Iraq Inside Out: 'Revolt on the Tigris'

DATE January 11, 2006 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Tigris: The Al-Sadr Uprising and the Governing of Iraq" and his
time spent as a governorate coordinator in Wasit Province, Iraq
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

If you want to better understand why it's been so difficult to create a
democracy in Iraq, consider what my guest Mark Etherington has to say. For
nine months, he worked with the Coalition Provisional Authority as the
governor of a province in the south of Iraq. He reported to the head of the
CPA Paul Bremer, who we heard from on yesterday's program. Etherington has a
new memoir called "Revolt on the Tigris: The Al-Sadr Uprising and the
Governing of Iraq." It's in part about how his compound was attacked by the
army led by the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Etherington is a
British civilian who is an expert in post-conflict reconstruction. He worked
with the European Community's Monitor Mission in the former Yugoslavia during
the war and has subsequently worked in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo and
Afghanistan.

First I'd like to ask you to describe your job.

Mr. MARK ETHERINGTON: I was appointed by the Coalition Provisional
Authority, in other words the authority led by Ambassador Bremer that ran Iraq
after the end of the maneuver war. And I was basically the governorate
coordinator--what's known as the governorate coordinator, which was de facto,
his representative in Wasit Province, which is a province some two hours
southeast of Baghdad, the capital, right up alongside the Iranian border. So
my job really was to oversee that province on his behalf during the period in
which we were administering Iraq.

GROSS: But you write in your memoir that the task you had taken on seemed to
you to demand an assertion of personal and national principles that in the
21st century verged on arrogance. You were concerned about assuming a
quasi-colonial position. Can you talk about some of your concerns there?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Yes, of course. It felt ironic. Actually, I had been
brought up in Kuwait, just a few hundreds miles to the south, where my father
had worked for the oil company on behalf of British Petroleum. And so,
actually, I was reasonably familiar with the area. And I guess one could
describe Kuwait as--at the time of my childhood--as essentially colonial in
character. And, of course, as Britain had retreated from empire in the late
19th century particularly and the early part of the 20th, we had also, I
think, turned our backs on it.

Obviously, no one really expected to be placed in the kind of role that was
characterized by our mandate post-maneuver war in 2003. So I suppose I felt
that cargo of guilt almost. It seems an improbable role for a sort of
middle-aged Brit to suddenly be administering a province in Iraq. It felt
doubly ironic, I suppose, that I had often traveled through that way with my
parents as we used to drive back to Britain. So there was definitely a sort
of cargo there, I think. And it required a little bit of time to adjust to
our new roles.

GROSS: When you assumed your position as a governor in Iraq in October of
2003, the war was much more unpopular in England than it was in the United
States. Did you have an opinion on the war when you took your position?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: I think--and I hope this doesn't sound too pompous--I had
seen a lot of the protests in Britain, and it is very clear now that the war
was initiated on a premise that was found to be false. The notion that there
were weapons of mass destruction now seems an extremely slender possibility.
As I went through my initial briefings in the British Foreign Ministry, I had
to push my way through many of these crowds that, of course, besieged the
building, or if not besieged, it then surrounded it certainly. And I think at
the time, it felt like an uneasy decision. And certainly it was a decision
that had been taken by our government in the teeth of considerable opposition.

I was to some extent colored by that, but I think overwhelmingly--and I said I
didn't want to sound pompous--overwhelmingly I simply felt as though it was
clear that we were in that position. No amount of bargaining was going to get
us out of the fact that we now have to put Iraq back together again. And that
it was quite clear that we were going to need help. And I felt that I could
help and I felt there were others that could also help. And that
overwhelmingly, I think, shaped my response.

GROSS: Would you describe Wasit Province, the province that you governed for
about a year? You wrote when you got there, there was no rule of law, there
were no rules, and if there were, there would have been no one to enforce
them.

