Nor could the Shia, who believed that sooner or later the Sunnis would expect to return to power. With Americans drawing down in 2010, and the election process gearing up, the Sunnis expected that moment to come very soon.
But as essential as the Sunni-Shia fault line was to understanding Iraq’s politics, many Iraqis themselves, especially educated classes, preferred to downplay its significance in conversations with foreigners, as if sectarianism were a family secret that to acknowledge would be to suggest that the country’s politics were divided along embarrassingly primitive lines. Thus, the leadership of the Iraq National Party, “Iraqiyya,” never spoke about its Sunni origins. Nor did the leadership of “State of Law,” Maliki’s election coalition, admit to foreigners that it was a Shia party. Each accused the other of sectarianism.
At 7 A.M. on May 25, 2009, most of the embassy employees and I stood outside the chancery while a bugler played a moving, even haunting version of taps. I gave a short speech on the meaning of Memorial Day, explaining why those who lost their lives in Iraq did not do so in vain, but rather to ensure a new beginning in Iraq and to do their duty to our country. We must, I paraphrased from the Gettysburg Address, take renewed devotion from their sacrifice and complete the unfinished business.
A few yards away, a convoy of Chevy Suburbans stood ready for the end of the ceremony and a trip to Anbar Province to inspect a water treatment facility under construction near Fallujah. Standing outside his vehicle ready to jump in was Terry Barnich, a three-year Embassy Baghdad veteran, the deputy director of U.S. reconstruction projects. Just a couple of weeks before, Terry and I had been throwing a lacrosse ball around, and Terry, the ultimate team player, had then ordered a dozen lacrosse sticks to help form a small club. “We need some exercise around here,” Terry explained.
That Memorial Day, at around 3:30 P.M. near Fallujah, Terry together with Navy Commander Duane Wolfe and a civilian contractor, Dr. Maged Hussin, were killed when their Chevy Suburban triggered an improvised explosive device (IED). Their remains were brought back to the embassy that night. Terry’s lacrosse sticks arrived in the mail the next day, now part of his estate. The deaths of our colleagues affected the entire embassy. Barnich was very popular, his water projects so obviously helpful to the Iraqis, and yet he died in a senseless attack. I thought about what Katharina Frasure had said to me on going out to the Balkans soon after Bob’s death, “How can you do this to your family?”
Soon after I arrived in Iraq, I was asked to produce a weekly memo for the president to update him on what was going on in Iraq. This request turned into a monthlong tug of war between the NSC staff and the State Department, because if I was to write a regular memo, surely it should be addressed to the secretary first. Finally, in a decision worthy of King Solomon, it was decided that the memo would go to both the president and the secretary, but it would first make its way to the State Department, addressed “Madam Secretary,” so that the secretary could read and reflect on it, then forward it on to the president with her own cover note.
On May 27, 2009, I began the series of memos that gave further details about the loss of our three colleagues two days before, discussed the Iraqi efforts to invite international oil companies for tenders and addressed some of the Iraqi challenges in normalizing relations with neighboring Kuwait (Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait almost twenty years before, and yet sanctions on contemporary Iraq were still in place). I also weighed in on discussions with the interagency committee on what kind of Iraq election law we should support (whether closed-list candidates or open list, though I thought this was a subject more appropriately discussed in Iraq by Iraqis, rather than among well-meaning micro-managers in Washington), explained the state-of-play on developing a mechanism for dealing with the Kurdish-Arab internal boundary disputes, and concluded with some thoughts about the upcoming visit to Washington of Prime Minister Maliki.
The State Department had put up a ferocious fight to make sure these memos did not go directly to the White House, but in fifteen months of writing them, I never received a single comment from anyone in the State Department. President Obama was the only person I ever heard from on the weekly memo. During a briefing Odierno and I gave to him in the Oval Office, he noticed the content of the briefing overlapped with that week’s memo. “You covered that in last week’s memo,” he said. I was impressed by the fact that at least someone reads back there.
It was increasingly clear that Iraq remained the military’s problem, not the State Department’s. It is not to say that Iraq was not on people’s minds in Washington. But it was increasingly a legacy issue, a matter of keeping faith with our troops rather than seeing Iraq as a strategic issue in the region.
Shia-led Iraq did not fit into any broader theme that the administration was trying to accomplish in the Middle East. The launching of former Senate majority leader George Mitchell’s mission as the Middle East envoy had been grounded almost immediately by the decision to press the Israelis for a settlement freeze as a precondition to the resumption of talks. In June 2009, Mitchell’s team began to consider options for how to approach President Bashar al Assad in Damascus to explore whether there might be flexibility on the issue of the Golan Heights. CENTCOM commander Petraeus had taken the view that the Syrians had in fact been helpful on the increasingly peaceful border with Iraq, and that this level of cooperation should be rewarded with a senior U.S. trip to Damascus and discussions with Assad about broader issues. A senior-level trip to Damascus on Middle East peace would be controversial enough, so a cover story was concocted in which the discussion would involve border stability with Iraq. The department asked me to inform Maliki of our intentions to talk with Assad, and to reassure him that the discussions were very preliminary, and that if they went anywhere they would surely not involve any requests made of the Iraqis.
