An Air Force Academy graduate’s experience with the serpentine, frustrating, fulfilling pursuit of a democratic Iraq.
September, 2009
Baghdad, Iraq
Up at 0530, dress, pack, grab my PPE (personal protective equipment—30-pound steel-plated vest and Kevlar helmet) and rush out into the morning heat to join Ambassador Chris Hill at the U.S. Embassy’s helo pad. We toss in our baggage, don our PPE, climb into the Blackhawks, belt ourselves in and lift off. The ambassador and I are joined by two other Foreign Service Officers, the ambassador’s military aid, two State Department Diplomatic Security sharpshooters and, posted just forward at each door, two U.S. Army crewmen manning 7.62 caliber machine guns. No skimping on security.
We soar over the rooftops of sprawling Baghdad toward its international airport. It’s a sad, worn and beaten city, a far cry from the capital of a world superpower of the 8th-10th centuries. The Abbasid Caliphate ruled then in what is described today as the “Golden Age of Islam.” Off to our rear is the Tigris River; further west is the great Euphrates. Between them sits the “cradle of civilization.”
The Super Power That Was
In their day, the Abbasids governed with wisdom, foresight and tolerance, welcoming celebrated scientists, philosophers, writers, architects and others of learning who converged on the capital. They gave mankind much, from agriculture to astronomy, and mathematics to medicine, philosophy, architecture and literature.
Today, in 2015, the cradle of civilization is a gathering place of mankind’s most perversely extremist movements. U.S. troops left three years ago, another Iraqi election has taken place, and the world’s most ruthlessly violent and extremist organization, The Islamic State, now runs its own “caliphate” extending along the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers from outside Aleppo in northern Syria through two western Iraqi provinces, an expanse of nearly 1,000 miles.
In 2009, when I made that journey to Iraq’s north, vague outlines of optimism had begun to appear not just to the Americans but Iraqis, too. Saddam Hussein’s nightmarish tyranny had ended, the bloody sectarian civil war ignited by our invasion was winding down, and Iraqis were now struggling to reclaim, if not the glory of their past, then simple peace and stability. They were wrestling with the unfamiliar political framework we had imposed, democracy. Mostly, they wanted a stable, predictable future. Like their battered and beaten capital, Iraqis had experienced enough violence, death, fear and despair.
Taking the Heat
At the airport, we transfer to our waiting prop plane. The ambassador asks the aircraft crew the temperature.
It’s 0900. “About 105 degrees, sir,” replies an Army warrant officer. “Thought I caught a whiff of fall in the air,” quips the ambassador. Temperatures in Baghdad may climb to 140 at their summer peak. Above 110, Iraq veterans grouse, no one pays attention.
As one of the State Department’s most experienced and highly regarded diplomats, Chris Hill is no stranger to heat. While new to the Middle East, he’s a veteran of the Balkan war (and peace) and the tough, other-worldly negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program. Hand-picked by President Obama and Secretary Clinton, he brings a fresh perspective to a war now entering its seventh year. Like his military counterpart, General Ray Odierno, Commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq, he’s been tasked by the president to take on the tough task of guiding America’s gradual withdrawal from Iraq and helping to fortify the country’s still shaky political underpinnings.
That’s where I come in. Having just completed a three-year stint as American Ambassador to the Sultanate of Oman, my Foreign Service career has concentrated almost exclusively on the Middle East (with early career-shaping tours to Nicaragua during the Contra War and on the Soviet Desk during the fall of the Soviet Union). Dealing with and understanding the region—its unique brand of governance, the abiding influence of Islam, limited freedoms, powerful security services, tense tribal relations, oil-dominant economies, pervasive threat of terrorism, and power-wielding royal families—have been my stock and trade for over 17 years. Armed with that experience and my Arabic, Chris had asked me to head up the embassy’s super-sized political affairs section and lead the push for the elections law and then elections monitoring.
A Valued Diversity
After a one-hour flight, we arrive in Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan. Kurds are ethnically apart from Arabs, who comprise the majority of Iraq’s 33-million population. Kurds speak their own language and possess their own unique culture and a rather colorful but also sometimes tragic history.
In fact, there are many ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq, including Turkomans, Assyrian or Chaldean Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks, Mandaeans, Persians, a remaining handful of a once thriving Jewish community, Marsh Arabs and others. Today, more than 65 percent of Iraqis are Shi’a Muslims. The majority of the rest are Arab and Kurdish Sunnis. All are under threat from the Islamic State, aka ISIS, whose ruthlessly ascetic, primitively sterile and monochromatic vision of the world cannot abide Iraq’s rich diversity.
