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How We Went Wrong
BOOK REVIEW
How we went wrong
‘The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict’ by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, and ‘Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq’ by Jonathan Steele
By Kit R. Roane
March 30, 2008 in print edition R-8
The Three Trillion Dollar War
The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
W.W. Norton: 192 pp., $22.95
Defeat
Why America and Britain Lost Iraq
Jonathan Steele
Counterpoint: 290 pp., $26
THE Iraq war seems no closer to resolution today than when it began five years ago. The daily stories of death, setbacks and gains bleed together like a list of mayhem on a police blotter, rarely jolting us anymore from our safe slumber back home. Two new books try to do just that by tallying the war’s costs from these daily ledgers. Although each has a different focus, both accountings draw the same picture of hopelessness.
The most enlightening is “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes. They matter-of-factly dissect the staggering monetary cost of the war and the human devastation behind the ever-increasing bill. In “Defeat,” Jonathan Steele uses the region’s history and his own extensive reporting on the ground for the Guardian to provide ammunition for his thesis, that “the occupation was flawed from the start.”
Both books are deeply critical of the rationale for going to war and the way it is being waged. But Stiglitz and Bilmes focus on a track less worn than Steele’s. They follow the money, ferreting out exactly how it was spent, explaining how we’ll be paying the bill – one they calculate to be at least $3 trillion – for decades to come and suggesting where all that money could have been used more effectively.
For instance, $3 trillion is enough to provide the nation’s 8.3 million uninsured children with health coverage for about 18 years. It is worth noting that $3 trillion is their ”excessively conservative” estimate of the war’s total cost when all is said and done.
“The Three Trillion Dollar War” isn’t likely to be an Oprah Book Club selection – its clinical prose and abundant lists don’t make for a leisurely read. But its statistics are a damning indictment of how the war has been conducted and a wake-up call for American taxpayers, who for the most part have remained untouched by a conflict that churns through money and lives on a daily basis. Borrowing the phrase “there is no free lunch,” Stiglitz and Blimes describe how hefty the bill will become if we don’t change course.
They note that the United States has been in Iraq more than a year longer than it fought World War II, and that the “cost of direct U.S. military operations – not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans – already exceeds the cost of the twelve-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.”
Deficit spending has hidden this cost, giving Americans “the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and butter.” But signs of strain are everywhere. The war has contributed to the ballooning national debt (adding about $1 trillion so far) and helped fuel the steep rise in oil prices (from about $35 a barrel in February 2003 to more than $100 a barrel today). The authors cite the tens of thousands of injured Iraq war veterans confronting squalid conditions at under-funded U.S. veterans’ hospitals and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that has produced a backlog of more than 400,000 disability claims, about 25% of which have been pending for more than six months.
Some veterans have been waiting for years. One young Texan who was wounded in 2004 got a visit from President Bush and a Purple Heart. But according to the authors, he didn’t receive disability benefits for three years and got them recently only because Bilmes informed veterans’ advocates, who alerted the media.
Many injured veterans have been charged for equipment no longer in their possession, such as body armor and night visions goggles probably left on the battlefield after they were wounded. The Department of Defense, the authors note, has pursued “hundreds of battle-injured soldiers for payment of non-existent military debts.” Such collection efforts are striking considering the money that has been spent in multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts to private firms backstopping the military effort. Although much of their discussion of veterans’ mistreatment falls under the rubric of the Bush administration’s alleged efforts to cut or hide costs, Stiglitz and Bilmes also note that the cost of care is being shifted to the veteran and the veteran’s family, spreading the war’s emotional and monetary toll even wider.
The administration “has not flinched at asking for ever higher amounts of cash to pay troops while they are in combat, and it has not balked at the astronomical demands of private contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater Security,” the authors complain. But it has “behaved as if there were a direct conflict of interest between funding the war and taking care of the veterans after they come home.”
Nor has war achieved the administration’s goals, Stiglitz and Blimes write, noting that Iraq has “descended into internecine conflict,” ranking above only Somalia and Myanmar in corruption. As for the war helping to bring democracy to the Middle East, the authors note that now “even the more modest goal of a stable and democratic Iraq appears unattainable.”
Steele’s “Defeat” also has a sense of exasperation at its core. He argues that the Bush administration’s belief that the troops would be welcomed as liberators disregards a long history of ambivalence and mistrust of the West by Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world. After toppling Saddam Hussein, Steele writes, the actions of coalition forces on the ground exacerbated that skepticism.
Steele is certainly not the only author to give Iraqis a voice, but his interviews with many locals are among the book’s strongest suits and they help him to lay out the reasoning behind his central argument: “The day on which Bush decided to have an occupation was the day he ensured its defeat.”
Although many may not agree with Steele’s overarching thesis of predestined doom, he, like other authors before him, provides plenty of examples of why U.S. intervention in Iraq has been a failure. Hubris, he shows, has kept the invaders out of touch with the population, while fear has led to the killing and incarceration of a multitude of innocent civilians.
Steele writes of a Baghdad veterinarian and his high-school-age son who described being stopped at a U.S. checkpoint in 2003, then taken into custody after soldiers found a pistol in their car, a common accouterment for Iraqis seeking a measure of safety in postwar Iraq. The father was released after a few weeks, but the boy spent 66 days in various jails, often living on about a cup of water a day. “At no time was I questioned, interrogated, or charged. It was punishment without trial,” the boy told Steele. “When the Americans first came to Baghdad I was happy, but I don’t want to speak about my feelings towards them now.”
Uncontrolled firing on civilians has been an endemic problem. While covering the war, I witnessed Marines at a makeshift checkpoint repeatedly open fire on civilian cars fleeing Baghdad. Steele cites documents outlining similar examples, noting the case of a driver killed for failing to get out of his car when warning shots were fired; an sergeant noted in the file that the driver likely didn’t know how to respond, adding, “If I was in his place I would have stayed put too.”
The question is what to do now. Both books argue that staying the course in Iraq is not an option. As Steele puts it, Bush’s goals of democracy, stability and security may one day be achieved, but they “cannot be imposed through the barrel of a foreign gun.” And even if those goals could be accomplished by remaining longer, how much more are Americans willing to pay? Stiglitz and Bilmes argue that the costs have already become too high.
“Staying another two years will simply add another 1,000 or more American bodies to the 4,000 who have already died in vain, and another 10,000 or more casualties to the 60,000 [Americans] who have already been injured,” they conclude. “When framed the correct way – not whether we should leave, but when we should leave – exit becomes simpler. It is a bleak situation. Leaving sooner rather than later is the only way to stop it from getting worse.” *
How we went wrong
‘The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict’ by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, and ‘Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq’ by Jonathan Steele
By Kit R. Roane
March 30, 2008 in print edition R-8
The Three Trillion Dollar War
The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
W.W. Norton: 192 pp., $22.95
Defeat
Why America and Britain Lost Iraq
Jonathan Steele
Counterpoint: 290 pp., $26
THE Iraq war seems no closer to resolution today than when it began five years ago. The daily stories of death, setbacks and gains bleed together like a list of mayhem on a police blotter, rarely jolting us anymore from our safe slumber back home. Two new books try to do just that by tallying the war’s costs from these daily ledgers. Although each has a different focus, both accountings draw the same picture of hopelessness.
The most enlightening is “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes. They matter-of-factly dissect the staggering monetary cost of the war and the human devastation behind the ever-increasing bill. In “Defeat,” Jonathan Steele uses the region’s history and his own extensive reporting on the ground for the Guardian to provide ammunition for his thesis, that “the occupation was flawed from the start.”
Both books are deeply critical of the rationale for going to war and the way it is being waged. But Stiglitz and Bilmes focus on a track less worn than Steele’s. They follow the money, ferreting out exactly how it was spent, explaining how we’ll be paying the bill – one they calculate to be at least $3 trillion – for decades to come and suggesting where all that money could have been used more effectively.
For instance, $3 trillion is enough to provide the nation’s 8.3 million uninsured children with health coverage for about 18 years. It is worth noting that $3 trillion is their ”excessively conservative” estimate of the war’s total cost when all is said and done.
“The Three Trillion Dollar War” isn’t likely to be an Oprah Book Club selection – its clinical prose and abundant lists don’t make for a leisurely read. But its statistics are a damning indictment of how the war has been conducted and a wake-up call for American taxpayers, who for the most part have remained untouched by a conflict that churns through money and lives on a daily basis. Borrowing the phrase “there is no free lunch,” Stiglitz and Blimes describe how hefty the bill will become if we don’t change course.
They note that the United States has been in Iraq more than a year longer than it fought World War II, and that the “cost of direct U.S. military operations – not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans – already exceeds the cost of the twelve-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.”
Deficit spending has hidden this cost, giving Americans “the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and butter.” But signs of strain are everywhere. The war has contributed to the ballooning national debt (adding about $1 trillion so far) and helped fuel the steep rise in oil prices (from about $35 a barrel in February 2003 to more than $100 a barrel today). The authors cite the tens of thousands of injured Iraq war veterans confronting squalid conditions at under-funded U.S. veterans’ hospitals and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that has produced a backlog of more than 400,000 disability claims, about 25% of which have been pending for more than six months.
Some veterans have been waiting for years. One young Texan who was wounded in 2004 got a visit from President Bush and a Purple Heart. But according to the authors, he didn’t receive disability benefits for three years and got them recently only because Bilmes informed veterans’ advocates, who alerted the media.
Many injured veterans have been charged for equipment no longer in their possession, such as body armor and night visions goggles probably left on the battlefield after they were wounded. The Department of Defense, the authors note, has pursued “hundreds of battle-injured soldiers for payment of non-existent military debts.” Such collection efforts are striking considering the money that has been spent in multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts to private firms backstopping the military effort. Although much of their discussion of veterans’ mistreatment falls under the rubric of the Bush administration’s alleged efforts to cut or hide costs, Stiglitz and Bilmes also note that the cost of care is being shifted to the veteran and the veteran’s family, spreading the war’s emotional and monetary toll even wider.
The administration “has not flinched at asking for ever higher amounts of cash to pay troops while they are in combat, and it has not balked at the astronomical demands of private contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater Security,” the authors complain. But it has “behaved as if there were a direct conflict of interest between funding the war and taking care of the veterans after they come home.”
Nor has war achieved the administration’s goals, Stiglitz and Blimes write, noting that Iraq has “descended into internecine conflict,” ranking above only Somalia and Myanmar in corruption. As for the war helping to bring democracy to the Middle East, the authors note that now “even the more modest goal of a stable and democratic Iraq appears unattainable.”
Steele’s “Defeat” also has a sense of exasperation at its core. He argues that the Bush administration’s belief that the troops would be welcomed as liberators disregards a long history of ambivalence and mistrust of the West by Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world. After toppling Saddam Hussein, Steele writes, the actions of coalition forces on the ground exacerbated that skepticism.