I had already met with Maliki on several occasions in my first few weeks at post. He was intelligent and thoughtful, tending to get down to business faster than the average Iraqi politician. He had a dry sense of humor, and some irony that also eluded many of his contemporaries, not to speak of Washington visitors often frustrated at the lack of any English language capacity. Apart from saying “very good” excessively to visitors, Maliki appeared to offer very little. Extremely thin-skinned, he devoted much of his interpersonal skills to detecting any slights, real or imagined. Fortunately, this extreme sensitivity did not appear to extend to the casual clothing sometimes chosen by Washington visitors to the war zone. Maliki wore dark suits and dark neckties seemingly every day of the year.
He listened to the reassurances I offered on Syria, and thanked me for the heads-up. Then, at first politely, and later not so, he got to the point, “You Americans have no idea what you are dealing with in that regime,” he said. “Everything for those people is a negotiation, like buying fruit in a market.” He gestured at the luncheon table. “If you even mention us [Iraq], Assad will see it as something you are concerned about losing and will make you pay in the negotiation for it. Please do not even say the word Iraq to him. Just keep it on your Middle East negotiations. That is your business, not mine.” Okay, I thought. That became a typical meeting with Maliki. Not a lot of fun, but at least I know where he stood.
So much, I thought, for the idea that Maliki had some kind of special relations with the Assad regime. I sent the telegram in to the department. Within a few days I learned from the embassy’s political-military counselor, Michael Corbin, who was soon to become the Iran-Iraq deputy assistant secretary and briefly visiting Washington in preparation for that assignment, that the proverbial road to Damascus had been closed for permanent repair. Not that I had thought it a particularly good idea to go there in the first place, but I asked Michael why the idea had been shelved, and whether Maliki’s skepticism had played any role. “No idea,” he told me, reflecting the chaotic information flow in Washington. “But I’m sure it had nothing to do with what anyone in Iraq said about it.”
As the Obama administ
ration spent its first six months sorting out who was going to do what, it was increasingly unclear in fact just who was doing what. An embassy, especially a large player like Embassy Baghdad, needs someone in D.C. to watch its back. I had had high hopes that Undersecretary Bill Burns would play that role, but he seemed to have been asked to do everything not Iraq, including taking on the task of ensuring that Iran policy would not be taken over by the White House with the creation of a special envoy position. Although special envoy Dennis Ross, a former Middle East envoy and an internationally respected expert on the region, was to sit at the department, the ease with which he enjoyed relationships in the White House (indeed, all across Washington) made it understandable why the secretary had wanted a crafty operator like Bill to shadow that issue.
The decision to pull Bill away from Iraq meant that our backstop would be Deputy Secretary James Steinberg. Although a political appointee, Jim had had vast experience in the State Department and the White House during the Clinton administration and could be counted on as a steady presence in the interagency process, often a microwave cookbook of bad, half-baked ideas (such as micro-managing what kind of candidate lists to have in the Iraqi election law). Jim had an appetite for facts and figures, and a talent for taking any idea, good or bad, and analyzing the perils of it in such a way that soon everyone would want to wheel it back into the garage for further work. Jim saved people from themselves on a daily basis.
But within months, there were rumors that Jim was unhappy with his role at State. Jim was above all a foreign policy realist, especially on China, where he had delivered a thoughtful speech on the need to overcome “strategic mistrust” (during the first term of the Obama administration the word strategic was often married with another word, for example patience, to convey thoughtfulness in foreign policy), but his reflections on China were not necessarily what the administration was looking for at the time. He seemed increasingly unhappy with the more strident tone the Obama administration was taking on China and other issues. I knew he could not be counted on for long to carry water for us back in Washington.
The Near Eastern Bureau leadership was often criticized for being inadequately seized with Israel’s agenda. Many of NEA’s leaders had already done their Iraq time and had no intention of doing any more if they could avoid it. Iraq, so the thinking went, was someone else’s problem—especially the military’s, and rarely did Shia-led Iraq help on any regional issues that NEA was concerned about. Assistant Secretary Jeff Feltman, a veteran Arabist who had had a career in the region in small but important posts, culminating as ambassador in war-torn Lebanon, seemed particularly distressed by Iraq, insofar as it caused him problems with the rest of the region and with the Pentagon suspicions that the State Department lacked commitment. Iraq got the bureaucratic reputation as a loser, something to stay away from. No question, Shia-led Iraq was the black sheep of the region, with no natural allies anywhere.
• • •
Meanwhile, NEA was far more concerned that George Mitchell’s Middle East peace efforts be integrated with its own. The bureau was always focused on the elusive peace in the Middle East, but it also was the traditional sounding board for ambassadors from the Gulf Arab states and peninsular Arab states to come into the State Department and complain about their neighbors—in this case about Shia Iraq. The Saudis were the most vociferous of these—repeatedly accusing Maliki of “lying to the king,” without offering any details of what the alleged prevarication was. In turn, I would receive messages from the department to go in and tell Maliki he had a problem with the Saudis and needed to solve it. I never got very far with him.
