Imperial Life in the Emerald City (20 page)

         

It is not hyperbole to say that we have very few years to complete and very few months to begin the rebuilding of higher education in Iraq. The excellent faculty leaders who were trained in Europe and the United States in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies are at or near the end of their careers. Those who will follow in leadership have never been exposed to world-class research or international higher education. Without immediate, as well as in-depth, exposure to the contemporary scholarly world and the technology to participate in it, the needed experience to rebuild a quality teaching and research infrastructure for the coming generations will be lost. The lack of knowledge-based workers and world-educated leaders endangers the stability of Iraq and, by extension, the security of the rest of the world.

         

The donor nations pledged $400 million. Agresto was not disappointed. It was a start, he figured. There would be another conference in six months. He could ask for more money then.

Physical reconstruction was a means to an end for Agresto. What really excited him were Iraqis such as Asmat Khalid, the president of the University of Dohuk. A short, stocky, and gruff man, Khalid seemed to Agresto “more the head of a New Jersey truckers local than the founder and president of a major university.” He had opened his university in the early 1990s, when U.S. fighter jets began enforcing a no-fly zone over Dohuk and the rest of Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, keeping Saddam's army at bay and giving the Kurds de facto autonomy. Asmat wanted to start what he called a “College of Humanity,” which would offer courses in political philosophy, democratic theory, Western civilization, the history of liberty, and human rights. No one would be allowed to graduate without passing the human rights course. There would even be a course in comparative religion. Agresto asked if Khalid would really introduce students to the Old and New Testaments in such a course. “Yes, of course,” he told Agresto. And would he, Agresto asked, ever hire a Jew to teach the Old Testament course? Khalid didn't hesitate. “Of course,” he said. “Why not?”

When the Pentagon asked him how long he'd stay in Iraq, Agresto didn't say three months, the minimum commitment required of CPA staffers and the response heard most often in the palace.

“For the duration,” he replied.

PART TWO

Shattered Dreams

9

Let This Be Over

THE AL-RASHEED HOTEL WAS
a concrete-and-glass monstrosity built by the Oberoi Group of India in the 1980s, before Saddam's manic spending spree on weapons to defeat Iran, and before the invasion of Kuwait made Iraq an international pariah. When the al-Rasheed opened, its 428 guest rooms had buttery leather chairs, color televisions, touch-tone phones, wall-to-wall carpeting, and marble-floored bathrooms. Downstairs, the Sheherezade Bar poured Johnnie Walker Black Label, the 1,001 Nights Disco teemed with dolled-up call girls, and a shopping arcade stocked French perfume. A medical clinic staffed with a European doctor tended to guests' aches and pains.

After the Kuwait war, United Nations sanctions forced the Oberoi Group to leave the country. Saddam's government took over the al-Rasheed and every other foreign hotel in the country, including the Ishtar Sheraton and Le Méridien, which was renamed the Palestine Hotel. The cash-strapped Finance Ministry eliminated the al-Rasheed's maintenance budget. For a few years, nobody noticed. Then the elevators broke, the linens frayed, and the toilets began to leak. By the time I paid my first visit to the hotel in 2002, the leather chairs had faded and cracked, the mattresses sagged, and I had to bribe the cleaning man for a roll of toilet paper. Most of the phones didn't work, and the televisions displayed only a half dozen channels, all of which were run by the government. Saddam's regime didn't allow CNN or the BBC in the hotel. My fellow guests and I suspected that Saddam's secret police had hidden bugs in the televisions.

A week before the war, the Pentagon warned American news organizations to vacate the al-Rasheed. A big bunker underneath the hotel put it on the target list. But those of us on the ground knew better. As decrepit as it had become, it still was the best place to sleep in town. The Americans would want to stay there when they came.

The first wave of American civilians—Jay Garner and ORHA—moved into the Republican Palace instead. Their security advisers said that the fourteen-story al-Rasheed, which soared over neighboring buildings, was too vulnerable to an attack. But as the palace began overflowing with people, the threat assessment changed: the CPA's security officers deemed the hotel safe enough to bed hundreds of employees who had been sleeping on cots in the palace, waiting for the housing trailers Halliburton was supposed to bring to Baghdad.

The job of running the al-Rasheed fell to Halliburton, which promptly rehired dozens of the hotel's prewar employees, including several I suspected were former intelligence agents. Little was done to renovate the rooms, but the company did reopen the disco and set up a sports bar in the basement bunker. The hotel became the place to party in the Emerald City.

         

Colonel Elias Nimmer yawned and rolled over. He had opened his eyes ten minutes earlier, at six o'clock, as the first sliver of the sun edged above the horizon and transformed the desert sky from deep indigo to light blue. His roommate was away, and Nimmer hadn't bothered to close the curtains before going to sleep. After almost three decades in the army, his body was accustomed to waking at sunrise.