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Yes, I arrived there in early October, and the only person
who had been representing the coalition up to that point for the Coalition
Provisional Authority was my very able American deputy, who remains a State
Department officer. I think it's very easy to sort of conjure up in a studio
this sweep of the job, the idea that one is governing a province. But
actually when you get done to the detail of it, the raw fact was that there
were only two of us in October of '03. It was some months, of course, after
the end of the maneuver war. We had a population of just under a million for
whom we were, at least theoretically, wholly responsible, a border with Iran
of 145 kilometers, no police force, no institutions, no electrical capacity at
all, really, and a pretty criminal underclass, I think, that had appeared as a
result of the fact that we had been unable--and some would say fatefully
unable--to assert our will in the awkward and very turbulent months following
the war. Because really--and I think this is absolutely true--we had no plan
worth the name, which is pretty extraordinary. So overwhelmingly what we saw
was that everything really needed fixing, and it was very, very difficult to
know where to begin with typically.

And so I think I and my deputy, who, of course, we got to know each other very
well during the succeeding months, we spent an awfully lot of time trying to
work out where to prioritize our efforts and where was the key to this
extraordinarily complex problem.

GROSS: My guest is Mark Etherington, and for about a year, he served as
governor of a province in southern Iraq, serving under the Coalition
Provisional Authority. He is British, and he's written a new memoir called
"Revolt on the Tigris: The Al-Sadr Uprising and the Governing of Iraq."

I want to ask you about two of the most controversial decisions that were made
by Paul Bremer, who was the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority while
you were in Iraq. And one decision was to disband the Iraqi army and the
other was to dismiss Iraqis who had been members of the Baath Party, Saddam
Hussein's party, to dismiss them from their positions. And this order applied
to the top four levels of...

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Yes.

GROSS: ...former Baath members. But it was tens of thousands of people who
lost their jobs because of that order. So how did those two controversial
decisions affect you as governor of a province in southern Iraq?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Well, I think on the face of it, of course, these were two
very difficult decisions. Although I don't sit in the camp of those who think
those decisions should not necessarily have been taken, because had we not
taken them there would too have been difficulties of a different character.
But let me say first of all how it affected us. I mean, clearly, Saddam
Hussein had an extraordinarily complex and wide-ranging array of security
forces of all hues and kinds. It was inconceivable really at the time, given
the nature of the war that had been prosecuted against Hussein, that this
apparatus that had served to prop him for so long and so--and I think this is
an important point--to persecute pretty thoroughly particularly the Shia South
could really have remained in place. So it would have required an
extraordinary act of salesmanship, I think, political salesmanship to have
persuaded those who had suffered so long that the apparatus that they had been
fighting should remain in place.

The difficulty though was, of course, in dissolving it--and even dissolving is
probably the right word, of course--wrong word in the sense that legally, of
course, it was dissolved. But it is also true that it simply fell apart, and
it would have been quite hard to put it back together again. In dissolving
it, of course, one dissolves completely the rule of law apparatus that kept
these provinces together. And so what happened was that one had a limbo, a
vacuum in the rule of law terms, in which these places were simply unpoliced.

And so one had a million strong population, this sensitive 145-kilometer
stretch of border with Iran, that was effectively unoccupied by any term, by
any form of force capable of projecting the rule of law. Now, of course, we
had a Ukrainian Brigade there but they were remarkably thinly stretched, and
we simply lacked the local capacity really to buttress their efforts. So,
overwhelmingly, the rule of law was the major deficiency in the province as we
arrive. Now we can argue, of course, that had the institutions that have
provided the rule of law before not been dissolved, then things might have
been very different. But I think there were clear political difficulties in
retaining them in being.

