Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (51 page)

Ray’s staff often worried about the influence his British political advisor had over him, especially as she was known for harboring very strong opinions generally, and especially on the subject of Maliki. Indeed, Maliki’s tough-minded behavior, his own bitter disappointment at not coming out ahead of Allawi, and his increasing feistiness on every issue were making him a thoroughly unlikable and unlikely candidate to replace himself. The foreign press corps was completely against him. Most foreign diplomats were against him, including the U.S. Embassy’s own political section.

I noticed too that a pattern I had seen many times in the Balkans was playing out in Iraq: Iraqis would tell foreigners things that were different from what they would tell each other. Time and time again, a politician would say things like “never will I support Maliki,” but two weeks later he would be in Maliki’s office cutting a deal of some kind. Thus a foreign
observer—especially a visitor—could come away with a very wrongheaded assessment of Maliki’s relative support.

Maliki was far from my ideal candidate, but I had real doubts whether someone else was going to be able to unseat him. “Can’t beat someone with no one,” I kept repeating to Gary, Yuri, and other members of the political section, who always seemed to fall silent when I asked the question, “If not Maliki, then if you were king who do you suggest for prime minister?” as if it were our choice to make. As the crucial postelection weeks of April and May 2010 rolled by, Allawi spent more of his time traveling abroad, using a jet provided him by the Gulf states, and never building any additional political support beyond the ninety-one seats he already had. I also noticed that regardless of Maliki’s volatile and at times ugly behavior, there seemed to be no swing from the other Shia blocs toward Allawi, despite kind words that people had for Allawi in discussions with foreigners.

The process suggested to me that much of what we were seeing from the other Shia was just bluster and an effort to give Maliki a well-deserved hard time, but that whenever Maliki was prepared to show some real respect and humility toward them, he could also gain their support. Maliki’s Shia detractors had plenty of kind words for Allawi, but I could not see that any of them were truly prepared to support Allawi’s Iraqiyya. Listening to the Kurds in Erbil, many describe Iraqiyya as a crypto-Baathist party. I became skeptical that Allawi’s party would ever be allowed by the Shia and Kurds to become the governing party. He seemed to have no chance of increasing the number of seats through coalition building beyond the ninety-one he had won in the actual election.

Allawi was a Shia, but he was not a Shia leader. Those foreigners, and especially those foreigners who had not seen these political patterns in other countries, who believed that a Shia without Shia constituents could become prime minister in Iraq’s current circumstances didn’t understand the game being played. During my time in the Balkans, every leader I ever met had members of the other ethnicities at his side to claim that he
had broader support than just his own people. But the fact that Milosevic had an Albanian or two in his delegation, or Tudjman had a Serb, or Izetbegovic had a Croat really did not change the basic political calculation.

The fact that the Sunni community had Allawi, a “secular Shia,” as its leader did not have an impact on how the Shia voted. During the hard-fought campaign, Allawi never ventured into southern Iraq, where most of the Shia lived. In short, he did not make the slightest effort to gain Shia votes. I concluded that the government formation period was not going to be even close, but I hedged my comments to Washington, not wanting to seem pro-Maliki or anti-Allawi. I concluded we needed to focus on a better Maliki than he had been in his first four-year term, rather than engage in a quixotic effort to try to oust him.

By the end of April I was reporting to Secretary Clinton and President Obama that Allawi could not win, but that Maliki “remains a force to be reckoned with,” however unpopular he was in some circles. I concluded in my note that “we need to be mindful that at the end of this messy process, Maliki could still wind up on top.”

The thought that Maliki could ultimately win was not welcomed by many Iraq watchers, especially those for whom experience had taught them the bitter lesson to be very attentive to Sunni sensitivities. For these veterans of those painful times, a victory by the “secular” Iraqiyya seemed to be what the doctor ordered. But as secular as it looked to foreigners, within Iraq, especially among the Shia, Iraqiyya looked a lot like an all-in Sunni party. During the election campaign, Shia leaders, including the neoconservative hero Ahmed Chalabi, had waged what was an unspoken anti-Sunni campaign using the old de-Baathification boogeyman. Chalabi had been a consistent voice in Washington for the invasion, and was expected by many to assume a place in the Iraq senior leadership. As with many people who have been away from their country for decades, he wasn’t as well-known in Baghdad as he was in Washington.

