CAIO CAMARGO/YH Jonathan Finer, LAW ’09, reported from Iraq for the Washington Post.

I. The Journalist

    Windows blew in, a door came off, and the bomber’s severed hand landed in Jonathan Finer’s backyard. Finer, LAW ’09, was a Washington Post reporter embedded in Iraq from March to May 2003 and from May 2005 to July 2006 who was luckily on vacation when a car bomb exploded outside of his house in Baghdad. Finer speaks quickly and confidently, telling the story in an almost jaded tone. “The security situation was such that you were always on guard, so you got used to it,” he said. “After a while you stopped realizing how dangerous it actually was.”

    During his first stint in Iraq, Finer admitted, he was nervous. “I’d never covered the military, never been in a war zone,” he said. He was also working 16-hour days. But beyond the long hours, beyond the obvious risks of working in a war zone, it was considerably difficult to be an American reporter in the midst of the war. “You can’t just walk around the battlefield unaccompanied by soldiers,” he said, “and even when you do get to interact with the local population, you can explain to them you’re not a soldier, but there’s a guy standing next to you with an M-16, so it’s not all that convincing.”

    Finer was also frustrated by government assertions that American journalists were overplaying the deteriorating security situation. “At one point, we were accused by the former defense secretary of manufacturing and exaggerating reports of looting,” he said. But Finer reported only on what he saw. One time, that was a double-decker bus stacked floor to ceiling with stolen electronic goods on the streets of Baghdad. And every day, he left the Green Zone to do reporting, often taking long and dangerous trips on the highway away from any U.S. military presence. His only protection was to keep a low profile, dress like an Iraqi, and keep his mouth shut.       

    Ironically, the greatest immediate threat Finer encountered came from an American soldier, not an Iraqi insurgent. “I was wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet when I rounded a corner and saw a group of soldiers I didn’t know,” he said. He put his hands up, thinking the soldiers would recognize he was not an enemy. But one soldier lowered his rifle—and fired about a foot above Finer’s head. “The guy said later he thought my vest looked like a suicide bomber’s vest,” said Finer incredulously, “which is fine, except for the fact that I was wearing a helmet also. If your intention is to blow yourself up, would you have a helmet on your head?”

    Finer misses being on the ground in spite of these frustrations. “[Reporting] felt like something very essential to the world,” he said. Yet a lot of people are tuning out, which Finer attributes to the desensitizing effect of seeing the same bad news every day. “How many times can you read that 10 people were killed with a car bomb in such-and-such city?” he asked. “A lot of people just read the headlines now and say, ‘Okay, I get it, more bombs in Iraq.’ It’s too bad, but I understand it. This has all been going on for a very long time.”

    This Thanksgiving, Jonathan Finer is having a small reunion at his house in Vermont. Two of his translators from Iraq will be there, as well as some American reporters. But still, many of his friends will be missing. “That’s one of the hardest parts of leaving,” he said, “knowing that people are still there.” On some level, too, he misses the exhilaration of working in the field. Taking classes is less of an adrenaline rush than being in Baghdad, and the Taft, where Finer lives, is not exactly a military compound. “There are still days I wonder if I’d rather be out running around in some godforsaken place,” he said. “But my family and friends are a lot happier that I’m here.”

VALERIE CERVANTES/YH Professor Kathryn Slanski led an effort to help Iraqi scholars preserve artifacts.

II. The Scholar

    It was almost a scene from a bad movie: national warfare, bombs falling, a gang of organized criminals stealing and selling ancient artifacts in order to finance their war of terror. But on Apr. 10, 2003, archeologists and other academics watched in disbelief as news reports told of thieves robbing the Iraqi National Museum of age-old treasures such as cuneiform tablets. Some worried for their colleagues in Iraq—scholars, not soldiers—who guarded the museum during the chaos. Some felt empathy for the desperate looters. But all were horrified at the callous treatment of the irreplaceable cultural assets.

    Kathryn Slanski is an Assyriologist and a lecturer in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations whose research in ancient Mesopotamia dovetails with her interest in the modern Middle East. She remembers watching the drama play out across her television screen. “We felt helpless,” she said. “You heard the phrase ‘cradle of civilization’ when you were in fifth or sixth grade; it wasn’t as exciting as the Egyptians, but it had the first city, the first myths. It’s the heritage of the whole world.”

    As looters search only for precious objects, they destroy the physical place in which those objects are found; they search for things which will bring them cash, but also destroy the archaeological record so valuable to scholars. “That looks very bad for future understanding of our past,” Slanski said. “We will get some of the objects back, but we will never be able to reconstruct how they looked, the relationship in which they lie with other objects around them.” Slanski and her colleagues joke that when the war is over, they will go to Iraq and excavate the dirt that the looters threw to the side, but, as Slanski said, “the way things are now, the future looks pretty black.”