In terms of the Baathists, I think much depended on to whom you were talking.
The Shia South hated the Baath Party, and indeed they spent most of their time
persecuting them and hunting them down. And in the province south of mine,
they spent some time hanging them from lampposts. It would have been an
extraordinarily difficult magician's act, I think, to persuade them that the
Baath Party should have remained in place. There was arguably a compromise
possible that perhaps the cuts should not have gone so deep in removing many
of these people. The difficulty was, of course, the Baath Party retained all
of the administrative expertise required to run the institutions of the
province. So, overwhelmingly, we had to try and put the province back
together again, but we really had no tools with which to do it. This was the
difficulty.

GROSS: Your security was supposed to be provided by a small Ukrainian
Brigade. In Paul Bremer's new memoir, he talks about how he told Donald
Rumsfeld a couple of times that he felt we needed more troops in Iraq. Did
you feel that way, too?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: I agree entirely with Ambassador Bremer, and I think this
was one of the major difficulties that we faced in Iraq. The--the key to this
business is that as one goes in, first of all, you have to project your brand.
People need to know what it is your stand for and they need to be conscious of
your particular identity and your profile. One has to project this early.
It's important to set the tone. And the reason it's so important is because
one has typically a finite period of time in which really to win the consent
necessary to prosecute these reforms.

Now our difficulty was that Iraq is a large country, and we had insufficient
numbers of troops to lend the public that sense of security that is so
essential. And what that meant in villages in my province, for example, they
might see a military patrol once a month or something of that order. And this
was really not enough for them to feel confident in the kind of role we were
trying to play.

And what this editorially meant is that it placed a lot of pressure on the
military forces there, many of whom hadn't really done this before. Now, of
course, although the Ukranians--and I'm not singling them out for criticism.
The Ukrainians, of course, did their best, but I think few were argue that
they are very experienced in peacekeeping terms. And this is a particularly
sophisticated art, this business of capacity building and peacekeeping. In
fact, it's more than peacekeeping. It's capacity building as well. It's
state building. And so this decision not to send more troops, more American
troops, more NATO troops--and obviously much of this was NATO member troops,
much of this was forced upon us by the lack of political consensus. This
decision cost us very dear, I think. And what it meant was that we were
unable really to seize control in the way required and keep it in those
vitally sensitive few months following the end of the war.

GROSS: Was there anything that you could do to ask for more troops?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: No, there was not. And I think, although I wasn't
particularly conscious at the time of Ambassador Bremer's discussions on the
matter, I mean it's clear in retrospect, and it was clear at the time for me
that we didn't have enough. By then, though, this Coalition of the Willing,
so-called, had been so-called, had been formed. And in the area in which I
served in the south central area, this was a Polish-led area, and actually the
American troops that had previously been positioned there had been withdrawn.

GROSS: Now, you write that not only weren't there enough military troops
backing you up and keeping the Iraqis secure, the police were virtually
dysfunctional in the province that you governed under the CPA. You write you
couldn't even rely on the police to secure a gas station. What were some of
the problems you faced with the police?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: I think it comes back again to this very vexed issue of the
rule of law because we had dismantled--and I think for good reasons. One can
revisit the issue, but there were good reasons for dismantling the existing
apparatus. Once the Baath Party's hold on the institutions of government had
been removed, once the apparatus that had kept it there had been dissolved,
one was left with these vacuums.

Now, we had a police force of a kind that had been very rapidly trained and
put into place in the intervening period before our arrival. The problem was,
of course, it had been done very quickly and that there had been insufficient
attention paid to the quality of the individual. Now, again, I'm not casting
blame on the people who must have performed a difficult job, had been forced
to perform a difficult job at high speed. There were huge difficulties, I
think, in deciding who to recruit into forces like this because Iraqi society
is very, very different to our own. It was very hard to screen such people,
very hard to know who to turn to for advice. It was not easily possible to
turn to a senior Iraqi society figure and say, `Who would you recommend for
the police?' Because he or she would have their own particular views that were
born essentially of tribal liaisons rather than a sense of the greater good.

So the huge difficulty that we had was that there was a police force at the
time. They represented their society, so they were feudal in nature. They
owed their allegiance to various individuals and not to a sense of a national
police force. And this was a problem that was to dog us throughout our time
there.

