Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (44 page)

If the opinion of local Iraqis was sought, the favorite question was “What do you need?” And if the answer, as it often turned out to be, was “money,” the response was “We can work with you.”

The sheer size of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) funds and even the smaller civilian funds, which had long since peaked before 2009, meant that senior officials in Washington working the issues of Iraq became familiar with local place-names, which often gave them a false sense that they understood the issues. Their poor understanding of the issues was compounded by being thousands of miles away, or worse, by the fact that a past eighteen-hour trip to Iraq empowered them to speak with certainty in the windowless confines of the White House Situation Room, where the interagency squabbles dragged on and played out. And when things don’t go well, especially for a new administration anxious to demonstrate that it could handle Iraq, out come the micromanaging tinkerers and the proverbial 8,000-mile-long screwdrivers.

During my preparation time in Washington, I tried to arrange to arrive at the civilian side of the Baghdad airport. I thought entering through the civilian terminal would be a powerful symbol of the changing mission in Iraq, that this would be an era of transition from the military to the civilians, and that, just maybe, we were entering a period of increasing “normalcy,” a state that the Iraqis desperately wanted.

In some previous posts I had looked for a gesture, a symbolic step to convey that the new ambassador would represent change. Successful ambassadors increasingly tend to be those who understand that they are not
just accredited to the foreign ministry or the government, but rather to the broader public. Such a symbol in Iraq was not so apparent. The Iraqis I talked to before my departure told me over and over that what their families in Baghdad wanted was a “normal” life; they were desperately seeking signs that things could get better. Thus I thought I could start that by coming through the civilian terminal.

The embassy and the military insisted I come the same way every one of my predecessors had come and gone, slipping in through the darkness on the military end of the runway. Security concerns were appropriately paramount, and no security officer in a war zone is particularly interested in symbolic gestures, but I felt the lack of enthusiasm for change or transition was deeper than just the nervousness of the security office.

Baghdad was having another one of its infamous sandstorms. Sandstorms at their worst are a kind of London fog, with a brown tint rather than blue, and are as old as the Bible. But in Baghdad in 2009, everything was laid at the doorstep of the U.S. presence. Many people in Iraq made the case that it was entirely Americans’ fault, that U.S. tactical vehicles in the deserts in Anbar and Ninewah were stirring up sandstorms!

Pat explained we would have to drive in a convoy to the embassy instead of taking the usual UH-64 Black Hawk helicopter ride. That was fine with me. I had taken enough Black Hawks in the Balkans to last a lifetime. The chief of my security detail, Derek Dela-Cruz, gave me my Kevlar helmet and “PPE” (personal protective equipment), a bulletproof vest. I climbed into the armored Chevy Suburban and off we went into the darkness, with Derek riding shotgun next to the driver and me in the backseat with Pat.

That was the first of many times I would ride with Derek, then later his successor, Ian Pavis. For an ambassador overseas, a close relationship with a security detail is crucial. Often compromises needed to be found between the ambassador’s wish to be out in the field and the security detail’s fervent desire that the ambassador stay locked up in the embassy. Conversations often ran along these lines, “Sir, we can support your idea
for a three-day visit to place X, but it would involve Y and Z resources. Could you consider an early morning departure and return that night?” I always agreed. Sometimes the security detail would come into possession of a tactical piece of information that would require some adjustment in the route or schedule. “Huh?” I responded once to Derek when he pulled me back from getting into the car. “Sir, please humor me.” And I did because he had a job to do.

As he drove into Baghdad, I spent the twenty-minute drive staring out the three-inch-thick ballistic window at the scenery, such as it was. I was struck by the fact that even though I was riding in a six-vehicle convoy of armored-up vehicles and anticipating the thousands of embassy employees awaiting my stewardship of the U.S. mission, I felt as alone as I had some thirty-five years ago arriving in Douala, Cameroon, for my Peace Corps service.

