So Al-Tamimi, 52, stood his ground in the 100-plus heat. A senior U.S. officer was called, rules were bent and finally the un-frisked mayor of Baghdad proceeded to his meeting with L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, the outgoing American pro-consul.
Patient, persistent, exacting and precise, Al-Tamimi has all the virtues of an accomplished technocrat. And he ought to. He learned the ropes in the toughest, most elite Iraqi bureaucracy of all–the nuclear program. From 1987 to 1993, as his country came within months of producing an atomic bomb, Al-Tamimi was one of several “director generals” in the overall nuclear project. If Saddam Hussein had not invaded Kuwait, and provoked the first war with the United States, the dictator would have had his bomb, says Al-Tamimi, and the world would be a very different place. But now, says the mayor, he’s glad that never happened. “We have a strategic relationship with the United States,” he told me the other night at his house. “We will not need such things.”
In the Bush administration, until recently, anyone who served the old regime was highly suspect, and Al-Tamimi’s background might have set alarm bells ringing. But as the manifest failures of the occupation became obvious–and all but inescapable–U.S. officials on the ground started wising up to a simple fact: among the thousands of people Saddam drafted into his weapons programs were many, if not most, of the nation’s best and brightest minds. And they have just the kinds of skills needed to rebuild the country.
“They know how to run projects and make things happen,” says David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. “A lot of them, in the ’90s [under the U.N. embargo], learned how to live with very little and get things done.”
Many of these scientists and technocrats were members of the Ba’ath Party, but many were not, says Albright, “because the regime valued its scientists so much.” They might have been put to work immediately on reconstruction. But after the invasion last year, the American obsession with uncovering the unfound (and perhaps unfindable) weapons of mass destruction took first priority. “The U.S. just scared the hell out of these people,” says Albright.
Al-Tamimi was out of the country at the time. He was not a party member, and he and his wife and son had managed to escape in 1995, despite Saddam’s strict prohibition on travel. Saddam’s secret police threatened and cajoled Al-Tamimi, trying to persuade him to return. Instead, he took a job in the gleaming emirate of Abu Dhabi as a senior planning advisor.
Then last spring, the fledgling Baghdad city council formed under Bremer’s tutelage put out a sort of tender for the man-who-would-be-mayor. Minimum age: 40. Experience: at least 10 years of engineering, urban planning or city management. Candidates also had to embrace “the principles of democracy.” According to a Washington Post article last April, more than 90 people applied, but when the final votes were cast by the council, Al-Tamimi got the job by a big majority. He took office on May 29.
Since then, he’s been working with Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli of the 1st Cavalry Division to open up and revitalize a city damaged by war, weakened by almost 13 years of draconian sanctions, abused by Saddam and finally pillaged by looters after the Americans rolled into town.
A first step is to take down some of the massive concrete barriers and blast walls that have been squeezing Baghdad traffic into countless convoluted snarls, and one of the first places such barriers have been removed is around Al-Tamimi’s own offices in the municipal building. “If I want to ask anyone to do something, I should begin with myself,” he says. “As a manager, I am telling people there is a new situation in Baghdad.”
Al-Tamimi is, in fact, a big fan of President Bush for ending Saddam’s rule. Without the Americans the dictator and his family would be running Iraq and ruining Iraqi lives for generations more, he says. If the embargo had ever been lifted, Al-Tamimi told me with the assurance of an insider, Saddam would have re-launched all his weapons programs instantly. But that doesn’t excuse the disasters of the last 14 months. “We were living under darkness, and then there is a light–and then? The situation we are living now is the result of many mistakes.”
“Iraq is not a simple country and not a simple people,” Al-Tamimi explained as he jumped into his car to pay surprise visits at work sites around the city. His own complicated background is suggestive. He’s from a Shiite tribe in the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah, but identifies himself with the cosmopolitan vision of the capital that many educated Iraqis cherish. This is, after all, a great city. In the 8th century, under the mythic Caliph Harun al-Rashid (immortalized in the many tales of “The Thousand and One Nights”) it was unrivaled by any European capital. From the 1930s to the 1970s it developed into a modern metropolis with some of the most accomplished contemporary artists, thinkers–and scientists–in the Arab world.
Next on Al-Tamimi’s project list is the opening up of Abu Nawas Street along the banks of the Tigris. The boulevard is now blocked by concrete mazes and main battle tanks because foreign contractors, officials, and some of the foreign press have taken up residence in its high-rise hotels and once-luxurious villas. Al-Tamimi wants to do away with those concrete labyrinths. “Abu Nawas used to be the center of the life of the city,” says Al-Tamimi. “It will be again.”
The greatest obstacle of all to restoring the city’s sense of itself, however, is the Green Zone. Its walls encompass several of Saddam’s old palaces, Baghdad’s biggest hotel, even the city zoo. More than three square miles were cut out of the very center of the capital so that occupation forces could cobble together an ersatz America filled with soldiers, contractors, diplomats and spies. No unauthorized traffic is allowed. (There are checkpoints within checkpoints.) And while the official occupation may have ended on June 28, the Green Zone endures intact.
The new U.S. ambassador, John D. Negroponte, insists his operation inside the zone “is not a mega-embassy, it’s not a super-embassy, it’s an embassy.” But he also insists “at the moment, the imperatives of security require that we take certain measures.”
In fact, there’s no good reason for Americans to take up 10 per cent of the center of Baghdad. As Anthony Cordesman at the U.S. Center for International and Strategic Studies has pointed out, this doesn’t even make sense militarily. It’s pure hubris that has “created a no-go zone for Iraqis and has allowed the attackers to push the U.S. into a fortress that tends to separate U.S. personnel from the Iraqis. This follows a broader pattern where terrorists know that attacks tend to push the US into locating in ‘force protection’ enclaves and cut Americans off from the local population.”
Al-Tamimi has a better idea. “I don’t want Americans in the Green Zone, or outside the Green Zone. I want them outside Baghdad in their camps,” he says. As for himself, he insists and on living and working out here in what’s generally called the Red Zone.
I like Al-Tamimi, as you might have guessed, and I worry about him. Assassins are waging a ferocious campaign to kill anyone they can in government. Over the last few days they’ve knocked off top officials in Mosul and Basra, and narrowly missed the justice minister. But Tamimi seems to regard the risks as just another bureaucratic obstacle, and he’s facing them down with the same stubborn persistence he showed the guard at the edge of the Green Zone. Call it foolish pride, or simple Iraqi patriotism.
“I think he’ll make it,” says a European diplomat. “He defied Saddam. He escaped the secret police. Now he’s the mayor of Baghdad. This man will survive.” And if more people like him are allowed to do their jobs, so might Iraq.
