Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir

by Christopher R. Hill

  The vote was 73–23. “If you had been a treaty” (that requires a two-thirds majority) Strobe Talbott cheerfully told me, “you would have been confirmed with votes to spare.” Several senators from both sides of the aisle called me later that night to apologize for the three-week delay and promised to visit me in Baghdad. Many of them did visit, including McCain, who was always gracious to my team and me during both of his trips. At one point during the second trip, after my security detail and I had snuck him out beyond the Green Zone to an Iraqi pastry shop, McCain draped his arm over my shoulder, thanked me, and apologized for supposedly “hurting” my “feelings” during the nomination process. I called a few other Senators to pass on my thanks to them, and, more for my own therapy than his, I put in a call to Brownback to express the hope that he would come out to Baghdad. He never returned the call or visited Baghdad. (The rather “unexpeditionary” Brownback also never visited Korea.)

  I headed for my newest outpost within thirty-six hours of the vote. My son, Nathaniel, had returned just days before the vote from a six-month tour of duty at Camp Slayer in Baghdad, dashing my hopes to overlap with him in Iraq. I asked him for some advice.

  “Keep your head down and bring a good pair of sunglasses,” he told me.

  22

  THE LONGEST DAY

  It was April 24, 2009, the start of the seventh year of the Iraq War, when I arrived in a C-35, a small Lear-type military jet, at Baghdad International Airport. I was exhausted but relieved to touch down after a three-part trip that consisted of a twelve-hour commercial flight to Kuwait International Airport, a drive through various U.S.-manned checkpoints over to the military side of the Kuwait airport, and finally a ninety-minute flight over the dark desert below to my new home in the “cradle of civilization.”

  After making a “tactical landing,” a stomach-churning dive with all aircraft interior and exterior lights shut off to thwart the aim of any would-be attacker, I emerged from the plane a little woozy. Patricia Butenis, the deputy chief of mission who had been holding down the fort since Ryan Crocker had departed in February, met me at the bottom of the short flight of stairs. Pat, a superb officer who had served with me in Warsaw ten years before as head of the consular section, apologized repeatedly for the ongoing sandstorm, as if it were somehow her fault. It was 7:30 P.M. and pitch-dark except for the sand in the air that was illuminated by the headlights of the several armored black SUVs that had come to take me to the embassy.

  I had been thinking about what I would draw on from my past in this assignment. As past posts flickered through my mind—Belgrade, Warsaw, Seoul, Albania, Skopje, even Buea in the Peace Corps—each was very different and offered its own lessons. I knew I would now need to draw on a lifetime of experiences to get through this one.

  I knew, and not just because of my prior work in places like Albania, about the necessity of success. But the stakes in Iraq were so much higher. And the feel-good aura of opening up new post–Cold War states in Europe would not make an appearance in the nerve-racking and meat-grinding world of Iraq.

  I also knew that the expectations for the embassy in Iraq were enormous and out of proportion to what could be done well and in a realistic time frame, and were not necessarily geared to the withdrawal dates for our troops. Moreover, I knew that people who might have had little idea about the situation on the ground, or even of what an embassy or any embassy anywhere can actually do, were setting these expectations. The overall capacity of Iraqis to absorb the Marshall Plan–worthy load of advice that was being poured on them by our fire hoses was far more limited than Iraq’s social index of literacy and other educational achievements might otherwise suggest. Development economics literature often cites “the absorption capacity” as a factor in determining whether a country can make use of foreign funds, technical assistance, and other forms of assistance. Most often what determines a country’s absorption capacity may have to do more with embedded sociological and even psychological factors. Sociology can be changed over time but cannot be trumped by politics or economics, conveyed in a kind of American secular Bible school. And of course there was the additional burden that whatever the actual transcript of the Petraeus/Crocker testimony read, the music of it was that the war had been won.

  In 1989, when Poland threw off its communist system, its prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, addressed the Polish parliament on the day his government replaced the last government of the communist era. Mazowiecki’s bent frame and deeply lined face seemed a perfect living metaphor to describe not only the system his government was to replace, but also his tasks ahead.

