Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

breaking into a vault under the Central Bank that housed a priceless collection of Assyrian gold, she fired off an e-mail to the U.S. Central Command. The exchange, as she and a State Department official in Washington who was copied on the messages remember it, went something like this:
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    BODINE: The Assyrian vault under the Central Bank is in immediate danger of being looted. We need to get on this.
    CENTCOM: What’s in the Assyrian vault?
    BODINE (
thinking of the “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” line
): Assyrian treasure.
    CENTCOM: What’s an Assyrian treasure?
    BODINE: Go read the early chapters of your Bible. It’s old stuff. It’s really, really valuable. We need to save it.
    CENTCOM: Okay. We’ll see what we can do.
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    There were no apologies from the military. Rumsfeld’s war plan did not include enough troops to guard government installations in Baghdad and other major cities. Asked about the looting, he brushed it off with the now-famous phrase “Freedom’s untidy.”
    Because of the looting and bedlam in Baghdad, the military refused to allow Garner and his team to move into the Iraqi capital right away. Eight days after the fall of Baghdad, with the military still unwilling to budge, Garner flew to Qatar to see General Tommy Franks, the top military commander in the region.
    â€œI said, ‘Tommy, you have got to get my team to Baghdad,’” Garner recalled. “And he said, ‘Jay, I’m not going to do that. Hell, they’re still killing people there. I’m not going to send you there.’”
    Garner argued that opportunistic Iraqis were claiming leadership of Baghdad’s local government and police force. “Power vacuums are going to be filled with stuff you and I aren’t going to like, and it’s going to take a long time to get rid of that,” Garner insisted. Franks finally relented and allowed Garner to be flown into Baghdad on April 21, 2003—twelve days after U.S. troops took over the city.
    Carney and his fellow ORHA ministers set out from Kuwait three days later. He and a dozen other senior ORHA personnel waited three hours on the tarmac in Kuwait because the C-130 Hercules transport plane that had been assigned to them was commandeered by a rear-echelon general. Once the ORHA team arrived at Baghdad International Airport, they discovered that the convoy sent to pick them up had left. They had to wait some more.
    When they finally arrived at the Republican Palace, it was a marble tent: there were no lights, no windows, no working toilets or sinks. They had been given sleeping bags in Kuwait, but nobody thought to dole out mosquito nets or other camping supplies issued to soldiers. Nor did ORHA receive the satellite phones they had been promised by military communication specialists. Carney grew increasingly alarmed. It was one thing not to have all the documents he wanted in Kuwait. It was quite another to be in Baghdad without basic living quarters.
    Moving into the Republican Palace had never been the plan. The civilians wanted ORHA to take over a hotel in Baghdad. If the group squatted in a palace, they worried that Iraqis would see them as occupiers. Military personnel within ORHA opposed a hotel, arguing that it would not have a sufficient perimeter to guard against car bombs and small-arms fire, and instead proposed an Iraqi army base on the outskirts of the city, but the civilians insisted that that would be too far away from the ministry buildings they would have to visit every day. With no other good option, ORHA’s leaders agreed to a palace.
    The job of picking a palace fell to Major Peter Veale, an army reservist who was also an architect. During the first week of the war, he walked over to the villa at the Kuwait Hilton inhabited by ORHA’s intelligence team and asked them for information about all the