When Nimmer stood at his west-facing window in Room 916, he could gaze down on an eight-lane expressway and, beyond that, the city's zoo and a surrounding park, a dusty expanse with wilting plants and decrepit buildings. To the left were the most famous monuments erected by Saddam: a giant ziggurat to commemorate the war with Iran, and a military parade ground bookended with massive arches in the shape of human arms—reportedly modeled after Saddam's own—hoisting crossed swords.

I need to get up,
Nimmer thought. It was a Sunday, and he didn't have to report for duty at the Republican Palace until eleven, but he sensed that it would be a pleasant morning. He contemplated going for a walk before getting an early start at work. He was the chief budget officer for the CPA team that worked with Iraq's Ministry of Health. It was an exceedingly complex job, but Nimmer, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Lebanon and spoke Arabic, had plenty of experience. He had been the chief budget officer for the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Before that, he'd managed a billion-dollar budget at Fort Detrick, the army's top medical research facility.

Nimmer was a beefy man with a square jaw, a pointy nose, and a swarthy complexion. His receding graying hair had been buzzed with army-regulation clippers. He yawned and thought about catching a few more minutes of shut-eye.
Should I or shouldn't I? Should I or—
A deafening explosion rocked the hotel, and the building shuddered. Nimmer jolted awake.

Oh my God,
he thought.
They've finally done it.

Instinct took over, and Nimmer rolled onto the floor.
Nobody ever fires one rocket. More are coming,
he thought. The safest place was on the ground, as far from the window as possible. He couldn't slide under his bed because he was too large to fit under the low box spring. He did the next best thing: he lay on his stomach between his bed and his roommate's.
It's like a trench down here. I'll be safe.

It was October 26, 2003—six and a half months after American troops arrived in Baghdad. Insurgents had targeted the al-Rasheed with rockets a month earlier, but it had been a Wile E. Coyote affair. The projectiles had been launched from a makeshift stand in a residential neighborhood north of the Green Zone. One of them hit the top floor but caused little damage. Another landed in the garden. A third struck a house near the launch site. The hotel's narrow north façade wasn't the worry, nor the south, which abutted a mile-long expanse of Green Zone. The greatest points of vulnerability were the eastern and western faces—the two long sides with windows.

The CPA's security officers had dismissed the chances of a serious attack, assuming that the insurgents didn't have the skill or equipment to target the hotel with accuracy. But residents had been unnerved by the incident.

Sniper attacks and roadside bombings outside the Green Zone had become more frequent. Car bombs had destroyed the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations headquarters, killing the head of the mission, Brazilian diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello. Intelligence officers began hearing of plots to kidnap foreigners. But the Emerald City, with its seventeen-foot-high walls and its checkpoints, was supposed to be safe.

Twenty seconds after the first impact, a second rocket crashed into a concrete awning outside Nimmer's window, shattering the glass and propelling debris into the room.

Nimmer began to pray.
Please God, let this be over.

The third rocket followed the same trajectory as the second, except it streaked through the clear morning sky at a slightly higher angle. Like the others, it was an eighty-five-millimeter Katyusha, made in Russia. It had probably been sold to Iraq in the 1980s for use against Iran. Thousands had been looted from arms depots after the war.

A Katyusha travels at three times the speed of sound. If you're standing near one being launched, its sound resembles a high-pitched squeal amplified through a megaphone. If you're on the receiving end, you don't hear a thing until impact.

The third rocket flew through the shattered window of Room 916 and slammed into the wall to Nimmer's right. He saw a bright flash—as if someone had stuck a camera into his face—from the rocket's exploding phosphorous warhead. Then he felt a powerful burst of pressurized air from the blast wave. Scalding chunks of the rocket, pieces of wall plaster, slivers from the steel beams, and glass from the light fixtures pierced his flesh like shotgun pellets. The debris slammed onto his head, his back, his legs, singeing his skin.

Nimmer screamed. He thought he was going to die.

With his next breath, he tried to speak. “Help,” he shouted hoarsely. “I need help in here.”

Burning debris crackled around him. Electrical wires sparked. The room filled with smoke and the acrid odor of cordite. In the distance, he could hear shouting.

The hotel shuddered from the impact of another rocket. And then it was quiet.

“Is anybody there?” he wailed softly. “Somebody, please help me.”

Nobody called out to him.

I better not shout anymore. I need to preserve my energy.

He tried to crawl, but only dug himself deeper into the debris.

I know they'll come for me. I have to save my strength.

Another rocket hit the hotel. And another. Nimmer counted seven more rockets after the one that got him.

He didn't know it at the time, but the rocket that flew through his window didn't explode in his room. If it had, he wouldn't have been alive to scream. It had punctured the wall and detonated in the bathroom. Much of the force of the blast had traveled away from him, demolishing the closet, the front door, and the hallway.

