Battlegrounds

by H. R. McMaster

  Religion served as justification for atrocities on both sides of the Iran-Iraq War. On the Iranian side, Ayatollah Khomeini sent unarmed teenagers into certain death, with instructions to pick up the rifle of the boy who fell in front of them. These young men wore red headbands printed with the words Sar Allah (Warriors of God). The Ayatollah gave them small metal keys that he promised would gain them admission to Paradise when they were martyred. Many were bound by ropes to prevent their desertion. On the Iraqi side, Saddam Hussein portrayed himself as the defender not only of Iraq, but also of the entire Arab world against Iran’s Shia Islamist revival and designs for expansion. His forces used chemical weapons and waged war directly on Iranian civilians. In January 1987 alone, his forces launched more than two hundred missile strikes on Iranian cities, killing nearly two thousand and wounding more than six thousand innocents. More than sixty thousand Iranian civilians died in the war.16

  Abadi was lucky. He missed the maelstrom. He ran a small design and technology firm in London and continued to host Iraqi exiles in a popular café. When he became more vocal in calling for the liberation of Iraq, the Baath Party rescinded his passport.17 Meanwhile, in Iraq, Abadi’s family was under duress. Two of his five brothers had been imprisoned under Saddam, and their fate was still unknown.

  Outside Iran, the Islamists did not get very far. Nationalist dictators in Syria and Iraq brutally repressed opposition. In Syria, Assad’s army put down a 1982 Muslim Brotherhood Islamist uprising in Hama, a city of around two hundred thousand, with a siege, bombings, and a tank assault. Between seven thousand and thirty thousand people died in the span of twenty days.18 Those not killed were imprisoned under horrible conditions; many were never seen again. The blood spilled made Syria fertile ground for growing future generations of Islamist terrorists. Hama was a harbinger of the brutality to come to Syria under Assad’s son, Bashar, an ophthalmologist turned dictator who would surpass his father’s grim record of murder, imprisonment, and torture.

  The legacy of the Iran-Iraq War and earlier Syrian uprisings are apparent in the sectarian civil wars that engulfed the Middle East in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Iran cultivated relationships with Shia opposition groups and militias that became part of Iraq’s political and military landscape. During the Iran-Iraq War, Ibrahim al-Jaafari and many of Haider al-Abadi’s Shia contemporaries fled to shelter in Iran. Iran exacted a price, recruiting young Iraqi men into anti-Saddam groups, such as the Badr Organization. Iran used Badr and other organizations for assassinations and guerrilla attacks in a low-level war that went on for fifteen years after the end of the conventional conflict in 1988. The terrible costs of the war and the historical animosities it resurrected divided Sunni and Shia Muslims. The sectarian divide fueled violence and complicated efforts to develop coherent national identities and legitimate governance across the Middle East. And it intensified the political and religious power struggle between Shia-majority Iran and Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia while setting conditions for a sectarian civil war in post-Saddam Iraq. As Islamism rose from the ashes of Arab and secular nationalism, it brought discord rather than unity, pursuit of particular rather than general interests, and a preference for violence rather than representative political processes to settle differences or compete for power.

  Some, like Abadi and Jibouri, would emerge from that era as conciliators who sought to bridge the sectarian divide. Others, like Jaafari, would deepen and widen that divide and, along with Sunni jihadist terrorist organizations like AQI, accelerate the destructive cycle of violence.

  * * *

  RAYBURN AND I arrived at the hotel and ascended the last two flights of stairs past several armed U.S. Secret Service agents to Prime Minister Abadi’s floor. He welcomed us into his suite, and we began a relaxed conversation. I reminisced about meeting him on my first day in Baghdad in May 2003. I had left a fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University to serve on Gen. John Abizaid’s staff at U.S. Central Command’s forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar. As I flew with Abizaid from Doha to Baghdad, I met an Iraqi American who would become one of Abadi’s assistants in the new Iraqi government. We talked about how, after the successful Coalition offensive that removed Saddam from power, the most difficult tasks lay ahead. Later, at the gaudy Republican Palace that Coalition forces occupied, I had helped Abadi receive his badge in time to attend a security committee meeting.

