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

by Christopher R. Hill

  Thus the Foreign Service began to send both its best, and sometimes its not so best, to Iraq.

  I was soon to meet in our embassy some of the most gifted Americans one will ever meet in or out of uniform. AID officers under the direction of Chris Crowley, for example, would come to my office to show what they had accomplished in terms of numbers of trained officials and how some of the ministries were now led by people we had trained. It was impressive. The Treasury Department program, which always had absolutely top-notch leadership, too, demonstrated it had come to Iraq to make a difference. Similarly, the embassy’s political and economic section, made up of Foreign Service officers, came in a mood to make a difference in what was truly one of the most complex problems facing the United States and the Arab world. After all, our invasion had made Iraq the only Shia-led Arab majority country in the Middle East, and the new Iraq was not particularly welcomed in the neighborhood.

  But there was also a mood in some quarters of the embassy, especially among those back for repeat tours, that they wanted their Iraq experience to remain the same. Whether it was a variant of the Stockholm syndrome to have grown fond of the circumstances, bad as they were, or a basic human need for familiarity, I was soon to see that making changes would encounter resistance.

  As any organization, the Foreign Service is driven at the top by a highly motivated class of officers who didn’t need to be encouraged to go, who were eager not to miss an assignment in a post that would be a subject of discussion for decades to come. There were the Middle East specialists, who were naturally drawn to both the duty and the opportunity to bring their skills to bear. But there are only seven thousand or so FSOs to staff more than 194 diplomatic posts around the world. There were not enough qualified, high-caliber volunteers to fill the hundreds of slots for FSOs in Embassy Baghdad and its subsidiary posts, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). And so there were people who were simply told by their personnel officers in Human Resources that they were going to Iraq. Everybody had to go, and the best thing to do was to go soon and get the requirement over with.

  • • •

  There were those who saw Iraq as a ticket punch, a place to go for an assignment on the understanding that the next assignment would be to a cushy place in Europe. There were those who went for the money. Danger pay and hardship pay could double one’s salary, and so some parts of Embassy Baghdad often looked like a near retirement home, with people who were soon to retire from the Foreign Service adding to their nest eggs.

  There were also some who did not have the experience of other posts to draw on (as seasoned Foreign Service officers did) and considered Baghdad the baseline of what should be done and how one should behave in a foreign country. Often visitors from Washington who had served previously in Embassy Baghdad came back out gushing with a sense of nostalgia from tours of duty there, cheerfully relating tales of sacrifice and woes as if these were the best moments of their lives. A comment as innocent as “it’s hot today” (what with the temperature approaching 120 degrees) would be greeted by derisive laughter and the all-too-familiar “That’s nothing. You should have been here in August of ’07 when . . .”

  One visitor serving as a special advisor in the State Department, and who considered her Iraq service as if it had been her time at a college sorority, cheerfully told a group in my living room before dinner about the time seven Turkish air-conditioning workers repairing duct work in the old embassy (the Republican Guard Palace) had all gotten lost in the maze of metal and had died, in effect cooked to death in an aluminum oven. Horrified, I leaned over and whispered to a person next to me who had previous experience in Iraq, “Oh my God, did that really happen?” He answered, “Well, who knows, but she just loved her Iraq experience.”

  Despite the enormous numbers of State Department personnel, I was surprised to learn that the political section, the heart and soul of most embassies, and in Iraq one of the absolute largest, was often bypassed in managing the embassy’s relations with Iraqis and in its reporting back to Washington in favor of contractors who had come to Iraq as a one-off opportunity, rather than as part of a foreign service career. Often this small number of temporary contract appointees based in the front office and under the direct supervision of the ambassador and/or the commanding general were the key people to maintain contacts with the Iraqis.

  Based on what I heard during my preparations in Washington, I felt that the political section had been sometimes poorly led in the past, its expert officers relegated to attending endless internal meetings or escorting Washington visitors around to secondary officials in the Green Zone. I thought the Foreign Service hadn’t stood up for itself in Baghdad, had allowed its normal structures to be undermined in favor of improvised solutions, with a dubious justification based on the catch-all, argument-ending point that “we’re at war” and therefore nothing can be done according to normal procedures. When I looked at the breadth and quality of the Foreign Service officers in the political section in late spring of 2009, I was determined to change that.

  Whether it was the luck of the draw that year or something else, the 2009 recruitment class of political officers was among the best I had ever seen in the Foreign Service. The head of it all was Gary Grappo, a twenty-year Foreign Service veteran who had most recently served as U.S. ambassador to Oman. An Air Force Academy graduate, Gary spoke fluent Arabic, as did many of the political officers, and he had a broad context for the region, having served in Saudi Arabia as the number two officer. He was a born leader. Others in the political section included Bill Roebuck, another Arabic speaker with tremendous Middle East experience and a gift for telegram writing, and Eric Carlson, also a brilliant writer and an Arabic speaker. John Godfrey was a rising star in the service with fluent Arabic and broad experience, including in Libya when the U.S. reopened the embassy in Tripoli. Steve Bondy had special responsibilities to liaise with some of the Sunni extremist groups and was another class act, as was Evyenia Sidereas, who had probably the best Arabic skills of anyone and had served in Egypt. Derek Hoffman, one of the most junior members of the section, had learned Arabic as a child and followed some of the Shia political parties—and was wise beyond his years.

  We also had the services of Mustafa Popal, another rising star who had the added skill of speaking Dari and whom we were able to use in contacts with the ayatollahs based in Najaf, once sending him there with a hidden beacon in an unmarked car, a courageous act by a courageous young officer. His telegram about his conversations with the ayatollahs was read by Vice President Biden, who sought him out on his next visit (Biden was to visit four times during my sixteen months in Iraq).

  Finally, I had the ace of the whole operation, the former East Asia special assistant Yuri Kim, who had signed up earlier for Iraq to work in a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Anbar. When I realized I was going to Iraq, I broke her assignment and brought her to the embassy. She knew me well, and understood what I was trying to achieve. As I explained to Gary, who had not yet met Yuri because she had spent most of her career in East Asia, she is really just about the best the Foreign Service has, and “we will all someday work for Yuri,” I explained. And though, unlike the others, she did not have Middle East experience or the language, I knew that if she were assigned to the planet Jupiter she would learn the local language and figure the place out.

  I met with her and with Gary first, and then with all of the officers, and told them that there would be no more so-called special assistants running around the embassy and around town pretending to be professional political officers. The political section officers were what we had, they were among the best I had ever seen, and I was going to sink or swim with them. One of the first moves I made was to have Yuri and Gary and Chris Klein, who were always around the action, work with their military counterparts to begin embedding the military’s “embassy,” the J9, into the political section. Major General Dave Perkins, with whom I had worked in Macedonia some thirteen years before, was key to the merger
. So too was General Odierno, who understood that it was time to begin civilianizing and professionalizing the mission, hard as that was for some. It was an important step, with many challenges ahead.

  Occasionally, I was able to have visitors come out from the States to help on a short-term basis in working with host country officials. One of these was Robert Sweet, a senior judge from the Southern District of New York, who some eighteen years earlier had visited Albania when I was there to provide technical assistance to that country’s fledgling judiciary system. Bob was eighty-seven years old when he touched down at Baghdad’s airport after an overnight flight from New York via Amman, Jordan. He had a youthfulness of body, mind, and spirit that had his Iraqi and American interlocutors in awe. (“Just good genes,” he would explain to those who wanted to know his secret formula.) On the day of his arrival in Baghdad, I arranged to have DJ, one of our best security officers, meet and escort him to the embassy. DJ found Judge Sweet at the passport control area and gave him the requisite Kevlar helmet and flak jacket. He told me later that day that he explained to Sweet, “Judge, if there are any problems I want you to stay close to me.” I chuckled in anticipation of what the World War II veteran’s response probably was to that. “So what did the judge say?” I asked.

  “Sir, he just said to me, ‘No, kid. If there are any problems I want you to run like hell. I’ll be fine.’  ”

  23

  WINDING DOWN THE WAR

  It was clear the Obama administration had two objectives in Iraq: first, demonstrate to the American public that it had taken over from the previous administration without squandering any of the fragile gains of recent years; and, two, wind down the war and bring our troops home. These were spelled out in detail when President Obama delivered his February 29, 2009, speech to a war-weary military audience of marines at Camp Lejeune, a speech I watched with great interest in my office in the East Asian and Pacific Affairs Bureau as I prepared for the assignment. Achieving these goals was not going to be easy. Proponents of the first saw it in conflict with the second. Senator McCain, who initially expressed cautious optimism about the speech, had run his presidential campaign largely on the basis of support for President Bush’s “doubling down” on the Iraq War, the decision to increase the number of U.S. troops by thirty thousand in what became known as the “surge.”

  Candidate Obama had never acknowledged the surge as a driver of supposed success in Iraq, a description that would have given credit to another chapter of his opponent’s narrative as the courageous but sometimes lonely figure willing to do the right thing for the country even if it did not pay him political dividends. Throughout the campaign McCain helped to transform the surge into something much broader than the technical issue of adjusting troop-to-task ratios in Iraq. It became in his mind a proxy for leadership and courage. He had no intention of allowing Obama a free ride on his leadership express.

  To those who supported the idea of sending more troops to Iraq when everybody else was advocating pulling out, the surge was a signature moment, a kind of validation of one’s own courage and boldness. While many were calling for troop withdrawals, supporters of the surge instead called for more troops. Like Horatio at the bridge, or John Paul Jones’s “I have not yet begun to fight,” it was a moment when the protagonist fought on rather than retreat, with a moral foundation that would instill confidence in the inevitable triumph.

  Because it was widely viewed as a success, the surge had many fathers eager to see their names in the history books of this lost cause now turned into supposed triumph. Ray Odierno, who always gave credit for the surge where it belonged, with President Bush, told me a story at the end of a long and difficult day in Baghdad. Petraeus and he had been briefing a congressional staff delegation when Ray explained to the staff members that he had ordered additional troops for the Kirkuk area, in effect additional troops who would in the counterinsurgency (COIN) jargon have a mission to seize, hold (that is, protect the local population), build (that is, give the population jobs and opportunities), and transfer (to Iraqis, the exit strategy). Ray’s order had come at a time when Petraeus was still in Fort Leavenworth supposedly etching the tablets of the army’s new COIN doctrine and surge strategy. After the congressional staffers had left, Petraeus, according to Odierno, asked him to remain for a minute. Petraeus then sternly told Odierno, “Ray, don’t ever make that mistake again. The surge was my idea!”

  So it may have been, but what it wasn’t was a cure-all, nor was ordering more U.S. troops the only reason, not even the primary reason why violence had started to subside. Sunni sheiks in Anbar province, increasingly disgusted by the bloody tactics employed by Islamist insurgents, began to turn their militias against them. Meanwhile, U.S. marines in Anbar and U.S. soldiers elsewhere, often young lieutenants and squad leaders at a tactical level, began to do what marines and soldiers have done for centuries: they adapted to the battlefield. In the Iraq case, it meant embracing a complex set of skills based on developing relationships and incentives for local leaders to turn against extremists. They worked one sheik at a time, convincing them, sometimes with argumentation, sometimes with money, to consider their futures. One army lieutenant from upstate New York told me of having built a fence to help keep the sheik’s cattle accounted for, provided, of course, the sheik improved security. The lieutenant described to me another incident in which he had worked with the trainer of a military explosive detection dog so that in front of a line of suspected insurgents the dog barked specifically at those whom the lieutenant suspected ahead of time of lying; it was a “lie detector dog,” as he told the frightened suspects. “You learn any of that in a COIN manual?” I asked him. “You kidding?” he laughed. Stephen Ambrose once wrote a book about citizen soldiers who improvised their way from Normandy to the liberation of Germany. When the history of the Iraq War is finally told, it will be about a similar journey undertaken by brave and resourceful young Americans, ably led by their generals to be sure, but also by their own battlefield resourcefulness.

  As for the generals, I never subscribed to the view of some correspondents that our military’s leadership was incompetent. Many of these writers, however fascinated by the military, based their strong opinions on unnamed sources who often had axes to grind and email addresses to provide. Iraq was a tough mission and lessons often had to be learned on the fly. No one had to learn these lessons faster and harder than General Ricardo Sanchez, a newly appointed commanding general who was the first in and who confronted an Iraq that was completely different from the one he and his troops had trained and prepared for.

  The generals I knew while I served in Iraq—Odierno, Huntzinger, Jacoby, Anderson, Perkins, Helmick, Petraeus: the list is long—were all men whose dedication to their duty I had the highest respect for.

  Among the very best was General George Casey, who replaced Sanchez and was to serve the longest as the commanding general, from June 2004 until February 2007. We had first met during the Kosovo crisis and I had watched with great satisfaction his meteoric rise in the ranks to four-star general. Casey, who never failed to give credit to others, was the leader who developed much of the COIN tactics for the war. He created a COIN academy in Baghdad for all incoming commanders, in essence a retraining school. When Casey and the army leadership agreed on General Petraeus as the next commanding general, Casey urged that Petraeus be sent to Fort Leavenworth and along with teachers from the academy rewrite the army’s doctrine on counterinsurgency.

  Petraeus, whom I first met when he was a colonel accompanying the chairman of the Joint Chiefs Hugh Shelton on trips to the Balkans during the Kosovo war, was well prepared to be Casey’s replacement and to implement his tactics, operations, and strategy. He had served as a divisional commander of the 101st Airborne, which had fought its way along with the rest of the invasion force up through Iraq and who moved in and occupied Mosul after army special forces with Kurdish guerrillas had liberated it. Later, he took command of the training mission in Iraq, a cou
rageous but thankless assignment that was absolutely essential to readying the Iraqi army to take over for U.S. forces. Petraeus approached that difficult job with the same level of thoroughness, dedication, and enthusiasm he put to use in all his assignments. His production of weekly statistics demonstrating progress in the training of Iraqis was essential to planning for the U.S. drawdown.

  Seldom did Secretary Rumsfeld hold a press conference in Washington without referring to the progress Petraeus was making to ready the new Iraqi forces. Unfortunately, sometimes the metric of trained Iraqis played the same kind of role that “body count” did during the Vietnam War: numbers that were somewhat misleading and had little to do with the reality of who was winning the war. The number of training certificates issued does not determine the readiness of an army to fight, and certainly Petraeus—and probably even Rumsfeld—knew that.

  Not everything that happened in Iraq had to do with what the Americans were up to. On the Shia side of Iraqi’s sectarian divide, Prime Minister Maliki employed another approach from those advocating a protect-the-civilians COIN strategy. Against the advice of the U.S. military, he sent his army to crush Shia militia groups in Basra, the southernmost city in Iraq, and which like Mosul in the north had never been cleaned out of its militias. Maliki’s troops soon got in trouble, and as the U.S. military could not resist backgrounding the press, ultimately required augmentation in prevailing over the militias in Basra. His decision to use force against fellow Shia cemented his reputation as a tough leader, but it also created huge political problems for him during the government formation period in 2010, especially with the Sadrists, who had numerous links to the militia groups. But most importantly for the future of his country, Maliki’s message that the militias must disarm had been sent and received.