Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (47 page)

So it may have been, but what it wasn’t was a cure-all, nor was
ordering more U.S. troops the only reason, not even the primary reason why violence had started to subside. Sunni sheiks in Anbar province, increasingly disgusted by the bloody tactics employed by Islamist insurgents, began to turn their militias against them. Meanwhile, U.S. marines in Anbar and U.S. soldiers elsewhere, often young lieutenants and squad leaders at a tactical level, began to do what marines and soldiers have done for centuries: they adapted to the battlefield. In the Iraq case, it meant embracing a complex set of skills based on developing relationships and incentives for local leaders to turn against extremists. They worked one sheik at a time, convincing them, sometimes with argumentation, sometimes with money, to consider their futures. One army lieutenant from upstate New York told me of having built a fence to help keep the sheik’s cattle accounted for, provided, of course, the sheik improved security. The lieutenant described to me another incident in which he had worked with the trainer of a military explosive detection dog so that in front of a line of suspected insurgents the dog barked specifically at those whom the lieutenant suspected ahead of time of lying; it was a “lie detector dog,” as he told the frightened suspects. “You learn any of that in a COIN manual?” I asked him. “You kidding?” he laughed. Stephen Ambrose once wrote a book about citizen soldiers who improvised their way from Normandy to the liberation of Germany. When the history of the Iraq War is finally told, it will be about a similar journey undertaken by brave and resourceful young Americans, ably led by their generals to be sure, but also by their own battlefield resourcefulness.

As for the generals, I never subscribed to the view of some correspondents that our military’s leadership was incompetent. Many of these writers, however fascinated by the military, based their strong opinions on unnamed sources who often had axes to grind and email addresses to provide. Iraq was a tough mission and lessons often had to be learned on the fly. No one had to learn these lessons faster and harder than General Ricardo Sanchez, a newly appointed commanding general who was the
first in and who confronted an Iraq that was completely different from the one he and his troops had trained and prepared for.

The generals I knew while I served in Iraq—Odierno, Huntzinger, Jacoby, Anderson, Perkins, Helmick, Petraeus: the list is long—were all men whose dedication to their duty I had the highest respect for.

Among the very best was General George Casey, who replaced Sanchez and was to serve the longest as the commanding general, from June 2004 until February 2007. We had first met during the Kosovo crisis and I had watched with great satisfaction his meteoric rise in the ranks to four-star general. Casey, who never failed to give credit to others, was the leader who developed much of the COIN tactics for the war. He created a COIN academy in Baghdad for all incoming commanders, in essence a retraining school. When Casey and the army leadership agreed on General Petraeus as the next commanding general, Casey urged that Petraeus be sent to Fort Leavenworth and along with teachers from the academy rewrite the army’s doctrine on counterinsurgency.

Petraeus, whom I first met when he was a colonel accompanying the chairman of the Joint Chiefs Hugh Shelton on trips to the Balkans during the Kosovo war, was well prepared to be Casey’s replacement and to implement his tactics, operations, and strategy. He had served as a divisional commander of the 101st Airborne, which had fought its way along with the rest of the invasion force up through Iraq and who moved in and occupied Mosul after army special forces with Kurdish guerrillas had liberated it. Later, he took command of the training mission in Iraq, a courageous but thankless assignment that was absolutely essential to readying the Iraqi army to take over for U.S. forces. Petraeus approached that difficult job with the same level of thoroughness, dedication, and enthusiasm he put to use in all his assignments. His production of weekly statistics demonstrating progress in the training of Iraqis was essential to planning for the U.S. drawdown.

Seldom did Secretary Rumsfeld hold a press conference in Washington
without referring to the progress Petraeus was making to ready the new Iraqi forces. Unfortunately, sometimes the metric of trained Iraqis played the same kind of role that “body count” did during the Vietnam War: numbers that were somewhat misleading and had little to do with the reality of who was winning the war. The number of training certificates issued does not determine the readiness of an army to fight, and certainly Petraeus—and probably even Rumsfeld—knew that.