  Now, in his Washington hotel suite, I began by telling him how much I appreciated his leadership under the most difficult circumstances. In 2014, it was under duress that the previous Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al Maliki, abandoned a postelection effort to remain prime minister and ceded leadership to Abadi. I asked him about our friend General Jibouri. When he assumed the prime ministership, Abadi had asked Jibouri who was then living and working in Northern Virginia and was on a path to U.S. citizenship, to return to fight the terrorists who had taken Fallujah and Mosul and were threatening the capital city. Abadi told me that Jibouri, as we had done in Tal Afar over a decade earlier, was helping to reconcile communities that had been torn apart. Abadi related the sad story that, when ISIS terrorists learned that Jibouri had returned to northern Iraq, they rounded up members of his extended family and his tribe, tortured them, and murdered them. Just a few months earlier, ISIS put six of Jibouri’s family members in a metal cage, chained them to its bottom bars, and submerged them in a pool until they drowned.

  Our conversation then turned to the regional dynamics that were perpetuating conflict. Having witnessed the failures of Arab nationalism and Islamism, Abadi believed that only representative governments that were regarded as legitimate by the population could allow the people to escape the suffering associated with the cycle of violence. The sectarian civil war would not end unless there was accommodation among religious, ethnic, and tribal communities, yet outsiders were continuing to pour fuel on the flames of communal conflict. Away from the rest of Abadi’s party, Abadi and I discussed Iranian infiltration of the Iraqi government and especially of the formidable militias, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), or Al-Hashd al-Shaabi, formed by and under the control of Iranian agents. The Iranians had pressured Abadi to appoint a titular commander of the PMF, and Muhandis as the more powerful deputy commander. Muhandis was also commander of the Iranian-supported anti-American terrorist organization Kata’ib Hezbollah. Members of the PMF have additionally attacked local diplomatic and energy targets, carried out drone attacks in Saudi Arabia, and provoked Israeli air strikes through efforts to assist Iranian missile proliferation.19 Abadi knew that it would be very difficult for the United States to have a positive long-term relationship with Iraq under the conditions of Iranian state capture. It was clear to me that the United States and our partners in the region had to do more to strengthen Iraq’s sovereignty and counter the Iranian efforts.

  Abadi described how the Syrian Civil War was the epicenter of the sectarian violence afflicting the region. He highlighted the Assad regime’s long history of sponsoring Sunni and Shia terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Kurdish terrorist organization the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Assad regime created a pipeline of foreign fighters to AQI to fight U.S. forces. I added that in Syria, Assad acted as an agent of Iran, stoking the flames of a broader civil war in the region designed to keep Iraq and the Arab world weak and divided.20

  Abadi discussed how Assad, with the help of Iran and Russia, used radical Salafi jihadists to portray all opposition groups as terrorists aiming to create an Islamic caliphate in Syria. Assad released thousands of hard-line Islamists from Syria’s jails in early 2011 who would later become major leaders in AQI and ISIS. I responded that, tragically, Assad’s strategy seemed to have worked. As my friend the late Professor Fouad Ajami had observed as the war intensified, Assad was able to convince the Obama administration that his, Assad’s, tyranny was preferable to the opposition.21
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br />   We discussed the unresolved legacy of the so-called Arab Spring and how the Syrian insurgency began in March 2011, after antigovernment protests spread from Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya into Syria. The Assad regime’s arrest and brutalization of teenage demonstrators sparked riots across the country nine days later, the most violent of which occurred in Homs. And thus began an escalating cycle of growing opposition and brutal repression.22

  We discussed how what we did together in Tal Afar, Iraq, was relevant to the problem set across the greater Middle East. While the United States was not going to deploy armored cavalry regiments across Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, Abadi stressed how the overall strategy must aim to help break the cycle of violence through diplomacy as well as military and intelligence support for local partners.

  Jibouri and Abadi were threats both to Al-Qaeda and Iran because they were effective mediators, true humanists whose empathy allowed them to broker accommodation among parties in conflict. But the two men could go only so far without jeopardizing their lives and the lives of their families. The United States uses diplomacy and economic incentives to exert influence; Iran uses these tools as well as assassination.