The Kurds have progressed remarkably since the 1991 Gulf war, when the U.S. saved them from the ravages of Saddam’s army and then protected their return from Turkey under a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone. Iraqi Kurdistan is using its autonomy well, so well in fact that it is Iraq’s most stable region. Turks, Emiratis and Europeans all have growing business interests. In the face of the invading Islamic State, the Kurdish militia, or peshmerga (“those who face death”), has held the line under indispensable U.S. air support. The Iraqi army, trained and equipped by the Americans before our withdrawal, disintegrated.
On a Mountain Top
Following our welcome in Erbil, we move to Blackhawks again for the ride we’ve all been anticipating, a breathtaking 25-minute dash through Kurdistan’s fabled mountains to Kurdish President Masoud Barzani’s mountain retreat. And what a ride it is—zipping over sharp mountain peaks, winding through deep canyons and skipping above glacial rivers. Even our gunners and protective detail are captured by the stunning scenery. We soak in a thrilling helo ride. Kurdistan by Blackhawk! For an Academy graduate with an engrained love of flying, it is downright exhilarating.
The adrenaline-charged flight also reminds me why I love serving the United States as a Foreign Service Officer—seeing the world like no other, all the while serving our interests through diplomacy.
We soon set down on a mountain top, surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs. Not an easy landing, but our Army pilots manage it with characteristic American military precision. I am proud of our servicemen and women here.
Under intense pressure and frightening danger, they serve with remarkable professionalism and pride. It is one reason Iraqis seem to be coming around. Iraqis most definitely want their country back, but many are grudgingly coming to respect what we are trying to do, and perhaps even learning to trust us.
On the mountain-top landing pad, some of the local populace come to greet us, but mostly they gawk at the American helicopter pilots and crews with their Star Wars-like flight gear. Those of us in polos and khakis are a side show. We quietly slip away into awaiting cars. Just the way diplomats like it.
President Barzani greets us and we drive to his guest house for a get-acquainted meeting. The ambassador and I met Barzani before but this visit is intended to get to know the Kurdish president better on his own turf. His support is vital to our work in bringing stability to all of Iraq as the elections approach.
Barzani has governed the KRG since 2005 and led his party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, since 1979. His family has been steeped in Kurdish history for generations.
Trials of Iraq’s Kurds
Essentially a tribal society, Kurds have looked to the Barzani clan and others for leadership for years. The Kurds are also warriors. Barzani recounts for us an early 1970s invasion of Kurdistan by Arab Iraqi, Syrian, Turkish and Iranian forces. The Kurds retreated to their familiar mountain redoubts and awaited the invaders, eventually slaughtering nearly half the Syrians and sending the Iraqis scurrying back to Baghdad and the Iranians and Turks in full retreat back home.
Toward the end of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, however, the tables were turned in what is known as the Al Anfal Campaign, or Kurdish Genocide. Saddam’s army invaded Kurdistan, killed some 100,000 Kurds, displaced a million, and destroyed several thousand Kurdish and Assyrian villages. Saddam sought to forcibly remove the Kurds and resettle their land with Arabs from elsewhere in Iraq.
The Kurds are familiar with suffering and sacrifice. But they are also tough and resilient and masters of guile and inventiveness. Their history dating back to before the Roman Empire has proven that.
Barzani is gracious in our many meetings with him over two days, including a hike through the Kurdish countryside surrounded by squads of watchful peshmerga guards. He also invites us to iftars—the meal breaking the Ramadan fast at sundown—and long evening patio discussions over tea and Cuban cohibas. Barzani shares more Kurdish and Iraqi history, his views on Iraq’s future, the role of Kurds and, important for us, his expectations for the new elections law the parliament must take up.
At the end of our visit, we board our Blackhawks for the reverse of the trip sequence of two days ago. The Blackhawks are perched on the steep cliffs overlooking the river with 400-foot deep canyon walls on both sides. They lift off maybe ten feet and then bank sharply down into the canyon, practically freefalling before leveling off just above the river. Wide-eyed, we adjust to the weightlessness and then marvel at the scenery.
I leave Kurdistan, its people, culture and history with a wonderful first impression. (I ended up making a half-dozen visits there but none like that first.) I would get a more complete picture of them and Iraqi politics in a few very short weeks.