I spent numerous sessions over the months convincing Maliki to distance himself from this smear tactic, but Maliki understood the
successful politics of it and was not going to completely disassociate himself. (Indeed, my efforts with him earned me a public rebuke from Maliki’s spokesman for interfering in Iraq’s politics.) Sectarianism was on the rise through the campaign, and the government formation period offered the prospect of things getting even worse.

After one of our daily, morning joint leadership meetings, in which Ray Odierno gave a glass-half-empty monologue for some ten minutes, complaining about Maliki’s shortcomings, I half-jokingly told him and the others that “worrying is not a policy,” nor is “pique a substitute for policy,” Eagleburger’s old line. If we thought it would be in our interest to steer things one direction or the other, we would certainly need support from Washington, but my reading was that the major concern was not who became prime minister, but rather the fact that the weeks were going by and there was no prime minister. I suggested we ought to support a “grand coalition” government and bring Maliki and Allawi together. Ray agreed, our staffs agreed, and even Washington agencies agreed that this would be our approach.

Encouraging Allawi and Maliki to work together was far-fetched stuff, but I had seen stranger bedfellows before (Izetbegovic and Tudjman, to name one such odd couple). Besides, the drift in Iraq politics during that spring was that Maliki was being forced to reach out to the other Shia parties, something that appeared attainable provided he was willing to eat a hefty portion of humble pie; but if he succeeded, it would exacerbate the Sunni-Shia rift. As much as the Sunnis tried to suggest (especially to uninformed foreigners) that Maliki was a sectarian/Iranian agent, in fact, State of Law under Maliki was one of the most secular of the Shia political structures. Enlisting to the Shia coalition the viscerally anti-American and populist Sadrists would not be a step forward toward more secular rule.

As I often did for an in-country sanity check, I went up to Kurdistan to meet with President Barzani. This time Barzani had a special treat in mind, hiking around the mountains of eastern Kurdistan. Certainly,
Barzani has his critics, but for me he was what I wished for in all the Iraqi politicians—sensible, intelligent, moderate, pragmatic, and with a sense of history (he and his father had lived it) and timing. He understood Iraqi Arab politics better than the Iraqi Arabs did. And while he, like most Kurds, wanted an independent homeland, he also understood that the best route to that destination lay through a positive and enduring relationship with the United States. We walked along the mountain ridges, looking out and up at rock-strewn and sharply pointed mountaintops, a wild and forbidding landscape in one of the world’s most remote regions. Barzani, wearing his trademark Peshmerga khaki uniform with billowing trousers, a more traditional military shirt, and red and white checkered tribal turban, assured me, as he always did, “Don’t worry. When the time is right, we will be part of the solution.”

I was indeed worried. Our efforts to get Maliki and Allawi to work together were really going nowhere, and meanwhile there were growing signs that the Shia were beginning to tighten up their own internal lines of communication and perhaps even bring the Sadrists into the coalition to help Maliki increase his total of 89 seats to the 163 he needed to control the Council of Representatives. My team had arranged a meeting between Maliki and Allawi, down to furnishing each the cell phone number of the other so they could be in direct communication, but it seemed to have no carry-over effect, and I was left to believe that perhaps both leaders had agreed to meet to get us off their backs rather than for each other, much less for Iraq.

I suspected that Allawi knew what I also knew, that he did not have any chance of running the country. Allawi had a special problem, however. Many of the Sunni Arab states, especially in the Gulf, who had backed him—indeed bankrolled him—as head of Iraqiyya had also believed his promise that he could pull off the political miracle: essentially returning Iraq to a Sunni- or quasi-Sunni-based government. I tried to encourage NEA to spend less time listening to Sunni Arab states’ complaints about Maliki and more time convincing them that Maliki
was not an Iranian agent but wanted to play a role with the Arab states, provided they could get over the fact that he was a Shia leader. In fairness to NEA, their Gulf Arab interlocutors were not going to listen to a pitch about Shias in Iraq and change their minds, but I thought we needed to show more support and confidence in what we had essentially created in Iraq, that is, majority rule, which in the current context of political identity meant Shia-led rule.