  * * *

  UPON HIS arrival in Baghdad in April 2003, Abadi and his mother went immediately to the prison, where they hoped to find his long-lost brothers. After racing past the prisoners pouring out of the gates, he rifled through abandoned file cabinets in the office. There he found a document revealing that his brothers had been executed soon after their arrest three decades earlier. Across those decades, Abadi’s mother had borne witness to three wars. The first, Iraq’s war with Iran, killed an estimated six hundred thousand Iraqis.23 Saddam killed over a quarter of a million more of his own people, including Abadi’s brothers, in a country of twenty-two million. The second war began in 1990, instigated by Saddam’s belief that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states owed him a debt of gratitude—and cash to pay off his war debt. It was anger over their ungratefulness that led to the Iraqi invasion and annexation of Kuwait in August of that year. After the George H. W. Bush administration gathered a coalition of thirty-five nations and marshaled a force of 750,000 in Saudi Arabia, a thirty-seven-day-long bombing campaign and a one-hundred-hour ground war defeated Saddam’s army and evicted it from Kuwait in February 1991. The third war, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, ended Saddam’s brutal rule, but would not bring peace to Iraq’s traumatized society.

  Abadi and I disagreed about what should have happened after the 1991 Gulf War. Abadi welcomed the liberation of Kuwait, but he wanted the United States to unseat Saddam so that he and fellow Iraqis could replace the brutal dictatorship with the virtuous Islamist government they envisioned. The vast majority of the 1.5 million Iraqi exiles at the time of the Gulf War, 500,000 of whom were in Iran, viewed the Gulf War as an opportunity for revenge against a weakened Saddam and his Baath Party. Ideological divisions, however, weakened the exile opposition and the opposition inside Iraq. I witnessed those divisions firsthand in the wake of the Gulf War, and would confront them again during my service in Iraq across five years from 2003 to 2008.

  Unlike Abadi, I did not believe that the United States should have unseated Saddam in 1991. After our cavalry troop’s experience in An Nasiriyah at the end of the Gulf War, I wrote an editorial arguing that “although any alternative to Hussein would be an improvement, replacing him ourselves would have been problematic.” I cited the divisions among Iraq’s competing ethnic, sectarian, and tribal groups. In a post-Saddam Iraq, “justice and a responsible national leadership would remain elusive if not unobtainable,” and “we would assume at least partial responsibility for establishing a new government under these conditions.” In so doing, we would certainly encounter armed opposition, and “a new government would have to face the constant attack” from die-hard Baathists and Islamists who would attempt to cast our motives as “‘Zionist’ and ‘neo-imperialist.’” I concluded that removing Saddam would result in “a post-Hussein commitment of tremendous proportion for a project of indeterminable time” with “no guarantee of success.”24

  In the wake of Operation Desert Storm, President George H. W. Bush encouraged a Shia uprising to topple Saddam, but then withdrew U.S. forces out of southern Iraq. Saddam’s Mukhabarat and Special Republican Guard swiftly inflicted large numbers of casualties on the Shia and weakened the opposition. Abadi called the 1991 experience in southern Iraq a “Bay of Pigs Moment,” referring to the failed CIA-supported invasion of Cuba thirty years earlier. Moreover, the subsequent sanctions placed on Iraq actually strengthened the Baath as they took control of smuggling networks to circumvent those sanctions. Sanctions made more Iraqis dependent on Saddam’s patronage as the Baath reduced social services to communities deemed disloyal. Caught in the midst of a rebellion and the brutal repression of it, Abadi’s father fled in 1994 to the United Kingdom, where he died of heart failure less than two years later. Abadi’s mother, originally from Lebanon, remained in Baghdad. She would live to see what must have been unimaginable after watching Saddam’s thugs drag three of her sons to prison in the 1980s: another one of her sons, Haider, sworn in as prime minister of Iraq in 2014. When I first met Abadi in Baghdad, neither one of us expected that we would work together in Iraq over the next several years in the midst of an insurgency and civil war, let alone meet again in the White House nearly fourteen years later.

