by Vali Nasr
On the campaign trail, Obama had said that Iraq was a misguided enterprise, a needless and costly war of choice that had tarnished America’s image. So it was not a surprise that the White House celebrated when the last convoy of American soldiers left Iraq for Kuwait on December 18, 2011. It was the fulfillment of a campaign promise, or, as Vice President Biden called it, “one of the great achievements of this administration.” (He went on to promise “a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”)1 Less was more, in the administration’s thinking. The withdrawal would make achieving our goals there more likely.
When Bush left office, Iraq did look as if it was on the rebound. General David Petraeus’s COIN strategy and the surge of troops in 2007 had turned the fiasco of the war into something of a success story. When Obama came in, Iraq was enjoying relative calm. The insurgency had ended, al-Qaeda in Iraq was a thing of the past, and the fragile peace between Shias and Sunnis was holding.
But storm clouds loomed. Iraq’s government was hopelessly corrupt and ineffective. We were in part responsible for that failure by first hastily dismantling the Iraqi state and then giving Iraq a constitution that confirmed sectarian divisions while requiring an overwhelming majority before a government could form—which could be achieved by promising control of large areas of government to prospective allies to milk as they saw fit. Even then, it took Iraqi politicians six months of squabbling after the March 2010 elections to form a government. At best, in 2009 when the Obama administration took office, Iraq was going sideways, unity and peace beyond its reach.
The problem, many think, is Maliki. Since taking office in 2006 he has proven, at various times and in various ways, both ineffectual and dictatorial. He hails from the smallest of the three major Shia political parties, al-Da’awa, and has had to rely on the support of a constellation of Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish political blocs to govern.
His on-and-off relations with the firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr worry many, but by and large U.S. authorities have found ways to work with him. Once or twice he has even managed to pleasantly surprise America with bold action. No one found fault with Maliki’s leadership when he saddled up in the spring of 2008 to lead the nascent Iraqi army into Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood and then the southern city of Basra in order to flush out and defeat the so-called Mahdi Army, Sadr’s private force of Shia militiamen.
But all told, Maliki has not amounted to the kind of leader that Iraq needs.2 He is a weak manager,3 and his authoritarian style has even alienated his own Shia (and Kurdish) allies.4 Maliki is deeply sectarian, still nursing anger born from the years of abuse that Shias suffered at the hands of the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein. When Maliki first emerged on the scene, he openly embraced Shia chauvinism and talked of revenge against Sunnis—payback for decades of mistreatment. He has favored Shias not only in civilian posts but also in the highest ranks of the military and police. Iraq needed a leader who would promote reconciliation. What it got instead is one content to stoke the fires of sectarianism.
Obama thought it futile to invest any more time and effort in this failed project. There were not going to be any more gains—the picture was not going to get any rosier. Staying in Iraq in great numbers, boosting Maliki, and keeping in place his alliance with Sunnis were not going to pay any dividends.
The U.S. military wanted to stay longer; the generals worried about Iraq backsliding into open conflict. But they had been touting the victories won by the surge and singing the praises of the new Iraqi security forces. And Obama had the war in Afghanistan to think about. Thus—in a pattern that repeated itself with respect to the latter country—he took the military’s rhetoric of success at face value and announced that the situation in Iraq was good enough to make an American withdrawal possible.
Iraq policy was handed over to the vice president; he would see to our exit. Biden knew Iraq well. He had followed developments there closely from his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His prediction in 2006 (made jointly with veteran foreign policy thinker Leslie Gelb) that Iraq would not survive the combined centrifugal pull of Shia revival and Kurdish autonomy, and was bound to split up along ethnosectarian lines and that the United States should not stand in the way, had made quite a stir.5 Now he would be seeing to a precipitous American withdrawal, which could make that forecast come true. He was not a fan of the COIN strategy (in Iraq or Afghanistan), and inside the White House he advocated leaving Iraq sooner rather than later.6
In October 2008, the Bush administration had bowed to Iraqi pressure and pledged to withdraw all U.S. troops by the end of 2011. Obama used that deadline as his goalpost too, accelerating the drawdown of troops as they handed over security to Iraqi forces. The schedule depended on Iraqi politics holding together and Iraqi forces keeping the peace on the streets for a decent enough interval to give the administration plausible deniability when things fell apart after the U.S. departure. It was touch and go for a while, especially when the March 2010 elections took so long to produce a government. But much to everyone’s relief, the long months of haggling between politicians brought little sectarian violence and even less al-Qaeda activity.