Not everything that happened in Iraq had to do with what the Americans were up to. On the Shia side of Iraqi’s sectarian divide, Prime Minister Maliki employed another approach from those advocating a protect-the-civilians COIN strategy. Against the advice of the U.S. military, he sent his army to crush Shia militia groups in Basra, the southernmost city in Iraq, and which like Mosul in the north had never been cleaned out of its militias. Maliki’s troops soon got in trouble, and as the U.S. military could not resist backgrounding the press, ultimately required augmentation in prevailing over the militias in Basra. His decision to use force against fellow Shia cemented his reputation as a tough leader, but it also created huge political problems for him during the government formation period in 2010, especially with the Sadrists, who had numerous links to the militia groups. But most importantly for the future of his country, Maliki’s message that the militias must disarm had been sent and received.

While anyone in country was aware of the Sunni-Shia divide and the fact that the name of the game in Iraq was politics, in Washington the issue orbited around counterinsurgency and its immediate tactical cousin, the surge.

As the COIN strategy took hold in Iraq, it became an even higher-stakes game in Washington. Counterinsurgency efforts had been given credit for the fact that the killing had been much diminished (credit it only partially deserved), and for that, people whose faith in the Iraq War had wavered were very grateful to the doctrine and its disciples. But for others, especially those whose faith never had wavered, COIN offered the
vast prospect for a renewed dedication to the task of the forced perfecting of the rest of the world to the benefit of U.S. interest. COIN not only “won” the Iraq War; it would, in this worldview, soon win the Afghan War and any other war we chose to engage in. Counterinsurgency and the surge became the watchwords of the ever faithful, tools to realize a very ideological (and frankly warlike) agenda as to how America can always get its way in the world.

With Iraq defined as a security situation, rather than a political problem involving local players who did not cooperate well together, politics became reduced to another element of COIN. Diplomacy, the set of deployed skills necessary to get people to do things they didn’t otherwise want to do, also became a subfield of COIN. In the fine print of COIN there was the calculation that U.S. forces in any particular conflict would need years to complete the mission, probably more years than the American people, or frankly any people, had the patience to endure. The fine print got smudged and came to be interpreted to the effect that long-term follow-on force would not be more soldiers, but rather more diplomats. Thus the diplomatic effort became an essential part of the “whole of government” approach so often ballyhooed in Washington: the total war effort, the marshaling of all instruments of power behind the tip of the military’s spear. Proponents of the war now looked to diplomacy to address the “nonkinetic space” (to use a particularly irksome military term), where they understood the war could be won or lost.

• • •

Coming out of the pressure cooker of North Korean negotiations, where half the Bush administration opposed the negotiating process, I had thought that those working on the gut-wrenching issues of Iraq, however stressed, were united in their cause. In fact, nerves were frayed on a daily basis and blame-game politics seldom took much of a break. The military had its internal issues, but so did the State Department in trying to run an embassy that had outgrown any conceivable economies of scale, out of proportion with everything else the department was doing in the rest of
our 194 posts around the world (with the exception of Kabul, which was also fast ramping up), as the inevitability of the military’s departure became clear. Much of what I saw on my arrival in April 2009 was the effort by the military to set up the State Department as the successor organization in charge of Iraq.

But letting go is hard to do, and the military was clearly uncertain whether the State Department, much less Embassy Baghdad, was ready for the responsibility. The military and its civilian camp followers were used to running everything in Iraq. Iraqi national security meetings held on Sunday nights included U.S. military officials as well as (for civilian sensitivities) the U.S. and British ambassadors, even though the British had pulled their troops out and could not even agree with the Iraqis on a residual maritime patrolling mission. I was appalled by the idea that anyone but Iraqis should be in attendance at an Iraqi national security meeting, but was told to avoid thinking that anything in Iraq should be what is considered normal elsewhere.

I soon learned that the word
normal,
which I always thought was on balance a good thing, was taken as a sign that the person did not really understand Iraq, a bellwether of that person’s naïve state of mind. To suggest that our goal should be a normal place was a failure to understand what had gone on there, and what would probably continue to go on there for some time. “We have stayed more than a half century in Germany,” was the supposed barn burner of an argument, whose reference to Iraq was in fact not particularly persuasive.

