Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (52 page)

The embassy’s interest in Iraqi oil was never to safeguard the oil for American companies, but rather to ensure that whatever process the Iraqis agreed on, it would be fair and transparent to all the oil companies. As much as oil was publicly discussed as a motivation for the war, it was never really considered in those terms. Rather, from the president on down, oil was described as a huge revenue source for the Iraqis, and as a potential means to help keep the Kurds within the Iraqi state, the three provinces of Iraq that made up the Kurdish Regional Government.

When Secretary Clinton arrived for her whirlwind, six-hour visit back in April 2009, Iraqi deputy prime minister Barham Salah informed her of a very tentative plan to move ahead with technical service contracts even in the absence of the hydrocarbon legislation. The Iraqis, under Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, had launched this process in 2008 along with a prequalification review, only to drop the proposal later that year in
the face of political and labor opposition. This time, according to Salah, they seemed ready to move to approve long-term contracts in the absence of the elusive hydrocarbon law. The Iraqi concept was to retain ownership of the fields and pay for the production activity with oil. He asked for technical assistance in the form of an American advisor.

The embassy’s economic section immediately got to work. By coincidence we had an oil expert, an academic, coming to Iraq anyway. After two weeks of working with the Oil Ministry he endorsed the Iraqi plan as feasible even in the absence of the much-anticipated hydrocarbon legislation.

Back on June 30, 2009, the first bid round opened in a ballroom in the al-Rashid Hotel with television lights and cameras turned on as representatives of major oil companies made their way to the stage to deposit their bids in a large Plexiglas urn. I watched the show on live television, suspecting that the oil companies, as their representatives had told me, were not going to be aggressive in trying to meet the Iraqi demands. The embassy’s economic section, led by John Desrocher and his deputy, John Carwile, and our oil expert, Patrick Dunn, were present for the bid. There was a buzz in the room as the bidding got under way, but when Oil Minister Shahristani announced there would be no sharing of profits, but rather a fixed price paid for each barrel, there was a stunned silence, and some laughter when he announced the figure two dollars above the benchmark. As it turned out, only BP and a Chinese partner (the China National Petroleum Corporation, CNPC) won their bid for one of the major blocks, the Rumaila field, with estimated reserves in excess of 17 billion barrels. The international press pronounced the event a complete failure. After all, the Iraqis had put up some of the largest oil fields in the world and had failed to reach their minimal demands.

The international press had a field day with the apparent failure of the bidding process, while other Middle East countries, which had been somewhat worried about Iraq’s potential as a rival, breathed a sigh of relief.

I invited Oil Minister Shahristani to my home to talk about the
situation, and to my surprise he told me that in fact he was very pleased with what had happened. Importantly for him, there were some Iraqi oil worker protests of the BP bid, but overall his concerns about mounting antiforeign sentiment never materialized. BP, he pointed out, was not exactly an insignificant player, and had jumped in on Iraqi terms to take the largest field. By the end of July 2009, the BP contract was approved, and Shahrastani was fast putting together plans for a next round of bids.

I briefed Vice President Biden, who visited a few days after the bidding round, during the Fourth of July holiday, and told him that the situation had gone better than many believed and that Shahrastani had plans for another round. I told him that there might be another benefit to how the Iraqis were handling their oil. If other major companies follow BP’s lead, that might start to convince the Kurds that their interests are served by staying in Iraq and getting their share of the giant amounts of oil that will be produced in southern Iraq.

“You mean oil can actually become the glue that eventually holds Iraq together?” he asked. As I listened I thought how I wished I could occasionally think of big, gushing metaphors like that. “You’re absolutely right, Mr. Vice President,” I responded still, trying to gauge how badly a line like that would go down in a State Department cable, even though he had grasped something that most of our experts in the State Department had not.

In November 2009, oil company executives again converged on the al-Rashid Hotel and one by one approached the Plexiglas urn with envelopes containing their bids in hand. This time thirty-two firms were involved in the bid, and several of the largest came away with a field: The Brits and Dutch (Shell), the French (Total), the Russians (Lukoil), the Italians (ENI), the South Koreans (Kogas), and the Americans with Exxon Mobil and Occidental. Several of these bids were ultimately changed as some oil companies sold them and others wanted in. As a Total executive said, “It is difficult for any major oil company not to be in Iraq.”