GROSS: Would you tell us one story where you finally got money to buy guns
for members of the police force and a lot of the police sold the guns on the
black market? Why would they do that?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Yeah, that's quite true. And it's to do, I think, with--I
mean, firstly, corruption clearly. But, secondly, to do with the rather
peculiar notions we encountered in the force. When the police were given
their weapons, which had taken months to procure, many of them saw them as
gifts, as a sort of reward for high performance, which was reasonable actually
given the circumstances. And they simply sold them on the weapons market. I
think part of this--when one spoke to Iraqis about this, the extraordinary
corruption that existed in our province and others--it was simply because
faith in government had been so substantially shaken that the theft of
government resources, of government equipment and of government money was
regarded as a form of--it was regarded as a perfectly reasonable act because
faith in the institutions that had generated these things was long gone.

GROSS: Now, your background is in reconstruction of countries. You know, you
worked in the Balkans. What are some of the other countries you worked in in
rebuilding democracy? Yeah.

Mr. ETHERINGTON: I began work in the former Yugoslavia during the war of
'92, '95.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. ETHERINGTON: And from then, I think, many of us went on to Kosovo and to
Serbia and to Palestine and Afghanistan and many of the places that have
suffered to some degree or another from the kind of problems we encountered.

GROSS: Did you feel that the leadership of the Coalition Provisional
Authority, including Paul Bremer, had sufficient experience in this kind of
rebuilding of countries?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Not necessarily. I think, in some cases, they did. And
actually in the main, I was impressed by the leadership of the Coalition
Provisional Authority. I think what dogged us particularly was the fact that
we didn't seem really to have a formed plan. We weren't unable to inject
power and presence into these vacuums I spoke of early enough, which meant
that much of Iraq, particularly in the areas where there were less-experienced
troops, failed really to understand where we were going. And the man in the
street so-called, I think, lacked confidence that we were able to keep he and
his family secure. This was the overarching difficulty.

So my own feeling was the Coalition Provisional Authority was really locked in
logistic rather than ideological struggle in the early months when I was
there, just trying to compensate for the lack of a plan and really trying to
generate one on the hoof, and that clearly is not the way to do what remains a
very complex enterprise.

GROSS: You not only did not have enough troops to keep the Iraqi people in
your province secure, there weren't enough troops to protect you and the
people who work with you through the Coalition Provisional Authority. The
main insurgent in your area was Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric.
He had set up his own court and prisons. Was he doing that in your province?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: We believe so, certainly anecdotally. Although we never
found any evidence to support it, certainly it was the case in cities farther
to our west.

One of the principal difficulties here was that he was able very effectively
to exploit our own confusion and unpreparedness, and was able to act pretty
effectively as an opposition group. Now he, along with his supporters,
articulated fairly early a fairly potent manifesto based on Islamic tenets,
based on opposition to what he termed the "Occupation," and based really on
criticism of our own shortcomings. And these were easy charges to make, how
we distributed scarce resources, why we allowed what he called a corrupt
police force to remain in power. And this became a real thorn in our sides.

When the rebellion of early April 2004 occurred, we were completely unprepared
for it, I think largely because, firstly, we did not anticipate the rebellion
itself. And, secondly, we underestimated his popular appeal. I think if
there were a third error we made, is we underestimated their military
capability.

GROSS: Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, closed
down a newspaper that was published by Moqtada al-Sadr in which al-Sadr
attacked the CPA. He attacked Paul Bremer. He called for violence. What
were the after-effects in your province?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Well, they were very rapid. The paper was closed, and one
of his deputies was arrested. And we had had some discussion previously with
their leader in our province, although I had always refused personally to meet
him because I felt that that should be a carrot, if you like, something that
should reward a certain pattern of behavior. We had had nothing but trouble
from he and his militia in Kut, the capital of Wasit Province.

