Law and Disorder in Iraq
Six weeks before American forces invaded Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration chose Jay Garner, a retired U.S. Army general, to be the American civilian administrator of post-Saddam Iraq. A blunt sixty-four-year-old Florida native who had led relief operations in northern Iraq after the first Gulf War, Garner began frantically pulling together a staff to manage a fractious nation the size of California.
Three weeks before the invasion, Garner met with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and National Security Council officials to brief them on his plans. He and a team of experts from various civilian agencies said they believed a large contingent of American and European police officers would be needed to train a new Iraqi police force and prevent lawlessness. Garner unveiled an ambitious proposal to send five thousand American and foreign advisers to Iraq. Richard Mayer, a Justice Department police-training expert on his staff, had put together a detailed inch-and-a-half-thick plan that included organizational tables, budgets, and schedules.
The proposal was sweeping but not unprecedented. In Kosovo, a place one-tenth the size of Iraq, the United Nations had deployed forty-eight hundred foreign police officers to train locals and help deter crime. In Bosnia, two thousand international police officers had trained and monitored local forces.
In Mayer’s analysis, two clear lessons had emerged from the Balkans. First, he believed that following a strategy he called “law and order first” was vital. If an effective police force and judicial system were not quickly created in Iraq, all other postwar reform and reconstruction efforts would stall. Second, Mayer believed that flooding local police stations with foreign trainers would help ensure that Iraqi police officers actually applied the training they received. The presence of foreigners also helped deter brutality, corruption, and infiltration by militias.
Garner and others on his staff warned administration officials that the Iraqi police, after decades of neglect and corruption, would collapse after the invasion. The police were “at the bottom of the security food chain,” Garner recalled saying at the NSC meeting. “They didn’t train. They didn’t patrol.”
Garner was not alone. In February, Robert M. Perito, a policing expert and a former official at the National Security Council and the State and Justice Departments, had made separately the same recommendation to Defense Department officials. Perito had called for six thousand American and foreign police officers to be dispatched across postwar Iraq.
But NSC officials reacted with skepticism to Garner’s call for five thousand trainers. A vocal opponent was Frank Miller, the NSC official who would oversee the White House’s effort to govern Iraq.
“He didn’t think it was necessary,” Garner said in a later interview. Rice, who was chairing the meeting, said the administration would revisit the issue after Saddam Hussein was removed from power. She then moved on to other issues.
“We settled for ‘Don’t make the decision not to do this yet,’” Garner recalled. “Let us get there and then make the decision on what was needed.”
In truth, though, ideology was distorting administration policy. In a speech a month before the invasion, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that international peacekeeping operations could create “a culture of dependence” and that a long-term foreign presence in a country “can be unnatural.” In interviews, Miller and Douglas J. Feith, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy, said their goal in post-Saddam Iraq was to minimize the American presence and empower Iraqis.
Feith insisted that his “strategic thought,” as he later described it, was “that we are going to get into very big trouble in Iraq if we are viewed as our enemies would have us viewed, as imperialists, as heavy-handed and stealing their resources.”
Rivalries and distrust between government agencies also skewed American prewar planning. Frank Miller, the skeptical NSC aide, said a CIA assessment led administration officials to believe that Iraq’s police could maintain order. Doug Feith blamed the CIA report as well. He said agency analysts deemed Iraq’s police professional, an appraisal that events proved “fundamentally wrong.”
John E. McLaughlin, deputy CIA director from 2000 to 2004, said intelligence officials made it clear in prewar White House planning sessions that Iraq’s police were troubled. He insisted that the CIA was not at fault.
“I left these meetings with a clear understanding that this police force was not one that we could rely on,” McLaughlin said in a later interview. “I don’t remember the agency, or intelligence more broadly, reassuring people about the police force.”
Nine days before the invasion, President Bush rejected Garner’s proposal and the recommendations of civilian experts. He approved guidelines that called for only a limited number of American police advisers. They would not have the power to enforce the law. That would be left to the Iraqi police.
