Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (43 page)

Senator McCain issued a stinging press announcement questioning my competence, seizing on the fact that I did not speak Arabic and raising Zinni again. As a prominent Republican explained to me, McCain had “nothing personal” against me; he opposed the nomination on principle because of Obama’s refusal during the campaign to give credit to the “surge” of U.S. troops into Iraq in 2007.

Before the Senate vote I went to McCain’s office to meet him for the first time. He was armed with talking points full of distorted comments attributed to me in connection with the North Korean negotiations. Months before, a
Washington Post
reporter asked me during an evening reception at the nonprofit organization Search for Common Ground’s annual awards what I thought of North Korea’s human rights record. I replied that every country, including our own, needs to work on its human rights record, but that North Korea had the most work to do because it had just about the worst human rights record on the planet. The article suggested the possibility that I had come to the conclusion that the U.S. and North Korean human rights record were somehow equivalent. McCain read from that story in a disgusted tone.

I was dumbfounded, but the confirmation process being what it is, I sat before the senator taking it all in, trying to occasionally draw his attention to my thirty-one-year record of service and my qualifications for the job. He was not interested. Instead he undertook an impassioned soliloquy on the surge and Obama’s perfidy in failing to acknowledge its role in winning the war.

I tried to suggest this was all rather over my pay grade. I told the senator that if confirmed I would look forward to working with him on the best policies for U.S. interests in Iraq. He continued to express his outrage over President Obama. He seemed so consumed by his anger that when the interview was over, he was uninterested even in shaking my hand, instead sitting in his chair, continuing his inner dialogue with himself about the president’s failure to endorse the surge. I contrasted what seemed like deep-seated, pent-up anger that was so out of proportion with anything I or the president for that matter had done, with his public persona, that look of earnest but rueful sorrow and seriousness, and playful sense of humor that he regularly displays on Sunday morning talk shows. “Great job!” his embarrassed staffer told me.

• • •

The committee hearing went fine, but Senator Brownback maintained his hold on the nomination, in effect demanding a floor debate and delaying my departure at least another three weeks due to the Easter break. Once floor action was scheduled it was a foregone conclusion that the Senate would approve the nomination, at which point one does begin to question the motivation of a person like Brownback, who had shown no interest in the Iraq War one way or the other, to hold up the departure of the ambassador.

A staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested privately that Brownback was perhaps fund-raising, that is, holding the nomination at the behest of special interest groups. I got on the Internet to look at Brownback’s donor list. It was a motley crew whose only common denominator seemed to be that many had nothing to do with Kansas, par for the course in modern political fund-raising. I was not able to find any group that would have been exercised about me or about sending an ambassador to Iraq, not surprising given that Brownback’s own views on Iraq seemed to be a blank slate. I concluded his opposition to me must have been based on the great line from the
Star Wars
bar scene when someone says to one of the protagonists: “He doesn’t like you!”

As I prepared for what turned out to be a desultory meeting with Brownback, some of my colleagues in EAP did some research to explore whether there was anything Brownback and I had in common. (Who knows, one of them said: “Maybe he likes the Red Sox.”) They reported that Brownback has a tremendous interest in Mother Teresa. Perhaps I could talk about my work with her. Since the time I worked with her in Albania, I had kept a few pictures in a frame in my office, including a note from her: “To Chris Hill, God love you for all the help you have given our poor. My gift is my prayer for you.”

I said, “Mother Teresa might be a way to break the ice with him.” Then my colleague added, “You should also know that every year around Easter, Senator Brownback washes the feet of his staffers.” I looked back at him and said nothing.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said.

I said on the record in my hearing that I would leave immediately for Iraq as soon as I was confirmed. I made the commitment for a couple of reasons. The first was that I was troubled by Ambassador Crocker’s comments that everyone who knew anything in the embassy had left, and second, my commitment to get on a plane immediately added to the sense of urgency of getting the nomination through.

My concern about an ambassadorless embassy was heightened when I received a call from NEA, asking me to call a contractor in the embassy’s political section and suggest he not submit for publication in the
New York Times
an impassioned plea to the Senate to confirm me. I asked why I should call, and was told that the State Department and Embassy Baghdad leadership both felt the op-ed could be counterproductive in the sense that some senators might be offended that the State Department was encroaching on their prerogatives. I asked in that case why didn’t the chargé (interim ambassador) or the employee’s immediate supervisor tell him not to publish it. After all, he was in Baghdad as a U.S. government employee, paid for by the U.S. government and not there to run his own foreign policy. He won’t listen, I was told. I realized I was dealing with
a different kind of embassy. My thoughts turned to how quickly Eagleburger would have handled that situation in Embassy Belgrade.

When the Senate floor debate finally came on April 20, it was essentially Kerry versus Brownback. Senator Kerry was energetic and generous in his support. I kept thinking about how I wished my parents were alive to hear him.

On the other hand, I was glad my parents were not around to hear Brownback’s half of the debate. He opened by reminding the Senate that this was Holocaust Remembrance Week. I asked Glyn Davies, who was standing in my office with me watching the debate on C-SPAN, “Where’s he going with this?”

“Maybe he thinks you’re Hitler.”

It soon became apparent that the connection to the Holocaust was that some FSOs in Switzerland in the late 1930s had refused visas to Jews, dooming them to return to Nazi Germany and certain death. In Brownback’s world, I was the living prodigy of that. As he droned on I was running a grainy slide show in my head of things I had done in the course of my government career. Peace Corps, the Solidarity movement in Poland, reporting on democracy demonstrations in South Korea in the spring of 1987, meeting in remote prison work camps with the families of political prisoners in Albania in 1991, gaining access to mass graves in Bosnia in 1995, meeting with displaced persons in central Kosovo and helping to provide them with food and shelter in the summer of 1998, a midnight visit to the Stenkovac refugee camp to protect Roma under attack from angry gangs of Kosovo refugees, working (quietly and effectively) with Chinese officials to allow North Korean refugees to get out of the diplomatic compound in Shenyang on to new homes in South Korea, convincing Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen to release immediately Kem Sokha and other arrested members of the human rights movement . . . I sat slumped in my chair watching the closing statement as the Senate readied a vote. McCain stood to denounce me, employing that mournful, concerned voice he uses in public.

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.

I
t 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.