Imperial Life in the Emerald City (32 page)

16

A Lot Left to Be Done

JOHN AGRESTO HAD BEEN IN BAGHDAD
for two weeks, and his ivory-tower plans to overhaul Iraq's university system, crafted back home in New Mexico, had met reality. Promoting academic freedom and opening liberal-arts colleges would remain pipe dreams until he addressed the devastation wrought by postwar looting. His big ideas would have to wait. He needed desks, chairs, books, and blackboards.

Agresto, the CPA's senior adviser for higher education, didn't have a budget. In September 2003, before the Supplemental, America's paltry reconstruction funds were controlled by the U.S. Agency for International Development. So he walked across the palace to the USAID office to ask for help. He'd heard that they had $25 million set aside for Iraqi universities.

A USAID program officer told Agresto that the money was already earmarked for grants to American universities that wanted to establish partnerships with Iraqi institutions. Agresto was dumbstruck.
American universities?
What about rehabilitating looted buildings? Restocking libraries? Reequipping science laboratories? Perhaps the American universities will help with that, the program officer said. It's up to each school to decide how it wants to use the money.

Well, Agresto replied, can I at least see the proposals from the American universities? Sorry, the program officer said. I'm not authorized to show them to you.

When Agresto threatened to file a Freedom of Information Act request with USAID, bureaucrats in Washington relented. He read the documents in near disbelief.

The University of Hawaii's College of Tropical Agriculture had been selected to partner with the University of Mosul's College of Agriculture to provide advice on “academic programs and extension training.” Not only was Mosul's near-alpine climate far from tropical, but the college had been burned to the ground by looters. What it needed was a new building.

A consortium led by the University of Oklahoma was tapped to work on “leadership strengthening” with five Iraqi schools, including the University of Anbar, based in Ramadi. Anbar province was the most dangerous area in all of Iraq, a no-go zone for Americans. How, Agresto wondered, would a bunch of Oklahomans ever meet up with their counterparts in Anbar? A team from the State University of New York at Stony Brook won a $4 million grant to “modernize curricula in archaeology” at four of Iraq's largest universities—schools where students were sitting on the floor because they lacked desks and chairs.

“It was like going into a war zone and saying, Oh, let's cure halitosis,” Agresto said.

With no money from USAID, Agresto set his sights on the Supplemental. He heard that Bremer was going to ask the White House for $20 billion. Such a large request, he figured, had to have a budget line for Iraq's universities. He assembled what he deemed to be an exceedingly modest proposal, asking for only $37 million to reconstruct the universities.

Bremer's office rejected it without explanation.

Agresto, a stalwart Republican, eventually got a little help from Representative Nita Lowey, a Democrat from New York. During negotiations over the Supplemental in Congress, she insisted that $90 million be devoted to education. Of that, $8 million would go to universities.

It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. Then Agresto discovered that USAID was claiming that it held the purse strings. He went ballistic and sent a letter to Bremer saying he'd rather not have the money than have it go to USAID. Bremer's secretary called Agresto and told him to rewrite his letter; it was too inflammatory.

A few days later, he confronted a USAID official by the pool. “You folks go on all the time about how we work together. We never work together,” he growled. “You never listen to me. You know I put in for this money. You know I put in for thirty-some-odd million dollars, and all I'm getting is eight, and now you want to take my eight away. I'm not gonna let you take my eight away.”

USAID relented, but Agresto still had to work with a new bunch of Pentagon bureaucrats whose job was to disburse the billions of Supplemental dollars. He was told that he'd have to deduct $500,000 for administrative fees. He reluctantly agreed and told the bureaucrats what he wanted to do with the remaining $7.5 million: buy basic science lab equipment for every Iraqi university. The bureaucrats told him it would take a while. They needed to write up a request for proposals, solicit bids, select a winner, and then manage procurement and distribution. By the time Agresto left Iraq in June 2004, just before the handover of sovereignty, no lab equipment had yet arrived.