  The clear-headed Polish intellectual captured the issue brilliantly: “We in Poland do not want a Polish way, a third way, because we know what works in the world and we know what doesn’t work and we want what works.”

  Mazowiecki set a course of a kind that no Iraqi leader had thus far articulated. Poland, he was suggesting, should not be a world leader in producing new ideas and tailor-made concepts for social and economic development. Poland embraces what works in the world and wants it, and, most importantly, by its own internal reforms would prepare to receive and make the best use of it.

  The fact that Iraq is not Poland was hardly the only factor at work. U.S. goals in Iraq, increasingly economic ones, were often set by senior U.S. officials, including senior military generals, who had neither the expertise nor the patience to slog through the no-man’s-land of economic development projects and capacity-building. The military had become the largest dispenser of foreign aid in Iraq for programs whose primary and more sober purpose was to convince the Iraqis not to shoot at our soldiers.

  In occasional unguarded moments, senior generals would admit to their civilian counterparts the profound difficulties they had in understanding the place. As General Odierno, late at night over cigars, once said to me, “You know, when we came here [Iraq] we had absolutely no idea what we were doing or what we were facing.” But these moments were few and far between. What came between these rare moments were exhortations to “dominate the battle space,” identify the “drivers of instability,” as the PowerPoint slides obligingly did, and move on to the next development machine-gun nest. Thus, if the problem of declining date palm production in Diyala Province found its way onto a slide as a “driver of instability” (young people otherwise employed as date palm harvesters might turn to the insurgency for their livelihoods), this problem became the subject of follow-up meetings and briefings aimed at a solution through a “mitigation strategy.” And because, after all, senior officers had identified the problem as important, unsustainable money transfusions were thrown at it. In today’s army, money is indeed a weapon of war.

  If the opinion of local Iraqis was sought, the favorite question was “What do you need?” And if the answer, as it often turned out to be, was “money,” the response was “We can work with you.”

  The sheer size of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) funds and even the smaller civilian funds, which had long since peaked before 2009, meant that senior officials in Washington working the issues of Iraq became familiar with local place-names, which often gave them a false sense that they understood the issues. Their poor understanding of the issues was compounded by being thousands of miles away, or worse, by the fact that a past eighteen-hour trip to Iraq empowered them to speak with certainty in the windowless confines of the White House Situation Room, where the interagency squabbles dragged on and played out. And when things don’t go well, especially for a new administration anxious to demonstrate that it could handle Iraq, out come the micromanaging tinkerers and the proverbial 8,000-mile-long screwdrivers.

  During my preparation time in Washington, I tried to arrange to arrive at the civilian side of the Baghdad airport. I thought entering through the civilian terminal would be a powerful symbol of the changing mission in Iraq, that this would be an era of transition from the military to the civilians, and that, just maybe, we were entering a period of increasing “no
rmalcy,” a state that the Iraqis desperately wanted.

  In some previous posts I had looked for a gesture, a symbolic step to convey that the new ambassador would represent change. Successful ambassadors increasingly tend to be those who understand that they are not just accredited to the foreign ministry or the government, but rather to the broader public. Such a symbol in Iraq was not so apparent. The Iraqis I talked to before my departure told me over and over that what their families in Baghdad wanted was a “normal” life; they were desperately seeking signs that things could get better. Thus I thought I could start that by coming through the civilian terminal.

  The embassy and the military insisted I come the same way every one of my predecessors had come and gone, slipping in through the darkness on the military end of the runway. Security concerns were appropriately paramount, and no security officer in a war zone is particularly interested in symbolic gestures, but I felt the lack of enthusiasm for change or transition was deeper than just the nervousness of the security office.

  Baghdad was having another one of its infamous sandstorms. Sandstorms at their worst are a kind of London fog, with a brown tint rather than blue, and are as old as the Bible. But in Baghdad in 2009, everything was laid at the doorstep of the U.S. presence. Many people in Iraq made the case that it was entirely Americans’ fault, that U.S. tactical vehicles in the deserts in Anbar and Ninewah were stirring up sandstorms!