What happened, though, I think, startled us all. Very shortly after the
closure of the paper, within a matter of days, in fact, when they arrested his
deputy, a demonstration occurred outside our compound in which they demanded
basically the reopening of the paper and the release of the deputy. It was
really an unusual day. We met the leaders ultimately inside our compound, and
it was clear to us from the onset really there was no negotiation possible
with them. It was very clear they had a very concrete manifesto that there
was really no negotiation to be had between the two of us, no narrowing of
what was a pretty profound ideological gap. But I think even though we
realized that during that discussion, that very tough discussion, the
suddenness with which their onslaught occurred surprised us all.

GROSS: In retrospect, do you think it was a bad decision to shut down his
newspaper or do you think that that needed to be done?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: It is very, very difficult to decide how best to proceed in
instances like this. What we know is hate speech, in other words a newspaper
or a media forum that promotes hatred, insights criminal behavior, is never
going to be an easy bedfellow when one is trying to build democratic
structures. Having said that, of course, democracy itself demands a certain
element of free speech, so it's very tough. It may have been the wrong
decision. Now we understand how capable Moqtada al-Sadr's militia actually
were in the sense that we were not ready for the rebellion to follow. But I
don't think anybody predicted at the time that this would itself be enough to
spark armed rebellion. And even if we had predicted that, I don't think we
would have predicted the raw capability actually that his militia displayed in
the succeeding days.

GROSS: So you were describing that after Paul Bremer of the Coalition
Provisional Authority shut down Moqtada Al-Sadr newspaper, Al-Sadr organized a
revolt and attacked your compound. Would you describe the attack that you
came under?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Yes, and I remember pretty clearly. We had always taken
security pretty seriously, and I was fortunate in the sense that my deputy was
a former officer in the US Army, and I myself had had some military
experience. There were also others with military experience on the compound,
and this stood us in good stead. The rebellion when it came happened very
suddenly. The compound came under mortar attack and then had a whole series
of rocket-propelled grenades fired into it, and then we were later
machine-gunned. And the entire period probably lasted for a period of some 14
hours, I would say.

I think what was particularly striking at the time was just how quickly the
institutions--the very fragile institutions we had started to build--fell
apart. The police were nowhere to be seen. The civil defense groupings that
we had formed again vanished. People failed to come to work. The very raw
institutions, the nascent early institutions of provincial government simply
ceased to exist. And it became very clear to me at the time that our hold on
the province was tremendously fragile, not necessarily because we were walking
the wrong avenue but because we had underestimated--in a sense fatally
underestimated--the hold that people like Moqtada al-Sadr had over the
ordinary Iraqi.

And so what occurred, I think, in those early hours was that the province was
literally paralyzed by this rebellion, which spread very, very quickly across
the south. We couldn't move out of our compound, and we were unable to
communicate with the aircraft that had been sent to assist because we lacked
the communications equipment to do so. And ultimately--in retrospect of
course--we were not in any way prepared to be placed in that kind of position.
But then, arguably, of course, the Coalition Provisional Authority was not
constructed for this kind of thing.

More importantly, perhaps, it was quite clear that the troops locally--our own
troops, our Ukrainian troops, and more broadly than that the Polish-led
division of which they were a part--really weren't set up for this either.
They had come to keep the peace. What they were now in was really a war
fighting situation, and very few of the armies present in Iraq--with the
exception, of course, of the US Army and the British--were really set up for
that kind of campaign.