Steele is certainly not the only author to give Iraqis a voice, but his interviews with many locals are among the book’s strongest suits and they help him to lay out the reasoning behind his central argument: “The day on which Bush decided to have an occupation was the day he ensured its defeat.”
Although many may not agree with Steele’s overarching thesis of predestined doom, he, like other authors before him, provides plenty of examples of why U.S. intervention in Iraq has been a failure. Hubris, he shows, has kept the invaders out of touch with the population, while fear has led to the killing and incarceration of a multitude of innocent civilians.
Steele writes of a Baghdad veterinarian and his high-school-age son who described being stopped at a U.S. checkpoint in 2003, then taken into custody after soldiers found a pistol in their car, a common accouterment for Iraqis seeking a measure of safety in postwar Iraq. The father was released after a few weeks, but the boy spent 66 days in various jails, often living on about a cup of water a day. “At no time was I questioned, interrogated, or charged. It was punishment without trial,” the boy told Steele. “When the Americans first came to Baghdad I was happy, but I don’t want to speak about my feelings towards them now.”
Uncontrolled firing on civilians has been an endemic problem. While covering the war, I witnessed Marines at a makeshift checkpoint repeatedly open fire on civilian cars fleeing Baghdad. Steele cites documents outlining similar examples, noting the case of a driver killed for failing to get out of his car when warning shots were fired; an sergeant noted in the file that the driver likely didn’t know how to respond, adding, “If I was in his place I would have stayed put too.”
The question is what to do now. Both books argue that staying the course in Iraq is not an option. As Steele puts it, Bush’s goals of democracy, stability and security may one day be achieved, but they “cannot be imposed through the barrel of a foreign gun.” And even if those goals could be accomplished by remaining longer, how much more are Americans willing to pay? Stiglitz and Bilmes argue that the costs have already become too high.
“Staying another two years will simply add another 1,000 or more American bodies to the 4,000 who have already died in vain, and another 10,000 or more casualties to the 60,000 [Americans] who have already been injured,” they conclude. “When framed the correct way – not whether we should leave, but when we should leave – exit becomes simpler. It is a bleak situation. Leaving sooner rather than later is the only way to stop it from getting worse.” *
The mother of all cons
The mother of all cons
By Kit R. Roane
October 21, 2007 in print edition R-4
Who’s to blame for America’s ill-advised invasion of Iraq? A few well-known public officials likely come to mind. But in “Curveball,” Bob Drogin points to another culprit, a man one wouldn’t think could merit a footnote in such an expansive policy but who became a crucial linchpin for all that followed.
Known as “Curveball” to the Western intelligence community, he was just another Iraqi asylum seeker when he flew to Germany in November 1999. But what he had to say set him apart. Curveball “wanted to share a secret,” Drogin, the national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes. “Biowaffen” was the word that made it into German intelligence reports. Germ weapons to you and me.
It was explosive stuff. Curveball was seen as a one-in-a-thousand find, a talkative chemical engineer who had helped design and build Saddam Hussein’s mobile germ warfare program and could sketch out the proof for all to see. His information changed the focus of America’s spy agencies, infected their analysis of the threat posed by Hussein and in the end became the Bush administration’s hammer in its call for war on Iraq.
But Curveball was lying. Worse, Drogin shows, many people who doubted him, including some at high levels in the U.S. government, didn’t seem to care. He gave them “evidence” for a theory they already believed and became the needed spark for a war they’d already planned.
“Curveball,” based on reporting Drogin and others did for The Times, is a sad illumination of just how dysfunctional the West’s spy apparatus had become and how prone its reports were to spin and manipulation. This was “the dark side of intelligence,” writes Drogin, adding that the CIA’s leaders took a calculated risk when they chose not to reveal their doubts before the invasion of Iraq. Once U.S. troops reached Baghdad and found the stockpiled weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), they figured, “no one would remember a bogus defector.”
Whatever Hussein’s ultimate plans were, a postwar search of Iraq found no WMDs of any kind. When the hunters returned empty-handed, the public wanted to know why. Curveball is the sad answer.
How this Iraqi defector entered the intelligence firmament and successfully exploited the spy apparatus is the first question Drogin answers in his book. He gracefully describes how fear of Hussein’s military ambition, before and after Sept. 11, led the West’s spy agencies to listen to Curveball; how the historic friction between the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency left him Unchallenged; and how the stubborn inability of their leaders to come clean about this mistake left his lies tucked into important intelligence reports that were used as the basis for war.
From the Iraqi defector’s point of view, he landed on the German spy agency’s doorstep at a most opportune time. Hussein had had a long and well-known love affair with chemical and biological weapons. During the later stages of its war with Iran in the 1980s, Iraq unleashed chemical weapons, such as mustard gas, against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.N. Security Council ordered Iraq to surrender its WMDs, and inspectors found thousands of chemical munitions. In 1995, the Iraqi government admitted researching biological weapons; in 1996, U.N. engineers destroyed what was believed to be a germ factory. In 1998, the inspectors, who had been the CIA’s eyes and ears, were thrown out of the country. There were few potential replacements; Hussein had pushed out or killed most of his opponents, and few in the Iraqi exile community could be trusted or had useful connections back home. As a top CIA official told Drogin, it was a period of nail-biting inertia, with the United States “almost in Chapter 11 in terms of our human intelligence collection.”
Still, most officials believed that Hussein still had a bioweapons program brewing. They just needed someone to help them find it. The “mind-set was we’re going to see the WMD,” retired Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, then director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, tells Drogin. “I don’t know anybody who didn’t believe it was there.”
Curveball filled in the frame for these true believers, offering intricate diagrams of germ-making equipment, fermenters, mixing vats, controllers and all sorts of ghastly things. The diagrams, Drogin notes, “were plausible,” even though they couldn’t be reverse-engineered to “brew anthrax” or “build a bio-lab in a garage.”
Drogin tells Curveball’s story with an eye toward intrigue. He keeps the pace moving, even as he catalogs the snowballing intelligence blunders that kept this alcoholic and increasingly erratic source on the German agency’s payroll and ensured that his unverifiable information was dutifully sent up the chain. In a prime example of “Garbage in, garbage out,” his inconsistent information was “interpreted, summarized, reformatted and analyzed at every stage,” notes Drogin, but it was never verified.
The author also illuminates the way in which human frailty infected the intelligence-gathering process. He makes clear that the CIA and the Germans allowed their mission to be corrupted by ego and an inability to admit mistakes. The Germans failed to act, Drogin writes, because doing so would have put “[c]areers and pensions” at stake. CIA leaders worried that “backtracking” would throw into doubt “two years of classified reports and threat assessments” and briefings given to the White House and Congress. It would also “embarrass the CIA,” writes Drogin, and mean that the agency “didn’t back a crucial part of the White House case for war.”
Had doubters decided to “burn” Curveball as a source and retract the tainted intelligence trail he spawned, the Bush administration would have had a much harder time making its public case for war. Instead, his assertions became the centerpiece for the administration’s push.
When the vice president’s office gave then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell a draft for his prewar U.N. speech featuring “a laundry list of unconfirmed rumors based on dubious evidence,” Powell turned to the CIA to help unravel fact from fiction. But Drogin reveals that CIA skeptics chose not to wave Powell off Curveball. Instead, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet assured everyone that the information was “totally reliable,” Powell recalls.
When Powell took the podium in February 2003, Drogin writes, “Virtually every word … was coming from Curveball, although he wisely didn’t mention the odd code name.”
Even if the CIA had come clean about Curveball’s problems, Drogin makes it clear that it might not have changed the course of history. Information meant to confirm the mobile weapons lab, from a second Iraqi defector who was clearly “deemed a fabricator,” also made its way into the administration’s case for war. And there was a growing sense among U.S. spies who were trying to steer the administration away from its reliance on Curveball’s lies that they were unlikely to prevent the war. “Let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about,” e-mailed one supervisor to a frustrated CIA whistle-blower.
In the end, Drogin may overstate Curveball’s importance when he calls him “the con man who caused a war.” But there is little doubt, after reading Drogin’s well-written and researched book, that this chain-smoking charlatan provided just the pretext the Bush administration needed when it decided the deed had to be done.
–
EXCERPT: To read Chapter 1 of “Curveball,” go to latimes.com /curveball.
By Kit R. Roane
October 21, 2007 in print edition R-4
Who’s to blame for America’s ill-advised invasion of Iraq? A few well-known public officials likely come to mind. But in “Curveball,” Bob Drogin points to another culprit, a man one wouldn’t think could merit a footnote in such an expansive policy but who became a crucial linchpin for all that followed.
Known as “Curveball” to the Western intelligence community, he was just another Iraqi asylum seeker when he flew to Germany in November 1999. But what he had to say set him apart. Curveball “wanted to share a secret,” Drogin, the national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes. “Biowaffen” was the word that made it into German intelligence reports. Germ weapons to you and me.
It was explosive stuff. Curveball was seen as a one-in-a-thousand find, a talkative chemical engineer who had helped design and build Saddam Hussein’s mobile germ warfare program and could sketch out the proof for all to see. His information changed the focus of America’s spy agencies, infected their analysis of the threat posed by Hussein and in the end became the Bush administration’s hammer in its call for war on Iraq.
But Curveball was lying. Worse, Drogin shows, many people who doubted him, including some at high levels in the U.S. government, didn’t seem to care. He gave them “evidence” for a theory they already believed and became the needed spark for a war they’d already planned.
“Curveball,” based on reporting Drogin and others did for The Times, is a sad illumination of just how dysfunctional the West’s spy apparatus had become and how prone its reports were to spin and manipulation. This was “the dark side of intelligence,” writes Drogin, adding that the CIA’s leaders took a calculated risk when they chose not to reveal their doubts before the invasion of Iraq. Once U.S. troops reached Baghdad and found the stockpiled weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), they figured, “no one would remember a bogus defector.”
Whatever Hussein’s ultimate plans were, a postwar search of Iraq found no WMDs of any kind. When the hunters returned empty-handed, the public wanted to know why. Curveball is the sad answer.
How this Iraqi defector entered the intelligence firmament and successfully exploited the spy apparatus is the first question Drogin answers in his book. He gracefully describes how fear of Hussein’s military ambition, before and after Sept. 11, led the West’s spy agencies to listen to Curveball; how the historic friction between the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency left him Unchallenged; and how the stubborn inability of their leaders to come clean about this mistake left his lies tucked into important intelligence reports that were used as the basis for war.
From the Iraqi defector’s point of view, he landed on the German spy agency’s doorstep at a most opportune time. Hussein had had a long and well-known love affair with chemical and biological weapons. During the later stages of its war with Iran in the 1980s, Iraq unleashed chemical weapons, such as mustard gas, against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.N. Security Council ordered Iraq to surrender its WMDs, and inspectors found thousands of chemical munitions. In 1995, the Iraqi government admitted researching biological weapons; in 1996, U.N. engineers destroyed what was believed to be a germ factory. In 1998, the inspectors, who had been the CIA’s eyes and ears, were thrown out of the country. There were few potential replacements; Hussein had pushed out or killed most of his opponents, and few in the Iraqi exile community could be trusted or had useful connections back home. As a top CIA official told Drogin, it was a period of nail-biting inertia, with the United States “almost in Chapter 11 in terms of our human intelligence collection.”