The desert was flat, and the dirt and sand packed hard. Looking out over the vast landscape on that day with General Brooks in May 2010, I could see nothing growing, not even a shrub. It looked like the surface of the moon.

We toured the facility and saw the housing being erected for international workers. There was also a set of CHUs to house the Chinese workers. Chris Klein, cupping his hand against the side of his mouth, whispered to me, “Those are the Fu Man CHUs.”

We congregated in a boardroom, located in one of the prefab structures that now sat defiantly on the inhospitable desert, the air-conditioning struggling mightily to counter the sweltering 130-degree heat outside. There were BP officials and local Iraqis representing local government and the Basra Chamber of Commerce. The mood was festive as we raised our glasses to toast BP. I leaned over to Chris Klein: “I must be the only American ambassador in the world toasting the accomplishments of BP this month.”

I spoke to several of the newly employed Iraqi engineers, all wearing bright orange overalls, about their new careers working for an American oil drilling company. They were proud of the affiliation with Weatherford and obviously pleased to be employed, and their mood was buoyant. I told them I was making a visit to Baghdad University and meeting students the next day. What should I tell them?

“Tell them to learn English,” one engineer instantly answered. “Tell them to study math and chemistry and computers, but above all tell them to study English. That is the language of engineering, and of democracy.”

On May 18, 2010, I wrote to the president and secretary that Maliki is “in the driver’s seat.” I added a note of caution about how it was not in our interest to be seen running around forming the government. We needed to show some patience toward the Iraqi process, such as it is.

But patience is a hard thing to find in Washington, as I knew from Korea and the Balkans. Soon we were getting offers of assistance. The assistant secretary of NEA came out to post together with a member of the National Security Council staff for the first of several visits to “help.”

“Did you say, help?” Gary Grappo asked me. Gary, like the rest of his team, was working all day and half the night meeting with difficult Iraqi counterparts in their offices and homes, trying to forge consensus on points that could pave the way for a winning bloc that could cobble together the 163 seats necessary for a majority in the 325-seat parliament. He didn’t want to pull fully employed political officers off to become babysitters for Washington visitors.

Petraeus was the first to offer reinforcements starting with his two Arab-American interpreters, who over the course of his time in Iraq had morphed into his political advisors. A few months before, one of them arrived in Baghdad unannounced to say that Petraeus had sent him to help with the election law. I told Ray: “He’s all yours. I don’t need him.” Ray didn’t need him either and put him on the next flight out. When the request came again (this time at least in advance), the political section did some due diligence and told me they wanted nothing to do with these people. I got the same reaction from Iraqis, including, amusingly, Maliki and Allawi and one of Barzani’s aides. “Finally, Maliki and Allawi agree on something!” I told Gary. When I learned that Petraeus had flown the then-retired Ryan Crocker up from Texas in a military plane to accompany him as a kind of civilian avatar for consultations in Washington on what we were doing wrong in Iraq (and Afghanistan), I looked up at the calendar on my wall to see how much more of this I needed to endure before my planned August 2010 departure. I had promised Secretary Clinton one year and now I was in extra time. I had seen a lot of micromanaging from Washington over the course of my career, but I had never seen a four-star general take an interest in staffing up junior positions in an embassy’s political section. “What do these people have on him?” was the usual question people had. Crocker was a class act about what he obviously understood were rather poor manners in second-guessing two embassies in the field (offering free advice to our colleagues in Kabul was also fast becoming a cottage industry in Washington). I sent an email to Crocker to ask for his version of what had transpired in the meetings in Washington. He responded that he had limited his own
comments to his view that the State Department needed to do a better job of recruiting FSOs to multiple tours in the war zones, a point he had made before to many audiences in and out of government.

Within a few weeks, Petraeus was on his way to Afghanistan to take over for General Stanley McChrystal.

