Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (49 page)

The State Department had put up a ferocious fight to make sure these memos did not go directly to the White House, but in fifteen months of writing them, I never received a single comment from anyone in the State Department. President Obama was the only person I ever heard from on the weekly memo. During a briefing Odierno and I gave to him in the Oval Office, he noticed the content of the briefing overlapped with that week’s memo. “You covered that in last week’s memo,” he said. I was impressed by the fact that at least someone reads back there.

It was increasingly clear that Iraq remained the military’s problem, not the State Department’s. It is not to say that Iraq was not on people’s minds in Washington. But it was increasingly a legacy issue, a matter of keeping faith with our troops rather than seeing Iraq as a strategic issue in the region.

Shia-led Iraq did not fit into any broader theme that the administration was trying to accomplish in the Middle East. The launching of former Senate majority leader George Mitchell’s mission as the Middle East envoy had been grounded almost immediately by the decision to press the Israelis for a settlement freeze as a precondition to the resumption of talks. In June 2009, Mitchell’s team began to consider options for how to approach President Bashar al Assad in Damascus to explore whether there might be flexibility on the issue of the Golan Heights. CENTCOM commander Petraeus had taken the view that the Syrians had in fact been helpful on the increasingly peaceful border with Iraq, and that this level of cooperation should be rewarded with a senior U.S. trip to Damascus and discussions with Assad about broader issues. A senior-level trip to Damascus on Middle East peace would be controversial enough, so a cover story was concocted in which the discussion would involve border stability with Iraq. The department asked me to inform Maliki of our intentions to talk with Assad, and to reassure him that the discussions were very preliminary, and that if they went anywhere they would surely not involve any requests made of the Iraqis.

I had already met with Maliki on several occasions in my first few weeks at post. He was intelligent and thoughtful, tending to get down to business faster than the average Iraqi politician. He had a dry sense of humor, and some irony that also eluded many of his contemporaries, not to speak of Washington visitors often frustrated at the lack of any English language capacity. Apart from saying “very good” excessively to visitors, Maliki appeared to offer very little. Extremely thin-skinned, he devoted much of his interpersonal skills to detecting any slights, real or imagined. Fortunately, this extreme sensitivity did not appear to extend
to the casual clothing sometimes chosen by Washington visitors to the war zone. Maliki wore dark suits and dark neckties seemingly every day of the year.

He listened to the reassurances I offered on Syria, and thanked me for the heads-up. Then, at first politely, and later not so, he got to the point, “You Americans have no idea what you are dealing with in that regime,” he said. “Everything for those people is a negotiation, like buying fruit in a market.” He gestured at the luncheon table. “If you even mention us [Iraq], Assad will see it as something you are concerned about losing and will make you pay in the negotiation for it. Please do not even say the word
Iraq
to him. Just keep it on your Middle East negotiations. That is your business, not mine.” Okay, I thought. That became a typical meeting with Maliki. Not a lot of fun, but at least I know where he stood.

So much, I thought, for the idea that Maliki had some kind of special relations with the Assad regime. I sent the telegram in to the department. Within a few days I learned from the embassy’s political-military counselor, Michael Corbin, who was soon to become the Iran-Iraq deputy assistant secretary and briefly visiting Washington in preparation for that assignment, that the proverbial road to Damascus had been closed for permanent repair. Not that I had thought it a particularly good idea to go there in the first place, but I asked Michael why the idea had been shelved, and whether Maliki’s skepticism had played any role. “No idea,” he told me, reflecting the chaotic information flow in Washington. “But I’m sure it had nothing to do with what anyone in Iraq said about it.”

As the Obama administration spent its first six months sorting out who was going to do what, it was increasingly unclear in fact just who was doing what. An embassy, especially a large player like Embassy Baghdad, needs someone in D.C. to watch its back. I had had high hopes that Undersecretary Bill Burns would play that role, but he seemed to have been asked to do everything not Iraq, including taking on the task of ensuring that Iran policy would not be taken over by the White House with
the creation of a special envoy position. Although special envoy Dennis Ross, a former Middle East envoy and an internationally respected expert on the region, was to sit at the department, the ease with which he enjoyed relationships in the White House (indeed, all across Washington) made it understandable why the secretary had wanted a crafty operator like Bill to shadow that issue.