In June 2009, President Obama announced that Vice President Biden would take on special responsibilities for Iraq. I welcomed the vice president’s involvement, especially since no one else seemed to have our back in Washington. There was the usual Washington silliness that followed the announcement. First, that the president was fobbing the issue off (in fact, the vice president is a pretty senior person). Then, that Secretary Clinton wasn’t interested (her plate was rather full trying to deal with the rest of the world). After that passed, Biden jumped in, and soon I would receive telephone calls that often started with “Hey Chris, this is Joe.” The vice president (I never called him Joe, nor did anyone else that I could see) visited Iraq on the Fourth of July, and his interest never wavered. He brought with him a talented staff, including Tony Blinken and Herro Mustafa.
On June 30, 2009, Prime Minister Maliki gave a speech to announce a major development in the U.S.-Iraqi Security Agreement. The occasion was the anniversary of the 2003 assassination of the Iraqi Shia leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. After a few words in memory of the fallen ayatollah, Maliki shifted gears to describe the moment that U.S. forces would withdraw from populated areas as a great victory for the Iraqi people, which did not sit well with those who had backed the war effort. After all, Maliki was suggesting that what had happened was the U.S. forces had in effect been ordered to retreat. But as he talked more about the sacrifice that must attend such a great victory, I began to understand better what he was saying. In essence, Maliki was acknowledging that the Iraqi forces that would soon take over checkpoints and mobile patrols would have their problems doing so. He was bracing people for more casualties to follow.
I understood what he was saying, but it sure didn’t win him any friends in Washington. Ray Odierno spoke with him soon thereafter to tell him he needed to make a gesture, suggesting that during his upcoming visit to Washington he visit Arlington National Cemetery and lay a wreath. He did so, but it was too little, too late. Maliki’s reputation never recovered in Washington, and complaints about him, whether in matters of human rights or relations with Sunni neighbors, or his attitudes toward Americans, or political alliances within Iraq, all seemed to reinforce each other with the conclusion that Iraq would be better off with a new prime minister, perhaps one who did not seem systematically to upset every conceivable constituent group. Nonetheless, Maliki was a formidable player who could outwork and often outthink his rivals. For years, U.S. officials had looked for a strong Iraqi leader, and having found one they objected to the fact that he didn’t do what he was told. As Bob Frasure had once said about a certain Balkan leader, “We wanted a junkyard dog like this for a long time. Why would people expect him to start sitting in our lap?”
The Washington-based concerns about Maliki, reinforced by the complaints from other Arab countries, gave rise to the view that somehow we needed to replace him, as if this were our responsibility let alone within our capability. Foreign ambassadors in Baghdad, having heard the discontent reported by their colleagues in Washington, came to my embassy to ask me, “So, how are you going to get rid of him?” as if I had instructions to do so. My sense was that these foreign ambassadors were hearing typical Washington grousing and were then pole-vaulting to the conclusion that we were hatching a plan. Obviously that was not the case, but I could tell that the talk was reaching the ever paranoid Maliki and not helping our relationship with him. I could see that a similar process was unwinding in Afghanistan. Even if the United States were a latter-day Roman Empire as some neo-con pundits seemed to want, we still have to work with local leaders like Maliki and Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai. Our ability to cooperate with them is not facilitated by reports that we are trying to get rid of them.
But even if we wanted to topple Maliki, you can’t beat something with nothing, and the Iraqi political landscape was not exactly blooming with new political prospects. As sparse as that landscape looked to me, I never lacked for advice coming from Washington, where some seemed to think that choosing Iraqi leaders was akin to forming a fantasy football team. People who had served in Iraq, and for whom time froze when they left, increasingly manned Iraq policy. Thus I was treated to suggestions, often in the form of admonishments, as to why I hadn’t recently visited such-and-such a politician, who, I was to glean, had been some kind of hot prospect back in 2004 and 2005.
Th
e months wore on, through the hot summer and then the fall of 2009, punctuated by an enormous truck bomb that had devastated the Foreign Ministry building and killed several hundred people. I was visiting Kirkuk that day, but people in the embassy, miles from the ministry, reported they could feel the blast in their offices.
I visited the victims who had been taken to the U.S. hospital for emergency help in attempting to remove shards of glass that were dangerously lodged near vital organs and in their eyes. Victims lay on hospital cots, bloody gauze everywhere. Some moaned, but most stayed quiet in their misery as family members gathered around each bed. Whether it was because they were dazed or whether because they were Iraqis, nobody complained. Later in the day I went to the Foreign Ministry, where I saw the extent of the damage, the façade ripped off to reveal what had been normally functioning offices just seconds before. There was an enormous crater where the tractor-trailer truck had been parked in front of the building on the near lane of a four-lane road. Nearby automobiles, including a lime-green taxi, had been hurled into the air and had somehow landed on the other side of the road; bloodstains were easily visible on the doors and windows of the taxi.
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