October, 2009
Inside Iraqi Politics
I am sitting in a smoke-filled basement room in Baghdad’s parliament building. It’s mid-October and still well over 100 degrees outside. The air conditioner is wheezing but I hardly feel the coolness. Across the tobacco, coffee and tea-stained table from me, a political officer and Iraqi notetaker, sit representatives of various parties and ethnic groups from Iraq’s Kirkuk and Ninewah provinces vigorously making their case against the latest elections law draft, now six weeks overdue. The Kurds, Turkomans and Sunni Arabs are having a tough time coming to terms. The majority Shi’a Iraqis have gotten pretty much what they wanted and just want to see the others “sort it out,” offering little constructive help.
Over the past four weeks, the Arabic-speaking political officers on my staff and I have been cultivating relationships with Iraqi parliamentarians, cajoling and pleading with as many as possible to help “sort it out” and find compromise. We are non-partisan mediators. Most parliamentarians welcome us; others merely listen and nod politely, offering at least sweet tea if not words. A few, like the popular Muqtada al Sadr’s Sadrist Movement,won’t meet with us, making our job more difficult. Years of political isolation, reinforced by decades of Saddam’s brutal repression, have made Iraqis suspicious and distrustful of “the other,” anyone outside one’s tribe, clan, religious or ethnic group.
But Washington is anxious for a law and for the elections. So, now I spend the better part of my days, usually accompanied by one of my political officers, calling on the Speaker (a Sunni Arab) and Deputy Speakers (a Shi’a Arab and a Kurd), and walking the halls of the parliamentary building to strike up conversations with any member who will talk, i.e., doing what I always presumed lobbyists in our Congress do. I’m on a perpetual caffeinehigh
since the Iraqis always serve strong, sugar-doused tea and stronger Turkish or Arabic coffee.
My officers and I periodically gather in the large downstairs hall of the parliament building, swapping notes on recent meetings, deciphering new positions and alliances, looking for openings and deciding next steps. I send some back to the embassy to get started on the “reporting cable,” a now daily and sometimes twice daily report to the State Department and White House on the parliament’s progress, or lack thereof.
Those gatherings and our ventures into the newly established but emotionally charged Iraqi parliamentary process are now a fixture. Occasionally, I will be cornered for a comment for the Iraqi or American media. For all its fits and starts and erratic directions, democracy in Iraq plods forward.
Sectarianism to Democracy
Life and politics in Iraq have always been highly influenced by sectarianism. Shi’a versus Sunni, Arabs versus Kurds, Muslims versus non-Muslims and tribe versus tribe. A handful of ideologically oriented parties, like the tiny communist party, exist but most major parties break down according to one of those affiliations and a particular leader or family. That’s a problem for democracy in Iraq and throughout the region.
In the post-World War I period and after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when much of the rest of the world began to grapple with revolutions, “liberalism versus conservatism,” democracy, socialism, communism, free markets, socialist democracy, environmentalism, human rights, women’s rights, et al, the autocratic governments of the Middle East cut their subjects off from such ideological corruption, usually hiding behind Islam or security.
As a result, in today’s post-Arab Spring, Arabs are just beginning to grapple with such concepts. They lack the philosophical framework and organizational structures to act on otherwise noble political aspirations. In time, therefore, as we see in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Bahrain and elsewhere—and as I personally observed in Iraq—loyalties and alliances generally fall along sectarian, ethnic and/or tribal lines.
November, 2009
The Art and Necessity of Compromise
Over two months past the deadline for the elections law, the Iraqi parliament is deadlocked, stuck on a matter of a few designated seats to be decided among Kurds, Turkomans and Sunni Arabs in the area of Kirkuk, an oil-saturated region in the north-central part of Iraq where Saddam had centered his Al Anfal campaign.
My political officers and I, working with the parliamentary and party leaderships and others, have suggested various formulae without success. Sitting with Ambassador Hill in his office at the embassy, we plot strategy. Washington is nervous, knowing that any timetable for withdrawing our forces depends on a successful election, which in turn requires a parliamentary-approved elections law. Iraqi citizens are also nervous about their nascent democracy and the prospect of delayed elections. A way forward must be found and in days.
By mid-November, Chris decides it’s time we step up our efforts. He and I together begin making the rounds —parliamentary leaders, bloc chiefs, party heads and key members. The message— it’s time to compromise. America will help but decisions must be made by them.