The decision to pull Bill away from Iraq meant that our backstop would be Deputy Secretary James Steinberg. Although a political appointee, Jim had had vast experience in the State Department and the White House during the Clinton administration and could be counted on as a steady presence in the interagency process, often a microwave cookbook of bad, half-baked ideas (such as micro-managing what kind of candidate lists to have in the Iraqi election law). Jim had an appetite for facts and figures, and a talent for taking any idea, good or bad, and analyzing the perils of it in such a way that soon everyone would want to wheel it back into the garage for further work. Jim saved people from themselves on a daily basis.

But within months, there were rumors that Jim was unhappy with his role at State. Jim was above all a foreign policy realist, especially on China, where he had delivered a thoughtful speech on the need to overcome “strategic mistrust” (during the first term of the Obama administration the word
strategic
was often married with another word, for example
patience,
to convey thoughtfulness in foreign policy), but his reflections on China were not necessarily what the administration was looking for at the time. He seemed increasingly unhappy with the more strident tone the Obama administration was taking on China and other issues. I knew he could not be counted on for long to carry water for us back in Washington.

The Near Eastern Bureau leadership was often criticized for being inadequately seized with Israel’s agenda. Many of NEA’s leaders had already done their Iraq time and had no intention of doing any more if they could avoid it. Iraq, so the thinking went, was someone else’s
problem—especially the military’s, and rarely did Shia-led Iraq help on any regional issues that NEA was concerned about. Assistant Secretary Jeff Feltman, a veteran Arabist who had had a career in the region in small but important posts, culminating as ambassador in war-torn Lebanon, seemed particularly distressed by Iraq, insofar as it caused him problems with the rest of the region and with the Pentagon suspicions that the State Department lacked commitment. Iraq got the bureaucratic reputation as a loser, something to stay away from. No question, Shia-led Iraq was the black sheep of the region, with no natural allies anywhere.

• • •

Meanwhile, NEA was far more concerned that George Mitchell’s Middle East peace efforts be integrated with its own. The bureau was always focused on the elusive peace in the Middle East, but it also was the traditional sounding board for ambassadors from the Gulf Arab states and peninsular Arab states to come into the State Department and complain about their neighbors—in this case about Shia Iraq. The Saudis were the most vociferous of these—repeatedly accusing Maliki of “lying to the king,” without offering any details of what the alleged prevarication was. In turn, I would receive messages from the department to go in and tell Maliki he had a problem with the Saudis and needed to solve it. I never got very far with him.

In June 2009, President Obama announced that Vice President Biden would take on special responsibilities for Iraq. I welcomed the vice president’s involvement, especially since no one else seemed to have our back in Washington. There was the usual Washington silliness that followed the announcement. First, that the president was fobbing the issue off (in fact, the vice president is a pretty senior person). Then, that Secretary Clinton wasn’t interested (her plate was rather full trying to deal with the rest of the world). After that passed, Biden jumped in, and soon I would receive telephone calls that often started with “Hey Chris, this is Joe.” The vice president (I never called him Joe, nor did anyone else that I could see) visited Iraq on the Fourth of July, and his interest never
wavered. He brought with him a talented staff, including Tony Blinken and Herro Mustafa.

On June 30, 2009, Prime Minister Maliki gave a speech to announce a major development in the U.S.-Iraqi Security Agreement. The occasion was the anniversary of the 2003 assassination of the Iraqi Shia leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. After a few words in memory of the fallen ayatollah, Maliki shifted gears to describe the moment that U.S. forces would withdraw from populated areas as a great victory for the Iraqi people, which did not sit well with those who had backed the war effort. After all, Maliki was suggesting that what had happened was the U.S. forces had in effect been ordered to retreat. But as he talked more about the sacrifice that must attend such a great victory, I began to understand better what he was saying. In essence, Maliki was acknowledging that the Iraqi forces that would soon take over checkpoints and mobile patrols would have their problems doing so. He was bracing people for more casualties to follow.

