Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (48 page)

“Don’t we have a coffee cup with an embassy seal, or maybe an embassy baseball hat?” I asked. “Yes, sir, but who’s going to pay for them?” came the lame answer. Our intrepid chief of staff, Chris Klein, leapt in before I could answer and said, “I will figure it out.”

Odierno would soon come to my office to report that some of my staff had offended some of their military counterparts on these new procedures. I assured him that I would correct any problem immediately, but I wanted to make sure that he understood that no ambassador could sit in his own embassy and play a subservient role in a briefing for American elected leaders. I told him it was a first symbolic step in fulfilling the mandate President Obama had given me, had indeed given both of us, to begin civilianizing the U.S. presence in Iraq. He said he understood completely, and supported this effort, even if some of his staff, never having seen an embassy in operation before Iraq, did not. Ray related how his staff, including his British national political advisor, had to take the lead in organizing for President Obama’s visit in March, including having his British political advisor contact Prime Minister Maliki and deliver him to the airport for his meeting with President Obama. “What was the embassy doing?” I asked, incredulously. “I don’t know, but I am sure glad that that will change.” I appreciated his collegiality, which never wavered during our time together in Iraq.

Within a couple of weeks, however, some journalists in the United States were reporting that Odierno and Hill were in conflict. Odierno told me repeatedly that he never, ever implied such a thing with anyone, let alone a journalist, and that he didn’t know where in the world it was coming from. I never had a reason not to believe him. Ray and I spent many evenings together in each other’s quarters, sometimes one-on-one,
sometimes with close-in staff. We smoked cigars, talked lots of football and baseball, and, of course, discussed our common mission and why we must succeed. We met senior Iraqis together, and traveled together. Despite all the pressures on us in Iraq, never once were we ever short with each other.

However well Ray and I worked with each other, the command system in Iraq was problematic because of the dual system that existed between the ambassador, as the president’s representative in-country, and the commanding general, who reports directly through his own chain of command in Washington (namely the secretary of defense). From the military’s point of view, the notion of dual control in the “battle space” could never sit well with any commander, especially when the “battle space” overlapped as it did in Iraq with the role of civilians. Odierno limited integration of immediate staff with the embassy, preferring to retain his own structures and his own separate political advisor.

Political advisors, or “polads,” are almost always drawn from the ranks of the Foreign Service on detail to the military. They normally have two main tasks: to help the commander interpret political developments on the ground, and to be a liaison with the embassy and to help the commander interpret embassy views. In the case of Iraq, Odierno employed on a personal services contract a very capable but independently minded British national. Prior to Iraq, she had never visited the United States, nor had she ever worked with a U.S. embassy before. She did, however, have an extensive background with British assistance programs in the Middle East, especially in the Palestine-controlled areas of the West Bank. Moreover, she impressively and courageously had been in Iraq almost the entire time since the allied invasion of 2003, certainly more time than any of the embassy political officers with whom she had challenging relations given their relative short time in country and her almost resident status. Unlike her embassy counterparts, she also was frequently featured in the international press with the dominant narrative, especially in the UK press, being that she had vociferously opposed the war but was now working
with the U.S. military to help it right the mistakes of that intervention. She became a vigorous advocate of COIN, referring at one point to an alleged prior indifference to civilian casualties (what is sometimes called “collateral damage”) as “mass murder.” As she told the
New York Times
in one of her frequent on-the-record interviews, “When you drop a bomb from the air and it lands on a village and kills all those people and you turn around and say ‘oh, we didn’t meant to kill the civilians,’ well, who do you think was living in the village?” Such comments did not always endear her to Americans. Neither did her on-the-record endorsement of the U.S. military as an institution somehow better than the United States itself: “America doesn’t deserve its military.”