All this yielded a peculiar form of political correctness. In a talk on Iraq I gave at the Brookings Institution in Washington in the summer of 2009, I explained Iraq’s oil bidding process to a group of think tank researchers from around Washington and laid out the challenge of the coming parliamentary elections. I spoke of the progress being achieved, the jockeying for political advantage, the fact that the sullen Sunnis were clearly in a mood this time to try to unite and take part in the political process, albeit with the understanding that Iraq would continue to be
run by a Shia, and of the growing sense of achieving normal politics, even though for the foreseeable future parties would tend to build their platforms along the sectarian divide. The organizer of the event, Brookings scholar Kenneth Pollack, a liberal interventionist of the 1990s and a strong advocate for the Iraq intervention, rushed up to me after the talk and warned, “Be careful. Don’t use the word
normal
around these people.”

Even embassy briefings for visitors were not what I would consider normal. I have taken part in numerous embassy staff meetings and briefings over the course of my thirty years, from discussions of who to invite to the Fourth of July reception, to deciding whether to evacuate Embassy Skopje in the wake of the assault by an angry mob. In Sarajevo, I sat with Ambassador Menzies to discuss ongoing embassy operations during a bloody part of the siege of the city by Serb heavy weapons. In Warsaw during General Jaruzelski’s martial law, we discussed how to deal with the pressure that was mounting on the embassy to cease its outreach to the Polish public. But nothing in my experience prepared me for my first briefing at Embassy Baghdad.

In a session for several U.S. governors whose national guards were on duty in Iraq, I walked down to the embassy’s Conference Room. I noticed that on my side of the table I was in the center, with General Odierno immediately on my right. To his right, the remaining five seats, as well as to my left the remaining four seats, were all reserved for senior military, who would explain to the five governors ongoing military operations, and deployment and withdrawal schedules.

I took my seat next to Ray, looked behind me, and saw that all the backbenchers were in military uniform. I followed the line of uniformed aides behind me going to my left, and finally, after the end of the conference table, still on a back bench, I saw a solitary political officer flipping through what looked like a stack of Arabic press clips. Glad he was busy, I thought. Looking on the bright side, I thought perhaps he was confident of my ability to master my part of the briefing without receiving any whispered factoids. Given how far away he was seated, he would
have practically needed a telephone to tell me anything. I glanced across the conference table and noticed that all the coffee cups at the place settings for the governors were emblazoned with the letters MNF-I (Multinational Forces—Iraq). Each governor also had in front of him a pad of paper and a U.S. military pen, as well as a large coin, the size of a drink coaster, with General Odierno’s signature and the seal of MNF-I, a lamassu (a human-headed winged bull) from Nimrud, the capital of ancient Assyria.

I looked at the lamassu at my own place setting and wondered whether the embassy conference room setup quite embodied the spirit of civilianizing the Iraq mission. To our right was an enormous screen on which would soon be shown the slides of the briefing. I realized why my political officer was half a mile away. He already knew that so-called joint embassy/MNF-I briefings had little input from the embassy. General Odierno briefed on the first sixteen slides. When slide seventeen flashed up on the screen it mentioned “Embassy” and the “Strategic Framework Agreement.”

“Mr. Ambassador,” General Odierno asked, using my honorific for the benefit of the visitors, “would you like to say a few words about the SFA?”

At the close of the briefing I bid farewell to the governors who were lining up to have their photos taken with the marine security guard, and called a quick embassy staff meeting. I asked whether this was how briefings had always been conducted, with the commanding general handling 95 percent of it while the ambassador sat like a bobblehead doll, nodding his approval. I asked whether during the so-called heyday of civilian-military cooperation, the Petraeus-Crocker period, this was how briefings were conducted. Petraeus, I was told, was in the lead, but he encouraged his “wingman” to jump in when he chose to do so. I told the staff that henceforth embassy briefings for VIPs should reflect, both in substance and style, the partnership between the civilian and military missions in Iraq. For starters, and I told them I would convey this to Odierno, that
would mean there should be just as many suits at the table as uniforms, and following long-standing protocol, the ambassador, who is after all the president’s representative, would lead the briefing. If there were going to be trinkets at each place setting, they needed to include something from the embassy.