GROSS: You had to decide whether to evacuate or not. How did you decide what
to do?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Well, we didn't want to evacuate. Although clearly it was
a very tense time and we had no way of knowing how it would end, actually a
number of compounds were later attacked but we were among the first, and so
there was really nothing to compare the situation to. We merely saw at the
time how awkward a precedent it would set if a militia--however well-armed,
however well-prepared, however well-led--were able to evict a coalition team
and if not defeat, then certainly circumvent the troops present in the
province. So we were very, very conscious of what an enormous setback this
would be, and so we were not at all keen to leave even though the situation
was, of course, a very difficult one. We were wholly unable to hold the
compound because we had insufficient troops to do so, the compound was too
large, and our own security details, our close protection details had already
been in a firefight on the roof for some time. We believed that some form of
rescue attempt would be possible. That ultimately was not possible, and we
were told to evacuate in the early hours of the next day, which we did in
convoy with great reluctance because I think we were all conscious of the
political damage we felt might be caused.

GROSS: Well, you also write that you felt like a coward after you evacuated.

Mr. ETHERINGTON: I think we all felt pretty humiliated. Of course, when one
is given this job of governing a province and one assembles a team to do
it--together with, of course, the pronouncements we had all made about the
democratic process, about where we had hoped Iraq would go--it's clear that
despite all of its firepower, despite, you know, the 160,000 US troops present
in the country, the 10,000 British troops to our south, despite all the air
power available to us, despite all the technological advantages, clearly to
contemplate them withdrawing from a compound--having made all of these public
pronouncements--after an attack by militia, was a pretty difficult pill to
swallow.

GROSS: So you evacuated. You returned after a month and resumed authority,
which must have been hard to do.

Mr. ETHERINGTON: It was very difficult to do because--and here I speak very
personally. I felt embarrassed. I felt as though I had failed, that I
deluded myself about what we had achieved in the province. I felt that we had
been evicted by a sort of ragtag militia. I felt that we should never have
gone, and now to go back under those circumstances was pretty embarrassing.

What was most striking though is that--and incidentally, my American deputy
was sent back far sooner than me, than the British team was. My American
deputy had told me that that actually was not the case, that there was still
much to be achieved. And I have to be honest, I mean, despite our excellent
relationship, I rather doubted him. I was much more conscious of the reverse
that we had suffered.

What was very striking though is just how unsuccessful the Sadr militia
themselves had been. They were, in a sense, were trying to motivate the same
middle-class group in our province that we had been courting. And this middle
class had effectively vanished from the political scene. They wanted no more
politicking. They just wanted to stay at home, their heads below the parapet
with their families. They were scared. They were fatigued by years of
oppression and war, and they just wanted to get on with their own lives. So
they really didn't want much to do with us. And I had always taken that
pretty personally. But actually became very clear on our return is they
hadn't wanted anything to do with Sadr either, and so Sadr had been just as
unable to move this invisible middle class forward as we had. So Sadr
actually had failed completely to gather the kind of public support they
required. And so as we went back, actually we found we were able to put
together province institutions much more quickly than I had originally feared.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Mark Etherington, and he was
the governor of a southern province in Iraq for about a year under the
Coalition Provisional Authority. He has written a new memoir called "Revolt
on the Tigris: The Al-Sadr Uprising and the Governing of Iraq."

Looking back now on your experiences in Iraq and looking at what the situation
is now, what do you think is the wisdom of invading a country like Iraq that
has a long history of dictatorship and trying to transform it into a
democracy?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: I think this is a very difficult question to answer. My
personal view is that these difficulties we've encountered, these terrible
difficulties are merely the characteristics of this kind of game. There is no
easy way to pick up a country like Iraq, to change its economy from a central
to a market economy, to change its leadership, to change its political system,
to do all of this in two or three years and then to walk away again. The idea
that this was ever going to be easy is an extraordinary notion and, in a
sense, merely reinforces the extraordinary naivety that existed in the world
about what is required in this kind of endeavor.

GROSS: Do...

Mr. ETHERINGTON: I cannot see, though, that these kind of difficulties
should necessarily militate against us trying it. If you were to speak to any
member or any number of members of the Shia in the south where I served at the
time, you would hear nothing but praise for what had been done. It is wrong
to somehow conflate the ends of the insurgency and the attacks they carry out
with general popular opinion. If you look at the turnout for these public
polls at the most recent elections, staggeringly high numbers. One sees a
different Iraq that one doesn't necessarily see in this endless sequence of
tragic attacks, particularly on American soldiers.

