Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran Page B

Department.
    Nine days before the first bombs and cruise missiles pummeled Baghdad, Paul Wolfowitz called Carney. The two men had known each other since the late 1980s, when Wolfowitz was ambassador to Indonesia and Carney was his top political officer. It was a short phone call, with none of the usual reminiscing. Wolfowitz asked Carney to join the team being assembled to handle postwar reconstruction and governance. Carney, always a sucker for adventure, agreed.
    Before he hung up, Wolfowitz expressed unhappiness with the inclusion of State Department personnel on the postwar team. Many of the department’s veteran Middle East hands had been openly skeptical of transforming Iraq into a democracy, as Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives had been advocating. Carney was no neocon, but he defined his politics as “center right,” instead of the center-left label that applies to many in America’s diplomatic corps. Wolfowitz suggested that his old friend call things as he saw them. It was a message that Carney would take to heart—just not as Wolfowitz had intended.
    On his first full day in Baghdad, Carney discovered that the military had assigned so few soldiers to ORHA that only two or three staffers could travel out of the palace at one time. He and his fellow ministerial advisers decided that the top priority should go to the American Treasury Department team that wanted to inspect the Central Bank. The bank was atop ORHA’s ignored list of places to protect.
    As three Treasury specialists headed out the door, wearing their flak vests and helmets, senior ORHA staffers assembled for a morning meeting. Ten minutes later, the Treasury staffers returned, walked up to Carney, and asked to borrow the tourist map of Baghdad he had purchased from a Washington travel store before his departure. “The military doesn’t know where it’s going, either,” one of them said. For the next several days, referring to Carney’s map was the only way ORHA staff could identify government buildings in the capital.
    When the Treasury officials finally arrived at the site of the Central Bank, they found the building burned to the ground. No one knew the fate of the Assyrian gold in the underground vaults.
    The next day it was Carney’s turn to visit the Ministry of Industry. He carpooled with Robin Raphel, the adviser to the Trade Ministry. The building was only a half mile across the Tigris River from the palace, but it took them almost half an hour to make the trip. With no policemen at work and no electricity to power the traffic lights, Baghdad’s streets had become a free-for-all. Before the day was over, Carney and Raphel had reached two conclusions: the looting had caused far more damage to Iraq’s infrastructure than the bombing campaign, and the failure to restore order was creating a climate of near-total impunity. Once government buildings had been stripped bare, miscreants began stealing from fellow Iraqis. When electricity was restored—for no more than a few hours at a time—home-owners began tapping distribution lines so they would not have to pay for service. My driver, an English-speaking law student who had not dared to flout a traffic rule before the war, now coolly drove on the wrong side of the street, into opposing traffic at times, to avoid traffic jams. When I asked him what he was doing, he turned to me, smiled, and said, “Mr. Rajiv, democracy is wonderful. Now we can do whatever we want.”
    When Carney got to the Ministry of Industry site, he found pretty much what he had expected: a giant, charred honeycomb. He asked the few ministry employees loitering uncertainly in the parking lot to return with their bosses the next day. They did, along with eight senior ministry officials dressed in blazers and ties. Their first order of business was to find someplace other than the parking lot to meet. They quickly determined that most of the ministry’s