Still, most officials believed that Hussein still had a bioweapons program brewing. They just needed someone to help them find it. The “mind-set was we’re going to see the WMD,” retired Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, then director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, tells Drogin. “I don’t know anybody who didn’t believe it was there.”
Curveball filled in the frame for these true believers, offering intricate diagrams of germ-making equipment, fermenters, mixing vats, controllers and all sorts of ghastly things. The diagrams, Drogin notes, “were plausible,” even though they couldn’t be reverse-engineered to “brew anthrax” or “build a bio-lab in a garage.”
Drogin tells Curveball’s story with an eye toward intrigue. He keeps the pace moving, even as he catalogs the snowballing intelligence blunders that kept this alcoholic and increasingly erratic source on the German agency’s payroll and ensured that his unverifiable information was dutifully sent up the chain. In a prime example of “Garbage in, garbage out,” his inconsistent information was “interpreted, summarized, reformatted and analyzed at every stage,” notes Drogin, but it was never verified.
The author also illuminates the way in which human frailty infected the intelligence-gathering process. He makes clear that the CIA and the Germans allowed their mission to be corrupted by ego and an inability to admit mistakes. The Germans failed to act, Drogin writes, because doing so would have put “[c]areers and pensions” at stake. CIA leaders worried that “backtracking” would throw into doubt “two years of classified reports and threat assessments” and briefings given to the White House and Congress. It would also “embarrass the CIA,” writes Drogin, and mean that the agency “didn’t back a crucial part of the White House case for war.”
Had doubters decided to “burn” Curveball as a source and retract the tainted intelligence trail he spawned, the Bush administration would have had a much harder time making its public case for war. Instead, his assertions became the centerpiece for the administration’s push.
When the vice president’s office gave then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell a draft for his prewar U.N. speech featuring “a laundry list of unconfirmed rumors based on dubious evidence,” Powell turned to the CIA to help unravel fact from fiction. But Drogin reveals that CIA skeptics chose not to wave Powell off Curveball. Instead, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet assured everyone that the information was “totally reliable,” Powell recalls.
When Powell took the podium in February 2003, Drogin writes, “Virtually every word … was coming from Curveball, although he wisely didn’t mention the odd code name.”
Even if the CIA had come clean about Curveball’s problems, Drogin makes it clear that it might not have changed the course of history. Information meant to confirm the mobile weapons lab, from a second Iraqi defector who was clearly “deemed a fabricator,” also made its way into the administration’s case for war. And there was a growing sense among U.S. spies who were trying to steer the administration away from its reliance on Curveball’s lies that they were unlikely to prevent the war. “Let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about,” e-mailed one supervisor to a frustrated CIA whistle-blower.
In the end, Drogin may overstate Curveball’s importance when he calls him “the con man who caused a war.” But there is little doubt, after reading Drogin’s well-written and researched book, that this chain-smoking charlatan provided just the pretext the Bush administration needed when it decided the deed had to be done.
–
EXCERPT: To read Chapter 1 of “Curveball,” go to latimes.com /curveball.
Embedded - Last One In
Embedded - Last One In A Novel Nicholas Kulish Ecco/Harper
Perennial: 264 pp., $13.95 paper
By Kit R. Roane
July 15, 2007 in print edition R-7
I did not meet anyone like Jimmy Stephens during my journey through Iraq in 2003. But I don’t doubt that the sharply carved protagonist of “Last One In,” a down-on-his-luck New York gossip columnist with a taste for velvet jackets and sushi from Nobu, lurked somewhere among the hundreds of often wide-eyed and ill-prepared journalists sent to cover the American-led invasion.
This invasion was perhaps the first to invite everybody to the show, and few declined. For me, nothing summed up the peculiar reporting atmosphere more than when I happened upon an MTV crew inside a Marine encampment in the Kuwaiti desert. The music channel, known for pimping rap artists’ rides and chronicling the selfish little lives of 16-year-old rich kids, had sent a motley Gen Y crew to probe the innermost thoughts of some Marines playing cards. And the crew members didn’t want company, shooting me several annoyed looks before one of them questioned my purpose there, chewed on my answer for a minute, and responded, “That’s cool, man. I dig it.”
I was glad he dug it too, because in a war that has turned reason on its head, this twentysomething MTV producer might have had the clout to get me booted from the camp because I was not an embedded reporter. These were MTV’s Marines, after all, and I was just passing through.
Nicholas Kulish, a fellow journalist I met in Kuwait through a mutual friend and with whom I’ve shared a few laughs since, has picked up on this absurdity in his debut novel, “Last One In,” and has deftly built a readable and compelling satire of both an ill-planned war and the many naive reporters who covered the invasion.
The book in some ways is an Iraq version of Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop,” another satire that hinges on the angle of a journalist becoming an accidental war correspondent. But in Kulish’s novel, it is no accident that Jimmy is sent to war – it’s payback.
Jimmy, you see, has gotten himself into a classic reporting jam. In an attempt to salvage his career at New York’s Daily Herald, the insecure tabloid reporter files a half-baked scoop that turns out to be his undoing. The subject of the exclusive, an A-list celebrity, takes issue with Jimmy’s description of him being pleasured by a cocktail waitress in the Nobu men’s room and threatens to sue the paper. Jimmy knows he’s a dead man walking. Then happenstance, somewhat unhappily, intercedes.
On the verge of the Iraq war, the Daily Herald’s one seasoned war correspondent – who’s also named James Stephens – is run over by a Manhattan delivery truck. Suddenly, Jimmy can step into the breach or pack his things into a cardboard box and kiss his expense account goodbye. More troubling for Jimmy is that his failure to take the new assignment will also lead to collateral damage, likely costing his debt-ridden section editor his job. “A feeling that rarely troubled Jimmy settled over him,” writes Kulish of the moment Jimmy realizes he holds two lives in his hand. “It was shame.”
This act of uncharacteristic empathy secures Jimmy a front-row seat at the war, a campaign we watch spiral out of control as he slowly sheds his gossip columnist skin and stumbles upon the war correspondent within. The trajectory of the war will be well-known to readers, as cocky hubris gives way to the bleak realities on the ground, where the term “quagmire” goes from being a bored reporter’s catchy prediction to an infantry soldier’s inescapable fact.
Jimmy’s own personal arc is also never in doubt. But the author manages to make it a gripping journey, even if its basic roadmap is unsurprising. Kulish, the son of a military man, was working for the Wall Street Journal when he was sent to cover the Iraq war as an embedded reporter with a Marine attack-helicopter squadron. Although Kulish didn’t traipse through the war zone in an infantry unit, he has an ear for the infantryman’s cadence and occasional crude sense of humor. He has nailed the cynical egotism and self-importance that defines many a war correspondent as well, clearly patterning some of his characters after real-life participants. Case in point, a corpulent French photographer who grills Jimmy over breakfast: “I will call you Louis, like the king,” he cracks, while munching on veal bacon, “because your head and body will go home separate.”
Such spot-on dialogue helps make the “Last One In” a good romp, an entertaining road trip that keeps the reader yearning for Jimmy’s next flub. But Kulish, now an editorial writer for the New York Times, takes the book up a notch, marking this journey with insightful commentary, writing at length, for instance, on the oddity of a war in which death knocked “from three football fields away,” and “the scythe was the invisible arc of each projectile, calculated against prevailing winds by whoever was charting the square of metal hail.”
In the end, we are as happy to see Jimmy’s redemption as we are saddened to see its cause – the soldiers he has slowly befriended starting to die. For weeks, Jimmy had worried only about himself with an “egotism worth noting in a textbook somewhere,” writes Kulish. “Now, he threw up, puked his guts out under the tires of a high-backed Humvee, more scared than he’d ever been. Fear for one is only so big, but fear for dozens or hundreds was too much.” Many of Iraq’s newly minted war correspondents would agree.
By Kit R. Roane
July 15, 2007 in print edition R-7
I did not meet anyone like Jimmy Stephens during my journey through Iraq in 2003. But I don’t doubt that the sharply carved protagonist of “Last One In,” a down-on-his-luck New York gossip columnist with a taste for velvet jackets and sushi from Nobu, lurked somewhere among the hundreds of often wide-eyed and ill-prepared journalists sent to cover the American-led invasion.
This invasion was perhaps the first to invite everybody to the show, and few declined. For me, nothing summed up the peculiar reporting atmosphere more than when I happened upon an MTV crew inside a Marine encampment in the Kuwaiti desert. The music channel, known for pimping rap artists’ rides and chronicling the selfish little lives of 16-year-old rich kids, had sent a motley Gen Y crew to probe the innermost thoughts of some Marines playing cards. And the crew members didn’t want company, shooting me several annoyed looks before one of them questioned my purpose there, chewed on my answer for a minute, and responded, “That’s cool, man. I dig it.”
I was glad he dug it too, because in a war that has turned reason on its head, this twentysomething MTV producer might have had the clout to get me booted from the camp because I was not an embedded reporter. These were MTV’s Marines, after all, and I was just passing through.
Nicholas Kulish, a fellow journalist I met in Kuwait through a mutual friend and with whom I’ve shared a few laughs since, has picked up on this absurdity in his debut novel, “Last One In,” and has deftly built a readable and compelling satire of both an ill-planned war and the many naive reporters who covered the invasion.
The book in some ways is an Iraq version of Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop,” another satire that hinges on the angle of a journalist becoming an accidental war correspondent. But in Kulish’s novel, it is no accident that Jimmy is sent to war – it’s payback.
Jimmy, you see, has gotten himself into a classic reporting jam. In an attempt to salvage his career at New York’s Daily Herald, the insecure tabloid reporter files a half-baked scoop that turns out to be his undoing. The subject of the exclusive, an A-list celebrity, takes issue with Jimmy’s description of him being pleasured by a cocktail waitress in the Nobu men’s room and threatens to sue the paper. Jimmy knows he’s a dead man walking. Then happenstance, somewhat unhappily, intercedes.
On the verge of the Iraq war, the Daily Herald’s one seasoned war correspondent – who’s also named James Stephens – is run over by a Manhattan delivery truck. Suddenly, Jimmy can step into the breach or pack his things into a cardboard box and kiss his expense account goodbye. More troubling for Jimmy is that his failure to take the new assignment will also lead to collateral damage, likely costing his debt-ridden section editor his job. “A feeling that rarely troubled Jimmy settled over him,” writes Kulish of the moment Jimmy realizes he holds two lives in his hand. “It was shame.”
This act of uncharacteristic empathy secures Jimmy a front-row seat at the war, a campaign we watch spiral out of control as he slowly sheds his gossip columnist skin and stumbles upon the war correspondent within. The trajectory of the war will be well-known to readers, as cocky hubris gives way to the bleak realities on the ground, where the term “quagmire” goes from being a bored reporter’s catchy prediction to an infantry soldier’s inescapable fact.