So should we carry on doing this kind of thing? Yes, I believe we should. I
believe it's our duty to do so. Should we do it in a much better way? Yes, I
believe we should certainly do that, and we have to learn these lessons. This
is a science. It is not something one can simply walk into. It requires
detailed planning. It requires an experienced coterie of people to do this
kind of work.

GROSS: What's the best way, do you think, of finding an exit strategy?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Well, we hold our nerve, that's my personal opinion and I
have stuck to it since I served there. We have a political process still.
That in itself is a pretty extraordinary achievement given the pressures on
us. We have retained that political process throughout. All members, all
groups of Iraqs still feel there is credibility in that process. They still
feel that the government is something they wish to be part of. They still
feel they should take part in elections. They still feel the need to debate
with one another about the future shape of the country. This to me is an
enormous achievement. So the exit strategy is to stick with it.

Now, clearly, America particularly has had to pay a terrible price for this,
but that doesn't necessarily mean that the strategy was wrong. Could we have
done it better? Certainly. We now have to hold our nerve. Troop withdrawals
are now planned. Iraqi institutions need to be strengthened. It's going to
be a bumpy ride. It has been a tumultuous ride, but I don't see that there
was ever any substitute for it.

GROSS: The larger goal of invading Iraq, as described by the Bush
administration, that Iraq was a front on a war on terror, and this would help
the war against terrorism. Your experiences watching the insurgency grow, did
that lead you to think that this was helpful or not helpful finally in the war
against terrorism?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: I think the jury has to remain out on whether this was a
front in the war on terror. I'm not sure there's much evidence to support the
notion. There's more evidence to support the notion that this actually was a
home-grown rebellion created to some extent by our shortcomings and
complemented, I think, by other agendas.

GROSS: Do you think that Iraq is like attracting terrorists and creating more
terrorists, as some critics of the war say?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: I think that's entirely impossible, and I think that the
evidence supports it. We have created targets there, and the difficulty is
that these two events--the state-building effort in Iraq and the fight against
the insurgents, the growing insurgency--have now become conflated to be one.
They're not. They are two very separate issues, and the one doesn't mean that
we should not prosecute the other, in other words the state building in the
country.

GROSS: What was the last thing you did before leaving Iraq?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Well, to be honest with you, and I know it sounds rather
romantic, I buried a box full of momentos in the garden for my children
because I cling to the hope--not least because I spent my childhood just south
of there--I cling to the hope that they'll be able to go back there with me
one day, I'll be able to visit my Iraqi friends. And I hope very much, very
sincerely that it will be a peaceful place and that the friends I knew then
will look back on it and say that, however difficult, it had been worthwhile.

GROSS: One more question. The United States, that kind of led the charge
into Iraq, intentionally did not go through the United Nations. Now, when you
worked in the former Yugoslavia, you were there as part of a group that was
organized by the United Nations. Has the two different experiences made you
think about the pros and cons of being part of a larger UN-led mission?

Mr. ETHERINGTON: The overwhelming advantages--and I'll put aside the legal
arguments which must be paralleled by people better versed in it than me. The
overwhelming advantages are of a broad coalition in prosecution of this kind
of thing. Our disadvantage in Iraq was that it was essentially a narrowly led
coalition, and this opened us to criticism, made it, if you like, an "American
war," quotation marks at each end.

It's ironic that as I went into Iraq to take up my duties, I imagine that this
very narrow coalition actually would be advantages to us because I think all
of us have been fatigued by the bureaucracy that tends to attach itself to
large missions and occasionally large UN missions. So we felt it would be a
leaner partnership. As it is, we relearn that these things are pretty
difficult and that we need to learn the lessons like anyone else.