The fine sand, besides finding a way into every human pore, turned every building and road sign into varying shades of brown, and the view of “Route Irish” (all major highways in Baghdad, like many war zones before, were given very clear Western cultural names—another one for example being Route Tampa—to facilitate memorization by our soldiers) was not much of a view at all. I kept looking for signs of flowers and landscaping, which General Petraeus in his Chamber of Commerce speech to me weeks before had mentioned. “Where have all the flowers gone?” I muttered to myself. We entered the Green Zone, a place so nicknamed for its level of supposed personal safety than for any particular commitment to the environment. Minutes later our vehicles arrived at the main gate of the vast embassy compound, where a very professional Peruvian contract guard in a khaki uniform and floppy hat waved the vehicles through the gate.

U.S. Embassy Baghdad is a 104-acre facility that has cost American taxpayers some half a billion dollars. A company called First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting built it, and often bore the brunt of numerous employee complaints when things didn’t work well. First
Kuwaiti, along with numerous other subcontractors, employed construction workers from all over the globe—except Iraqis, who were deemed a security threat, and in some cases probably for very good reasons. Media descriptions of the property depicted it as a luxury facility on the banks of the Tigris River, with a food court and other amenities that would remind its happy thousand or so full-time inhabitants of home. In reality, there was nothing luxurious about the compound, and it definitely did not remind anyone of home. All the buildings had windows that could withstand blasts from 107mm rockets, and all the roofs were built to a bombproof standard, at least in the event they were hit by the type of rocketry that was regularly fired at the Green Zone from Sadr City and other “points of origin,” or “POOs,” as the military described them in this acronym-rich environment. We drove past the so-called food court. It consisted of a veranda where sullen-looking people—mostly in military uniforms—lounged on plastic chairs smoking and using the Wi-Fi.

I stared out the SUV window at what was unfolding in front of my eyes. I have seen embassies all over the world. Served in many. This one lived up to its reputation as a colossus. Bright white lights along the barbed-wire-tipped, ten-foot-high cement wall gave it a look more appropriate to a corrections facility. The chancery building, where the ambassador’s office is housed, was also lit up by security lights. The building was a familiar design to anyone who has seen one of the many new U.S. embassies that have cropped up in the unfertile soils of newly independent countries since 1989: brown, utilitarian buildings, which looked like giant cardboard boxes with air holes and housed the thousand-plus employees, were bathed in white light. The starkness of the flat-roofed housing buildings, the lack of even the slightest sign of landscaping save for a giant, forlorn lawn in front of the chancery building, gave it the look of a Mars colony.

The convoy stopped every hundred feet to manage the metal speed bumps. Peruvian contract guards in brown uniforms and floppy desert
hats walking in pairs, their M-16 rifles loosely slung over their shoulders, waved and saluted as we went by. We went past an enormous brown open space that could presumably have furnished all the necessary sand and dust for a countrywide sandstorm. Finally we turned into a metal, grilled front gate and entered the small front yard of the residence of the ambassador. My new home. I took off the body armor and helmet in the car (I had felt foolish wearing it, even though I understood why the regulations required it) and got out to meet the staff of the residence. It was about 8
P
.M
.

The residence was shaped vaguely like a giant shoe box. It too was painted brown. Windows were long and narrow and appeared to be designed more as someone’s concept of a shooting position than as a source of light. Like every other window on the compound, the glass was several inches thick and could not be opened, even with direct rocket fire. A porch on the upstairs seemed at first glance to offer some respite from this dreary look, but it too was retrofitted with thick Plexiglas to guard against the possibility that someone might aim a weapon at it.

Inside, however, furnished with the State Department’s limitless supply of Drexel furniture and by an equally endless supply of industrial-strength Oriental carpets, the residence was rather pleasant. I looked at the artwork that adorned the walls. The theme, by and large, was the American flag, and many of the pieces featured numerous patriotic scenes of America that the State Department’s office of interior designs and furnishings had chosen.