Alas, the facade of stability barely masked the trouble brewing under the surface. The year 2010 proved a critical one for Iraq. The country’s political scene was still fractious, and held together only thanks to a fragile power-sharing arrangement that required close American management. But the Obama administration had no time or energy for that. Instead it anxiously eyed the exits, with its one thought to get out. It stopped protecting the political process just when talk of American withdrawal turned the heat back up under the long-simmering power struggle that pitted the Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds against one another.
The end of the drawn-out government-formation scrum in December 2010 left Maliki in the premiership. Before long, he was embarking on an ambitious power grab. Washington ignored his increasing abuse of the constitution, his illegal push for more de-Baathification, and his browbeating of the judiciary, all of which gave Maliki grounds to believe that the United States would place no impediment in the way of his plan to build a Shia authoritarian regime. Rather than develop trust in one another, the Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish factions grew further apart, jealously guarding their political fiefdoms (the presidency for the Kurds, the premiership for the Shias, and the lesser offices of vice president and parliament speaker for the Sunnis). Maliki thought that the premiership would be his forever, a permanent perch from which he could reach out to dominate the presidency and whatever offices Sunnis might hold.
The 2010 elections and their aftermath were a telling exercise in deal making. The Iraqiyya party won 24.7 percent of the popular vote and 91 of the one-chamber parliament’s 325 seats. This showing nosed out Maliki’s al-Da’awa, which won 24.2 percent and 89 seats. The results should have given Iraqiyya’s leader, ex-premier Ayad Allawi, a shot at putting together a government. But Maliki moved quickly to block Allawi. Among other things, Maliki persuaded U.S. officials that the Shia majority would reject Allawi—a nominal Shia and former Baathist who had served as interim premier in 2004 and 2005 and was now rebounding with the backing of Saudi Arabia—so decisively that any government formed by him would plunge the country back into sectarian combat.
Maliki came out on top and resumed the premiership in December 2010, backed by the United States.7 That the incumbent could finish second and still keep his job signaled flaws in the system. Iraqis now thought that it was America and not Iraqis who picked the prime minister. Indeed, but there was another power broker in Iraq with the same agenda: Iran.
Iranian leaders were at first divided over who should become prime minister (and confident in their right to choose). General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Brigade and the day-to-day superintendent of Iran’s political and military involvement in Iraq, was frustrated with disagreements between Iraqi Shia leaders—and blamed these for th
eir inability to quickly form a government. Soleimani (and also Syria’s ruler Bashar al-Assad) favored another Shia politician, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, to take the job. But Maliki and his allies resisted. Muqtada al-Sadr in particular objected because Mahdi’s party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), was Sadr’s main rival. Sadr and other pro-Maliki Shia politicians lobbied Iran’s Supreme Leader. Eventually, in December 2010, Khamenei wrote a letter to all Iraqi Shia leaders exhorting them to agree on Maliki as the choice for the premiership.
Iran then leaned on Syria to stop its support for Mahdi. Iran and Syria, generally allies, had not been on the same page regarding Iraq since 2003. Iranians supported the Shia rise to power, whereas Syria had backed the insurgency in all its permutations, from al-Qaeda to the Baathist diehards. Damascus had turned on Maliki after he had called for a United Nations investigation into Syria’s role in bombings in Iraq. Syria had bankrolled Maliki’s Shia rival, Mahdi. But with Iranian pressure mounting, Syria cut a deal: in exchange for dumping Mahdi, Assad was promised a gas pipeline from Iran. Iran then asked Hezbollah to mediate between Assad and Maliki.
