The demeanor of our occupation also foreshortened the Golden Hour. The de-Baathification order in May 2003 led a long queue of MacArthur-like edicts. The British and other coalition countries had little input into these actions. An aide to the British counterpart of Jerry Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), describes as “a very close-run thing” a diversionary effort by the British to head off an edict legitimizing capital punishment. Others privatized state-owned businesses and liberalized commerce. Worthy? Maybe. Workable? No.

Washington’s lack of consensus about the war affected occupation conduct and assertiveness. Contemporary reportage and more recent retrospectives miss the impact of incessant second-guessing and snide back-channeling on occupation conduct. Well briefed by factional favorites in Washington, Iraqi politicians coming into ORHA already knew the weak points—that Garner would be replaced, that a decision to remain in Iraq indefinitely was in the cards.

In the first month, before the decision to stay on indefinitely became irrevocable, the closest allies in Iraq—Australia, Britain and Japan—failed to present the Bush administration with a set of common views. Senior representatives from these countries preferred a less ambitious, shorter occupation. Though President George W. Bush could be stubborn, he listened carefully to trusted allies. But each country chose a bilateral agenda instead, losing a chance to insist jointly on a shorter occupation. Early on, the British offered to send a large number of royal paratroopers to Baghdad; when I told this to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in June, he almost had a seizure. He suspected it was a case of military jealousy: “You mind your town; we’ll mind ours.” An American officer familiar with this never-publicized offer said Britain had acted because of Washington’s decision not to deploy the First Cavalry Division to Iraq. “The Brits recognized we didn’t have enough troops on the ground at the center of gravity of Iraq,” says Paul Hughes, then a colonel with ORHA. The British proposal would have put 1,300 or more vitally needed, street-smart soldiers into a Baghdad wracked by looting and lawlessness.

Remorseless media attention amplified policy tussles and telegraphed indecisiveness to the Iraqis. ORHA’s media-management section, to which I was briefly detailed, spent most of its time cultivating major American media despite urgent “messaging” needs for the Iraqi people. The State Department’s Margaret Tutwiler arrived to try to beat some sense into ORHA’s messaging. Her approach: the more outlets, the better. The British, by contrast, permitted only one newspaper—their newspaper. They closed down all AM-radio outlets except their own, even dynamiting at least ten AM-radio broadcast towers around Basra. A UK major tasked with controlling media explained: “One message. Our message.” When ORHA’s first road convoy left Kuwait for Baghdad, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant gave those assembled the message that they would be out of Iraq in ninety days.

Well-known missteps occurring afterward simply deepened the hole into which we had dug ourselves after victory. The defeated Iraqis had sufficient eyesight to see—in favoritism shown to Ahmad Chalabi or in the returning émigrés demanding reinstatement of lands seized thirty years earlier—the skewed priorities of a stumbling occupation.

THAT’S THE macro picture. At the individual level some seized the initiative. Britain’s Simon Elvy, senior adviser at the Iraqi Ministry of Planning, and American Eugene Stakhiv (in the same role in Iraq’s irrigation-and-water ministry) showed authority and skill. Elvy told me he had felt uncomfortable with the rigid, top-down de-Baathification order, which targeted the top three “layers” and “levels” of Baathists.

At his ministry, Elvy assembled senior staff and simply asked for names on paper of all “the fearful people here.” He then ran the most frequently cited names past a group of people not mentioned at all in the first cut. In this way, Elvy smoked out the secret police who would otherwise have eluded the “levels and layers” law but couldn’t escape peer identification as being “fearful.” Elvy sacked them and the place resumed functioning.

Stakhiv used a similar approach within a much bigger structure, employing some personal flourishes. At his first meeting, he asked the Iraqi bureaucrats who was in charge. All the more prominent political figures had fled; most of those remaining had, necessarily, become Baathists during their engineering and hydrologist careers. Gene knew he needed their technical skills. They had begun a technical meeting when “one director-level guy put up his hand and said he wouldn’t obey my orders because Iraq ‘had become a democracy’ with Saddam’s departure.” There are many ways to show authority; Gene chose one to which the Iraqis could readily relate. He pulled a little Beretta revolver out of his holster and placed it on the table. “Any more democracy talk today?” he asked.