None of the $400 million in international pledges, made months earlier at a donors' conference in Madrid, had come through either. He also couldn't get a cent from the CPA to support the “College of Humanity” at the University of Dohuk—the project that had made Agresto want to stay in Iraq for “the duration.” Agresto had asked the palace bean counters for just $3 million to build the college.

With only pocket change for reconstruction, he turned back to the item atop his original to-do list: promoting academic freedom. It didn't cost a thing.

With the help of CPA lawyers, he assembled an eight-point bill of rights that called for universities to be “independent in the managing of their academic affairs” and guaranteed the “freedom of thought, belief, and clothing.” It prohibited weapons on campus and the coercion of others “to join a religion, sect, race, or political ideology.” It was a direct challenge to Shiite student activists who had been threatening secular-minded professors and hectoring female students to cover their hair. The university presidents unanimously adopted the bill of rights in March and had it printed up as a large poster to hang on the walls of every campus.

Agresto regarded the document as one of his most significant achievements, although it didn't really change anything other than the dynamics of the minister's meetings with the university presidents. Like the traffic code and all of the other CPA edicts, it sounded good on paper but there were no resources to implement it. The colleges couldn't afford to hire guards to confront the Shiite activists, who continued to swagger around the campuses, forcing women to wear head scarves and demanding holidays for religious festivals. When I asked Taki Moussawi, the president of Mustansiriya University, why he didn't enforce the bill of rights, he pointed to the hallway walls, which were plastered with photographs of Shiite ayatollahs. “The bill of rights is a good thing and I agree with it, but I cannot use it,” he said. “It would be very dangerous to confront the students.”

         

Two days after the November 15 Agreement, the CPA's Governance Office sent an e-mail to Agresto and his fellow senior advisers asking for their thoughts on the decision to hand over sovereignty by the following June. Agresto typed up a short note, but before hitting Reply, he added one more address on the carbon-copy line: “All Hands”—everyone in the Republican Palace.

If you're asking how the departure of the CPA will affect all that we have tried to do in our Ministry, the short and sad answer is that there is much that we had hoped to do that we now know we cannot. Serious curricular reform? Beginning an American University? Reorganizing 20 universities into some kind of rational system? Starting Western-style business schools? We can do all the groundwork on these we'd like, but once we're gone the inertia of the system will take over and all will wither. We will concentrate our efforts on those things that have hope of surviving our departure—infrastructure rebuilding, partnerships with some American universities, some scholarship programs, and the like.

If you're asking our view on the transfer of sovereignty, my answer is even more pessimistic. Thirty years of tyranny do terrible things to a people: It breeds a culture of dependency; it breaks the spirit of civic responsibility; it forces people to fall back upon tight-knit familial, ideological or sectarian groups for safety and support. The professors I work with are still incapable of believing they can do something on their own, freely, and not ask permission. Freedom, democracy and rights are not magic words. The transfer of sovereignty will bring about some form of “democracy.” But a liberal democracy, with real notions of liberty and equality and open opportunity—without strongmen, or sectarian or sectional oppression—well, I think that's doubtful.

Agresto's bitterness was bred of experience. Two weeks before he had arrived, the Governing Council appointed twenty-five ministers. Each of the members staked claim to a different ministry—and the right to appoint the minister. Governing Council member Mohsen Abdul Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni organization with ties to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, demanded the Ministry of Higher Education. Hamid appointed Ziead Abdul-Razzaq Aswad, a professor of petroleum engineering and an ardent supporter of Hamid's party, as minister. Aswad's first act was to fire all of the university presidents. He wanted to replace them with his allies, many of whom were Sunnis. Agresto didn't want to meddle in the day-to-day operations of the ministry, but Aswad had gone too far, and Agresto commanded him to rescind the order.