In the end, Iran actually implemented what also happened to be American policy. The irony was not lost on Iraqis, and the more suspicious among them thought they could discern the outlines of a sinister U.S.-Iranian conspiracy to turn Maliki into a permanent prime minister—a dictator.
While there was no conspiracy, American policy in Iraq at this point was not committed to promoting national unity (though Obama did make an effort to promote reconciliation by trying to secure the presidency for Allawi as a consolation prize),8 nor to continuing with institution building, but to ensuring a state strong enough to permit U.S. withdrawal. It was easier to see Iraq in terms of balancing its divisions—Biden thought of it as resembling the Balkans—than to chart a path to greater political unity. Pursuing real unity would require keeping America’s commitment to Iraq, and a leader other than Maliki.
Washington’s priority was not building Iraqi democracy but creating a security state around a strong leader, authoritarian by default. (The same would be true of Afghanistan and Yemen down the road, revealing the pragmatic or realist heart of Obama’s approach to the Middle East).9 It made for a disconnect between America and the Iraqi political leaders with whom Washington claimed to be working. Most Iraqi leaders were concerned with preventing the return of a dictator (when the leading candidate for the role was Maliki), and felt wary of growing Iranian influence. The Obama White House had different priorities and was perturbed by neither Maliki’s authoritarianism nor the growing Iranian influence that it facilitated.
Obama had turned Bush’s Iraq policy on its head. America went into Iraq to build democracy, but left building an authoritarian state as an exit strategy. It is obvious now that—talk about democracy in his Cairo speech notwithstanding—Obama was not really committed to democracy in the Middle East. We did not know it then, but Iraq in 2009 and 2010 was a preview of how the Obama administration would react to the Arab Spring in 2011, and a window onto his thinking about the Middle East.
The White House, not understanding Maliki’s debt to Iran, misread Maliki, thinking that having won the elections with American backing he would now serve as the Shia strongman to do Washington’s bidding—notably to provide the security cover for the United States to leave and sign on to a new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) to replace the one that Bush had negotiated and that would expire in 2011. But anointing him prime minister did not endear America to Maliki. He still thought that U.S. authorities had conspired with Allawi and Iraqiyya to rig the voting (Hamid Karzai would claim similar feelings of U.S. persecution after the 2009 elections in Afghanistan). Maliki grew more stubborn and even less willing to compromise. He both resented the suggestion that America had picked him and saw the United States as a hurdle to further consolidation of his power.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, continued to worry about the consequences of a hasty exit. It thought that danger was still lurking in Iraq and that the country needed an American presence to maintain stability and forward momentum. There was Iranian influence to worry about, and a U.S. military footprint in the heart of Mesopotamia would be a strategic asset, giving America influence along a wide arc stretching from the Levant to the Persian Gulf.
The question was how many U.S. combat troops would be needed for this, and under what terms would they stay in Iraq. High on the White House’s list of demands was that American soldiers would enjoy immunity from local prosecution—something that the Iraqi government would have to agree to in the new SOFA.
Washington thought that Maliki would deliver on the SOFA. But he didn’t, and neither would anyone else. Why should they? Maliki was tiring of the U.S. presence, and his rivals still viewed it as something that had served him and his ambitions, not Iraqi democracy. Why strengthen Maliki by keeping America in Iraq? With America gone, Maliki might be weaker and riper for a takedown. Later, after the die was cast, Sunnis openly rued not having backed the SOFA; by then it had become clear that the U.S. departure would mean a Maliki power grab.
The White House’s gambit of choosing the SOFA over strengthening democracy proved to be a lose–lose proposition. America did not get a new agreement, and Iraq ended up with an authoritarian strongman who would push the country to the edge of a cliff.
