The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [142]
“My best guess is the country would collapse into civil war within weeks,” one of the reporters told me. “One hundred, maybe two hundred thousand dead. We’re the only thing holding this place together.”
That night, our delegation accompanied Ambassador Khalilzad for dinner at the home of Iraqi interim President Jalal Tala-bani. Security was tight as our convoy wound its way past a maze of barricades out of the Green Zone; outside, our route was lined with U.S. troops at one-block intervals, and we were instructed to keep our vests and helmets on for the duration of the drive.
After ten minutes we arrived at a large villa, where we were greeted by the president and several members of the Iraqi interim government. They were all heavyset men, most in their fifties or sixties, with broad smiles but eyes that betrayed no emotion. I recognized only one of the ministers—Mr. Ahmed Chalabi, the Western-educated Shi’ite who, as a leader of the exile group the Iraqi National Congress, had reportedly fed U.S. intelligence agencies and Bush policy makers some of the prewar information on which the decision to invade was made—information for which Chalabi’s group had received millions of dollars, and that had turned out to be bogus. Since then Chalabi had fallen out with his U.S. patrons; there were reports that he had steered U.S. classified information to the Iranians, and that Jordan still had a warrant out for his arrest after he’d been convicted in absentia on thirty-one charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds, and currency speculation. But he appeared to have landed on his feet; immaculately dressed, accompanied by his grown daughter, he was now the interim government’s acting oil minister.
I didn’t speak much to Chalabi during dinner. Instead I was seated next to the former interim finance minister. He seemed impressive, speaking knowledgeably about Iraq’s economy, its need to improve transparency and strengthen its legal framework to attract foreign investment. At the end of the evening, I mentioned my favorable impression to one of the embassy staff.
“He’s smart, no doubt about it,” the staffer said. “Of course, he’s also one of the leaders of the SCIRI Party. They control the Ministry of the Interior, which controls the police. And the police, well…there have been problems with militia infiltration. Accusations that they’re grabbing Sunni leaders, bodies found the next morning, that kind of thing…” The staffer’s voice trailed off, and he shrugged. “We work with what we have.”
I had difficulty sleeping that night; instead, I watched the Redskins game, piped in live via satellite to the pool house once reserved for Saddam and his guests. Several times I muted the TV and heard mortar fire pierce the silence. The following morning, we took a Black Hawk to the Marine base in Fallujah, out in the arid, western portion of Iraq called Anbar Province. Some of the fiercest fighting against the insurgency had taken place in Sunni-dominated Anbar, and the atmosphere in the camp was considerably grimmer than in the Green Zone; just the previous day, five Marines on patrol had been killed by roadside bombs or small-arms fire. The troops here looked rawer as well, most of them in their early twenties, many still with pimples and the unformed bodies of teenagers.
The general in charge of the camp had arranged a briefing, and we listened as the camp’s senior officers explained the dilemma facing U.S. forces: With improved capabilities, they were arresting more and more insurgent leaders each day, but like street gangs back in Chicago, for every insurgent they arrested, there seemed to be two ready to take his place. Economics, and not just politics, seemed to be feeding the insurgency—the central government had been neglecting