* * *
Three weeks after American forces invaded Iraq, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert Waltemeyer looked sternly at the thirty Iraqi community leaders gathered around him, put his hands on his hips, and read them the riot act. Forty-eight hours earlier, several hundred American Special Operations soldiers under Waltemeyer’s command had driven Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Mosul, the country’s third-largest city and an ethnic and religious tinderbox.
“I came halfway around the world to protect your freedom,” the frustrated colonel said. “You are the elder statesmen and wise men of this community and I need your help. We won the war and now need to win the peace.”
Looting had erupted across the sprawling metropolis of 1.7 million people in northern Iraq, and unknown gunmen were firing on American forces. Waltemeyer—bald, stocky, and at times brusque—was trying to act like the new sheriff in town.
The local leaders, a cross section of Sunni Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis, and Assyrian Christians, listened politely to the American’s speech but said nothing. As U.S. soldiers patrolled the streets in vehicles flying large American flags, some residents waved. Others spat at them.
In later conversations, local leaders and residents angrily complained that American forces had entered the city too slowly after Iraqi troops withdrew, and stood by as most ministries, colleges, and hospitals were looted. At the same time, clashes erupted between armed groups. Doctors said twenty-five to thirty people died in the first forty-eight hours of the American occupation. Over time, those numbers would spiral.
At the center of it all was Waltemeyer, a forty-two-year-old Special Forces colonel. From his base at the looted Mosul airport, Waltemeyer served as mayor, prosecutor, police chief, and public-works director in one. In public, he tried to convey the image of a take-no-prisoners strongman. In truth, he had only several hundred soldiers and no engineers, police, city managers, or other civilian experts to help him. Surrounded by an often hostile population, he and his troops were expected to somehow pacify and administer a city of dizzying ethnic and political complexity.
“Mosul has the promise to be a model community of a free democratic Iraq,” he said at his first press conference. “But it ain’t there yet.”
As cities fell across Iraq, the same dynamic played out. Units of American troops rolled into towns and were confronted by angry locals who demanded that they police streets, repair downed electrical systems, and reopen schools. In Washington, Bush administration officials tried to play down the problem. Asked at a Pentagon press conference about the looting, Donald Rumsfeld gave an answer that became an infamous symbol of the administration’s failure to properly prepare for governing post-Hussein Iraq.
“Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things,” Rumsfeld said. “They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.”
It was also an example of an American tendency to focus on military force and ignore the vital role civilian efforts play. Military might alone is not enough to stabilize a country. Bush, Rumsfeld, and other senior officials ignored the warnings of career State Department officials, CIA analysts, and retired military officers that they would face chaos in Iraq. Instead, they were intent on quickly defeating Saddam Hussein’s forces and avoiding Clinton administration–style “nation building.” When they finally recognized that the United States had to mount a major effort to train Iraqi police, rebuild cities, and reopen schools, America’s anemic civilian agencies were largely unable to carry it out. So were contractors.
* * *
In scores of communities across Iraq in the spring of 2003, scenes like the one I had witnessed in Mosul unfolded. Just as Garner’s team had predicted, local police abandoned their posts en masse as government civil servants stopped coming to work across Iraq. Basic services disintegrated, and American military officers found themselves trying to repair municipal water systems and organize trash collection. Lawlessness, confusion, and uncertainty were rampant. In Baghdad, sixteen of twenty-three major government ministries were looted shells. Garner arrived with a team of twenty aides, toured the country, and tried to reassure Iraqis. But the postwar American plan to rule the country was in chaos.
After only three weeks on the job, Garner was fired by White House officials and replaced by L. Paul Bremer III, a former aide to Henry Kissinger. Bremer was even less prepared for Iraq than Garner. In a later interview, Bremer told me he had not participated in prewar planning and was never told of Garner’s police training plan.
“I had only two weeks to get ready for the job,” he recalled. “I don’t remember being specifically briefed on the police.”
When Bremer arrived in Baghdad on May 12, 2003, government offices were still burning. A full month after the fall of the city, looting continued. That night, Bremer gave his first speech to his staff.
“I put the very first priority on police and law and order,” he recalled. “I said we should shoot the looters.”