  Abadi shared my surprise over the lack of preparation for the ambitious endeavor to remake Iraq. In the years following the 2003 invasion, as the cost and difficulty of stabilizing Iraq became apparent, Americans would debate endlessly whether the United States and United Kingdom’s invasion was misguided. Much of that debate centered on whether Saddam actually possessed weapons of mass destruction, the primary casus belli that the United States presented to the United Nations. But as the war morphed into an insurgency, a civil war, and a sustained counterterrorism campaign, I thought that a more useful question to debate might be, who thought “regime change” in Iraq would be easy, and why did they think so?

  * * *

  ON THE day I first met Abadi, I was serving as General Abizaid’s executive officer. When Abizaid assumed command of Central Command (CENTCOM) two months later, I would become the director of the Commander’s Advisory Group, a small team charged with helping the commander understand better the complex challenges in the Middle East and how U.S. military forces in the region could best contribute to U.S. policy goals.

  I carried with me a dozen copies of a study that Col. Conrad Crane and Professor Andy Terrill had recently completed at the U.S. Army War College. The report warned that “the primary problem at the core of American deficiencies in post-conflict . . . is a national aversion to nation-building, which was strengthened by failure in Vietnam.”25 The study listed tasks that, after the invasion of Iraq, the military would have to perform initially and then hand over to civilian authorities or to a new Iraqi government and security forces. It was clear from the moment I arrived in Baghdad that the U. S. military and the hastily assembled civilian Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) were woefully unprepared for these tasks. Failure to consider what was required to turn military gains into ambitious political objectives led to many of the difficulties encountered after the invasion of both Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.26 A post-Vietnam emotional aversion to long-term military commitments combined with faith in America’s technological military prowess had overwhelmed historical experience, suggesting that the consolidation of military gains was an optional, not an essential, part of war. But those lessons of history that I carried with me lay inert in that unread study as those unprepared for the stabilization of Iraq reacted reluctantly, slowly, and often too late to circumstances much different from those they imagined in that complex, traumatized country.

  Some seemed unaware of how ambitious their goals were: Operation Iraqi Freedom was to free the Iraqi people of a brutal regime, ensure that a hostile dictator did not possess weapons
of mass destruction, and create a democratic government in the Middle East that would serve as an antidote to extremism. Leaders optimistically pursued those objectives despite the lack of broad international support for preventive military action. Warnings that a state-building effort in Iraq would be difficult, costly, and long-term were ignored. Optimists listened to the wrong people—many of whom were Iraqi expatriates with agendas of their own.

  * * *

  AS IN Afghanistan, the neglect of the very nature of war made an already challenging mission more difficult. Strategic narcissism is what conjured up the pipe dream of an easy win in Iraq. It did not imagine war as an extension of politics and a profoundly human endeavor in which the future course of events is uncertain. Although the Coalition and the Interim Governing Council adopted a United Nations–sponsored time line for the political transition of Iraq, the politics of the ballot were unfamiliar to those who had only experienced the politics of the gun. The Coalition vanquished Saddam’s government, but a clandestine Baathist network and a well-funded external Baathist organization survived the invasion. What began as decentralized, hybrid, localized resistance against occupation coalesced over time into a highly organized insurgency. Disparate Sunni insurgent groups drew on the intelligence infrastructure that Saddam had designed to subjugate his own people. Agents of the former regime benefited from external support from Gulf states as well as relationships with Islamist groups. Foreign fighters and suicide bombers flowed across Iraq’s unguarded borders.27 The U.S. mission was far from accomplished.

  U.S. leaders did not consider the degree to which Iraq’s people were traumatized or Iraq’s social fabric torn by the brutality of the Saddam regime and costly wars. The country’s youth were vulnerable to recruitment into terrorist organizations due to poor education and Saddam’s “Return to the Faith” initiative, designed to direct public anger toward Israel, the United States, and a grand “Zionist-Crusader Conspiracy” to keep Iraq, the Arab world, and Islam down. The middle class had eroded under the pressure of UN sanctions as the regime used corruption and patronage to stay in power. In the wake of the Coalition invasion, the institutions of Saddam’s government fell apart. As looters tore down the remnants of the Iraqi state, criminals and a developing insurgency moved into the vacuum. Removing Saddam without a plan to secure the country unleashed the centripetal forces of sectarian violence that grew out of the failure of Arab nationalism, the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, and the brutality of Baath Party dictatorships.