Agresto had never worked in an emerging democracy before, but his bookshelves in New Mexico were filled with volumes by Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. He had read the Federalist Papers and countless histories of America. Forming a democracy was easy, but forming a liberal, moderate democracy wasn't. He believed that the CPA had committed a catastrophic error by establishing a quota for Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds on the Governing Council, and then by filling many of those seats with politicians and religious leaders who were more interested in doling out favors to their supporters than in doing what was best for their country.

Agresto believed that Iraqis hadn't focused on ethnic and religious divisions before the war, and that it was the CPA's quota system that had encouraged them to identify themselves by race and sect. He and the few others in the palace who shared this opinion were half right. Iraqis hadn't flaunted their differences under Saddam's Sunni-dominated government. Shiites and Kurds were fearful they would get classified as troublemakers and shipped off to Abu Ghraib. And Sunnis, in order to mask the fact that a minority was ruling the majority, perpetuated the myth that “we're all Iraqis.” Liberation finally allowed the Kurds and, to a greater degree, the Shiites to worship openly. They could cover their car windows with paintings of the Imam Ali and make pilgrimages to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Shiite political leaders also demanded a majority of seats on the Governing Council. Even so, many of the Iraqis I met wanted leaders who would overcome divisions of race and sect, not those who pandered to differences.

Bremer and his governance team gave the Shiites the majority they sought, and allowed religious Shiite political leaders, particularly Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, effective veto power over the selection of other Shiite members. As a result, several more liberal and secular Shiites favored by the CPA were kept off the council, strengthening the position of SCIRI and Dawa. Leaders of the governance team argued that SCIRI and Dawa would have refused to participate in the council had more moderates been selected. Perhaps, but Agresto and others in the palace maintained that Bremer and the governance team hadn't pushed hard enough to get secular, nonpartisan professionals on the council.

Bremer's approach “magnified rather than muted the very divisions that so many Iraqis rejected,” Agresto said. “The best Iraqis knew that they could not form one country, one
democratic
country, unless they were somehow able to get these categories behind them and look for leaders who, one way or another, would transcend these divisions. The best Iraqis… knew this. We didn't.”

         

On January 18, 2004, a white pickup truck loaded with a thousand pounds of plastic explosive and several 155-millimeter artillery shells exploded at the Assassin's Gate. More than twenty people were killed and at least sixty were wounded, almost all of them Iraqis. Many of them worked for the CPA.

Agresto, who heard the blast from inside the palace, assumed that the attack would rally popular sentiment against the insurgency and in favor of the goals of the occupation. “What I expected was the ‘Mothers' March for Peace' or the ‘Don't Kill Our Kids Movement' or somebody to come out and say: Stop this. We want democracy,” he said. But Iraqis held funerals and went on with life. U.S. troops erected larger concrete blast walls in front of the gate. When Agresto asked Iraqis working for the CPA why there was not more outrage, everyone he talked to was too scared to condemn the insurgents in public. “I saw people still afraid,” he said. “I saw how easy it was to speak against the Americans and how dangerous it was to speak for democracy and liberty.”

During anguished rumination in the days after the bombing, he concluded that America had been shooting for the moon. It was a profound break with his ideological allies, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. “We should have been less ambitious,” Agresto said. “Our goal should have been to build a free, safe, and prosperous Iraq—with the emphasis on
safe.
Democratic institutions could be developed over time. Instead, we keep talking about democratic elections. If you asked an ordinary Iraqi what they want, the first thing they would say wouldn't be democracy or elections, it would be safety. They want to be able to walk outside their homes at night.”

Agresto tried to discuss these ideas with members of the governance team, but they pushed him away. He was the guy who worked on universities. He offered to help advise the Iraqis drafting the interim constitution. Perhaps, he said, they'd want to talk to someone who knew a bit about the history of democratic thought. Once again, he was dismissed. With nobody willing to listen, he wrote a note to a friend in the palace who worked for the CIA and had studied at St. John's College: