In the Green Zone

“They tell you it’s the oil but I know it is not the oil, I just can’t figure out what the hell it is we are here for.”
—American soldier in Baghdad, August 2003

The first leader of post-Saddam Iraq was a white American in khaki chinos, a navy-blue blazer, and combat boots. Paul Bremer—or “Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III,” as his name appears on the cover of his memoir—grew up in Connecticut. His father was the president of Christian Dior Perfumes, and his mother taught art history at a university. His education was about as elite as it gets: elementary schooling at New Canaan Country School, which as of 2023 charged more than $45,000 in tuition for kindergarten; high school at Phillips Academy Andover; and college at Yale University. After college, he studied business at Harvard and politics in Paris. He began his career in the Foreign Service in 1966, then moved over to the State Department. In 1989, he joined Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm, advising multinational corporations on which countries were too unstable to invest in and which were just unstable enough. By 2003, Bremer had spent nearly four decades in diplomacy and international relations, and he still looked the part of an energetic Ivy Leaguer with a spot on the squash team and a can-do spirit. He had a boyish face, bright eyes, and hair like a Kennedy. He favored conservative tailoring and spoke with a reedy but confident voice. He was six feet, four inches tall.

Bush appointed Bremer as presidential envoy to Iraq on May 6, 2003. He arrived in Baghdad six days later. It was the first time he had ever set foot in the country. “I did read as much Iraqi history as I could in the very brief time before I went, which was only a couple of weeks,” he said years later. “Would it have mattered greatly if I had known more? Perhaps. . . . I have never seen a convincing argument that my lack of deep Iraqi experience actually made a difference.” By June, he was the head of the newly formed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the country’s chief executive. In his memoir, Bremer wrote that he was “the only paramount authority figure—other than dictator Saddam Hussein—that most Iraqis had ever known.” This claim suggests that his “lack of deep Iraqi experience” did matter after all, because there were in fact millions of living Iraqis whose memories would have stretched back to before Saddam’s 1979 assumption of the presidency. Bremer’s mandate was to oversee both the reconstruction of a devastated country and the birth of a new democratic government. He held the job for fourteen months and basically answered to no one. He liked to wake up at 5:00 a.m. and go for a run through the gardens of Saddam’s presidential palace, and he accessorized his suits with a pair of Timberland boots his son had given to him on the eve of his departure, along with a note reading, “Go kick some butt, Dad.”

Bremer did not kick some butt. He spent a bit more than a year in Iraq, and when he left in June 2004, basic services were still unreliable, the temporary Iraqi Governing Council was a hornet’s nest of competing agendas, and popular discontent was in the process of developing into civil war. It would take a further three years for the military to bring the violence under any semblance of control. Bush awarded Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom several months after his return, but even back then he was generally seen as a failure.

Today, a similar judgment is often made about the war on terror as a whole. Despite the political benefits of rallying Americans around the flag in fits of nationalist enthusiasm, both parties found the war to be an enormous headache. George W. Bush had to mount an expensive and elaborate propaganda campaign to convince voters that Iraq was worth invading, and even with all that time and effort, the public remained on his side for little more than two years. By July 2005, a majority of Americans recognized that Bush had misled them about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and during the awful summer of 2008, Bush had the lowest approval ratings of any president since Harry Truman, with just 24 percent of Americans believing he’d done anything resembling a good job. His successor’s enthusiasm for the war is even harder to understand in terms of politics. Obama’s decision to increase America’s troop levels in Afghanistan alienated the base of his popular support and did nothing to appease his conservative antagonists. When he took office, just a quarter of Americans thought that invading Afghanistan had been a mistake. When he left, that figure was almost 50 percent.

The larger war continued to strain America’s relationships with many of its most important allies, boosted Iran’s influence in the region thanks to the Shia takeover of Iraqi politics, and seeded outbreaks of violence and social unrest across the Middle East. In 2008, a Nobel laureate in economics and a former CFO for the Department of Commerce calculated that the Iraq War alone had cost America more than $3 trillion, more than a fifth of the country’s GDP for that year. And in addition to the political and financial costs, a 2021 report found that roughly fifteen thousand American service members and private contractors lost their lives fighting the war, a figure that doesn’t even begin to reflect the real human cost to the United States. Add in the veterans who came home permanently disabled, or who took their own lives following their deployments, and you get a number in the hundreds of thousands. For most of its existence, the war on terror was unpopular at home and counterproductive abroad, diminishing rather than enhancing America’s standing and influence around the world.

To be blunt about it, governments do not often spend trillions of dollars doing something that is both politically unpopular and seemingly harmful to their global interests. So what was the point? Why did the war on terror continue for so long?

Over the past twenty years, there have generally been two answers to that question. Those who supported the war saw the project as a kind of crusade, an effort to rid the world of evil, make the Middle East safe for political and economic liberalism, and cement the United States atop the world order for at least the rest of the twenty-first century. After that project failed, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan, these supporters changed their account of the war’s meaning without giving up their belief in its righteousness. Now they gilded the war with the nobility of a doomed quest. America’s soldiers had not failed, they said—failure was impossible by definition. American troops were the greatest fighters in history, and if they had come home without completing their mission, the correct place to lay blame was at the feet of the officers, politicians, journalists, and protesters who lacked the fortitude required to see the task through. By this logic, the war persisted for so long because the men and women who fought it refused to give up even as the society they defended turned its back on them.

Those who opposed the war told a different story: America did it for oil. The slogan “No blood for oil” could be seen and heard everywhere at protest marches during late 2002 and early 2003. It sought an explanation for the war in the field of economics, envisioning the conflict as part of a zero-sum competition for access to industrial resources. At the time of the invasion, Iraq was believed to have at least the fifth-largest oil reserves of any country on the planet, and that was a conservative estimate. No one would really know what Iraq had until Western oil companies were allowed to fly in with their equipment and expertise and start looking around. In a report published two months after the invasion, a writer at the Brookings Institution noted that while the consensus put Iraq’s known and commercially viable reserves at 112 billion barrels, other estimates by The Petroleum Economist magazine and the Federation of American Scientists had the number closer to 200 billion barrels, and another study had gone as high as 300 billion. If the high-end estimate was correct, then Iraq was home to a quarter of all the drillable oil on earth.

Despite halfhearted demonstrations of indifference, Dick Cheney’s office was not very successful in concealing its interest in these oil fields. Even before September 11, the vice president instructed the National Security Council to work with the Energy Task Force he had established shortly after taking office. As Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker, Cheney wanted the two groups to work on combining “two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: ‘the review of operational policies towards rogue states,’ such as Iraq, and ‘actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.’” This was before technological advances in horizontal well bores made hydraulic fracturing, better known today as fracking, profitable on a large scale. Fracking eventually turned the United States into one of the largest fossil fuel producers in the world, but the technology wasn’t yet commercially viable in 2001, and pundits and think tank researchers often warned of an impending oil supply crunch and its attendant high prices (the U.S. government knows very well that its car-dependent citizenry will not tolerate expensive gasoline for any sustained period of time).

As the antiwar collective Retort observed, one private intelligence firm wrote in a report that invading Iraq would constitute “a ‘sublime’ opportunity to ‘scoop up cheap assets.’” What you had in 2003, then, was (1) a country gripped by anxiety about oil shortages, which (2) invaded Iraq, a country home to (3) perhaps the largest unexplored and unexploited oil reserves in the world. It’s not unreasonable to put those facts together and conclude that the explanation for the Iraq War is obvious. And yet, as Retort wrote, “it is one thing for an explanation to be vivid, another for it to be crushingly obvious. We tire of detectives solving crimes the criminals have never bothered to conceal.”

Though persuasive at first glance, the blood-for-oil thesis loses much of its explanatory power the closer one looks. The idea that the government worried only about the price of oil going too high forgets that the oil market includes sellers as well as buyers. Oil companies are constituents too, and the more prevalent worry within the industry was that a supply glut would drive prices so low as to make their operations unprofitable. Second, while the oil companies would have been pleased to learn that America’s military had made new reserves available for exploitation, it is not obvious that those same companies would weigh the benefits against the risks and come out in favor of invasion. Investment in oil production is very capital-intensive, and it requires years, even decades, to turn a profit. Risk is a normal part of doing business, but invading Iraq threatened to upend a fifth of global supply—that is not a normal risk. Finally, whatever oil might be able to explain about the Iraq War in particular, it cannot do the same for a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan, drones over Pakistan or Yemen, or a quiet but persistent campaign of special operations exercises and training across Somalia, Niger, and much of the Sahel.

This is not to deny that oil helped to shape America’s cost-benefit analysis; as one of the most important commodities in the world, it could hardly do otherwise. But proponents of the blood-for-oil thesis erred in treating oil as the Bush administration’s primary motivating force rather than as one part of a larger economic project.

In trying to look at the economic forces underlying the war from a sufficient altitude, one needs to remember the part of the war’s official name that is often omitted in conversation: global war on terror. The United States didn’t become the world’s most powerful country solely on the strength of its national economy after World War II, even if that economic strength was staggering (in 1960, the United States accounted for 40 percent of the world’s economic activity). What made the United States so powerful was its ability to superintend the global economy as a whole, to shepherd twentieth-century capitalism through its decades-long conflict with the Soviet Union, write the rules of global trade and finance, and enforce those rules when some malcontent got out of line. This enforcement often took place at gunpoint, as in the cases of Korea, Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, and any number of other countries in which the United States decided that legitimate governments needed to be replaced. But the United States also won countries over to its side by spreading around the wealth generated by its manufacturing prowess, with the reconstruction of Europe under the Marshall Plan as the most famous example. It shared the wealth at home as well, to a certain extent, permitting the growth of the powerful industrial unions whose labor advocacy created the vaunted American middle class and turning Americans into the most voracious consumers in world history.

For twenty-five years after World War II, America’s leadership of the world economy was a success, at least from the perspective of Americans and other inhabitants of the affluent north. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the world’s economic engine began to sputter. Global growth slowed down, and the mutually beneficial ties of trade and exchange that held together the American-led world system started to fray. By the end of the twentieth century, these ties had frayed to such an extent that a number of structural adjustments had to be made in order to sustain the American project through the twenty-first. To begin seeing the contours of that project, it will be helpful to look at what Paul Bremer tried to do with Iraq after Saddam was gone.

During his time in Baghdad, Bremer lived in what came to be known as the Green Zone, a fortified, ten-square-kilometer compound nestled into a bend in the Tigris River. Completely surrounded by blast walls and barbed wire, the Green Zone was the safest place in the city, home to soldiers, private contractors and mercenaries, civilian administrators, translators, and other Iraqi support staff. Many of them never set foot outside the Green Zone while in Iraq. Why would they? Outside its walls, the streets were choked with traffic and debris, the brutal heat was inescapable, and the risk of being kidnapped or caught in some firefight was high. Inside, however, were all the amenities of home: air-conditioning, swimming pools, movie nights, laundry service, bars, a dance club, and boxes of Frosted Flakes at the breakfast table. Bible study happened on Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m. The “Hash House Harriers” organized group runs around the compound. Women deployed to the Green Zone (there weren’t many of them) sometimes packed hot pants and heels for dancing at the al-Rashid on weekends.

Hermetically sealed off from Baghdad inside the Green Zone, Bremer and the young guns who worked for him found it easy to move fast and dream big. To Bremer, Iraq was a blank canvas on which he would outline the contours of a second American century. He approached the Iraqis themselves with a proud father’s alternating feelings of benevolence and frustration. His memoir suggests that he did not see them as fully adult. Saddam’s regime had been violent and oppressive, but the Ba’ath Party’s “command economy,” to use Bremer’s phrasing, had coddled Iraqis for decades, with state monopolies and price controls keeping the costs of fuel, heating, food, and medical care “artificially low.” This government-induced dependency made it hard for Iraqis to take the kind of grassroots political initiative that was crucial to the country’s hopes for a democratic future. “Most Iraqis have had no experience with free thought,” Bremer recalled telling President Bush. “They vaguely understand the concept of freedom, but still want us to tell them what to do.”

So Bremer set up a kind of liberal democracy kindergarten in the middle of Baghdad. He flew in the president of Michigan State University and began holding Monday-night seminars on the basic principles of free-market economics, which became “quite popular among people from the ministries, Iraq’s nascent ‘private sector,’ and younger potential political leaders.” He used real-world examples to reinforce the classroom lessons. At one meeting, he asked the country’s new oil minister, a Shell executive named Phil Carroll, about the long lines he was seeing at gas stations. Carroll explained that the artificially depressed price of oil was making it impossible for refineries to produce enough fuel to keep up with demand, which had been surging since the “Liberation,” a word Bremer always capitalized in his writing. “Huge subsidies distort activity,” Bremer replied for the benefit of his students. “Economics 101.”

This lesson was applied to people working in every sector of the Iraqi economy, though Bremer seems to have grappled only rarely with the implications of hiking the prices of a country’s most important staples immediately after overthrowing the government and firing half a million civil servants. In late May 2003, Bremer jumped the price of grain to $105 per ton while executing the sale of that year’s wheat and barley harvests to the United Nations. The change would provide for an immediate injection of $150 million into Iraq’s economy, but in Bremer’s view the longer-term effect of “beginning to move toward market prices” was just as important. Though he sometimes made concessions to a less hard-line version of economic policy, these were understood to be exceptional responses to exceptional circumstances. Once things calmed down in the near future, Iraq’s economy would operate according to the tenets of free-market orthodoxy. You’ve got your freedom now, Bremer told Iraqis, but that means the end of the free ride. On his first day in the country, Bremer saw “looters roaming freely through the streets of Baghdad.” He suggested they be shot.

The most detailed description of Bremer’s vision for the new Iraq—and, by extension, of America’s vision for the war on terror as a whole—can be found in Bremer’s 100 Orders. Orders 1 and 2 eliminated the Ba’ath Party, which had been for decades the most important political entity in the country, and disbanded the army. But that was just the beginning. Between Bremer’s arrival in the country and June 28, 2004, ninety-eight additional orders were hashed out and put into effect without any formal input from the Iraqi people. They were designed to remain in place forever, with stipulations prohibiting any future Iraqi government from modifying or rescinding them.

This should have been illegal, as lawyers working for the CPA noted at the time. But the CPA had a work-around. While Bremer sprayed Orders across the country, the CPA was also guiding the drafting of Iraq’s new constitution, the Transitional Administration Law (TAL). In its final form, the TAL specified that the Orders would remain in effect even after the Americans left and returned sovereignty to the Iraqis. Orders could be overturned or rescinded, but doing so would require the votes of the president, the two vice presidents, and a majority of the government’s ministers. These ministers were handpicked by the CPA and endowed with five-year terms, which meant that Iraqis wouldn’t have a meaningful say as to whether the orders should remain in force until the end of the decade. By then it would be too late, in many cases, to turn back. “You set up these things and they begin to develop a certain life of momentum of their own,” Bremer said, “and it’s harder to reverse course.” A less abstract way of putting that would be to say that if you sell a state-owned university to private buyers in 2003, you’re not going to be able to buy it back in 2009.

If the new Iraq was going to do business with the rest of the world, it would have to run its internal economic affairs more like the rest of the world—that is, more like the United States—as well. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any attractive investment opportunities for the foreign investors to invest in. Bremer’s reforms were intended to turn Iraq into the ideal buyer’s market. Businesses from anywhere on the planet could parachute in, make a bunch of money, pay essentially nominal taxes, and then take their profits wherever they wanted without having to worry about any legal or regulatory strictures that would bind their investments to the longer-term fate of the country.

Bremer thus set about rooting through the storeroom in search of enticing items to place in Iraq’s shop windows. Little more than a month into his tenure, he started telling any journalist who would listen that he was going to sell off the dozens of state-owned companies that formed the bedrock of Iraq’s economy. Steel manufacturers and food packaging businesses alike would be handed over to the private market. The Iraqi State Company for Water Transportation would lose its exclusive license to manage the country’s ports, and would henceforth have “to provide maritime agency services in competition with other companies.” A monthly food allowance previously handed out to all Iraqis would be replaced with a $15 cash payment, and state subsidies to unprofitable companies would end. These changes would be painful in the short term, as the withdrawal of state funding would doom companies that couldn’t compete on the open market. Bremer thought the pain was worth it.

Today, it is usually leftists who are stereotyped as believing that economics lies at the foundation of all meaningful political change, but in 2003 it was Bremer, a man who looked like what an AI image generator would produce if given the prompt “twentieth-century middle-aged Ivy League Republican,” who thought that Iraq’s transition to democracy depended entirely on the success of his economic reforms. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands is essential for Iraq’s recovery,” he said. “If we don’t get their economy right, no matter how fancy our political transformation, it won’t work.”

Unfortunately for Bremer, the “essential” fire sale of Iraq’s state assets didn’t even happen. It was not for lack of trying, but Bremer and his acolytes in the Green Zone slowly discovered that it is difficult to sell companies, factories, warehouses, shipping yards, and rail lines when all of those things are physically located in war zones. America’s claim to have “occupied” Iraq took on a hollow ring as the occupiers tried to come to grips with the chaos they had unleashed. The economic team responsible for orchestrating the sale of almost everything the state owned was tiny, whereas just one of the ministries they needed to work with employed 150,000 Iraqis. “Not only was the CPA’s economic team too small,” journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote, “it was hard to imagine any investor braving an eleven-hour drive from Jordan (Baghdad’s airport was closed to commercial traffic) to see a factory that was not operating because it lacked electricity and employees.” And when the CPA did have a deal they wanted to push through, they ran up against a bureaucracy whose workings they did not understand and whose employees thought they were hilarious. Chandrasekaran interviewed an Army reservist and former Wall Street banker named Glenn Corliss, whose job was to collaborate with the Ministry of Industry and Minerals. “The point of all of this is we could choose to privatize or not to privatize,” he said. “It didn’t matter.”

We didn’t have the power to privatize. We didn’t have the power to do anything, ’cause we didn’t have control of these assets. It’s like one man walking into a country—a hugely militarized country—with a piece of paper and saying, “This piece of paper now says I run the country,” and that country has twenty-four million people with weapons. They’re just going to look at him and go, “Oh, why don’t you sit down over there in the corner, crazy guy?” That’s what the Iraqis were like to us. They were like, “What are you talking about? There’s three of you. There’s 150,000 of us. You haven’t seen most of the factories. Why do you think that you’re going to make any of the decisions.” So they just kept doing their thing, and we sort of played in our little, imaginary world over at the CPA.

By the end of the year, the CPA admitted that its grand scheme was on hold. It would not be able to move forward again, it acknowledged, until people stopped getting shot all the time.

Even if the United States had been able to successfully privatize Iraq in 2003 and 2004, however, one still wouldn’t be justified in characterizing the war as just an attempt to get Iraq’s national resources and industrial assets into American hands. Oil, after all, was one of the only economic sectors that the CPA agreed to leave alone. That is not to say that the United States didn’t hope to get its energy companies involved in Iraq’s oil industry eventually, but it had the same hopes for non-American oil companies based in allied countries. Order 39 was quite clear on this larger principle: Iraq would be hospitable to foreign investment from everywhere, not just the United States. Why bother sending American soldiers into battle and putting their lives at risk if you’re then going to share the spoils with the same Europeans who spent all of 2002 moaning about what a bad idea the war was?

America’s nationalist economic self-interest was perhaps most visible in the area of military spending. Kellogg Brown and Root, DynCorp International, and Halliburton are just a few of the many American corporations that raked in huge piles of cash by providing food, transportation, housing, and other logistical services to the military in Iraq, often thanks to the extremely favorable terms stipulated in the no-bid contracts the government handed out like candy to its favored corporate partners. Criticism of these sweetheart deals usually included ominous references to President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech, which warned against the predations of what he famously called the “military-industrial complex.” But without minimizing the scale of the profits defense contractors accumulated as a result of the invasion, and without excusing the corrupt manner in which those profits were achieved, one still finds it hard to make the case that the combined forces of oil lust and military-industrial rapaciousness can explain America’s push toward Iraq. The invasion was a bonanza for defense companies, but Iraq was supposed to be a brief war. Bush declared that combat operations had ended less than two months after the bombs started falling, and Bremer made it clear upon his arrival that he thought America would be out of the country entirely within two years. A superpower like the United States does not take a geopolitical risk like toppling Saddam Hussein just so it can spoon-feed six months’ worth of high profits to a handful of defense companies that make up less than 3 percent of the S&P 500’s market capitalization.

But you can learn a lot from your own dreams even when they don’t come true. Bremer did not successfully remake Iraq’s economy during his year abroad, and by 2006 the United States had abandoned its utopian dreams for the country’s economic future, focusing instead on managing violence and containing the regional fallout from America’s occupation. But if we ignore the clumsiness with which Bremer pursued his goal and instead look closely at the goal itself, we can start to see what the global war on terror was for. The 100 Orders were not designed to turn Iraq into a source of profits for the United States; they were meant to turn Iraq into a source of profits for the whole developed world. By the twenty-first century, America’s national self-interest was much more internationalized than the blood-for-oil partisans understood. Individual Orders regarding seemingly mundane issues such as central bank independence, requirements that company board members act in the company’s best interest rather than their own, free repatriation of profits, the suspension of tariffs and duties on imports and exports, dispute resolution, and adjustments to copyright and trademark law take on a deeper resonance when considered alongside one another.

America wanted to turn Iraq into a country that functioned just like all the other countries that counted themselves members of the modern global economy. It wanted to integrate Iraq into a system. America did not control what occurred within that system by fiat, but it exercised more influence over the rules that governed it than any other nation, and it was the only country with the military, political, and economic strength to superintend the system as a whole. Al-Qaeda understood this perfectly well, as illustrated by their choice of targets on September 11: the Capitol or White House (seats of political power), which Flight 93 failed to hit; the Pentagon (nerve center of military power); and the World Trade Center (global symbol of America’s economic power).

The invasion was an attempt to force Iraq to join the twenty-first-century capitalism club, to make it subject to the same incentives and rules and pressures that structured the economies of all the other countries that had accepted the fact of America’s global leadership. It was never an attempt to bolster Iraq’s national sovereignty. Iraq had already been sovereign under Saddam Hussein’s autocratic (and, it should be said, secular) rule. In America’s eyes, that was exactly the problem.

From the book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck. Copyright © 2024 by Richard Beck. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.