“That was an interesting move,” I said to Vice President Biden about Petraeus’s assignment to Kabul when Biden visited in early July 2010. As he got into the backseat of a Chevy Suburban with me I asked, “Whose was it?” He tapped his own chest with his thumb and had a look on his face that told me all I needed to know.

With Biden again in town the “rocketeers” in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, four miles away, soon greeted him. One rocket screamed over the head of the vice president as he prepared to get out of his Chevy Suburban.

The type and amount of fuel packed into the 107mm modified Russian weapon (which came into the hands of the Shia militia groups via Iran) varied considerably. Some rockets (like the one that flew over the vice president’s head) landed harmlessly in the river beyond. Other rockets landed on the way to the American Embassy, sometimes short, on the nearby compound belonging to the Korean embassy, which was in the line of fire from Sadr City. The Korean ambassador, Ha Tae Yun, a career diplomat, had earlier invited me over to see his modestly sized facility (he slept in the back half of his small office) and hosted me in his dining room to some of the best Korean cuisine I had ever had outside of Seoul. I turned to Chris Klein, who was sitting beside me, and commented, “Isn’t it great to be back with Koreans having great food but not having to talk about North Korea’s nuclear program?”

The visits of the vice president were often an eventful time for the Koreans. During a briefing of foreign ambassadors a day after Biden’s visit, Ambassador Ha said, earnestly but with a Korean sense of humor that sometimes goes over the head of westerners not expecting Korean irony, “We understand that for security reasons you cannot tell us ahead
of time that you have a senior official visiting, but if you could just give us just a few minutes’ warning so we have time to get into our underground shelter it would be very appreciated.”

The vice president was indeed a frequent visitor. He had come just a few weeks before I arrived and a couple of weeks after I left in August 2010, six visits in a space of not much more than twenty months. Biden is known as someone who likes to talk, but I admired the fact that when he came to Iraq he did an awful lot of listening. We discussed the way forward, the fact that unless we wanted to create a political crisis in the summer of 2010, we were going to have a difficult time encouraging the unseating of Maliki, if that was really what people wanted. I told him that the other idea, circulating around Washington at the time among so-called Iraq experts, was that somehow President Talabani could be coaxed out of the presidency and replaced by Allawi.

I told Vice President Biden that I could understand the logic, but that kind of radical political surgery undertaken on Iraq now, in the year 2010, made little sense. The United States continued to have much influence in this country, I told him, but picking and choosing winners (and losers) was way beyond anything we could do by then. Perhaps back in 2004 or 2005, but in 2010 Iraq was its own country with its own political system, which we would interfere with at our peril.

Talabani remained popular in Iraq, with broad appeal that crossed sectarian lines. His ability to speak with all sides of the political equation was as unusual as it was valuable. He often kept Maliki in check when no one else would or could. He no doubt had his flaws, but for the United States to get down into the mud of Iraqi politics and force him out of the ring left me speechless. After seven years in the country we apparently had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.

Part of the implied justification for pushing Talabani out (apart from the expediency of making Iraqiyya happier) was that he had a friendship with the Iranian Quds Force commander, the murderous Qasim Sulaimani. It was a reminder that in Iraq, politics can be very local, as well
as very personal. As mentioned earlier, when Saddam Hussein’s forces used chemical weapons in the village of Halabja, near Talabani’s home in Sulemaniyah, the Iranians had kept the border open to give refugee to the survivors of the massacre. When I visited Halabja, I never heard a negative word about Iran.

I told the vice president that my team and I had one other idea that we had been working on for a couple of weeks, but that it too could be just another dive into another empty swimming pool (a metaphor Bob Frasure had often used while we struggled to find governance solutions in Bosnia). It was to create a new position for Allawi as the head of a powerful national security council. I told the vice president that I had asked one of our embassy lawyers, the young, imaginative, and practically minded Ben Metz, to see what could be created, with the understanding that we could not try to change the constitution. Ben looked carefully at the constitution and told Gary and me and the rest of the political section that it could be possible to create such a position that did not undermine the roles already established for the prime minister, the presidency, and the speaker of the parliament.