GROSS: I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. ETHERINGTON: Well, no, it's a great pleasure. Thank you very much.

GROSS: Mark Etherington served as the governor of an Iraqi province during
the occupation. His new memoir is called "Revolt on the Tigris: The Al-Sadr
Uprising and the Governing of Iraq." You can read an excerpt on our Web site,
freshair.npr.org.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Hoffmann"
TERRY GROSS, host:

One of opera's best loved fantasies, Jacques Offenbach's "The Tales of
Hoffmann," has captivated audiences for more than a century. The 1951 film
version by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger has just come out on DVD.
Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz has a review.

(Soundbite of opera music)

Mr. LLOYD SCHWARTZ: I was very young when I got hooked on opera, before I
was in my teens. I was captivated by the live radio broadcast from the
Metropolitan Opera and TV shows like "The Bell Telephone Hour" and "The Voice
of Firestone," where famous opera singers were featured. One of the first
operas to capture my imagination was Offenbach's "The Tales of Hoffmann," with
its glittering doll song, its seductive barcarole, its singing statue and
scary villains.

The opera was based on both the real life and the fantastical tales of the
German romantic writer, E.T.A Hoffmann. Offenbach was primarily a composer of
French operettas, but in Hoffmann, he was trying something more ambitious,
four stories about Hoffmann's own doomed romances. Sadly, Offenbach died just
before he completed his masterpiece. Controversy still exists about exactly
what his final intentions were, but these complex issues dissolve in a good
production, like the bewitching version filmed in 1951 conducted by the great
Sir Thomas Beecham and written, produced and directed by the British team of
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who had previously made the ultimate
fantasy about ballet, "The Red Shoes."

As Martin Scorsese points out in his commentary on the marvelous new Criterion
DVD, this was the first opera actually conceived as a film. We even hear the
orchestra tuning up as if the theater were inside our own heads, preparing us
for the disorienting events to come.

(Soundbite of orchestra tuning up)

Mr. SCHWARTZ: Powell and Pressburger's inspired idea is to transform
Offenbach's opera into a ballet. Most of the characters are played by dancers
lip-syncing the words in English to off-screen singing. Two of the objects of
Hoffmann's desire, the dancer Stella--in the original, she's an opera
star--and the doll Coppelia, are both played by the radiant ballerina Moira
Shearer, star of "The Red Shoes." All four of Hoffmann's menacing nemesis are
danced by the outstanding British character dancer Robert Helpmann. The
choreography is by the great Frederick Ashton, who dances several comic roles
himself. British actress Pamela Brown with the voice of mezzo soprano Monica
Sinclair plays the gender-bender trouser role of Nicklaus, Hoffmann's
concerned assistant. The whole film is a fiendish hall of mirrors.

(Soundbite of opera)

Mr. SCHWARTZ: The production is a bizarre mixture of sinister surrealism and
movie magic, filmed in intense supersaturated technicolor, splendidly restored
on the new DVD. My favorite episode is about Coppelia, the mechanical doll
Hoffmann thinks is human because he sees her through special glasses. The
doll's dazzling coloratura aria is Offenbach's satiric comment on operatic
vocalism.

(Soundbite of opera)

Mr. SCHWARTZ: During Hoffmann's wild waltz with Coppelia, his rose-colored
glasses break, and he finally realizes the devastating truth. The angry doll
maker tears his creation to pieces, but Coppelia's body parts keep moving even
after they have been severed. On the DVD, George Romero, the director of
"Night of the Living Dead," talks about the power influence this film had on
him.

Thought the scholarly dispute over Offenbach's intentions persist even today,
Powell and Pressburger not only keep us visually mesmerized, they also make
unsettling sense of this opera about how easily mesmerized we all are by love
and by irresistible, unforgettable music.

GROSS: Lloyd Schwartz is classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix and
teaches English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He reviewed the
1951 film version of Offenbach's "The Tales of Hoffmann" on a Criterion
collection DVD.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.