“This was no time for consensus building,” he later told me. “We all knew what the priorities were, and we all had to pitch in and get the job done—the beginning of the irrigation season was only a month away.”

Stakhiv was senior in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and managed to retain crucial technical staff, backing up this bravado by traveling unescorted with tribal sheikhs to the Shatt al-Arab, where policies going back to the British period (1918–1958) had drained the marshes, a policy imposed with rigor by Saddam after 1991 to deny Shia insurgents a sanctuary. Seeking waivers from de-Baathification strictures, Stakhiv bombarded the CPA with memos, one of which concluded with a plea to “not throw out the babies with the Baath-water.”

Others in ORHA also showed flair: Andrew Erdmann served as an adviser to the education ministry and drove over to a volatile University of Baghdad campus, where anxious students and professors needed a show of authority and purpose. Don Eberly, a political appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), became an adviser to the ministry of youth and sport, formerly run tightly by one of Saddam’s sons. Eberly organized a spread of soccer matches all around the city, defusing tensions and igniting optimism in the occupation.

Others showed refreshing indifference to bureaucratic rule books. The Office of Transition Initiatives, a part of USAID, sent tough and experienced contractors into “Saddam City” (now “Sadr City”), where they cleaned streets and collected rubbish in that vast slum. And Civil Affairs officers attached to battalion headquarters set up in each of Baghdad’s fifteen districts showed a similar initiative. I spent a day with one such command in mid-April: the lieutenant colonel in command showed amazing resourcefulness. Not least, Japan’s senior representative to ORHA, a rugby-playing diplomat named Katsuhiko Oku, ignored protocol and drove around Baghdad in a thin-skinned Toyota with his younger colleague Masamori Inoue, writing checks on the spot to repair electricity substations, shopping centers and water systems. In one aside, Jay Garner compared this can-do behavior to that of fiscally minded bureaucrats from Washington, already in Baghdad and already demanding full receipts for paltry sums needed in the immediate postinvasion situation. Each of these men exemplified the First Rule of Occupation Practice: show authority and leadership.

DESPITE EARLY televised “kinetics” showing Baghdad being slammed by precision munitions, Iraqi exhaustion resulted mostly from the impact of 1990s-era sanctions on civilian morale and health. Iraq’s hospitals, bridges, roads, railway improvements, and port and storage facilities had risen after the 1970s oil boom, but spending ended just as Saddam began the war against neighboring Iran in 1980, three times the size of Iraq in territory and population. The enormity of this war still escapes Americans.

Consider the gaping hole left by the up to 1.5 million Iraqis and Iranians killed during the 1980s. This Big Death of recent history punched a huge hole in the country’s demographics, one still felt today. In many ways, it is still that war, and not the one-sided American blitzkrieg in 2003, that hangs over today’s Iraq.

I thought about post–Civil War literary clichés in the United States about the town spinster or village widow following the loss of 5 percent of American males during that war. In April, when I visited a U.S.-educated Iraqi engineer at his home, I noticed middle-aged women hovering in the shadows at the rear of his house. They were a never-to-be-married sister and a dead brother’s widow. “Think about France in the 1920s, where the population pyramid’s male side was also savagely indented by the First World War,” he said. “That’s us, now.”

Later that month, in Kirkuk, I admired a quick completion of a receiving facility for refined products from Turkey. The Sunni Arab engineers were in no mood to be humored. “If you hadn’t bombed the bridge from the refinery to the storage tanks, we wouldn’t have to spend money to truck in Turkish kerosene and bribe the peshmerga [the Kurdish militia].” They were just getting warmed up. “You think we are like those effeminate sissies [the exact Arabic word was more direct] from the Gulf, who grow their fingernails long to show they don’t do manual work?” I caught the full blast now: “We are Iraqis! We know how to do things!”