Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir

by Christopher R. Hill

  While anyone in country was aware of the Sunni-Shia divide and the fact that the name of the game in Iraq was politics, in Washington the issue orbited around counterinsurgency and its immediate tactical cousin, the surge.

  As the COIN strategy took hold in Iraq, it became an even higher-stakes game in Washington. Counterinsurgency efforts had been given credit for the fact that the killing had been much diminished (credit it only partially deserved), and for that, people whose faith in the Iraq War had wavered were very grateful to the doctrine and its disciples. But for others, especially those whose faith never had wavered, COIN offered the vast prospect for a renewed dedication to the task of the forced perfecting of the rest of the world to the benefit of U.S. interest. COIN not only “won” the Iraq War; it would, in this worldview, soon win the Afghan War and any other war we chose to engage in. Counterinsurgency and the surge became the watchwords of the ever faithful, tools to realize a very ideological (and frankly warlike) agenda as to how America can always get its way in the world.

  With Iraq defined as a security situation, rather than a political problem involving local players who did not cooperate well together, politics became reduced to another element of COIN. Diplomacy, the set of deployed skills necessary to get people to do things they didn’t otherwise want to do, also became a subfield of COIN. In the fine print of COIN there was the calculation that U.S. forces in any particular conflict would need years to complete the mission, probably more years than the American people, or frankly any people, had the patience to endure. The fine print got smudged and came to be interpreted to the effect that long-term follow-on force would not be more soldiers, but rather more diplomats. Thus the diplomatic effort became an essential part of the “whole of government” approach so often ballyhooed in Washington: the total war effort, the marshaling of all instruments of power behind the tip of the military’s spear. Proponents of the war now looked to diplomacy to address the “nonkinetic space” (to use a particularly irksome military term), where they understood the war could be won or lost.

  • • •

  Coming out of the pressure cooker of North Korean negotiations, where half the Bush administration opposed the negotiating process, I had thought that those working on the gut-wrenching issues of Iraq, however stressed, were united in their cause. In fact, nerves were frayed on a daily basis and blame-game politics seldom took much of a break. The military had its internal issues, but so did the State Department in trying to run an embassy that had outgrown any conceivable economies of scale, out of proportion with everything else the department was doing in the rest of our 194 posts around the world (with the exception of Kabul, which was also fast ramping up), as the inevitability of the military’s departure became clear. Much of what I saw on my arrival in April 2009 was the effort by the military to set up the State Department as the successor organization in charge of Iraq.

  But letting go is hard to do, and the military was clearly uncertain whether the State Department, much less Embassy Baghdad, was ready for the responsibility. The military and its civilian camp followers were used to running everything in Iraq. Iraqi national security meetings held on Sunday nights included U.S. military officials as well as (for civilian sensitivities) the U.S. and British ambassadors, even though the British had pulled their troops out and could not even agree with the Iraqis on a residual maritime patrolling mission. I was appalled by the idea that anyone but Iraqis should be in attendance at an Iraqi national security meeting, but was told to avoid thinking that anything in Iraq should be what is considered normal elsewhere.

  I soon learned that the word normal, which I always thought was on balance a good thing, was taken as a sign that the person did not really understand Iraq, a bellwether of that person’s naïve state of mind. To suggest that our goal should be a normal place was a failure to understand what had gone on there, and what would probably continue to go on there for some time. “We have stayed more than a half century in Germany,” was the supposed barn burner of an argument, whose reference to Iraq was in fact not particularly persuasive.

  All this yielded a peculiar form of political correctness. In a talk on Iraq I gave at the Brookings Institution in Washington in the summer of 2009, I explained Iraq’s oil bidding process to a group of think tank researchers from around Washington and laid out the challenge of the coming parliamentary elections. I spoke of the progress being achieved, the jockeying for political advantage, the fact that the sullen Sunnis were clearly in a mood this time to try to unite and take part in the political process, albeit with the understanding that Iraq would continue to be run by a Shia, and of the growing sense of achieving normal politics, even though for the foreseeable future parties would tend to build their platforms along the sectarian divide. The organizer of the event, Brookings scholar Kenneth Pollack, a liberal interventionist of the 1990s and a strong advocate for the Iraq intervention, rushed up to me after the talk and warned, “Be careful. Don’t use the word normal around these people.”

  Even embassy briefings for visitors were not what I would consider normal. I have taken part in numerous embassy staff meetings and briefings over the course of my thirty years, from discussions of who to invite to the Fourth of July reception, to deciding whether to evacuate Embassy Skopje in the wake of the assault by an angry mob. In Sarajevo, I sat with Ambassador Menzies to discuss ongoing embassy operations during a bloody part of the siege of the city by Serb heavy weapons. In Warsaw during General Jaruzelski’s martial law, we discussed how to deal with the pressure that was mounting on the embassy to cease its outreach to the Polish public. But nothing in my experience prepared me for my first briefing at Embassy Baghdad.

  In a session for several U.S. governors whose national guards were on duty in Iraq, I walked down to the embassy’s Conference Room. I noticed that on my side of the table I was in the center, with General Odierno immediately on my right. To his right, the remaining five seats, as well as to my left the remaining four seats, were all reserved for senior military, who would explain to the five governors ongoing military operations, and deployment and withdrawal schedules.

  I took my seat next to Ray, looked behind me, and saw that all the backbenchers were in military uniform. I followed the line of uniformed aides behind me going to my left, and finally, after the end of the conference table, still on a back bench, I saw a solitary political officer flipping through what looked like a stack of Arabic press clips. Glad he was busy, I thought. Looking on the bright side, I thought perhaps he was confident of my ability to master my part of the briefing without receiving any whispered factoids. Given how far away he was seated, he would have practically needed a telephone to tell me anything. I glanced across the conference table and noticed that all the coffee cups at the place settings for the governors were emblazoned with the letters MNF-I (Multinational Forces—Iraq). Each governor also had in front of him a pad of paper and a U.S. military pen, as well as a large coin, the size of a drink coaster, with General Odierno’s signature and the seal of MNF-I, a lamassu (a human-headed winged bull) from Nimrud, the capital of ancient Assyria.

  I looked at the lamassu at my own place setting and wondered whether the embassy conference room setup quite embodied the spirit of civilianizing the Iraq mission. To our right was an enormous screen on which would soon be shown the slides of the briefing. I realized why my political officer was half a mile away. He already knew that so-called joint embassy/MNF-I briefings had little input from the embassy. General Odierno briefed on the first sixteen slides. When slide seventeen flashed up on the screen it mentioned “Embassy” and the “Strategic Framework Agreement.”

  “Mr. Ambassador,” General Odierno asked, using my honorific for the benefit of the visitors, “would you like to say a few words about the SFA?”

  At the close of the briefing I bid farewell to the governors who were lining up to have their photos taken with the marine security guard, and called a quick embassy staff meeting. I asked whether this was how b
riefings had always been conducted, with the commanding general handling 95 percent of it while the ambassador sat like a bobblehead doll, nodding his approval. I asked whether during the so-called heyday of civilian-military cooperation, the Petraeus-Crocker period, this was how briefings were conducted. Petraeus, I was told, was in the lead, but he encouraged his “wingman” to jump in when he chose to do so. I told the staff that henceforth embassy briefings for VIPs should reflect, both in substance and style, the partnership between the civilian and military missions in Iraq. For starters, and I told them I would convey this to Odierno, that would mean there should be just as many suits at the table as uniforms, and following long-standing protocol, the ambassador, who is after all the president’s representative, would lead the briefing. If there were going to be trinkets at each place setting, they needed to include something from the embassy.

  “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 all
ies 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.