the Tigris to the disco.
That night, the al-Rasheed was filled with five hundred CPA-related people (at least four hundred of whom had mustaches) grooving to Dirty South rap spun by an Arab DJ. The crowd was a mix of steroid-enhanced mercenaries, steroid-enhanced undercover US soldiers pretending to be mercenaries (Gis were not allowed to booze), fat contractors in snakeskin boots and ten-gallon hats, and State Department nerds. The few women in there were middle-aged D.C. Types and a handful of young Eastern Europeans, who should have sprayed themselves with mustache repellant before coming.
In a booth sat two sketchy Lebanese war profiteers, acquaintances of Jeff and me. They handed us Cuban cigars and we all pulled off a bottle of Cuervo 1800. Chucky was at another table, hanging out with some mercenaries. I toasted him. It was like the club scene in Scarface. Everyone was packing heat, except Jeff and me.
Our two Lebanese friends bragged about how many rugs they had sold that week. They spoke of a 30 million dollar school reconstruction project they were trying to secure from the CPA. It was amazing how the Lebanese thrived in Iraq. I guess a fifteen-year civil war will prepare you for business under the hairiest circumstances. One of them was a dead ringer for Big Pussy from the Sopranos. Both wore Rolex Sub Mariner GMTs—a gentlemen’s classic— in different colors. It was surreal. When “In Da Club” blazed, I could have sworn I was in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
At closing time, 1 am, the crowd stumbled out of the disco and into their armored SUVs. A scuffle broke out between rival mercenary crews. Gunfire burst out and everyone ducked for cover. We hopped into a red Mercedes owned by one of the Lebanese guys. They said something about hookers, but soon after, I blacked out from excessive intake of Valium and Cuervo. The rest of the night remains a mystery. I woke up with two different colors of puke on my pants.
Chucky was in Fallujah when the major combat began. Worried as we were, it ended up being for the best. Chuckles was solidifying himself as a serious journalist, and in a matter of weeks went from being a stringer for the Raleigh News and Observer to being mentioned by Frank Rich in the New York Times as “a keen Baghdad observer” and contributing pieces to the Washington Post. He is now USA Today’s Baghdad correspondent.
He hit the lecture circuit after returning from Iraq in May. Not bad for a kid who had been fresh out of school and outside the country for the first time. Gone were his Neo-Conservative-ish, University of Chicago-bred views. He now stated the obvious: “The structure of a federal liberal democracy is simply not an inspiring prospect for Iraqis.” It was a far cry from his words back in January when, after a sunset Tigris cruise, he spewed pro-invasion rhetoric over a bottle of Scotch and an issue of Foreign Affairs.
April 4th, the day Jeff and I left country, marked the turn of post-war Iraq (and not just because we left). It was the day that Sadr City, the pro-American Baghdad Shiite slum, exploded into violence. Seven soldiers were slaughtered during an all-night battle with a few hundred supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr.
Al-Sadr, a young Shiite cleric, had his anti-Coalition newspaper, al-Hawza, shut down by Lord Bremer the week prior. With a circulation of merely five thousand in a country of twenty-five million, it hardly constituted a major threat. Al-Sadr’s supporters fiercely responded to the closing, first taking to the streets in protest and then mounting an armed revolt that spread across Iraq. You have to wonder exactly what Bremer was thinking. After a ten thousand- strong demonstration at the pearly gates of the Green Zone, an über-senior CPA official told Jeff and me, “If it continues like this, it’ll be choppers on the roof, ala Saigon.”
The war’s new front was particularly painful to us. Sadr City, home to two-and-a-half million impoverished Shiites, was our main base of aid work. Jeff and I were in Sadr City nearly every day. Our closest Iraqi friends all lived there, and we had visited thousands of children in the area. Before April, you could drive for miles through Sadr City without seeing any U.S. Presence. It was disgusting to hear that armored divisions, supported by AC-130 warplanes, were mounting assaults in what had previously been the capital’s most peaceful and least visibly occupied area.
Back in the U.S., the 4th of July on the Mall in Washington, DC had me thinking of Iraq. Everywhere I went in the capital reminded me of it. The fourteen security checkpoints along the mall were eerily reminiscent of the checkpoints in the Green Zone. Concrete barriers and temporary fences distorted the view of every government building and national monument. Ugly fences crisscrossed the entire Mall, ruining the natural splendor of one of America’s great public spaces. It was much like the fortification around every Coalitionheld position in Iraq.
Flying above the Mall were two choppers, including a Blackhawk, circling from the Potomac along the length of the Mall. Baghdad was abuzz with similar chopper patrols at all hours. A variety of city and federal officers patrolled on horseback, bicycle, motorcycle, in cars and trucks, and on foot. So many guns, just like Iraq.
When the “bombs” burst in air, the crowd on the Mall cheered. It was a shock and awe show reminiscent of a mortar barrage. The Mall was a fury of nationalism. Flags flew aggressively and people chanted “U-S-A!” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Saw two young men walk by, the slogans on their T-shirts summing up the day and America. One proclaimed, in big block letters, “Pro-Life.” The other stated, in the same font, “Yankees Suck.” The Pro- Life shirt spoke for itself and its “Bush ‘04” button-wearing owner. The latter was a shirt that I had made. I started selling them outside Fenway Park in Boston in 1999.
I looked upon that T-shirt with new eyes. What once was just a slogan about baseball now sums up world opinion on America. Not since the Third Reich has one nation been hated by so many. The entire world thinks Yankees suck.