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after Paul Bremer, the Bush-appointed head ofthe Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), chose to disband the Iraqi military. Many of the sacked officers joined a nascent campaign to expel their expropriators. Added to their ranks were more disaffected Iraqis, victims of the controversial policy of “de-Baathification” that Bremer announced ten days after his touchdown in Baghdad.
    Making matters worse, Saddam had licensed a gray market in Iraq designed to evade UN sanctions—in effect, a state-tolerated organized crime network, headed by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his vice president. A member of the Sufi Naqshbandi Order, which claimed direct descent from the first Islamic caliph, Abu Bakr, al-Douri had been born in al-Dawr, near Saddam’s own hometown of Tikrit, in the northern Salah ad-Din province of Iraq. As such, he proved an adroit Baathist operator within the country’s Sunni heartland. And as vice president he was also able to stock arms of the regime’s intelligence services and military with his fellow Sufis. This was a form of ethnic patronage that in 2006, after Saddam’s execution, manifested itself in the creation of the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order—one of the most powerful Sunni insurgency groups in Iraq, which later helped ISIS take over Mosul in 2014.
    Al-Douri was an expert smuggler; he ran a lucrative stolen car ring, importing luxury European models into Iraq via the Jordanian port at Aqaba. It was a vertically integrated racket, Harvey told us, because al-Douri also maintained the auto body shops in which these illicit cars were worked on, furnishing both the factories and conveyances for the construction of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), one of the deadliest weapons used against American troops in Iraq.
    Saddam employed other counterrevolutionary measures before the war. We tend to remember his regime as “secular,” which it was up to a point. But after the First Gulf War, he sought to fortifyhis regime against foreign fundamentalist opponents, such as Iran’s mullahs, and also against domestic ones that might challenge his rule on Islamist “near enemy” grounds. Thus he Islamized his regime, adding the phrase “Allahu Akbar” (“God Is Great”) to the Iraqi flag and introducing a host of draconian punishments, most of which were based on Sharia law: thieves would have their hands amputated, while draft dodgers and deserters from the military would lose their ears. To distinguish the latter from disfigured veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddamists would also brand crosses into the amputees’ foreheads with hot irons.
    Ramping up state religiosity had an ancillary purpose: to deflect or distract criticism from an economy battered by international sanctions. The regime thus introduced a proscription on female employment, hoping to artificially lower Iraq’s lengthening jobless rolls. Most significant, however, was Saddam’s inauguration of the Islamic Faith Campaign, which endeavored to marry Baath ideology of regime elites with Islamism. The man he tasked with overseeing this conversion curriculum was none other than his car-smuggling caporegime , al-Douri.
    Predictably, the Faith Campaign was a Frankenstein patchwork of proselytization and mafia economics. Some of Iraq’s new-minted faithful had their hajj, orannual religious pilgrimage to Mecca, subsidized by the state, while others were bribed with real estate, cash, and—naturally—expensive cars. Colonel Joel Rayburn, another US military intelligence officer who served in Iraq and has written a history of the country, observes that one of the unintended consequences of the Faith Campaign was also its most predictable: “Saddam believed he was sending into the Islamic schools committed Baathists who would remain loyal as they established a foothold in the mosques from which the regime could then monitor or manipulate the Islamist movement. In actuality, the reverse happened. Most of the officers