  Pat explained we would have to drive in a convoy to the embassy instead of taking the usual UH-64 Black Hawk helicopter ride. That was fine with me. I had taken enough Black Hawks in the Balkans to last a lifetime. The chief of my security detail, Derek Dela-Cruz, gave me my Kevlar helmet and “PPE” (personal protective equipment), a bulletproof vest. I climbed into the armored Chevy Suburban and off we went into the darkness, with Derek riding shotgun next to the driver and me in the backseat with Pat.

  That was the first of many times I would ride with Derek, then later his successor, Ian Pavis. For an ambassador overseas, a close relationship with a security detail is crucial. Often compromises needed to be found between the ambassador’s wish to be out in the field and the security detail’s fervent desire that the ambassador stay locked up in the embassy. Conversations often ran along these lines, “Sir, we can support your idea for a three-day visit to place X, but it would involve Y and Z resources. Could you consider an early morning departure and return that night?” I always agreed. Sometimes the security detail would come into possession of a tactical piece of information that would require some adjustment in the route or schedule. “Huh?” I responded once to Derek when he pulled me back from getting into the car. “Sir, please humor me.” And I did because he had a job to do.

  As he drove into Baghdad, I spent the twenty-minute drive staring out the three-inch-thick ballistic window at the scenery, such as it was. I was struck by the fact that even though I was riding in a six-vehicle convoy of armored-up vehicles and anticipating the thousands of embassy employees awaiting my stewardship of the U.S. mission, I felt as alone as I had some thirty-five years ago arriving in Douala, Cameroon, for my Peace Corps service.

  The fine sand, besides finding a way into every human pore, turned every building and road sign into varying shades of brown, and the view of “Route Irish” (all major highways in Baghdad, like many war zones before, were given very clear Western cultural names—another one for example being Route Tampa—to facilitate memorization by our soldiers) was not much of a view at all. I kept looking for signs of flowers and landscaping, which General Petraeus in his Chamber of Commerce speech to me weeks before had mentioned. “Where have all the flowers gone?” I muttered to myself. We entered the Green Zone, a place so nicknamed for its level of supposed personal safety than for any particular commitment to the environment. Minutes later our vehicles arrived at the main gate of the vast embassy compound, where a very professional Peruvian contract guard in a khaki uniform and floppy hat waved the vehicles through the gate.

  U.S. Embassy Baghdad is a 104-acre facility that has cost American taxpayers some half a billion dollars. A company called First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting built it, and often bore the brunt of numerous employee complaints when things didn’t work well. First Kuwaiti, along with numerous other subcontractors, employed construction workers from all over the globe—except Iraqis, who were deemed a security threat, and in some cases probably for very good reasons. Media descriptions of the property depicted it as a luxury facility on the banks of the Tigris River, with a food court and other amenities that would remind its happy thousand or so full-time inhabitants of home. In reality, there was nothing luxurious about the compound, and it definitely did not remind anyone of home. All the buildings had windows that could withstand blasts from 107mm rockets, and all the roofs were built to a bombproof standard, at least in the event they were hit by the type of rocketry that was regularly fired at the Green Zone from Sadr City and other “points of origin,” or “POOs,” as the military described them in this acronym-rich environment. We drove past the so-called food court. It consisted of a veranda where sullen-looking people—mostly in military uniforms—lounged on plastic chairs smoking and using the Wi-Fi.

  I stared out the SUV window at what was unfolding in front of my eyes. I have seen embassies all over the world. Served in many. This one lived up to its reputation as a colossus. Bright white lights along the barbed-wire-tipped, ten-foot-high cement wall gave it a look more appropriate to a corrections facility. The chancery building, where the ambassador’s office is housed, was also lit up by security lights. The building was a familiar design to anyone who has seen one of the many new U.S. embassies that have cropped up in the unfertile soils of newly independent countries since 1989: brown, utilitarian buildings, which looked like giant cardboard boxes with air holes and housed the thousand-plus employees, were bathed in white light. The starkness of the flat-roofed housing buildings, the lack of even the slightest sign of landscaping save for a giant, forlorn lawn in front of the chancery building, gave it the look of a Mars colony.