After Bremer’s speech leaked to the press, American military officials promised him an additional four thousand military policemen in Baghdad. And a twenty-five-member Department of Justice assessment team arrived to draw up a plan to rebuild Iraq’s police. They were daunted by what they found.
One team member, Gerald Burke, a fifty-seven-year-old retired Massachusetts State Police major, drove onto the grounds of the Baghdad police academy. Thousands of people—some, civilian crime victims in search of aid; others, police officers in search of orders—besieged a small group of American military policemen.
“We had people drive in with bodies lashed to the hood and lashed to the trunk,” Burke recalled. “It was the only police facility that was open. People didn’t know what to do.”
The Justice Department team estimated that across the country 80 percent of Iraqi police had not returned to duty. Iraqis who had lived in a police state with virtually no street crime for twenty-five years were dismayed. They hailed Hussein’s ouster but bitterly complained that the United States was not doing enough about spiraling crime.
In the face of soaring murder, kidnapping, and rape, Bush administration officials sent Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, to Baghdad to lead the police training effort. Pentagon officials gave Kerik ten days to prepare for the job and little guidance.
With no experience in Iraq or overseas police training, Kerik said that one of the ways he prepared was by watching A&E documentaries on Saddam Hussein. He was never told of Garner’s police training plan.
“Looking back, I really don’t know what their plan was,” Kerik said in a 2006 interview.
When Kerik arrived in Baghdad in mid-May, he found “nothing, absolutely nothing” in place. “Twelve guys on the ground plus me,” he recalled. “That was the new Ministry of Interior.”
Kerik put one member of his team in charge of training a four-thousand-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities. A second aide was responsible for advising five hundred police commanders in Baghdad. A third was ordered to organize a border patrol for the entire country.
Kerik scrambled to reopen police academies and stations, screen thousands of Iraqis claiming to be policemen, and choose new police chiefs. Across Baghdad, American military policemen mounted joint patrols with Iraqis. All told, twenty-six hundred Americans tried to police a city of 7 million. New York, which has 8 million people, has thirty-four thousand police.
In rural areas, American military units launched their own impromptu police training programs that were completely separate from the civilian effort. Some lasted three weeks. Some lasted three days. Desperate for law and order, some American military officers declared local tribal leaders new police chiefs. In some cases, they welcomed repentant former supporters of Hussein back on the job.
Over the course of the summer of 2003, forty thousand Iraqi police officers returned to duty nationwide, and thirty-five police stations in Baghdad reopened. The numbers were promising but corruption was rampant. Insurgents and former criminals posed as policemen and infiltrated the force. And large parts of the population distrusted the former government officials Americans made police chiefs.
Fearing that long-term criminality and corruption would undermine any new Iraqi government, the twenty-five-member Justice Department assessment team drafted a plan to train a fifty-thousand- to eighty-thousand-member Iraqi police force. At first, members of the team suggested that Iraqi police recruits receive six months of training, the amount of time the trainers in Kosovo had settled on. Kerik said he “started laughing,” and calculated that it would take nine years to train the force. The team reduced academy training to sixteen weeks, and eventually eight weeks. Later, a State Department audit found that some Iraqi recruits actually received the equivalent of four weeks of training.
“If you took all of the post–cold war conflicts from the 1990s and combined them together, it would not equal what you’re up against in Iraq,” recalled Carr Trevillian, the leader of the Justice Department team. “Even if it were a benign environment.”
To make up for the shortened classes, Trevillian proposed a sweeping field-training program similar to the one Garner had outlined before the war. The team calculated that more than twenty thousand advisers would be needed to create the same ratio of police trainers to recruits in Iraq as existed in Kosovo. Deeming that figure unrealistic, they proposed embedding sixty-six hundred American and foreign trainers in police stations across the country to train Iraqis and, if necessary, enforce the law.
Officials from the State Department said they knew where to get the trainers: DynCorp. Like USAID, the State Department had gradually become dependent on the use of contractors over the course of a series of postwar interventions in the 1990s.
* * *
DynCorp’s rise from a little-known Texas-based aviation maintenance company to an indispensable wing of the State Department began in 1994. On the eve of the American invasion of Haiti, officials in an obscure State Department office known as the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, or INL, received an urgent request. The administration needed forty-five American police officers to help secure the Caribbean nation after American forces toppled military dictator Raoul Cedras and reinstalled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
INL officials contacted DynCorp, which already had a $30 million contract from the bureau to operate counternarcotics flights in Latin America. Impressed with the company’s aviation work, INL awarded DynCorp a small contract to recruit, hire, and deploy the forty-five American police officers to Haiti. State Department officials viewed the hiring of DynCorp as an interim measure; DynCorp saw it as a business opportunity.
“We always saw it as a growth area because of the conflicts in the world,” Stephen Cannon, a former DynCorp executive, told me.
Cannon was right. Throughout the 1990s, the government money kept flowing. A few months after winning the police trainer contract, DynCorp won a contract from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security to guard American diplomats in Haiti. When the United States intervened in Bosnia in 1996 and Kosovo in 1999, more money followed. All told, the State Department issued more than $250 million in police training and diplomatic security contracts to DynCorp for work in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
After the 9/11 attacks, DynCorp’s government contracts exploded. Between 2001 and 2011, the firm received $7.4 billion in contracts from the State Department and Pentagon in Afghanistan and Iraq. It became the third-largest American contractor in the two wars, behind only the massive oil and defense conglomerate Halliburton and a Kuwaiti-based firm, Agility, which provided food to American troops in Iraq.
* * *
While the Bush administration had largely ignored the need for police in Iraq, DynCorp had banked on it. After the invasion, the company posted help-wanted ads online and compiled a list of 1,150 active and retired American police officers who were interested in serving in Iraq. Under pressure for immediate results, the Justice Department team agreed that DynCorp should recruit the 6,600 trainers. On June 2, Bremer approved the plan.
The trainers, though, never materialized. Over the next six months, just fifty police advisers arrived in Iraq, even as the intensifying insurgency was presenting a much more lethal set of problems. Bremer, National Security Council staffers, and State Department officials all blamed one another for the problem.
“We and DynCorp were ready to go by June,” a senior State Department official later told me. “But no money was provided for this purpose.”
Miller, the National Security Council staffer who coordinated the postwar effort, said he was never told about the shortage of money. Miller said Bremer never made the need for field trainers a major issue. And DynCorp, meanwhile, waited.
“If at any point Bremer had said, ‘I just saw a report and I need sixty-six hundred,’ that would have made this a front-burner issue,” Miller told me. “I don’t recall that as an issue.”
Bremer insisted that he pushed for more trainers throughout the summer of 2003. Over and over he was told that DynCorp was unable to find Americans and that no foreign countries were willing to send large numbers of police trainers.
“DynCorp was not producing anybody,” Bremer said. “We were doing the best we could with what we had.”
In interviews, DynCorp officials said they responded to all the requests they received from the government.
Frustrated by their inability to get enough manpower, Bremer and his staff cut the target number of trainers nearly in half, from 6,600 to 3,500. By September, they cut the number to 1,500. Finally, as 2003 came to a close, the State Department opened a sprawling training center in Jordan that would train 25,000 police recruits in the next twelve months. But once they went to their posts there would be few foreign field trainers to monitor them.
As the effort stumbled and shrank, no American officials publicly sounded the alarm about the situation. After spending only three and a half months in Iraq, Kerik returned to the United States. In early October, he praised the Iraqi police during a news conference with President Bush on the South Lawn of the White House.
“They have made tremendous progress,” Kerik said. “The police are working.”
Four years later, Kerik was indicted on federal tax evasion and fraud charges. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a four-year term in a federal prison in Maryland. The former leader of the American police training effort in Iraq is scheduled for release in October 2013.
* * *
After Kerik’s departure from Iraq in the fall of 2003, infighting between American military and civilian officials involved in police training grew. American military officials announced that their training programs had produced fifty-four thousand police officers around the country. They said American soldiers would train another thirty thousand police in the next thirty days.
Civilian officials privately scoffed at the numbers. They believed that only superficial training programs could churn out so many graduates. Bremer said he repeatedly warned in NSC meetings chaired by Rice and attended by cabinet secretaries that the quality of police training was poor and focused on producing high numbers.