    As a self-proclaimed eternal optimist, however, Slanski is not content simply to rest her feet on a soapbox; her dark clothing and soft voice hide her willingness to get her hands dirty. In the summer of 2004, she and her husband, Eckart Frahm, a professor in Assyriology—whom she met at an Annual International Assyriologists Conference in 2000—went to Amman, Jordan, with a few colleagues on a three-million-dollar USAID grant. They gave daily lectures to the 56 Iraqi professors and graduate students who came, provided them with scanned literature and images they didn’t have access to, and invested in building construction and computer equipment. “I think what she did showed a lot of courage,” said Benjamin Foster, a professor in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department. At the end of the program, Slanski and Frahm were optimistic that the following summer, they’d be able to bring the most promising students to study abroad at Yale.     

    The second summer program never happened. As the situation in Iraq worsened, the State Department pulled their funding and diverted all of it to security; it also became impossible for the Iraqi students to leave their own country. “It was too dangerous for these Iraqis to be associated with us,” Slanski said. Her voice was quiet as she spoke of her students, her nose a little red. She hasn’t heard from them in over a year. “I’m heartbroken when I think about them. They’re not the only individuals in Iraq, but they’re the ones I know,” she said. “And statistically, some of them have died. They would have to have died.”

    Thousands of archaeological sites are destroyed on a daily basis; all academics who could have left Iraq have done so because of threats to their lives and their families. Slanski cited Foster in her assessment of the lasting damage of the war. “No matter what happens politically—and I know I’m misquoting him here—but whatever happens politically, the greatest lasting damage is going to be the loss of this world history,” she said gravely. “That’s what this war will be remembered for.”

CAIO CAMARGO/YH Roman Martinez, LAW ’08, advised the Iraqi provisional government.

III. The Diplomat

    One October morning three years ago, Roman Martinez, LAW ’08, woke up in Baghdad’s Rashid Hotel to the sound of explosions and the quivers of the floor under his feet. Two weeks earlier, rockets fired at the hotel had failed to explode. This incident was unusual—as Martinez said without a hint of humor, “The insurgency, in general, didn’t have very good aim.” But this time was different; this time, the presence of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz motivated the insurgents to send several rockets through the hotel’s walls. “The image that came to mind was 9/11,” he said. “We thought the building was coming down.” 

    Martinez is in his second year at the Yale Law School; he is young, charming, and wears jeans. He is a teaching assistant for John Gaddis’s “The Cold War” class and likes to joke about harassing his students during section. In short, he is not your typical diplomat. But after finishing his bachelor’s degree at Harvard University and his master’s in international relations at Cambridge University, he immediately started working at the Pentagon in 2002 in the Iraq office. After eight months at the Pentagon, he traveled to Iraq as part of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)—the transitional government established in Iraq after the U.S. invasion—essentially acting as a representative of the Bush administration. There, he spent 13 months helping to draft the Iraqi interim constitution.

    The summer before Martinez began law school, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad invited Martinez to return to Iraq, this time to contribute to the drafting of the permanent constitution. “I hadn’t started out as an Iraq expert,” Martinez said, “but I’d sort of become that.” After spending almost three years immersed in the Iraqi political process, he had an institutional memory that few on Khalilzad’s staff could match. “I’d literally been in the room when all these guys had been arguing about federalism, the role of Islam, the separation of powers and the bill of rights,” he said.

    The role of the United States in the drafting of the constitution has often been debated, and Martinez admitted the difficulty in striking a balance between diplomacy and dictatorship on the part of the United States. “Iraq is its own country,” he said, “but we wanted to help Iraqis build a democracy of their own. We had reasons which were sort of more national security-based for us as well, but we also wanted to liberate Iraq. Often, it was just useful for us to make sure that people stayed around the table and that conversations went on.” When the Shia and Sunni political groups began objecting to the hard-line demands of the Kurds, Iraq’s non-Arab ethnic minority, the CPA stepped in to moderate, using leverage the United States had earned from protecting the Kurds after the Gulf War. “In theory, it obviously would have been better if the Iraqis had been able to come together and get along,” Martinez admitted, “but I think it was constructive and absolutely necessary that we were there playing this facilitating role.”

    Ultimately, the Iraqi politicians themselves ensured that the constitution was essentially an Iraqi document. “They were very patriotic, very committed to build a government that was not going to repress them anymore,” he said. “The Kurdish leadership, in particular, was always a lot of fun to deal with. I lived in a trailer in the Green Zone in Baghdad, but [the Kurdish politicians] always had nice rooms for us and great food.”