Jimmy’s own personal arc is also never in doubt. But the author manages to make it a gripping journey, even if its basic roadmap is unsurprising. Kulish, the son of a military man, was working for the Wall Street Journal when he was sent to cover the Iraq war as an embedded reporter with a Marine attack-helicopter squadron. Although Kulish didn’t traipse through the war zone in an infantry unit, he has an ear for the infantryman’s cadence and occasional crude sense of humor. He has nailed the cynical egotism and self-importance that defines many a war correspondent as well, clearly patterning some of his characters after real-life participants. Case in point, a corpulent French photographer who grills Jimmy over breakfast: “I will call you Louis, like the king,” he cracks, while munching on veal bacon, “because your head and body will go home separate.”
Such spot-on dialogue helps make the “Last One In” a good romp, an entertaining road trip that keeps the reader yearning for Jimmy’s next flub. But Kulish, now an editorial writer for the New York Times, takes the book up a notch, marking this journey with insightful commentary, writing at length, for instance, on the oddity of a war in which death knocked “from three football fields away,” and “the scythe was the invisible arc of each projectile, calculated against prevailing winds by whoever was charting the square of metal hail.”
In the end, we are as happy to see Jimmy’s redemption as we are saddened to see its cause – the soldiers he has slowly befriended starting to die. For weeks, Jimmy had worried only about himself with an “egotism worth noting in a textbook somewhere,” writes Kulish. “Now, he threw up, puked his guts out under the tires of a high-backed Humvee, more scared than he’d ever been. Fear for one is only so big, but fear for dozens or hundreds was too much.” Many of Iraq’s newly minted war correspondents would agree.
U.S. Forces Learn A Hard Lesson In Sadr City
U.S. forces learn a hard lesson in Sadr
City
By Kit R. Roane
March 16, 2007 in print edition E-18
WHEN the United States invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, the media took some deserved lumps for cheerleading instead of reporting. It all seemed pretty easy in the beginning: Superior force and speed won over poorly trained troops and antiquated equipment. Few Americans were dying and few Iraqis were left living in the U.S. advance to provide another point of view.
Martha Raddatz enters the story further down the line, after the long slog of war has begun wiping the smiles off even the most optimistic commentators. It is April 4, 2004. The insurgency has found its stride, and U.S. military personnel are being cut down like cordwood. “The Long Road Home” is the ABC News reporter’s fast-paced narrative of how some of these soldiers struggled to survive when their routine patrol of a Baghdad slum went terribly wrong, forever changing the lives of those involved and signaling a new phase in the violent resistance to U.S. occupation of Iraq.
The statistics for what became known as “Black Sunday” are depressing enough: eight soldiers dead, more than 60 wounded and more than 500 Iraqis dead (the Iraqi casualties were mainly insurgents but did include innocent men, women and children). As Raddatz notes, “Black Sunday” was only the beginning of the 1st Cavalry Division’s deadly tour. After its year-long deployment, 168 of its soldiers were dead and more than 1,900 were wounded.
It’s not a pretty narrative, nor should it be. But it is perhaps a worthwhile description for the American public to confront. In some ways, even in 2007, we are about as prepared for what is happening in Iraq as Col. Robert Abrams was when he first saw, under the ghostly glare of some grimy headlights at Camp War Eagle, the dead and dying soldiers he had led there a few days earlier. He watched “the splayed black hole of a gunshot wound here, the rip of shrapnel there,” as medics hurried to probe “chunks of splintered bone, extract bits of steel, and bundle and bind wayward intestines.”
Abrams, Raddatz explains, “had never once in twenty-two years of service heard a gun fired in battle, never seen a soldier wounded in combat or watched a soldier die. He would see it all this night.”
We see it too in gruesome glory, gussied up at points by the valiant heroism of the players. Although this is Raddatz’s first book, the three-time Emmy Award winner has written a real page turner, with a cinematic pace and screenplay structure destined for Hollywood. Compared with and not unlike Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down” – the exquisite dissection of the failed 1993 U.S. bid to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid – “The Long Road Home” has at its disposal a cast of strong characters, from the sinister and charismatic Shiite leader, Muqtada Sadr, to the cool-headed Lt. Shane Aguero, whose platoon is pinned down and facing “waves of armed militia” as others from the 1st Calvary battle through the treacherous urban war zone to save them.
Rounding out the cast are the soldiers’ well-behaved children praying for the return of their fathers and the feisty, strong-willed and wise women left at home. As the bullets whiz around him, Aguero remembers his wife’s parting request: “In every war, there is always a platoon that gets pinned down. Don’t let that be your platoon.”
But it is his platoon. The only relevant question now, Aguero thinks to himself as he watches a little bird streak across a “patch of darkening blue sky,” is whether “we’re going to die in this
“The Long Road Home” is also an exciting read. Though images like the bird may be layering things on a bit thickly, and some potentially rich characters, such as Sadr, are left in the background, Raddatz excels at driving the story from the fateful command that landed Aguero in this mess through the attacks, mishaps and deadly rescue attempts. The author does so deftly without losing the humanity of the story. The tale of “Black Sunday” could easily have digressed into a series of melodramatic moments or fallen victim to the machismo that infects some writing about war. Some bits of internal dialogue sound obvious or seem wooden, but she takes pains to maintain the right tone, seamlessly weaving the bloody reality of the war front with the stories and worries of those left behind at home.
We are in that Humvee when the seemingly unstoppable Dusty Hiller, a new father, is shot in the neck and slumps over his steering wheel, the smell of “a butcher shop” permeating the acrid air as he bleeds dry. And we are with his wife, Lesley Hiller, when she gets the fateful knock on the front door from the base chaplain, “frantic, panic-stricken,” yelling that he’s got the wrong house, screaming and crying, as she tries to slam the door and prevent the inevitable news that “[h]er Dusty, her sweet husband,” is gone.
The question prompted by this book is whether all of this had to happen, whether better planning and execution could have mitigated the disaster that unfolded. There’s a feeling of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” embedded in the mix – a sense that someone blundered but that the soldiers had neither the time nor inclination to reason why: “Theirs but to do and die,” as the poem says.
Raddatz leaves us the markers to make conclusions but never pieces them together in any form of indictment. Still it is clear that the usual mix of bad decisions by commanders in the rear and a lack of intelligence on the ground helped create the mess. Department of Defense directives against soldiers having “boots on the ground” in Iraq for longer than a year meant that the experienced soldiers leaving the part of Baghdad known as Sadr City didn’t have a chance to pass along their survival techniques or intelligence information to the “Black Sunday” soldiers replacing them. And despite every indication that Sadr City was “a volcano ready to explode,” the Army pushed forward in the belief that the soldiers were on a humanitarian mission, busy with reconstruction projects and sucking up the knee-high slop of sewage that ran through this teeming Baghdad slum of 2.5 million people. This was “a babysitting mission,” therefore, much of the heavy armor was left at home.
Decisions on the ground didn’t help matters. Bravery trumped reason as rescue teams jumped into canvas-topped Humvees and open supply trucks lacking radio communication gear. There was no warning or much protection when they entered the “kill zone” and the bullets began hitting “like rain pounding a puddle.” With Raddatz eschewing much critical analysis of the events that unfolded, we are left to pray that the Army has devoted at least a PowerPoint presentation or two to the lessons revealed in “The Long Road Home.”
*
Kit R. Roane, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, was one of a handful of unembedded journalists who went to Baghdad with advancing U.S. and coalition forces in 2003.
By Kit R. Roane
March 16, 2007 in print edition E-18
WHEN the United States invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, the media took some deserved lumps for cheerleading instead of reporting. It all seemed pretty easy in the beginning: Superior force and speed won over poorly trained troops and antiquated equipment. Few Americans were dying and few Iraqis were left living in the U.S. advance to provide another point of view.
Martha Raddatz enters the story further down the line, after the long slog of war has begun wiping the smiles off even the most optimistic commentators. It is April 4, 2004. The insurgency has found its stride, and U.S. military personnel are being cut down like cordwood. “The Long Road Home” is the ABC News reporter’s fast-paced narrative of how some of these soldiers struggled to survive when their routine patrol of a Baghdad slum went terribly wrong, forever changing the lives of those involved and signaling a new phase in the violent resistance to U.S. occupation of Iraq.
The statistics for what became known as “Black Sunday” are depressing enough: eight soldiers dead, more than 60 wounded and more than 500 Iraqis dead (the Iraqi casualties were mainly insurgents but did include innocent men, women and children). As Raddatz notes, “Black Sunday” was only the beginning of the 1st Cavalry Division’s deadly tour. After its year-long deployment, 168 of its soldiers were dead and more than 1,900 were wounded.
It’s not a pretty narrative, nor should it be. But it is perhaps a worthwhile description for the American public to confront. In some ways, even in 2007, we are about as prepared for what is happening in Iraq as Col. Robert Abrams was when he first saw, under the ghostly glare of some grimy headlights at Camp War Eagle, the dead and dying soldiers he had led there a few days earlier. He watched “the splayed black hole of a gunshot wound here, the rip of shrapnel there,” as medics hurried to probe “chunks of splintered bone, extract bits of steel, and bundle and bind wayward intestines.”
Abrams, Raddatz explains, “had never once in twenty-two years of service heard a gun fired in battle, never seen a soldier wounded in combat or watched a soldier die. He would see it all this night.”
We see it too in gruesome glory, gussied up at points by the valiant heroism of the players. Although this is Raddatz’s first book, the three-time Emmy Award winner has written a real page turner, with a cinematic pace and screenplay structure destined for Hollywood. Compared with and not unlike Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down” – the exquisite dissection of the failed 1993 U.S. bid to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid – “The Long Road Home” has at its disposal a cast of strong characters, from the sinister and charismatic Shiite leader, Muqtada Sadr, to the cool-headed Lt. Shane Aguero, whose platoon is pinned down and facing “waves of armed militia” as others from the 1st Calvary battle through the treacherous urban war zone to save them.
Rounding out the cast are the soldiers’ well-behaved children praying for the return of their fathers and the feisty, strong-willed and wise women left at home. As the bullets whiz around him, Aguero remembers his wife’s parting request: “In every war, there is always a platoon that gets pinned down. Don’t let that be your platoon.”
But it is his platoon. The only relevant question now, Aguero thinks to himself as he watches a little bird streak across a “patch of darkening blue sky,” is whether “we’re going to die in this
“The Long Road Home” is also an exciting read. Though images like the bird may be layering things on a bit thickly, and some potentially rich characters, such as Sadr, are left in the background, Raddatz excels at driving the story from the fateful command that landed Aguero in this mess through the attacks, mishaps and deadly rescue attempts. The author does so deftly without losing the humanity of the story. The tale of “Black Sunday” could easily have digressed into a series of melodramatic moments or fallen victim to the machismo that infects some writing about war. Some bits of internal dialogue sound obvious or seem wooden, but she takes pains to maintain the right tone, seamlessly weaving the bloody reality of the war front with the stories and worries of those left behind at home.