“They were just pulling kids off the streets and handing them badges and AK-47s,” Bremer said.
Across Baghdad and the country, the spiraling insurgent attacks and lawlessness drove down popular support for the American-led occupation.
“We were the government of Iraq, and the most fundamental role of any government is law and order,” Bremer said. “The fact that we didn’t crack down on it from the very beginning had sent a message to the Iraqis and the insurgents that we were not prepared to enforce law and order.”
Burke, the retired Massachusetts State Police major, said he was impressed by the eagerness of Iraqi police officers to build a professional new force but appalled by the American effort.
“We had such a golden opportunity in the first few months,” he said. “These people were so willing. Even the Sunni policemen wanted change.”
By January 2004, Bremer himself viewed the field training program as impractical. American military officials did not have enough troops to guard civilian trainers posted in isolated police stations, particularly in the volatile Sunni Triangle.
In a final capitulation, Bremer and his staff backed a plan to reduce the number of DynCorp field trainers by two-thirds, from fifteen hundred to five hundred. The remaining funds would be used to intensively train senior Iraqi police officials.
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, fought the reduction. They argued that the police trainers could still operate in safer areas outside the Sunni Triangle. In March 2004, they lost the battle in Washington. The field training of a new Iraqi police force—at this point some ninety thousand officers—was left to five hundred DynCorp contractors.
When the DynCorp trainers fanned out across Iraq in 2004, they were disappointed and shocked by what they found. As one DynCorp trainer put it, they had hoped to be “part of an emerging democracy, part of history.” Instead, they found themselves completely overwhelmed—and undermanned—for the task they faced.
As Garner’s team had predicted, Iraqi recruits were generally motivated but their skills were rudimentary. In Saddam’s Iraq, resources were showered on the intelligence services and army, which were seen as more loyal. DynCorp trainers had to instruct Iraqis on the most basic elements of policing, from designing crime report forms to carrying out traffic stops.
Reed Schmidt, a police chief from Atwater, Minnesota, said he was trying to teach the police in the southern city of Najaf his two-officer method for pulling a driver over when Iraqi officers said they preferred their own method. The Iraqis told him how two police pickup trucks with seven officers each surrounded the suspect’s car with fourteen guns. Schmidt realized that if any of the Iraqi police opened fire they would shoot one another.
“Aren’t you worried about hitting another officer?” he asked.
“Sometimes that happens,” the Iraqis replied, according to Schmidt.
In northern Iraq, Ann Vernatt, a sheriff’s investigator from Eastpointe, Michigan, said she and five other trainers checked on fifty-five stations each month. The hour-long visits left her impressed by the officers’ motivation but dismayed by the bleak conditions.
“They had rusted Kalashnikovs, which they cleaned with gasoline. Most of their weapons did not work. And they got paid very little,” she said. “They’d sell their bullets to feed their families.”
Other DynCorp employees said their greatest frustration was simply having too many police officers to train.
Jon Villanova, a North Carolina deputy sheriff, said he was promoted by DynCorp to manage other trainers in southern Iraq four months into his yearlong stint. Under the original plan drawn up by the Justice Department team, he would have commanded a battalion of at least five hundred trainers. What he got instead was a squad of forty men to train twenty thousand Iraqi policemen in four provinces. Villanova said he couldn’t dream of giving the Iraqis the one-on-one mentoring American police cadets typically receive. In the end, his team struggled to visit their stations once a month.
“That hurt,” he said. “You need a lot of time to develop relationships and rapport so they trust you and are receptive to what you are trying to teach them.”
David Dobrotka, the top civilian overseeing the DynCorp workers, said security concerns prompted him to stop hiring advisers once the number reached five hundred. Attacks were so frequent that some trainers were unable to leave their camps.
“Early in the mission, five hundred were too many,” Dobrotka said. “Some were just sitting.”
At the same time, there were only two government employees and one contractor in Baghdad monitoring the performance of all five hundred DynCorp advisers spread across the country. Government auditors later accused DynCorp employees of selling ammunition earmarked for the Iraqi police. And they found that DynCorp failed to install proper fraud controls and that a subcontractor it hired stole $600,000 worth of fuel in 2003.