Indeed, managing these civil-military relationships in times of war is the stuff of lengthy books, and for good reason. In the case of Iraq, the perception that the State Department somehow came late to the action never really went away. As big as the embassy was, it was a tiny part of vast Camp Victory. The main chancery with its large atrium was a small outbuilding compared to the main palace at El Faw, which housed the offices of General Odierno and his many senior flag officers. I would often joke to Odierno, “Welcome to FOB [Forward Operating Base] Embassy.”

Ambassadors sometimes have an imperious reputation, but at most posts that simply isn’t the case. In the mornings I would walk by myself, certainly no aides in tow, from the house to the embassy, greeting the Indonesian cook, the Bulgarian gardeners, and Peruvian guards along the way. As I entered the embassy building carrying a briefcase and unread newspapers, I would salute the marine on duty on my way to the office, managing to open every door on my own without any assistance. When General Odierno came to the embassy for a meeting or to his large office suite near mine, fifteen to twenty aides accompanied him, a surrounding sea of green. Posted ahead of him and his entourage would be enlisted men at each door, sometimes waiting ten minutes to hold the door while the general and his aides passed through. In addition, a security team would have pre-positioned themselves for his trip through our atrium,
blocking anyone from walking across it in anticipation of the “movement” of the commanding general, procedures that were not particularly welcomed by embassy employees. General Odierno was the last person to insist on such attention, and I am sure would have discontinued the practice if someone had brought it to his attention. But Ray probably inherited the system from his predecessor, who inherited it from his, and so on.

Joint meetings in the embassy were another teachable moment. Embassy political and economic officers would discuss economic assistance matters, and whether we would be able to get a congressional committee to approve our assistance budget in time. General Odierno and his staff would shake their heads in disbelief at the paltry sums involved, well to the right of the decimal point for the numbers that he dealt with on a daily basis. “Twelve million dollars?” he exploded. “The future of the police training program hangs on whether we can get twelve million dollars?” He offered to fund it from an account that was the equivalent of petty cash.

To some extent, the State Department’s budget problems engendered sympathy from our colleagues in uniform, but they also fostered a sense that the State Department is so small and incompetent it cannot even raise $12 million for one of its most pressing needs.

The military also was careful to make sure it had allies back in Washington, and plenty of them. Visiting journalists, academics, and think tankers were invited, often at taxpayers’ expense, to spend several days embedded with units to see operations from the ground level while soldiers and officers were encouraged to speak freely about the day-to-day challenges, and share their emails for future contacts. The overall effect was to create an atmosphere in which the visitor was convinced that any and all problems were being fully aired and addressed by the military, not to speak of the opportunity to develop terrific sources in the field.

The definition of Iraq as a security problem now on a fast track to being solved—thanks to the surge!—of course missed the main point of what the country’s challenges were. Sitting on the fault line of the Shia and
Sunni world, Iraq had security problems that were a symptom of deeper political problems that no one who understood the situation could believe would go away any time soon. Iraq’s Shia community, so long oppressed by the Sunni minority, had no intention of returning power to the Sunnis. Many foreign visitors, especially those who view the 1,300-year-old Sunni-Shia divide as just another challenge in the security environment, saw sectarianism as a by-product of weak governance and poor economic performance, a passing inconvenience rather than a main driver of the crisis. After all, sectarian killing had been reduced because of the surge. Soon, the thinking went, it would be eliminated with a stronger economy and the emergence of “issues-based” politics. The surge was the wonder drug for all that ailed Iraq, even centuries of sectarian political conflict.

In fact, during the several elections that had taken place since 2004, rarely did Sunnis vote for Shia or vice versa. The sectarian conflict that broke out so horribly in 2006–2007 represented not just frustrations in the Sunni community about the “de-Baathification campaign” so clumsily and inopportunely launched that to this day no one in the Bush administration acknowledges who made that decision to begin it. The Sunni insurrection represented a deeper frustration that they (along with their cousins in Syria) were the only Sunnis in the Arab world being forced to live under the indignity of Shia rule. The State Department Arabists, trained in previous assignments throughout the (Sunni) Arab world, were an ideal choice to try to work with the Sunni community in Iraq, but Sunnis in Iraq could not put to rest the fact that the United States had turned a Sunni Arab country into a Shia Arab country, a potential gift to Shia-led Iran. They could not understand why the Americans had done this, and neither could some of our own Arabists who believed the 2003 invasion was a mistake for that reason alone.

