they transported patients. Security concerns led staff to leave work early in order to get home safely. When hospitals did receive supplies, staff worried about attracting looters. Hospitals had no cooling systems because of electricity shortages, so medicines and vaccines were routinely destroyed.
A visit to a hospital coincided with a car screeching to a halt in front. A shrieking, black-clad woman was thrown onto a broken wheelchair; relatives had to hold it together as she was wheeled in, blood pouring from her womb. A midwife had botched her labor. A thick trail of blood led from the hospital driveway to the reception and down the hall to the emergency room.
Iraqis grumbled about their invisible ruler, the proconsul Paul Bremer, who rejected representation for them, declaring Iraqis too immature to decide their own fate. The country had three dictators in three months: Saddam was replaced by the bucolic Gen. Jay Garner and then the urbane Bremer, while others, such as Gen. Tommy Franks and President George W. Bush, issued edicts that affected their lives, and Arnold Schwarzenegger visited but did not greet his Iraqi fans. Even the name of the government changed three times: the Baathist regime became the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), which was replaced by the Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority (OCPA). In his “freedom message to the Iraqi people,” Franks, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, announced that the Americans had “come as liberators, not occupiers,” adding that they aimed to “enforce UN resolutions requiring the destruction of weapons of mass destruction.” These weapons, of course, had not existed for years.
The foreign troops became an onerous presence as the burden of Saddam was removed. Iraqis had to suffer numerous intrusive checkpoints, roadblocks, and lines for gasoline, and there were raids, killings, arrests, and property damage. They were awakened by the rumbling of tanks through streets. Unaware of the fact that many soldiers chewed tobacco, they asked me why Americans spit so much. Frustrated young soldiers pointed their machine guns at grand-mothers and teased Iraqi youths about how easily they could kill them.
In the face of the American juggernaut, Iraqis were lost and confused. They were used to the way ministries got things done. Now they had to march through long paths carved out with barbed wire and stand in the sun with gun barrels facing them. They were searched, patted down, and questioned; their IDs were declared unsuitable; they were told they could not be helped, or sent elsewhere, their protests and supplications falling on deaf ears. Tempers were lost, and Americans screamed in English as Iraqis shouted in Arabic, neither understanding the other. American soldiers did not sympathize with the inconvenience. “We stand in the sun all day,” said one soldier, looking at hundreds of men standing or squatting, waiting.
Falluja 2004
A year later I was in Falluja, a small town forty-three miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates, in the Anbar province. Before the American invasion Falluja was rarely thought of unless Iraqis were stopping to get kabobs on their way to a picnic at Lake Habbaniya, an artificial lake in the middle of the desert with bungalows and a 1960s- style resort built along its rocky banks. True, it had a reputation for being conservative, with tribal mores still important, and its claim to fame was having the highest per capita number of mosques, earning it the nickname City of Mosques. But Falluja was conservative, not radical; it had not been a center of religious extremism or loyalty to the former regime. But it became a case study of how American policy in Iraq promoted sectarianism and armed resistance.
The city, once a Sufi bastion, suffered at the hands of the former regime because of the importance of religion there. Its Sufis began to depart in the 1990s, when Saddam stopped oppressing Salafis. Named after “al- Salaf al-Salih” (the virtuous predecessors), meaning the companions of the Prophet Muhammad and their followers, Salafis seek to purify Islam of innovations introduced over the centuries since Muhammad received his revelations, and they seek to return to a way of life similar to that of the early Muslim community, basing life only on the Koran and the Sunna, the deeds and words of the Prophet. Saddam began to encourage their revival, perhaps to counter a perceived Shiite threat. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion Falluja also suffered political purges, uprisings, and killings of tribal members who had served the previous regime. It was not a wealthy town, with little signs that it received preferential treatment. It was a trucking and smuggling hub, which would later prove useful to other clandestine networks.
Although it is common to blame the American decision to dissolve the Iraqi army and security agencies in May 2003 for the emergence of the resistance, the truth is that resistance in Falluja and elsewhere in the Anbar province began before this order. No hostile shots were fired at the Americans from Falluja during the invasion, and the city saw little looting. Instead, after the war, local officials and dignitaries took control and tried to establish order. It took two weeks before the Americans even established themselves in Falluja. Key influential foreign fighters later told me that they had tried to organize an armed resistance in Falluja and failed in those early days, because Falluja’s people wanted to give the Americans a chance. But the American perception was that Sunni Arabs were loyal to Saddam and thus to be treated with hostility. The Americans took a more aggressive posture in Sunni areas than in Shiite ones.
The Americans set up an imposing presence on the main street in the center of town, using a school as their base, and mounted aggressive patrols. Their presence in other civilian areas, and their practice of observing neighborhoods from rooftops, offended traditionally minded locals. The elites who had taken control of the town following the war were not recognized by the Americans. Little interest was shown in improving the local economy. A demonstration in April calling for the Americans to leave the school ended up with nearly twenty dead civilians, as the Americans met it with extreme force. There was no public American inquiry or attempt to reconcile with the locals. One foreign fighter I spoke to would later name this as a turning point. Similar demonstrations occurred in Shiite areas, but they were met with a different response from the Americans. In Diwaniya, a Shiite city that was also a bastion of the former army, anti-Bremer demonstrations following the disbanding of the army featured pictures of Saddam and Baathist slogans, but the Americans did not respond aggressively.
More demonstrations and more killings followed in Falluja, and the Americans adopted the attitude that “Arabs only understand force.” Tanks on the streets, low-flying helicopters, frequent patrols—Fallujans felt like they were under a foreign occupation. Local leaders who sought to avoid violence would eventually change their minds. The American view that there was a monolithic group of Iraqis called Sunni Arabs had always been mistaken, just as it was a mistake to identify a Sunni Triangle. The Baath Party was incorrectly viewed as an exclusively Sunni party, and Saddam’s regime was incorrectly viewed as a Sunni regime, since not all Sunnis were loyal to it. Many Sunnis felt they were victims of Saddam, and even Sunni clerics had been executed by the former regime. Some tribes were given privileged status, while others were weakened or marginalized. That there were no obvious Sunni leaders after Saddam was removed was but one sign that his own community had been weakened by his regime. But Sunnis would soon consider themselves the targets of collective punishment. Treated as the enemy, many of them soon became just that, fearing that they were about to be exterminated. These fears would be manipulated by those interested in promoting violence.
THOSE FEARS WERE the political effect of ideas and decisions that were fermenting thousands of miles away from Iraq. Much of what we have come to know about Iraq has come from self-styled “Iraq experts” or “terrorism experts”—celebrity pundits—who catered to the political demands of the occupation and the American administration. Most of these experts could not speak or read Arabic, had not been to Iraq, and had only a superficial experience of the Middle East. They hailed from Washington think tanks like the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic International Studies, and others. If they visited Iraq (or Afghanistan), they hopped from base to base, with the military as their baby-sitter and escort. They invoked terms that were barely in use before 2003, such as “Sunni Arab.” Geographical regions were simplistically layered onto Iraq’s ethnic groups, and simplistic labels like the “Kurdish north,” “Sunni Triangle,” and “Shiite south” were popularized. The importance of class identity—and the revolutionary potential of the poor, who supported Communists in the ’50s and the Sadrists in the ’90s and later—was ignored, as was the heritage of nonsectarian nationalism.
The Iraqis the Americans installed after the invasion, however, came mostly from the former opposition parties, many of which were formed on a sectarian or ethnic basis. None had a broad base of support. The American approach to Iraq was sectarian, as Iraqis quickly complained. The Americans viewed Sunnis as the bad