Richard Cashon, a DynCorp vice president, defended the company’s performance. The employees involved in the fuel theft were fired, and the company reimbursed the $600,000 the government lost. He said the firm’s only responsibility was to provide high-quality contractors. The design, administration, and monitoring of the police training program were the responsibility of the State Department.
“We are not judged on the success or failure of the program as they established it,” Cashon said. “We are judged on our ability to provide qualified personnel.”
* * *
Even as the police training effort in Iraq stumbled, DynCorp won more and more government contracts. Government workers eventually started to refer to DynCorp and other contracting firms as “body shops.” Whenever the government needed personnel to do anything, from interrogating prisoners to performing housekeeping on a base, DynCorp and other firms hired experts in the required field and offered them to the government for a fee. Between 2002 and 2012, DynCorp provided translators to American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, maintained helicopters the United States provided to Pakistan, trained police in Afghanistan and Iraq for the State Department, and won multibillion-dollar Pentagon contracts to build, supply, and maintain American military bases worldwide. After Afghan President Hamid Karzai narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Kandahar in September 2002, the State Department hired DynCorp to protect him. Within months, State Department and Afghan officials began to complain that the DynCorp guards were far too aggressive in their tactics. Their conduct alienated Afghan and European officials as well as Afghans. American officials evenutally stopped using DynCorp personnel to guard Karzai.
Investigators later found that so few firms were willing to work in Iraq and Afghanistan that DynCorp won some of its largest contracts with little competition. When DynCorp was not included in a final round of bidders for a new police training contract in 2009, the company filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office and won. Despite seven years of questionable performance, DynCorp won another police training contract worth up to $1 billion in December 2010.
In the end, DynCorp and other contractors had little responsibility for the actual outcome of U.S. government efforts but continued to profit enormously. Under DynCorp’s “cost-plus” police training contracts, the company spent as much money as it deemed necessary to complete a project, and the government agreed to pay a set fee as a guaranteed profit.
In short, it was impossible for DynCorp to lose money.
A bipartisan panel Congress created in 2008—the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan—found that the cost-plus contracts created no incentive for contractors to reduce costs.
“Their company was not carrying any risk whatsoever,” said Charles Tiefer, a member of the commission and a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. “They had the government’s credit card in their pockets. It was guaranteed, a percent profit.”
The spectacular returns caught the eye of traditional defense contractors and Wall Street. In 2003, Computer Sciences Corporation, a longtime defense contractor known by its acronym, CSC, purchased DynCorp for $914 million. Less than two years later, CSC split the company and sold its security and aviation divisions to Veritas Capital, a Wall Street venture capital firm, for $850 million. Two years later, Veritas took DynCorp public. And in 2010, Veritas sold DynCorp to a Wall Street private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, for $1 billion.
Officials from Veritas and Cerberus did not respond to interview requests. DynCorp officials said Cerberus had changed 90 percent of the firm’s top management and improved performance. Former DynCorp employees told a different story. They said that midway through Veritas’s six-year control of the company a new management team began cutting corners, reducing costs, and emphasizing profit over performance.
In truth, DynCorp’s owners and executives took advantage of overwhelmed government agencies whose staffing had been cut by repeated administrations and congresses. High-priced contractors, it seemed, could solve any problem. In fact, they could not. But as the civilian American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan faltered, the owners of DynCorp and other contracting firms grew rich.
The chairman of Veritas Capital, Robert B. McKeon, appears to be the American who made the single largest profit from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: $350 million from the purchase and sale of DynCorp. On September 10, 2012, McKeon committed suicide in his home in Darien, Connecticut, according to local police. A Veritas official who asked not to be named said the cause was personal and not work-related.
“Bob was an extraordinary person, a consummate professional, and a cherished friend and colleague,” Veritas said in a statement. “We are all deeply saddened by this tragic loss and have his family in our thoughts.”
The fifty-eight-year-old father of four was born in the Bronx and attended Fordham University and Harvard Business School. He established a fellowship at Harvard that helped military personnel attend business school. His suicide was a mystery and a tragedy.