    Still, life in Baghdad was no picnic. That early October morning in 2003 when Martinez’s hotel was bombed, two of his colleagues died, and several were injured. “Stuff like that livened up the situation in a very negative way,” he said, “but in general we couldn’t spend a lot of time worrying ourselves about safety things. There was no point—there was work we needed to get done, and we had to take some degree of risk to be active in our diplomacy. It’s not like policy is made in a vacuum, in an air-conditioned room with full deliberation. It’s like you have 15 minutes to make X decision and, by the way, you’re in the basement at the palace because they’re shooting mortars at you, and the phone’s aren’t working, and Muqtada al-Sadr is doing this, and there are 18,000 things going on.”

     These conditions did little to dampen Martinez’s conviction in the ultimate success of the Bush administration’s diplomacy. While sitting at a table in Claire’s, he reflects on whether democracy will stick for the Iraqis. “I don’t want to minimize the difficulties, I think the situation there is very tough—a lot tougher than we thought it would be,” he said. “But we’ve put our nation behind this effort and we should do everything in our power to win, as long as it’s still winnable.” His mouth was full of a mixture of granola, bananas, and Diet Coke, but his conviction—albeit a little mushy-sounding—made it through. “And I think it’s still winnable.”

COURTESY WIKIMEDIA General William Odom, a Yale professor, has been a vocal critic of the Iraq war.

IV. The General

    “The idea that we could install a constitutional regime in Iraq struck me from the very beginning as utterly fanciful,” said retired Lieutenant General William E. Odom. Odom is not just another liberal, Bush-bashing blogger typing away at the corner Starbucks; his military experience is intimidating. Not only was he a general in the U.S. Army, he also served as the director of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan and assistant chief of staff for intelligence from 1981-’85. He is now a professor adjunct at Yale and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His C.V. speaks for itself, but it is Odom’s vocal criticism of the Iraq war that has catapulted him into the national spotlight. “When the president says he is staying the course it reminds me of the man who has just jumped from the Empire State Building,” Odom remarked on a German television program in September 2004. “Halfway down he says, ‘I am still on course.’ Well, I would not want to be on course with a man who will lie splattered in the street. I would like to be someone who could change the course.”

    Joining the military a natural choice for the Tennessee native: His relatives had all fought with the Confederacy during the Civil War, and, growing up in the middle of World War II, he was inspired by the sight of Patton’s army marching by his front door. The military also provided an opportunity for him to leave his small town, a place, according to Odom, you wanted to get out of, not get into. “I had this childish admiration for West Point,” he said, and that’s where he headed upon leaving home in 1950. After his graduation, Odom served in Germany, Russia, and Vietnam.

    His experiences fuel his scathing criticism of the war in Iraq. “I watched efforts to train the Vietnamese military and to create an effective South Vietnamese government,” Odom recalled, “and I watched it fail miserably.” His article “Iraq through the lens of Vietnam,” first published on the Harvard forum Niemanwatchdog.org, draws several disturbing parallels between Iraq and the tactical disaster which was the Vietnam War, and urges immediate withdrawal. Of the ambassadors and diplomats who are convinced that staying to help Iraqis draft a constitution is the solution, Odom said, “Those guys are all impractical idealists.”

    “The odds of a constitutional breakthrough—not just writing a piece of paper and having a referendum on it, but getting a deal to stick and getting people to abide by it—the odds of that are very poor,” Odom said. “If anyone thinks we’re going to establish a constitutional regime in a short amount of time, it must be a joke.” According to Odom, political elites—“anyone with enough guns or money to violate the rules with impunity”—must first agree on a set of rules to follow; after 20 years, you can call that agreement a real constitution. “If you ask lawyers about the definition of a constitution, they’ll only confuse you,” he said, laughing. “They always want to add a lot more trash to the definition to make it too complicated to understand.” But Odom’s definition and its implications are clear: When political elites do not agree, the system breaks down. “What do you think the odds are that the Kurds and the Shia and the Sunni are going to be able to strike a deal?” he asked.

     Ultimately, Odom worries that while the democratic sentiment behind the invasion wasn’t wrong, the volatile political climate created through the war will prevent any kind of real success. “In some ways, it’s an admirable naïveté for Americans to want to do this for other people; our hearts are in the right place,” he said. But if you were betting your nest egg on [the constitution’s success], would you do it?”

    Between authoring articles about the war for various publications and teaching two courses at Yale, Odom has not exactly had a quiet retirement. But making his voice heard and making a difference has always been more important to him than living a peaceful existence in the backwoods of Tennessee. “You kind of get nostalgic for that simple, out-of-the-way life,” he said, “but in reality, it’s pretty boring.”

    Cover designed by Liana Moskowitz and Andrew Chittenden