One of Nimmer's colleagues on the Health Ministry team, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Fisher, was living across the hall, in Room 915. The blast wave was so powerful that it threw him to the ground. In between the explosions, he could hear Nimmer's cries for help, which were growing fainter.
Oh, shit,
Fisher thought.
He's hurt pretty bad.

“Elias,” he shouted. “I'm coming to get you.”

There was no response.

Fisher grabbed his rifle and his backpack, which contained his medical kit, and began to dig his way through the rubble blocking his door. Nimmer couldn't have been luckier. Fisher was a physician—not just any doctor, but the former director of critical care medicine at the Cleveland Clinic—and he was in the army's elite Special Forces.

When he reached the hallway, he found a wall of debris blocking Nimmer's door. He picked up what he could and threw it aside. When he entered Room 916, he came upon a 220-volt electrical wire dangling from the ceiling and sparking like an arc welder. Crawling under the wire, he began to dig toward Nimmer.

He's dead,
Fisher thought at first. Rubble covered much of Nimmer's body. His white T-shirt was soaked with blood, and a large piece of wood had fallen on his head.

As Fisher cleared the debris, Nimmer moaned.

“Chuck, I can't move,” he whispered. “I'm numb from the waist down.”

Two South African security contractors shouted into the room from the hallway. “Anyone there?”

Fisher asked them to clear a path wide enough to remove the injured man and then enlisted them to help him carry Nimmer to the lobby. Fisher and the South Africans wrapped Nimmer in a blanket and hauled him down nine flights of stairs. With each bump, Nimmer yelped in pain.

The al-Rasheed's lobby was filled with panicked, disoriented CPA staffers. Paul Wolfowitz and his Pentagon entourage had been overnighting in the hotel. They milled around in one corner, surrounded by guards. Wolfowitz was dressed better than anyone else—in slacks and a light blue oxford shirt—but his hair was tousled and his face ashen.

The crowd parted as Nimmer's rescuers carried him into the lobby and eased him onto the marble floor. A medic began an intravenous drip, and Fisher conducted a fuller assessment of his friend. It didn't look good. He suspected not just brain damage and a skeletal injury but also serious abdominal and spinal damage.

A Humvee ambulance pulled up to collect Nimmer for the short ride to the Green Zone hospital. Fisher jumped in the back with him. Halfway there, Nimmer removed the crucifix from around his neck and pressed it into Fisher's hand.

“Chuck, I don't think I'm going to make it,” he said. “Please give this to my wife. It's a family heirloom.”

At the hospital, Nimmer was placed on a gurney and rolled into the emergency room. “He's immediate,” Fisher shouted. “Roll him in.”

After Fisher went off to search for the chief neurosurgeon, an orderly mistook Nimmer for an Iraqi prisoner of war and wheeled him into a holding area for Iraqis who had been shot by American troops.

“You don't understand,” he screamed. “I'm a fucking U.S. Army colonel. I don't belong with these people.”

Then he passed out.

Surgeons removed two large Starbucks-size cups' worth of shrapnel from Nimmer's legs and back. They extricated bits of metal from his vertebrae that had caused the temporary paralysis. Examining his left ear, they discovered that the drum had been blown out. They treated burns on his face caused by the unspent rocket fuel.

Fifteen hours later, he was on a medevac flight to an army hospital in Germany. He would eventually be sent to Walter Reed. He would endure a dozen more surgeries. It would be harrowing, painful, and depressing at times, but he would recover.

The Emerald City never would.

         

Fifteen hours before the attack, Major General Martin Dempsey had stood at the center of the Fourteenth of July Bridge and proclaimed that “safety and security have been achieved” in Baghdad. As a U.S. Army band played Iraq's national anthem, he and three members of the Baghdad City Council cut a blue ribbon strung across the roadway.

“Go ahead, it's open!” an Iraqi policeman yelled. Hundreds of children and adults sprinted over, cheering and clapping.

The bridge, named after the July 14, 1958, revolution that overthrew the British-backed monarchy, spanned the Tigris southwest of the Republican Palace. It fed into an eight-lane expressway that flanked the al-Rasheed on the west before connecting to the main highway north to Mosul. Both the bridge and the expressway, which bisected the Green Zone, had been closed since the day the Americans arrived.

But as summer gave way to autumn, the U.S. military's “Force Protection” team, the unit responsible for securing the Emerald City, grudgingly agreed to reopen the bridge and the expressway. Seventeen-foot-high blast walls had been placed around the Green Zone's perimeter, reducing the chances that someone on the bridge could take a potshot at the palace. Blast walls also lined both sides of the expressway, forming an aboveground tunnel through Little America. Americans crossed the expressway using an underpass near the al-Rasheed.