We are in that Humvee when the seemingly unstoppable Dusty Hiller, a new father, is shot in the neck and slumps over his steering wheel, the smell of “a butcher shop” permeating the acrid air as he bleeds dry. And we are with his wife, Lesley Hiller, when she gets the fateful knock on the front door from the base chaplain, “frantic, panic-stricken,” yelling that he’s got the wrong house, screaming and crying, as she tries to slam the door and prevent the inevitable news that “[h]er Dusty, her sweet husband,” is gone.
The question prompted by this book is whether all of this had to happen, whether better planning and execution could have mitigated the disaster that unfolded. There’s a feeling of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” embedded in the mix – a sense that someone blundered but that the soldiers had neither the time nor inclination to reason why: “Theirs but to do and die,” as the poem says.
Raddatz leaves us the markers to make conclusions but never pieces them together in any form of indictment. Still it is clear that the usual mix of bad decisions by commanders in the rear and a lack of intelligence on the ground helped create the mess. Department of Defense directives against soldiers having “boots on the ground” in Iraq for longer than a year meant that the experienced soldiers leaving the part of Baghdad known as Sadr City didn’t have a chance to pass along their survival techniques or intelligence information to the “Black Sunday” soldiers replacing them. And despite every indication that Sadr City was “a volcano ready to explode,” the Army pushed forward in the belief that the soldiers were on a humanitarian mission, busy with reconstruction projects and sucking up the knee-high slop of sewage that ran through this teeming Baghdad slum of 2.5 million people. This was “a babysitting mission,” therefore, much of the heavy armor was left at home.
Decisions on the ground didn’t help matters. Bravery trumped reason as rescue teams jumped into canvas-topped Humvees and open supply trucks lacking radio communication gear. There was no warning or much protection when they entered the “kill zone” and the bullets began hitting “like rain pounding a puddle.” With Raddatz eschewing much critical analysis of the events that unfolded, we are left to pray that the Army has devoted at least a PowerPoint presentation or two to the lessons revealed in “The Long Road Home.”
*
Kit R. Roane, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, was one of a handful of unembedded journalists who went to Baghdad with advancing U.S. and coalition forces in 2003.
Intelligent Dissent
Intelligent dissent
By Kit R. Roane
February 04, 2007 in print edition R-3
I didn’t expect to be surprised by Edward Humes’ “Monkey Girl.” In many ways, I’d already lived it. My teenage years were spent in a relatively rural area of East Texas, where a God of a decidedly fundamentalist stripe held sway. A pastor’s view seemed behind nearly everything my peers said and about half of what they did. Although I wasn’t particularly religious, religion was not something I could escape. To date that pretty girl, I had to go a few rounds at her father’s Baptist church. When a good friend of mine – the first to get me drunk – found Jesus, he expected me to come along for the ride.
So I know the pervasive power of religious fundamentalism in America. Or at least I thought I did. Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has opened my eyes. I only wish I could close them again.
“Monkey Girl” is the story of the Dover, Pa., school board’s attempt in 2004 to “balance” the well-tested scientific theory of evolution with a faith-based version of human origins. The board’s headlong plunge into an expensive legal battle for the souls of Dover’s young people makes for an explosive and colorful read. The contest pitted a pregnant Sunday-school teacher, who knew religion when she saw it and didn’t want it in science class, against a former cop steeped in creationism and OxyContin. His withdrawal from the drug would be blamed for some of the less-than-Christian treatment of his evolutionarily inclined opponents, who were verbally and profanely bludgeoned for trying to keep Dover’s science classrooms religion-free.
Although Humes attempts to keep an even keel in reporting on this maelstrom, he clearly has a hard time finding much good to say about some of evolution’s opponents, expressing amazement at the “near-total incuriosity and ignorance” of a board member who admitted “chirpily” on the stand that she was opposed to a science she didn’t understand and was helping to ram through a creationist textbook she had never actually read. Such displays, he adds, shocked even the presiding judge, a conservative jurist and devout Christian – and, indeed, he ended by ruling against the school board.
Humes is a good storyteller, and “Monkey Girl” (the title refers to the epithet schoolmates hurled at the daughter of one of the board’s opponents) is full of vivid descriptions and interesting facts. Were you aware, for instance, that the 1925 Scopes trial, a litmus test for a Tennessee law that criminalized the teaching of evolution, was ginned up at a Dayton, Tenn., drugstore by town leaders who wanted to revive Dayton’s moribund economy with a show trial? John T. Scopes, the high school football coach and a part-time science teacher, agreed to help, Humes writes, because “it sounded like great fun.”
Where Humes especially shines is in his careful explication of the history of this larger fight over how human beings arose and what God’s role – if any – was in their creation. The Dover case was more than simply a reflection of the poor state of the U.S. educational system or an illumination of how religion and science might collide in one small town. Instead, Humes explains, it was the latest salvo in a long-standing war on evolutionary thought that can be traced back to 1859 and Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the subject, “The Origin of Species” – a book that, in the eyes of most believers, threatened to turn God’s masterpiece into “nothing more than a happy accident
Though it’s easy to see why Darwin’s theory continues to agitate those inclined toward biblical literalism, Humes points out that many faiths – Roman Catholicism, for example – have come to terms with evolution. Those who don’t accept Darwin’s premise often mischaracterize it; for instance, Darwin never said that human beings were descended from monkeys, despite this favored refrain of the creationists. Humes also notes that those who embrace the Bible’s account of human origins might find more contradictions or gaps there than they would like. Though the Bible’s moral lessons are timeless, Genesis, if taken literally, soon becomes contradictory, claiming at one point that man and woman were created simultaneously and at another that Eve was made sometime later, from Adam’s rib.
In Dover and elsewhere, the anti-evolution argument was carried forward by a bit of ingenious hocus-pocus called “intelligent design,” a theory that is little more than creationism in new, more complicated clothing. Championed by a retired UC Berkeley law professor named Phillip E. Johnson and the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, intelligent design is brilliant mainly for what it doesn’t say. Explicit references to God are eliminated. Instead, intelligent-design advocates insist that gaps in evolutionary data equal flaws in evolutionary theory. Their mantra has been to “teach the controversy,” eschewing direct religious connotations in favor of emphasizing life’s “irreducible complexity,” which, they argue, points toward the hand of a mysterious force, an intelligent designer.
Johnson exhibits little of the fire and brimstone of his creationist counterparts. But Humes demonstrates that beneath the gentle exterior lurks the mind of a trial lawyer, one bent on the destruction of evolutionary theory. Humes explains Johnson’s game plan thus: “Hammer the wedge into the tree of science hard enough,
In support of this reading, Humes cites the Discovery Institute’s 1998 “Wedge Document,” which promises to replace evolutionary materialism with “a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” The primary educational text of the intelligent-design movement, “Of Pandas and People,” began life as a creationist tome called “Creation Biology,” and the title, Humes notes, was just about the only thing changed in the book after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that creation science wasn’t a science. The other updates consisted of such things as stripping out references to creation and creationism and replacing them with the phrase “intelligent design.”
Humes’ conclusion is that none of these facts may matter in the end. The ultimate veracity of evolutionary theory and the mountains of geologic and genetic evidence supporting it mean little to true believers. These evolutionary doubters, Humes notes, include about 25% of the nation’s science teachers. The apocalyptic “Left Behind” series, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, remains a bestseller, and creationist Kent Hovind’s homespun arguments against the evidence for evolution provided by the fossil record (“If I got buried on top of a hamster, does that prove he’s my grandpa?”) still raise the roof on tour. Nor are believers dissuaded by the numerous court decisions that have tossed religious interpretations of human origins out of science classes.
In what must come as a cruel twist to evolutionists, nature may carry part of the blame here. Recent evidence, Humes writes, suggests that human beings are “genetically disposed to believe in mysteries, miracles, God, and faith.”
But whatever the cause of this stubborn persistence of belief, it is certain that the Dover court’s decision will not mark the end of the battle over evolution. *
By Kit R. Roane
February 04, 2007 in print edition R-3
I didn’t expect to be surprised by Edward Humes’ “Monkey Girl.” In many ways, I’d already lived it. My teenage years were spent in a relatively rural area of East Texas, where a God of a decidedly fundamentalist stripe held sway. A pastor’s view seemed behind nearly everything my peers said and about half of what they did. Although I wasn’t particularly religious, religion was not something I could escape. To date that pretty girl, I had to go a few rounds at her father’s Baptist church. When a good friend of mine – the first to get me drunk – found Jesus, he expected me to come along for the ride.
So I know the pervasive power of religious fundamentalism in America. Or at least I thought I did. Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has opened my eyes. I only wish I could close them again.
“Monkey Girl” is the story of the Dover, Pa., school board’s attempt in 2004 to “balance” the well-tested scientific theory of evolution with a faith-based version of human origins. The board’s headlong plunge into an expensive legal battle for the souls of Dover’s young people makes for an explosive and colorful read. The contest pitted a pregnant Sunday-school teacher, who knew religion when she saw it and didn’t want it in science class, against a former cop steeped in creationism and OxyContin. His withdrawal from the drug would be blamed for some of the less-than-Christian treatment of his evolutionarily inclined opponents, who were verbally and profanely bludgeoned for trying to keep Dover’s science classrooms religion-free.
Although Humes attempts to keep an even keel in reporting on this maelstrom, he clearly has a hard time finding much good to say about some of evolution’s opponents, expressing amazement at the “near-total incuriosity and ignorance” of a board member who admitted “chirpily” on the stand that she was opposed to a science she didn’t understand and was helping to ram through a creationist textbook she had never actually read. Such displays, he adds, shocked even the presiding judge, a conservative jurist and devout Christian – and, indeed, he ended by ruling against the school board.
Humes is a good storyteller, and “Monkey Girl” (the title refers to the epithet schoolmates hurled at the daughter of one of the board’s opponents) is full of vivid descriptions and interesting facts. Were you aware, for instance, that the 1925 Scopes trial, a litmus test for a Tennessee law that criminalized the teaching of evolution, was ginned up at a Dayton, Tenn., drugstore by town leaders who wanted to revive Dayton’s moribund economy with a show trial? John T. Scopes, the high school football coach and a part-time science teacher, agreed to help, Humes writes, because “it sounded like great fun.”
Where Humes especially shines is in his careful explication of the history of this larger fight over how human beings arose and what God’s role – if any – was in their creation. The Dover case was more than simply a reflection of the poor state of the U.S. educational system or an illumination of how religion and science might collide in one small town. Instead, Humes explains, it was the latest salvo in a long-standing war on evolutionary thought that can be traced back to 1859 and Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the subject, “The Origin of Species” – a book that, in the eyes of most believers, threatened to turn God’s masterpiece into “nothing more than a happy accident
Though it’s easy to see why Darwin’s theory continues to agitate those inclined toward biblical literalism, Humes points out that many faiths – Roman Catholicism, for example – have come to terms with evolution. Those who don’t accept Darwin’s premise often mischaracterize it; for instance, Darwin never said that human beings were descended from monkeys, despite this favored refrain of the creationists. Humes also notes that those who embrace the Bible’s account of human origins might find more contradictions or gaps there than they would like. Though the Bible’s moral lessons are timeless, Genesis, if taken literally, soon becomes contradictory, claiming at one point that man and woman were created simultaneously and at another that Eve was made sometime later, from Adam’s rib.