  The convoy stopped every hundred feet to manage the metal speed bumps. Peruvian contract guards in brown uniforms and floppy desert hats walking in pairs, their M-16 rifles loosely slung over their shoulders, waved and saluted as we went by. We went past an enormous brown open space that could presumably have furnished all the necessary sand and dust for a countrywide sandstorm. Finally we turned into a metal, grilled front gate and entered the small front yard of the residence of the ambassador. My new home. I took off the body armor and helmet in the car (I had felt foolish wearing it, even though I understood why the regulations required it) and got out to meet the staff of the residence. It was about 8 P.M.

  The residence was shaped vaguely like a giant shoe box. It too was painted brown. Windows were long and narrow and appeared to be designed more as someone’s concept of a shooting position than as a source of light. Like every other window on the compound, the glass was several inches thick and could not be opened, even with direct rocket fire. A porch on the upstairs seemed at first glance to offer some respite from this dreary look, but it too was retrofitted with thick Plexiglas to guard against the possibility that someone might aim a weapon at it.

  Inside, however, furnished with the State Department’s limitless supply of Drexel furniture and by an equally endless supply of industrial-strength Oriental carpets, the residence was rather pleasant. I looked at the artwork that adorned the walls. The theme, by and large, was the American flag, and many of the pieces featured numerous patriotic scenes of America that the State Department’s office of interior designs and furnishings had chosen.

  Pat explained what had been planned that evening. The foreign minister was waiting for us at his office, where at 9:30 P.M. I would present to him copies of my “letters of credence and credentials,” a 350-year-old diplomatic practice by which an arriving ambassador presents letters from his head of state to the effect that the person was in fact the real ambassador and
not some imposter. Copies were presented to the Foreign Ministry because in most countries an appointment with the receiving head of state could take weeks or months, and meanwhile the ambassador would need to get to work. In Baghdad, however, my appointment with President Jalal Talabani to present the letters was scheduled for 10:30 P.M., an hour later.

  Our six-car convoy lumbered up to the Foreign Ministry, which stood all too close to a busy intersection, with a small army of security guards, some of whom had already been deployed to the site in anticipation of the visit and were there to join the protocol officers greeting us on arrival. I made my way into the building and, accompanied by the protocol official, went up the elevator. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a former Kurdish Peshmerga guerrilla fighter who was a confidant of Kurdish president Massoud Barzani, was a gregarious, roundish-featured Kurd wearing a double-breasted blue suit, with a friendly smile, an optimistic outlook, and excellent English. In his Baghdad home he prominently displayed a picture of himself and President Barzani, in younger years, both in their brown Peshmerga uniforms wearing red and white turbans, sitting cross-legged on top of a snow-peaked mountain far up in the wilds of Kurdistan. The always fit President Barzani would later comment to me with his dry and ironic sense of humor that he was not entirely sure that Hoshyar could make it back up to that mountaintop for another such photo.

  Hoshyar (as he was called by all) welcomed me warmly in his fourth-floor outer office, introduced me one by one to his senior team, and took the outsized envelope containing copies of my papers. I tried my best to introduce my team, but having arrived in the embassy just an hour before I didn’t know who half of them were. We sat in two chairs at the end of a long, ornate room, decorated with display cases of bric-a-brac from various diplomatic visitors. Our embassy staffs and foreign ministry sat in two long rows, forming both sides of a U, his to his left, mine to my right, with coffee tables end to end placed between the two rows. It was a scene I had participated in numerous times throughout my career whether in Ban Ki-moon’s office in Korea, or Kiro Gligorov’s in Skopje. The only difference was that for this meeting I had a small army of security standing guard outside the office door, inside the door, at the elevator, at other elevator stops on other floors, at the back stairs, on the ground floor at the elevator and the stairs, at the building entrance, at the back entrance, inside the vehicles, and in a small helicopter circling overhead. That, I thought, was something new.