Pat explained what had been planned that evening. The foreign minister was waiting for us at his office, where at 9:30
P.M.
I would present to him copies of my “letters of credence and credentials,” a 350-year-old diplomatic practice by which an arriving ambassador presents letters from his head of state to the effect that the person was in fact the real ambassador and not some imposter. Copies were presented to the Foreign Ministry because in most countries an appointment with the receiving head of state could take weeks or months, and meanwhile the ambassador
would need to get to work. In Baghdad, however, my appointment with President Jalal Talabani to present the letters was scheduled for 10:30
P.M.
, an hour later.

Our six-car convoy lumbered up to the Foreign Ministry, which stood all too close to a busy intersection, with a small army of security guards, some of whom had already been deployed to the site in anticipation of the visit and were there to join the protocol officers greeting us on arrival. I made my way into the building and, accompanied by the protocol official, went up the elevator. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a former Kurdish Peshmerga guerrilla fighter who was a confidant of Kurdish president Massoud Barzani, was a gregarious, roundish-featured Kurd wearing a double-breasted blue suit, with a friendly smile, an optimistic outlook, and excellent English. In his Baghdad home he prominently displayed a picture of himself and President Barzani, in younger years, both in their brown Peshmerga uniforms wearing red and white turbans, sitting cross-legged on top of a snow-peaked mountain far up in the wilds of Kurdistan. The always fit President Barzani would later comment to me with his dry and ironic sense of humor that he was not entirely sure that Hoshyar could make it back up to that mountaintop for another such photo.

Hoshyar (as he was called by all) welcomed me warmly in his fourth-floor outer office, introduced me one by one to his senior team, and took the outsized envelope containing copies of my papers. I tried my best to introduce my team, but having arrived in the embassy just an hour before I didn’t know who half of them were. We sat in two chairs at the end of a long, ornate room, decorated with display cases of bric-a-brac from various diplomatic visitors. Our embassy staffs and foreign ministry sat in two long rows, forming both sides of a U, his to his left, mine to my right, with coffee tables end to end placed between the two rows. It was a scene I had participated in numerous times throughout my career whether in Ban Ki-moon’s office in Korea, or Kiro Gligorov’s in Skopje. The only difference was that for this meeting I had a small army of security standing
guard outside the office door, inside the door, at the elevator, at other elevator stops on other floors, at the back stairs, on the ground floor at the elevator and the stairs, at the building entrance, at the back entrance, inside the vehicles, and in a small helicopter circling overhead. That, I thought, was something new.

Hoshyar confirmed that we were scheduled to meet President Talabani in about an hour and we chatted for a few minutes in a friendly style, one that Hoshyar never departed from over my entire time in Iraq, no matter the pressure of the moment. He was proud of the ministry that he had run for five years, and was especially pleased that just twelve hours later he would be hosting Secretary Clinton in his office.

I had almost—but certainly not completely—forgotten that I had a visit from the secretary at nine o’clock the next morning. How late, I wondered, would the 10:30
P.M.
meeting with President Talabani go? Normally, visits by a secretary of state are a logistical nightmare for an embassy. As François Truffaut once said of making films: they start as an effort to create a masterpiece, and end as something you just want to get over with. Such is the case with a secretary’s visit. Everyone in the embassy is mobilized for such a visit. “Site officers” are assigned to each meeting location. Senior delegation members also have control officers available for every wish, whether to fetch a bottle of water or to arrange a meeting with a lesser official while the secretary is having “downtime” (unscheduled time, usually used for something like a phone call back to Washington or to some other place where there is another crisis going on).

But Embassy Baghdad was the visitor capital of the world. It had an entire visits unit staffed with former military personnel, more political and economic officers for note-taking than any embassy I had ever seen in the world, and logistical strengths in terms of a motor pool that were second to none. Managing the highly choreographed visit of a secretary would pose no strain on the embassy, so much so that Hoshyar was the first to mention it that night. I decided not to worry. After all, I was sure Clinton would be coming every few months.