In Dover and elsewhere, the anti-evolution argument was carried forward by a bit of ingenious hocus-pocus called “intelligent design,” a theory that is little more than creationism in new, more complicated clothing. Championed by a retired UC Berkeley law professor named Phillip E. Johnson and the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, intelligent design is brilliant mainly for what it doesn’t say. Explicit references to God are eliminated. Instead, intelligent-design advocates insist that gaps in evolutionary data equal flaws in evolutionary theory. Their mantra has been to “teach the controversy,” eschewing direct religious connotations in favor of emphasizing life’s “irreducible complexity,” which, they argue, points toward the hand of a mysterious force, an intelligent designer.
Johnson exhibits little of the fire and brimstone of his creationist counterparts. But Humes demonstrates that beneath the gentle exterior lurks the mind of a trial lawyer, one bent on the destruction of evolutionary theory. Humes explains Johnson’s game plan thus: “Hammer the wedge into the tree of science hard enough,
In support of this reading, Humes cites the Discovery Institute’s 1998 “Wedge Document,” which promises to replace evolutionary materialism with “a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” The primary educational text of the intelligent-design movement, “Of Pandas and People,” began life as a creationist tome called “Creation Biology,” and the title, Humes notes, was just about the only thing changed in the book after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that creation science wasn’t a science. The other updates consisted of such things as stripping out references to creation and creationism and replacing them with the phrase “intelligent design.”
Humes’ conclusion is that none of these facts may matter in the end. The ultimate veracity of evolutionary theory and the mountains of geologic and genetic evidence supporting it mean little to true believers. These evolutionary doubters, Humes notes, include about 25% of the nation’s science teachers. The apocalyptic “Left Behind” series, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, remains a bestseller, and creationist Kent Hovind’s homespun arguments against the evidence for evolution provided by the fossil record (“If I got buried on top of a hamster, does that prove he’s my grandpa?”) still raise the roof on tour. Nor are believers dissuaded by the numerous court decisions that have tossed religious interpretations of human origins out of science classes.
In what must come as a cruel twist to evolutionists, nature may carry part of the blame here. Recent evidence, Humes writes, suggests that human beings are “genetically disposed to believe in mysteries, miracles, God, and faith.”
But whatever the cause of this stubborn persistence of belief, it is certain that the Dover court’s decision will not mark the end of the battle over evolution. *
Myths Of A 9/11 Hero, Debunked
Myths of a 9/11 hero,
debunked
By Kit R. Roane
August 22, 2006 in print edition E-1
Note This article includes corrections to the original version.
Grand Illusion
The Untold Story of
Rudy Giuliani and 9/11
Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins
HarperCollins: 390 pp., $25.95
*
FEW reporters who covered New York City government during Rudolph W. Giuliani’s reign would dispute that the mayor saw himself as a powerful leader destined for greatness. But many were shocked when much of the country began to agree.
Giuliani was a lame duck when 2000 drew to a close, a mayor whose political stature was in a tailspin and whose private life was being rocked by illness and scandal. A local tabloid had revealed Giuliani’s long-term affair with a pharmaceutical sales manager, which led to an equally public call for divorce from his apoplectic wife. Meanwhile, prostate cancer had forced him from a tepid U.S. Senate campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton.
To Giuliani’s political enemies, this delicious farrago had been a long time coming. They relished the comeuppance of a man whose self-assured rhetoric often came off as mean-spirited bullying and who most often reacted angrily to criticism when he wasn’t being dismissive in the extreme. Many New Yorkers thought Giuliani would have had trouble being elected dogcatcher. Talk of a run for president of the United States would have been rich indeed. But as Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins note in “Grand Illusion,” their superb dissection of the reality behind the Giuliani myth-making after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: “What a difference a day made.”
When Islamic fundamentalists crashed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center on that crisp clear morning, causing New York’s signature towers to implode, they not only killed more than 2,700 Americans, they shook the faith of those left living. Solace was in short supply.
The only powerful force at work appeared to be Osama bin Laden, a terrorist mastermind of frightening proportion. America needed a hero, someone to reassure them that everything would be all right. But “the disaster had been so complete that there were remarkably few candidates for the role,” Barrett and Collins explain, adding that President Bush’s performance “was hardly the stuff of legend.” Into this breach stepped the shattered city’s mayor. When Giuliani walked before the cameras that day, stern-faced, calm and “covered in soot, he embodied the resolve of the nation.”
Giuliani’s dramatic showing during this time of crisis and his solemn attendance later at the scores of wakes across the city reignited his political torch. The praise showered on him was deafening. Everyone wanted to shake his hand. The queen of England knighted him. Time named him “person of the year” – beating Bush and Bin Laden. His boyhood dream of becoming president no longer seems so far-fetched; he is weighing a bid in 2008.
But although Giuliani’s “quick response and personal fearlessness
The city’s problems on Sept. 11 are now well known. Police officers and firefighters hardly communicated. With radios that didn’t operate between departments or work at all in steel high-rises, many firefighters didn’t get the final mayday call to evacuate the North Tower before it fell. Cut off from relevant information, emergency operators continued to tell victims in the tower to stay put even though top fire chiefs had called for a complete evacuation almost immediately after arriving on the scene. The list goes on. But somehow, the mayor has been able to escape much of the blame. Barrett and Collins now hold Giuliani accountable.
The focus of their ire is Giuliani’s claim that, although the magnitude of the attacks was unforeseeable, he had assumed from the moment he came into office in 1994 that terrorists would attack New York City and so he made the city’s emergency response a priority. There has been little in Giuliani’s record to support that claim. But “Grand Illusion” now reveals a record that directly contradicts it.
It is not that Giuliani wouldn’t have had reason to prepare. After all, terrorists had exploded a car bomb underneath one World Trade Center tower in 1993. But Barrett and Collins’ detailed research shows a mayor who utterly failed to grasp the importance of readying the city for another terrorist attack. Lou Anemone, the police department’s chief operating officer during much of Giuliani’s tenure, recalls trying to brief the mayor on a citywide terrorism security plan in 1998. “Rudy glazed over,” he said, adding: “We never had any discussion about security at the World Trade Center. We never even had a drill or exercise there
Anemone is not alone in making the assessment that Giuliani’s interests lay elsewhere. Barrett and Collins back up such charges against Giuliani with reams of documents and multiple human sources. This can’t help but slow the reader down. Some of their confirmations and details might have been better left in footnotes. But the wealth of material paints a clear picture of City Hall ineptitude in the face of continuing terrorist threats.
Some of the book’s sources may have an ax to grind. Giuliani dismissed one of them, New York’s current police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, when he became mayor in 1993. And some may have minimized their own failings. Jerome Hauer, Giuliani’s first director of the Office of Emergency Management prior to Sept. 11, is lauded by the authors for attempting to force the city’s notoriously antagonistic police and fire departments to work together. But Hauer also was intimately involved in some of the mayor’s biggest missteps, chief among them locating the city’s emergency command center in the World Trade Center complex.
In “Grand Illusion,” Hauer blames Giuliani for forcing him to build the center near City Hall. But it was Hauer who finally picked the location and then stumped for it. (When I broke the story of the command center plans in a June 13, 1998, article in the New York Times, which Barrett and Collins cite, Hauer expressed no reservations – on or off the record – about putting it on the 23rd floor of a building across the street from terrorists’ 1993 target. In fact, Hauer said the site was ideal, that the city needed “a facility that is survivable” and “that is this facility.”) The building housing the command center collapsed along with the twin towers that morning, contributing to many of the problems on the ground.
Luckily, “Grand Illusion” is too well-sourced for such concerns to be a major issue. The book handily punctures a hole in the myth of Giuliani as a praiseworthy terrorism czar who had prepared his city for the tragedy that unfolded. Although there is plenty of blame to go around, Giuliani, as mayor, set the tone of his administration and picked the people who would be counted on to respond appropriately. At both tasks, he failed miserably, the book shows, choosing politics over public safety.
“The facts – depressing but unavoidable – were that Giuliani had allowed the city to meet the disaster of September 11 unprepared in a myriad of ways,” write the authors, a statement that rings depressingly true by the end of “Grand Illusion.”
Kit R. Roane, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, covered New York City law enforcement from 1997 to 1999.
For the record
Giuliani and Sept. 11: A review in Tuesday’s Calendar section of the book “Grand Illusion” said one of the sources in the book, New York’s current police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, had been dismissed by Giuliani when he became mayor in 1993. Giuliani was mayor-elect in 1993 when he named Kelly’s replacement
By Kit R. Roane
August 22, 2006 in print edition E-1
Note This article includes corrections to the original version.
Grand Illusion
The Untold Story of
Rudy Giuliani and 9/11
Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins
HarperCollins: 390 pp., $25.95
*
FEW reporters who covered New York City government during Rudolph W. Giuliani’s reign would dispute that the mayor saw himself as a powerful leader destined for greatness. But many were shocked when much of the country began to agree.
Giuliani was a lame duck when 2000 drew to a close, a mayor whose political stature was in a tailspin and whose private life was being rocked by illness and scandal. A local tabloid had revealed Giuliani’s long-term affair with a pharmaceutical sales manager, which led to an equally public call for divorce from his apoplectic wife. Meanwhile, prostate cancer had forced him from a tepid U.S. Senate campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton.
To Giuliani’s political enemies, this delicious farrago had been a long time coming. They relished the comeuppance of a man whose self-assured rhetoric often came off as mean-spirited bullying and who most often reacted angrily to criticism when he wasn’t being dismissive in the extreme. Many New Yorkers thought Giuliani would have had trouble being elected dogcatcher. Talk of a run for president of the United States would have been rich indeed. But as Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins note in “Grand Illusion,” their superb dissection of the reality behind the Giuliani myth-making after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: “What a difference a day made.”
When Islamic fundamentalists crashed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center on that crisp clear morning, causing New York’s signature towers to implode, they not only killed more than 2,700 Americans, they shook the faith of those left living. Solace was in short supply.
The only powerful force at work appeared to be Osama bin Laden, a terrorist mastermind of frightening proportion. America needed a hero, someone to reassure them that everything would be all right. But “the disaster had been so complete that there were remarkably few candidates for the role,” Barrett and Collins explain, adding that President Bush’s performance “was hardly the stuff of legend.” Into this breach stepped the shattered city’s mayor. When Giuliani walked before the cameras that day, stern-faced, calm and “covered in soot, he embodied the resolve of the nation.”