I told President Obama and Secretary Clinton in my April 20 note to them that the risk of Iraq becoming an Iranian client state was “negligible” because there was far too much nationalism in the country for that to happen (nationalism that made foreign interference in the government formation process risky). The real problem, I pointed out to the president, was for Shia-led Iraq to become “an Arab outcast, isolated from and resentful of its neighbors.”

In late April, I spent a day in Qatar visiting Al Jazeera studios, followed by another day in Oman, where I met for a couple of hours with the sultan. In Qatar, I sensed the depth of mistrust toward the Shia Iraqis, the fervent hope that Allawi’s Iraqiyya would ultimately prevail and somehow restore the order of Iraq. But with the wise and deliberate sultan of Oman, I received a different message: that Americans needed to stop, in effect, jamming square pegs into round holes. “Your country is welcomed in this part of the world, but be respectful of what you encounter on the ground, what the forces are, and that sometimes change can come in the air, and when it does it can be difficult to analyze just in terms of politics.”

The sultan talked about Maliki in historical terms, not just in terms of the politics of the moment. He sat in his armchair, in his flowing robes, a large embroidered sash around his small waist, with a ceremonial dagger, its precious stones and brilliant colors reflecting in the light, tucked in the front. The conversation concluded after about ninety minutes, but I could have listened to him all night. Iraq was different from other countries, with two rivers and a unique history that flow through it, he explained.
My goodness, I thought as I slowly walked out of his palace, still pondering his wisdom. How I wished the sultan could address the interagency meetings back in Washington.

On May 10, in my note to the president and secretary I emphasized again that in consultations across the political spectrum of Iraq (except for the Sadrists, whose vitriolic views of the American presence meant that we had only minimal contacts over the years) “none” of them could see Allawi’s way to the prime minister position. I met on several occasions with Ammar al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), another major Shia party. Hakim’s party had not fared well in the elections, but because he was a frequent critic of Maliki and Maliki’s Dawa party, I looked for clues whether Hakim’s often kind words for Allawi might eventually become outright support. It never happened. Instead it was a useful reminder that what Iraqi politicians tell foreigners should not be confused with what goes on inside Arab councils.

In the meantime, Bill Roebuck and Eric Carlson, two members of our very strong and active political section, worked with President Talabani’s staff to draft an Iraqi presidential statement, effectively ending the notorious “Accountability and Justice Commission,” aka the de-Baathification Committee, which Chalabi and his henchmen had used to try to ban Sunni politicians from taking their seats in the new Council of Representatives.

While the political stalemate continued, on May 28 I took a day trip along with General Vince Brooks, the enormously gifted commander of our forces in the south of Iraq, and senior British Petroleum officials down to the Rumaila oil field to see Weatherford International, an American drilling company based in Houston, Texas, and working for BP, as they struck oil.

May 2010 was an unusual time to be extolling the virtues of BP. Just a month before in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20, a BP offshore well had blown out, killing eleven workers and spilling 200 million gallons of crude oil, endangering the wetlands and beaches along much of the Gulf
Coast of the United States. But in Iraq, BP’s investment and start-up operations represented a crucial and hopeful moment for the future.

Iraq had not seen a foreign oil producer search for oil on its territory in more than forty years, due to a combination of Iraq’s own nationalistic policies and international sanctions. The consequence was that oil was in the hands of various Iraqi state oil companies whose own technology levels, not to speak of their environmental record, had much to be desired. Flying over Iraq would reveal pools of oil sitting in the desert, and at night flares of gas illuminating the desert.

Given the role that oil had played in the international debate about the war in the first place, populist nationalistic sentiments in Iraq against foreign oil companies continued to persist despite Iraq’s desperate need for foreign investment. These sentiments, which were strongest among Iraq’s oil worker unions, combined with a political deadlock over the sharing of power and wealth between the provinces and the central authorities. Both acted to thwart progress in passing the hydrocarbon legislation in Iraq’s fractious legislative body. Proposed legislation had sat in the Council of Deputies since early 2007 with little prospect for approval.