The Audacity of Hope

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 Anbar, and male
unemployment hovered around 70 percent.
“For two or three dollars, you can pay some kid to plant a bomb,” one of the officers
said. “That’s a lot of money out here.”
By the end of the briefing, a light fog had rolled in, delaying our flight to Kirkuk. While
waiting, my foreign policy staffer, Mark Lippert, wandered off to chat with one of the
unit’s senior officers, while I struck up a conversation with one of the majors
responsible for counterinsurgency strategy in the region. He was a soft-spoken man,
short and with glasses; it was easy to imagine him as a high school math teacher. In fact,
it turned out that before joining the Marines he had spent several years in the
Philippines as a member of the Peace Corps. Many of the lessons he had learned there
needed to be applied to the military’s work in Iraq, he told me. He didn’t have anywhere