Giuliani’s dramatic showing during this time of crisis and his solemn attendance later at the scores of wakes across the city reignited his political torch. The praise showered on him was deafening. Everyone wanted to shake his hand. The queen of England knighted him. Time named him “person of the year” – beating Bush and Bin Laden. His boyhood dream of becoming president no longer seems so far-fetched; he is weighing a bid in 2008.
But although Giuliani’s “quick response and personal fearlessness
The city’s problems on Sept. 11 are now well known. Police officers and firefighters hardly communicated. With radios that didn’t operate between departments or work at all in steel high-rises, many firefighters didn’t get the final mayday call to evacuate the North Tower before it fell. Cut off from relevant information, emergency operators continued to tell victims in the tower to stay put even though top fire chiefs had called for a complete evacuation almost immediately after arriving on the scene. The list goes on. But somehow, the mayor has been able to escape much of the blame. Barrett and Collins now hold Giuliani accountable.
The focus of their ire is Giuliani’s claim that, although the magnitude of the attacks was unforeseeable, he had assumed from the moment he came into office in 1994 that terrorists would attack New York City and so he made the city’s emergency response a priority. There has been little in Giuliani’s record to support that claim. But “Grand Illusion” now reveals a record that directly contradicts it.
It is not that Giuliani wouldn’t have had reason to prepare. After all, terrorists had exploded a car bomb underneath one World Trade Center tower in 1993. But Barrett and Collins’ detailed research shows a mayor who utterly failed to grasp the importance of readying the city for another terrorist attack. Lou Anemone, the police department’s chief operating officer during much of Giuliani’s tenure, recalls trying to brief the mayor on a citywide terrorism security plan in 1998. “Rudy glazed over,” he said, adding: “We never had any discussion about security at the World Trade Center. We never even had a drill or exercise there
Anemone is not alone in making the assessment that Giuliani’s interests lay elsewhere. Barrett and Collins back up such charges against Giuliani with reams of documents and multiple human sources. This can’t help but slow the reader down. Some of their confirmations and details might have been better left in footnotes. But the wealth of material paints a clear picture of City Hall ineptitude in the face of continuing terrorist threats.
Some of the book’s sources may have an ax to grind. Giuliani dismissed one of them, New York’s current police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, when he became mayor in 1993. And some may have minimized their own failings. Jerome Hauer, Giuliani’s first director of the Office of Emergency Management prior to Sept. 11, is lauded by the authors for attempting to force the city’s notoriously antagonistic police and fire departments to work together. But Hauer also was intimately involved in some of the mayor’s biggest missteps, chief among them locating the city’s emergency command center in the World Trade Center complex.
In “Grand Illusion,” Hauer blames Giuliani for forcing him to build the center near City Hall. But it was Hauer who finally picked the location and then stumped for it. (When I broke the story of the command center plans in a June 13, 1998, article in the New York Times, which Barrett and Collins cite, Hauer expressed no reservations – on or off the record – about putting it on the 23rd floor of a building across the street from terrorists’ 1993 target. In fact, Hauer said the site was ideal, that the city needed “a facility that is survivable” and “that is this facility.”) The building housing the command center collapsed along with the twin towers that morning, contributing to many of the problems on the ground.
Luckily, “Grand Illusion” is too well-sourced for such concerns to be a major issue. The book handily punctures a hole in the myth of Giuliani as a praiseworthy terrorism czar who had prepared his city for the tragedy that unfolded. Although there is plenty of blame to go around, Giuliani, as mayor, set the tone of his administration and picked the people who would be counted on to respond appropriately. At both tasks, he failed miserably, the book shows, choosing politics over public safety.
“The facts – depressing but unavoidable – were that Giuliani had allowed the city to meet the disaster of September 11 unprepared in a myriad of ways,” write the authors, a statement that rings depressingly true by the end of “Grand Illusion.”
Kit R. Roane, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, covered New York City law enforcement from 1997 to 1999.
For the record
Giuliani and Sept. 11: A review in Tuesday’s Calendar section of the book “Grand Illusion” said one of the sources in the book, New York’s current police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, had been dismissed by Giuliani when he became mayor in 1993. Giuliani was mayor-elect in 1993 when he named Kelly’s replacement
No Experience Required
No experience required
By Kit R. Roane
August 06, 2006 in print edition R-4
BUILDING a civil society in postwar Iraq has been a mighty struggle. The infrastructure remains shattered; electricity and clean water are still in short supply. Despite efforts to infuse Iraq with political stability through elections and a constitution, the daily kidnappings, killings and insurgent attacks serve as mortal reminders that chaos reigns.
Why isn’t Iraq on better footing more than three years after America toppled Saddam Hussein? L. Paul Bremer III, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), has already written about his difficulties bringing order to the fractured country during his 14-month tour there, a tenure frustrated by White House directives to do more with less, as well as an Iraqi leadership that Bremer complained “couldn’t organize a parade, let alone run the country.” Now two new books – Rory Stewart’s “The Prince of the Marshes” and “Babylon by Bus” by Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann with Donovan Webster – attempt to explain the CPA’s ill-fated mission and Iraq’s decline from a vantage point much closer to the ground.
“The Prince of the Marshes” and “Babylon by Bus” begin by noting that their authors were wholly unprepared for the jobs they were given by the CPA as it attempted to gear up its humanitarian and nation-building efforts. Where, one might ask, did all the qualified applicants go? Were any even sought out?
To be fair, Stewart is more capable than either LeMoine or Neumann, self-described slackers who hawked T-shirts outside Boston’s Fenway Park before turning up in Baghdad in January 2004, where they were handed volunteer jobs coordinating humanitarian aid for the CPA. But Stewart, who had served in the British Foreign Service and had recently completed a quixotic walk across Afghanistan (which became the subject of his first book, “The Places in Between”) was still out of his depth when, in October 2003, he was hired as acting governate coordinator of Maysan, one of Iraq’s poorest southern lands. “I spoke little Arabic, and had never managed a shattered, unstable, and undeveloped province of eight hundred and fifty thousand people,” he writes, adding that he suspects he was given the post, in part, because nobody else was eager to go.
Of the two books, “The Prince of the Marshes” is the more elegant and useful account of the CPA’s failures, even if it suffers at many points from an excruciating fixation on bureaucratic detail. Part of its significance comes from Stewart’s position in the CPA chain. He was high enough to knock on important doors in Baghdad, including those of Bremer’s aides, and sometimes attended meetings with Bremer himself. But he also worked on the local level in Maysan and then in another nearby province, spearheading humanitarian projects and struggling to bring together the various Iraqi leaders who would one day administer the region’s daily affairs.
Based on notes he took during his tenure, Stewart’s book is written in short diary-like chapters that often begin with bits of wisdom from the likes of Machiavelli or T.E. Lawrence and end with a pointed insight or small resolution. We quickly learn what he is faced with: a demolished infrastructure in a relatively lawless place, a disgruntled and largely unemployed population and a host of warring tribes and religious sects herded onto local governing councils in preparation for the final handover of sovereignty and democratic elections. It mattered little that Stewart was being asked to coax political dialogue among leaders who refused to acknowledge each other or were, even as they sat together, engaged in low-level hostilities just outside the council’s doors.
According to Stewart, everything seemed possible to the CPA leadership in Baghdad, which “wanted to build the new state in a single frenzy,” implementing countless programs “on human rights, the free market, feminism, federalism, and constitutional reform.” On the ground, though, Stewart found accomplishing these goals far from easy and discovered a population that wanted almost none of them.
What the people desired was the thing most in short supply: security. Kidnappings, extortions and assassinations were almost routine. And including Iraqis in the new political framework wasn’t increasing their chance for survival, as Stewart realized when the new police chief of Maysan was assassinated as he walked out of a mosque. “Every day we gambled on insufficient information, trusted and suspected, persuaded reluctant bureaucrats, threatened, rewarded, and charmed,” he explains. “[P]eople were going to be killed almost whatever we chose to do.”
Stewart’s frustration is palpable as he spends each day listening to myriad complaints, then tries to iron out differences between the opposing factions in the governing councils and quell the anger of those left out of the process. This is grueling and often thankless work, full of “formal meetings, with carefully chosen words and mutual suspicion.”
It is also fairly repetitive work, and Stewart’s narrative sometimes suffers from a certain administrative cadence. So there’s a weary relief when he must give up the reins and let the Iraqis have a go at governing.
The results aren’t pretty. The new government in the south of Iraq is “authoritarian, supported by militia, and in favor of strict Islamic social codes,” Stewart writes. “Their new state was reactionary, violent, intolerant toward women and religious minorities, and uncooperative with the Coalition.” And in December 2005, Iraqis voted for the same hard-line Islamicists again, choosing security over the promise of freedom or democracy.
“Baghdad by Bus” offers a similarly pessimistic take on the Iraq occupation and the CPA’s work there. But here, it is from the narrower viewpoint of two CPA volunteers in Baghdad charged with finding Iraqi charities able to take small lots of donated clothing and other supplies. LeMoine and Neumann crack a few jokes about how they have stumbled into this opportunity, and they expend a fair amount of ink on the head-scratching decisions made by the CPA.
But such foibles aren’t what really drive the narrative. Instead, the book focuses on the metamorphosis of two shiftless losers into somewhat thoughtful members of the human race.
The transformation is no easy throw. Whether by accident or design, LeMoine and Neumann come off early and often as two of the most unappealing characters you might meet in a war zone – a couple of drunk, drug-addled disaster tourists who do little but get in the way and waste people’s time.
They are cocky and pushy and lack self-reflection as they trot around the coalition’s sealed Green Zone in Baghdad, describing the working journalists there as “vultures.”
Empathy is in short supply; a few pages after describing a checkpoint suicide bombing that killed 26 people as a landscape “full of things we’d, in retrospect, like not to have seen,” the two are happily toasting their newfound jobs at the CPA and wishing they “had some weed.” No wonder some journalists were initially repelled by them.
The problem with “Babylon by Bus” is that the “Bill and Ted” routine never seems to end. LeMoine and Neumann do become old hands at the aid racket, but their transformation into adults is never complete. That hinders their ability to offer much insight into the quickly deteriorating situation in Iraq. Yes, they are probably right when they say that “by completely obliterating Saddam’s Iraqi state, Bremer and the CPA planted the seeds for the shattered, sectarian Iraq of today.” But it’s hard to put too much stock in messengers who, on the very next page, are “gearing up for a party at the Hamra.”
“Babylon by Bus” isn’t without merit. When the authors focus on their personal story, the book is captivating and occasionally enlightening. At one point, the hung-over pair battle through the CPA’s red tape and deliver aid boxes to a mosque crowded with poor Iraqis. They are almost giddy with success.
Later, however, a more sober LeMoine realizes that this delivery may have worked at cross-purposes with the CPA’s goal of helping Iraq move toward a democratic future by propping up a local mosque’s religious authority. “I was inadvertently working against democracy and toward theocracy,” he notes, adding: “Of course, in the afterglow of such an exciting day, this contradiction escaped me.”