Negotiations over that new agreement started in earnest in June 2011. Washington offered to leave behind 10,000 combat troops. Iraqis across the political spectrum thought that number showed a lack of seriousness and commitment, and even in Washington the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen, told the president it would “constitute high risk.”10 It confirmed what Iraqi defense minister Qadir Obeidi had heard from the administration in Washington in the spring of 2009—that the United States wanted to be pretty much completely out of Iraq by December 2011. If Washington were serious, then it would commit 25,000 or more troops to Iraq, he felt. Even if Iraqis had been impressed with the offer of 10,000 troops, it still would have left the United States capable of playing only a marginal role in protecting Iraq’s security, and with little influence in Iraqi politics. Such a low number meant the American troops would do no more than protect themselves. If you are not there, then you will not matter.
Giving American soldiers immunity from local prosecution was not popular either. Many Iraqis thought that U.S. troops, and the private security forces that locals associated with the U.S. presence, had perpetrated violence on the population with impunity, and they wanted no more of that. In addition, giving American troops immunity ran counter to Iraqi nationalist sensibilities; it was an infringement on sovereignty. The powerful Iranian-aligned politicians, too, were opposed to the American troop presence in Iraq—Tehran had objected to the original 2008 SOFA and did not want to see it renewed.
The political cost of giving Washington what it wanted was too high for Maliki and his allies, and they were already content with the United States leaving. Thus the low number of troops that the administration promised was the perfect cover: negotiations broke down in October 2011, and the administration declared that all U.S. troops would be out of Iraq by the end of the year. In effect, Washington confirmed what Iraqis suspected: America was not serious about Iraq, it was not committed to its security, and privately it was happy not to have to leave behind even the 10,000 troops that it had offered.
The administration responded to the collapse of its halfhearted negotiations by declaring victory. It had extricated the United States from Iraq, fulfilling President Obama’s campaign pledge and freeing resources to attend to Afghanistan. But it was a Pyrrhic victory, a testament to American fickleness—a break-it-and-bolt legacy that will be tough to shake. The region got the message loud and clear that America was out of the game. The claim of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, that America had been defeated in Iraq gained traction on the Arab street, and not just in anti-American corners of Damascus or South Beirut. After we packed up and left, our influence would wane, a
nd we would not even care.11
The surge had hardly made Iraq whole, and our speedy departure threatened to break it apart again. Far from Biden’s “great achievement,” Iraq could prove to be one of the Obama administration’s greater mistakes.
American troops had barely left when Iraqi politics imploded. Two days after the last U.S. convoy crossed into Kuwait, the four key Sunni provinces of Anbar, Diyala, Mosul, and Salahuddin—the Sunni heartland and a bastion of Iraqi nationalism—asked for federalism and regional autonomy.12 This was followed by the major crisis that had been baked in the cake when Maliki left Washington thinking that he had gotten Obama’s go-ahead to hound Iraqiyya on terrorism charges. Iraqiyya threatened to leave the government and then appealed to Kurdish leaders for support to counter Maliki’s growing “dictatorship.”13
Relations between Maliki and the Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani were already tense. Baghdad had put its foot down—unsuccessfully—by declaring that the Kurdish region could not conclude its own oil deals with foreign firms. Kurds had bought into the concept of a united Iraq, provided it would be democratic. But with America leaving and Maliki turning his back on democracy, the Kurds felt vulnerable—it would be only a matter of time before Maliki would try to impose tight control over them. It was hardly a surprise, then, that the fleeing vice president Hashemi found the red carpet rolled out for him in the Iraqi Kurdistan region, or that the Kurds came to his aid by launching sympathetic remonstrations against Baghdad’s increasingly dictatorial ways. Barzani has since hosted Maliki’s Shia critics as well, and raised the possibility of holding a referendum in which the voters of the Kurdish region would be asked if they want to separate from Iraq—unofficial referendums on the same question have yielded 90 percent support for separation.