Nor could the Shia, who believed that sooner or later the Sunnis would expect to return to power. With Americans drawing down in 2010, and the election process gearing up, the Sunnis expected that moment to come very soon.

But as essential as the Sunni-Shia fault line was to understanding Iraq’s politics, many Iraqis themselves, especially educated classes, preferred to downplay its significance in conversations with foreigners, as if sectarianism were a family secret that to acknowledge would be to suggest that the country’s politics were divided along embarrassingly primitive lines. Thus, the leadership of the Iraq National Party, “Iraqiyya,” never spoke about its Sunni origins. Nor did the leadership of “State of Law,” Maliki’s election coalition, admit to foreigners that it was a Shia party. Each accused the other of sectarianism.

At 7
A.M.
on May 25, 2009, most of the embassy employees and I stood outside the chancery while a bugler played a moving, even haunting version of taps. I gave a short speech on the meaning of Memorial Day, explaining why those who lost their lives in Iraq did not do so in vain, but rather to ensure a new beginning in Iraq and to do their duty to our country. We must, I paraphrased from the Gettysburg Address, take renewed devotion from their sacrifice and complete the unfinished business.

A few yards away, a convoy of Chevy Suburbans stood ready for the end of the ceremony and a trip to Anbar Province to inspect a water treatment facility under construction near Fallujah. Standing outside his vehicle ready to jump in was Terry Barnich, a three-year Embassy Baghdad veteran, the deputy director of U.S. reconstruction projects. Just a couple of weeks before, Terry and I had been throwing a lacrosse ball around, and Terry, the ultimate team player, had then ordered a dozen lacrosse sticks to help form a small club. “We need some exercise around here,” Terry explained.

That Memorial Day, at around 3:30
P.M.
near Fallujah, Terry together with Navy Commander Duane Wolfe and a civilian contractor, Dr. Maged Hussin, were killed when their Chevy Suburban triggered an improvised explosive device (IED). Their remains were brought back to the embassy that night. Terry’s lacrosse sticks arrived in the mail the next day, now part of his estate. The deaths of our colleagues affected the entire embassy. Barnich was very popular, his water projects so obviously helpful to the Iraqis, and yet he died in a senseless attack. I thought about what
Katharina Frasure had said to me on going out to the Balkans soon after Bob’s death, “How can you do this to your family?”

Soon after I arrived in Iraq, I was asked to produce a weekly memo for the president to update him on what was going on in Iraq. This request turned into a monthlong tug of war between the NSC staff and the State Department, because if I was to write a regular memo, surely it should be addressed to the secretary first. Finally, in a decision worthy of King Solomon, it was decided that the memo would go to both the president and the secretary, but it would first make its way to the State Department, addressed “Madam Secretary,” so that the secretary could read and reflect on it, then forward it on to the president with her own cover note.

On May 27, 2009, I began the series of memos that gave further details about the loss of our three colleagues two days before, discussed the Iraqi efforts to invite international oil companies for tenders and addressed some of the Iraqi challenges in normalizing relations with neighboring Kuwait (Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait almost twenty years before, and yet sanctions on contemporary Iraq were still in place). I also weighed in on discussions with the interagency committee on what kind of Iraq election law we should support (whether closed-list candidates or open list, though I thought this was a subject more appropriately discussed in Iraq by Iraqis, rather than among well-meaning micro-managers in Washington), explained the state-of-play on developing a mechanism for dealing with the Kurdish-Arab internal boundary disputes, and concluded with some thoughts about the upcoming visit to Washington of Prime Minister Maliki.