“Babylon by Bus” details the CPA’s stifling bureaucracy and the Green Zone’s darkly comic social scene, with its testosterone-fueled nights of disco dancing and brawling. Noting the dearth of women, LeMoine describes a dance floor that “resembled a third-world cockfighting ring,” adding that whenever there was trouble, “you usually only had to look to the nearest mercenary steroid meatball in the room.”
That’s entertaining stuff. But ultimately, “Babylon by Bus” fails to deliver much beyond the surface, as LeMoine and Neumann continue their casual glide through Iraq. Whether providing a few Iraqis with donated clothing or helping a drug-addicted soldier find a local pharmacist, it all seems the same to them. The soldier may have been “quickly pushing his mind over the edge with the help of a never-ending bender of pills, booze, and ‘roids; no thanks to us,” LeMoine writes. But, hey, what do they care? He “no longer needed our help – with money, luck, and a connection or two, you could get pretty much anything you wanted in CPA-occupied Baghdad.”
Neither “The Prince of the Marshes” nor “Baghdad by Bus” will likely top the canon of literature from the Iraq war. Yet Stewart’s attempt is by far the more serious undertaking and provides a wealth of information about how the CPA struggled to shape the political process in the hinterlands. And both books serve at least one noble purpose: recording for posterity how some of the CPA’s assumptions and dictates played out on the local level, where its sometimes careless or misguided policies met an often angry and disillusioned people. Whatever the CPA’s intentions, these books leave one wondering whether the efforts to democratize Iraq have proved more disastrous to the country than doing nothing at all.
*
The Prince of the Marshes
And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
Rory Stewart
Harcourt: 396 pp., $25
*
Babylon by Bus
Or, the True Story of Two Friends Who Gave Up Their Valuable Franchise Selling Yankees Suck T-Shirts at Fenway to Find Meaning and Adventure in Iraq, Where They Became Employed by the Occupation in Jobs for Which They Lacked Qualification and Witnessed Much That Amazed and Disturbed Them
Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann
With Donovan Webster
Penguin Press: 316 pp., $24.95
By Kit R. Roane
August 06, 2006 in print edition R-4
BUILDING a civil society in postwar Iraq has been a mighty struggle. The infrastructure remains shattered; electricity and clean water are still in short supply. Despite efforts to infuse Iraq with political stability through elections and a constitution, the daily kidnappings, killings and insurgent attacks serve as mortal reminders that chaos reigns.
Why isn’t Iraq on better footing more than three years after America toppled Saddam Hussein? L. Paul Bremer III, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), has already written about his difficulties bringing order to the fractured country during his 14-month tour there, a tenure frustrated by White House directives to do more with less, as well as an Iraqi leadership that Bremer complained “couldn’t organize a parade, let alone run the country.” Now two new books – Rory Stewart’s “The Prince of the Marshes” and “Babylon by Bus” by Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann with Donovan Webster – attempt to explain the CPA’s ill-fated mission and Iraq’s decline from a vantage point much closer to the ground.
“The Prince of the Marshes” and “Babylon by Bus” begin by noting that their authors were wholly unprepared for the jobs they were given by the CPA as it attempted to gear up its humanitarian and nation-building efforts. Where, one might ask, did all the qualified applicants go? Were any even sought out?
To be fair, Stewart is more capable than either LeMoine or Neumann, self-described slackers who hawked T-shirts outside Boston’s Fenway Park before turning up in Baghdad in January 2004, where they were handed volunteer jobs coordinating humanitarian aid for the CPA. But Stewart, who had served in the British Foreign Service and had recently completed a quixotic walk across Afghanistan (which became the subject of his first book, “The Places in Between”) was still out of his depth when, in October 2003, he was hired as acting governate coordinator of Maysan, one of Iraq’s poorest southern lands. “I spoke little Arabic, and had never managed a shattered, unstable, and undeveloped province of eight hundred and fifty thousand people,” he writes, adding that he suspects he was given the post, in part, because nobody else was eager to go.
Of the two books, “The Prince of the Marshes” is the more elegant and useful account of the CPA’s failures, even if it suffers at many points from an excruciating fixation on bureaucratic detail. Part of its significance comes from Stewart’s position in the CPA chain. He was high enough to knock on important doors in Baghdad, including those of Bremer’s aides, and sometimes attended meetings with Bremer himself. But he also worked on the local level in Maysan and then in another nearby province, spearheading humanitarian projects and struggling to bring together the various Iraqi leaders who would one day administer the region’s daily affairs.
Based on notes he took during his tenure, Stewart’s book is written in short diary-like chapters that often begin with bits of wisdom from the likes of Machiavelli or T.E. Lawrence and end with a pointed insight or small resolution. We quickly learn what he is faced with: a demolished infrastructure in a relatively lawless place, a disgruntled and largely unemployed population and a host of warring tribes and religious sects herded onto local governing councils in preparation for the final handover of sovereignty and democratic elections. It mattered little that Stewart was being asked to coax political dialogue among leaders who refused to acknowledge each other or were, even as they sat together, engaged in low-level hostilities just outside the council’s doors.
According to Stewart, everything seemed possible to the CPA leadership in Baghdad, which “wanted to build the new state in a single frenzy,” implementing countless programs “on human rights, the free market, feminism, federalism, and constitutional reform.” On the ground, though, Stewart found accomplishing these goals far from easy and discovered a population that wanted almost none of them.
What the people desired was the thing most in short supply: security. Kidnappings, extortions and assassinations were almost routine. And including Iraqis in the new political framework wasn’t increasing their chance for survival, as Stewart realized when the new police chief of Maysan was assassinated as he walked out of a mosque. “Every day we gambled on insufficient information, trusted and suspected, persuaded reluctant bureaucrats, threatened, rewarded, and charmed,” he explains. “[P]eople were going to be killed almost whatever we chose to do.”
Stewart’s frustration is palpable as he spends each day listening to myriad complaints, then tries to iron out differences between the opposing factions in the governing councils and quell the anger of those left out of the process. This is grueling and often thankless work, full of “formal meetings, with carefully chosen words and mutual suspicion.”
It is also fairly repetitive work, and Stewart’s narrative sometimes suffers from a certain administrative cadence. So there’s a weary relief when he must give up the reins and let the Iraqis have a go at governing.
The results aren’t pretty. The new government in the south of Iraq is “authoritarian, supported by militia, and in favor of strict Islamic social codes,” Stewart writes. “Their new state was reactionary, violent, intolerant toward women and religious minorities, and uncooperative with the Coalition.” And in December 2005, Iraqis voted for the same hard-line Islamicists again, choosing security over the promise of freedom or democracy.
“Baghdad by Bus” offers a similarly pessimistic take on the Iraq occupation and the CPA’s work there. But here, it is from the narrower viewpoint of two CPA volunteers in Baghdad charged with finding Iraqi charities able to take small lots of donated clothing and other supplies. LeMoine and Neumann crack a few jokes about how they have stumbled into this opportunity, and they expend a fair amount of ink on the head-scratching decisions made by the CPA.
But such foibles aren’t what really drive the narrative. Instead, the book focuses on the metamorphosis of two shiftless losers into somewhat thoughtful members of the human race.
The transformation is no easy throw. Whether by accident or design, LeMoine and Neumann come off early and often as two of the most unappealing characters you might meet in a war zone – a couple of drunk, drug-addled disaster tourists who do little but get in the way and waste people’s time.
They are cocky and pushy and lack self-reflection as they trot around the coalition’s sealed Green Zone in Baghdad, describing the working journalists there as “vultures.”
Empathy is in short supply; a few pages after describing a checkpoint suicide bombing that killed 26 people as a landscape “full of things we’d, in retrospect, like not to have seen,” the two are happily toasting their newfound jobs at the CPA and wishing they “had some weed.” No wonder some journalists were initially repelled by them.
The problem with “Babylon by Bus” is that the “Bill and Ted” routine never seems to end. LeMoine and Neumann do become old hands at the aid racket, but their transformation into adults is never complete. That hinders their ability to offer much insight into the quickly deteriorating situation in Iraq. Yes, they are probably right when they say that “by completely obliterating Saddam’s Iraqi state, Bremer and the CPA planted the seeds for the shattered, sectarian Iraq of today.” But it’s hard to put too much stock in messengers who, on the very next page, are “gearing up for a party at the Hamra.”
“Babylon by Bus” isn’t without merit. When the authors focus on their personal story, the book is captivating and occasionally enlightening. At one point, the hung-over pair battle through the CPA’s red tape and deliver aid boxes to a mosque crowded with poor Iraqis. They are almost giddy with success.
Later, however, a more sober LeMoine realizes that this delivery may have worked at cross-purposes with the CPA’s goal of helping Iraq move toward a democratic future by propping up a local mosque’s religious authority. “I was inadvertently working against democracy and toward theocracy,” he notes, adding: “Of course, in the afterglow of such an exciting day, this contradiction escaped me.”
“Babylon by Bus” details the CPA’s stifling bureaucracy and the Green Zone’s darkly comic social scene, with its testosterone-fueled nights of disco dancing and brawling. Noting the dearth of women, LeMoine describes a dance floor that “resembled a third-world cockfighting ring,” adding that whenever there was trouble, “you usually only had to look to the nearest mercenary steroid meatball in the room.”
That’s entertaining stuff. But ultimately, “Babylon by Bus” fails to deliver much beyond the surface, as LeMoine and Neumann continue their casual glide through Iraq. Whether providing a few Iraqis with donated clothing or helping a drug-addicted soldier find a local pharmacist, it all seems the same to them. The soldier may have been “quickly pushing his mind over the edge with the help of a never-ending bender of pills, booze, and ‘roids; no thanks to us,” LeMoine writes. But, hey, what do they care? He “no longer needed our help – with money, luck, and a connection or two, you could get pretty much anything you wanted in CPA-occupied Baghdad.”
Neither “The Prince of the Marshes” nor “Baghdad by Bus” will likely top the canon of literature from the Iraq war. Yet Stewart’s attempt is by far the more serious undertaking and provides a wealth of information about how the CPA struggled to shape the political process in the hinterlands. And both books serve at least one noble purpose: recording for posterity how some of the CPA’s assumptions and dictates played out on the local level, where its sometimes careless or misguided policies met an often angry and disillusioned people. Whatever the CPA’s intentions, these books leave one wondering whether the efforts to democratize Iraq have proved more disastrous to the country than doing nothing at all.
*
The Prince of the Marshes
And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
Rory Stewart
Harcourt: 396 pp., $25
*
Babylon by Bus
Or, the True Story of Two Friends Who Gave Up Their Valuable Franchise Selling Yankees Suck T-Shirts at Fenway to Find Meaning and Adventure in Iraq, Where They Became Employed by the Occupation in Jobs for Which They Lacked Qualification and Witnessed Much That Amazed and Disturbed Them
Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann
With Donovan Webster
Penguin Press: 316 pp., $24.95