A meeting with Kurdish party leaders gets heated. They are unwilling to cede a seat to one of the minority parties. We try to make the case that sacrificing a seat in the interest of comity and agreement will give them leverage in Iraq’s quid pro quo politics. Argument is followed by counter-argument. We get only more tea and coffee from our Kurdish friends. After what seems likes hours of debate, I whisper to Chris, “There’s another party downstairs, let’s check in.” He welcomes the chance to leave the unyielding Kurds.
We’re back in the familiar smoke-filled basement meeting room. We sit across the large table surrounded by leaders of the various minority factions. Compromise here would get parliament over the line of a majority vote for the elections law.
We pursue the same line of argument with these tough politicians, hardened by years of political life under Saddam, invasion, occupation and civil war. They’re not inclined to agree with us either, arguing with increasingly louder voices why life is so hard for minorities in Iraq. Having been forced to compromise for years, they are not so inclined now. It’s hard not to be sympathetic.
After some hours of impassioned discussion, their leader announces a plan, however. We ask to see it and are handed a piece of paper with a half-page of Arabic scrawl. Our interpreter and I retreat outside to study it. Unsurprisingly, it’s a briefly sketched idea lacking detail and agreement. I return and whisper to Chris, “They got nothin’.”
Now, we move into high gear. There’s a vote scheduled for later that evening and we’re determined to see it succeed. We offer a plan we’re confident will get the support of the main Kurdish, Sunni and Shi’a parties. “Are you sure?” asks the head of the group. Chris answers confidently that while the vote will be very close, it will pass. Recognizing their clout, however, he adds, “But it won’t without all of you in this room.”
The leader stands and says he accepts “America’s word.” Hollywood could not have scripted it better, and only minutes before the vote.
We all exit the room—the Americans ecstatic over the agreement and smoke-free air and our Iraqi friends empowered. Chris and I rush to the Speaker’s office and urge him to get the members into the parliamentary hall quickly before members’ minds are changed. He agrees. The public address system blasts repeated announcements and my political officers informally take roll to see if a quorum is reached. Chris and I, in a moment reported in a subsequent New York Times article, are cajoling and cheering the parliamentarians into the hall.
All of us return to the embassy to watch the televised proceedings. The floor debate continues for hours, heightening our anxiety. Finally, the Speaker calls for the vote.
Another 45 minutes. When the vote count passes the threshold, all of us let out a stress-releasing cheer and start high-fiving. It’s a law we know can work (and months later, after some amendments, did with a successful election). Chris and I thank my political section staff for their herculean efforts. Chris later remarked to an American journalist that the embassy political section had a better attendance record than a good many parliamentarians.
Then and Now
Following those successful elections in March of 2010, Iraqi politicians took nearly nine months to reach agreement on a new government. I spent the remainder of my tour in Iraq doing what I had begun it doing, encouraging and prodding them to seek compromise. When I left in August 2010, they hadn’t succeeded, a source of considerable disappointment for me, Chris Hill and others who had been steeped in Iraqi politics and determined to see them through their trials. But, as one veteran diplomat once remarked, “America’s clock and Iraq’s don’t run on the same time.”
I believed then, and continue to believe today, that the Iraqis, only a few years after the dictatorship of Saddam, had proven that their democracy could work. As difficult as it is for a people with no experience in democratic governance whatsoever, they really had no choice.
During my one year there, so many Iraqis—politicians, military officers, diplomats, judges, tribal sheikhs, business people and average Iraqi citizens—shared with me their experiences living under Saddam and then through the post-invasion civil war. No one and no family was spared tragedy, usually multiple tragedies. Whatever their political, religious and ethnic differences, they all had one experience in common, tragedy. Family members killed, tortured or disappeared, lives lived in exile abroad, fortunes lost, careers destroyed, hope extinguished. All stories worthy of Job.
After all the conflict and the suffering of their recent history, almost all agreed that they needed to find a way to live together in peace. Democracy seemed their only option. They had to give it a try.
Just as in the fall of 2009 and the following spring, Iraqis again made a successful run last spring in perfecting their infant democracy with another election. In 2009, they would have done it without us. Nevertheless, American prodding, cajoling, encouragement and genuine commitment—I am convinced—provided them a certain reassurance their burgeoning democracy needed.
It was an exceptional example of American diplomacy at its best.