I understood what he was saying, but it sure didn’t win him any friends in Washington. Ray Odierno spoke with him soon thereafter to tell him he needed to make a gesture, suggesting that during his upcoming visit to Washington he visit Arlington National Cemetery and lay a wreath. He did so, but it was too little, too late. Maliki’s reputation never recovered in Washington, and complaints about him, whether in matters of human rights or relations with Sunni neighbors, or his attitudes toward Americans, or political alliances within Iraq, all seemed to reinforce each other with the conclusion that Iraq would be better off with a new prime minister, perhaps one who did not seem systematically to upset every conceivable constituent group. Nonetheless, Maliki was a formidable player who could outwork and often outthink his rivals. For years, U.S. officials had looked for a strong Iraqi leader, and having found one they objected to the fact that he didn’t do what he was told. As Bob Frasure had once said about a certain Balkan leader, “We wanted a junkyard dog like this for a long time. Why would people expect him to start sitting in our lap?”

The Washington-based concerns about Maliki, reinforced by the complaints from other Arab countries, gave rise to the view that somehow we needed to replace him, as if this were our responsibility let alone within our capability. Foreign ambassadors in Baghdad, having heard the discontent reported by their colleagues in Washington, came to my embassy to ask me, “So, how are you going to get rid of him?” as if I had instructions to do so. My sense was that these foreign ambassadors were hearing typical Washington grousing and were then pole-vaulting to the conclusion that we were hatching a plan. Obviously that was not the case, but I could tell that the talk was reaching the ever paranoid Maliki and not helping our relationship with him. I could see that a similar process was unwinding in Afghanistan. Even if the United States were a latter-day Roman Empire as some neo-con pundits seemed to want, we still have to work with local leaders like Maliki and Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai. Our ability to cooperate with them is not facilitated by reports that we are trying to get rid of them.

But even if we wanted to topple Maliki, you can’t beat something with nothing, and the Iraqi political landscape was not exactly blooming with new political prospects. As sparse as that landscape looked to me, I never lacked for advice coming from Washington, where some seemed to think that choosing Iraqi leaders was akin to forming a fantasy football team. People who had served in Iraq, and for whom time froze when they left, increasingly manned Iraq policy. Thus I was treated to suggestions, often in the form of admonishments, as to why I hadn’t recently visited such-and-such a politician, who, I was to glean, had been some kind of hot prospect back in 2004 and 2005.

The months wore on, through the hot summer and then the fall of 2009, punctuated by an enormous truck bomb that had devastated the Foreign Ministry building and killed several hundred people. I was visiting Kirkuk that day, but people in the embassy, miles from the ministry, reported they could feel the blast in their offices.

I visited the victims who had been taken to the U.S. hospital for emergency help in attempting to remove shards of glass that were
dangerously lodged near vital organs and in their eyes. Victims lay on hospital cots, bloody gauze everywhere. Some moaned, but most stayed quiet in their misery as family members gathered around each bed. Whether it was because they were dazed or whether because they were Iraqis, nobody complained. Later in the day I went to the Foreign Ministry, where I saw the extent of the damage, the façade ripped off to reveal what had been normally functioning offices just seconds before. There was an enormous crater where the tractor-trailer truck had been parked in front of the building on the near lane of a four-lane road. Nearby automobiles, including a lime-green taxi, had been hurled into the air and had somehow landed on the other side of the road; bloodstains were easily visible on the doors and windows of the taxi.

Foreign Minister Zebari met me in a makeshift ground-floor office, smiling and otherwise indicating that there had been but a minor disturbance, rather like a leak in a water main or an interruption in the electricity. He clearly had emerged from the horror determined not to allow it to defeat him, drawing on an inner toughness that his years in the mountains of Kurdistan had given him. He took me on a tour of the ground floor and introduced me to the structural engineer, who pronounced the building sound and ready for reconstruction as soon as the cleanup, already fast under way, was finished. Nobody seemed interested in the American forensic investigators’ advice to leave things as they happened to allow “evidence” to be collected. Everyone wanted to clean it up and try to forget it happened. “How long will it take to rebuild it?” I asked the engineer.