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.
“Oh,” he said, looking at the chaos around us, “maybe about twelve months, not longer.” Zebari added, “Less, if we have Kurdish companies do the work.”
On May 18, 2010, some eight months later, a consortium of Kurdish companies finished their work and the ministry was open for business. The front lobby, which had been totally destroyed yet miraculously had held up the building above it, was transformed and beautifully decorated, a newly installed plaque on the side listing the names of the dead. The ceremony included goose-stepping soldiers wearing white tunics and white pith helmets of the kind that would have looked more familiar in the kaiser’s army, who laid wreaths during a ceremony presided over by Prime Minister Maliki and Foreign Minister Zebari.
The soldiers stomped on the polished marble floor with a determination that seemed to symbolize the moment. Junior officers stood at their office desks on all floors, explaining to visitors like me where they had been at the bombing but much more interested in describing their current duties: “I handle Iraq’s relations with Southeast Asia. . . . I manage relations with South America. My Spanish is good, but I am also learning English.” I so admired them and what they did, and felt as never before in Iraq a sense of brotherhood and common cause. I concluded my memo to the secretary and president that week with a description of the reopening, and closed with the thought that one got the sense from every Iraqi minister, goose-stepping soldier, and junior diplomat that if it happened again, they would rebuild everything, and go on from there.
The fall of 2009 was a daily grind in Iraq’s political corridors as we lobbied the parties for the passage of an election law, on the basis of which there could be an election in early 2010. I met with the speaker of the parliament, a slow-talking, gentlemanly Sunni Islamist named Iyad Samarrai, repeatedly in early October to press for the progress that Washington was demanding. Samarrai’s laconic pace was in sharp contrast to the impatience in Washington for progress. The embassy’s political section, under Gary Grappo, spent far more time in the Council of Representatives (Iraq’s parliament) than in the embassy (and, frankly, more time than some Iraqi parliamentarians), and at night drew up the reporting cables for Washington. The Iraqis understood they needed to agree on an election law, but they would do so on their timetable, not ours. Hurrying them, as was Washington’s instinct to do, seemed to reinforce in the Iraqi minds that what we really wanted was to get an election, a new government, and pull our troops out. In diplomacy, being in a hurry never makes things easier or even faster. I repeated on several occasions to the press corps and others that working on Iraq offers no refuge to those in need of instant gratification.
• • •
On November 8, the Iraqi Council of Representatives overwhelmingly approved an election law, a vote several of us watched later that Sunday night in my office. It was the culmination of weeks of effort and gallons of tea and coffee, served in windowless rooms in the basement of the parliament during discussions with small caucuses of politicians, most of whom were heavy smokers. A day later President Obama called to thank me for the embassy’s efforts to get the law passed. His tone was weary and perhaps a little wary about the news, as he knew from our reporting how precarious things had been. I tried to sound optimistic that progress was being made, and assured him we would stay engaged for the election cycle.
But on November 19, Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni representative to the collective presidency, which also consisted of the Kurdish president Talabani and the Shia vice president Adel Abd al-Mahdi, used the power vested as a member of the presidency to veto the law. I received the news while I was visiting a displaced persons registration office on the outskirts of Baghdad outside the Green Zone. It was a scene I knew all too well from my Balkan days, which combines hollow-faced despair with third world bureaucracy and red tape. Amid crowds of desperate Iraqis who had been thrown out of their homes during the worst of the sectarian violence, all seeking compensation allotments to survive another period of internal exile, in a narrow, poorly lit corridor I pressed up against the whitewashed wall to take the call from Gary Grappo on my cell phone. I listened to the bad news as I looked at the scene. “We’ll have to start all over again, but we’ll get it done,” Gary concluded. I was still taking in the human misery at the registration center. “That’s right, Gary. Pull the team together and see what can be done and get the cable off to Washington. I’d rather they get the bad news from us.”
Hashimi was a former military officer, an English speaker who fell out early on with his fellow Sunni Saddam Hussein, and had political ambitions of his own, if only the Americans would come to understand that secular order in the country needed to be restored once they stopped supporting the Shia, almost all of whom, in Hashimi’s view, were sectarian. The fluent-English-speaking Hashimi was articulate and well-spoken, and cut a reasonably impressive figure in his Western suits. He had been an early hope of the U.S. occupation to bring the Sunni community along in embracing the new Iraq. Those hopes had long faded and my visits to the frustrated Hashimi became more akin to a painful visit to the dentist. Like many senior Iraqis, Hashimi’s home and office was an elegantly appointed palace in the Green Zone, where he held court with political operatives and with foreigners. He treated us to such downbeat assessments of Iraq’s future that one went away thoroughly depressed despite his kitchen’s unusually good fruit nectars.
Hashimi’s main line of concern with me was the perfidy of the Shia (and Kurds), and with Odierno he spent the lion’s share of his time seeking the immediate release of nefarious persons inexplicably, in his view, picked up by U.S. forces and held in detention centers. Ray always politely accepted to look into the matter, and would send back his political advisor to Hashimi with the bad news that the individuals in question could not be released at this time. The British-trained Hashimi would take advantage of Ray’s British political advisor to give a further spin on how bad things were—and how they were getting worse—due, of course, to the Americans. He then would give her still more lists of persons in detention who in his view had done nothing wrong.
Hashimi vetoed the election law based on an issue that was very much a Sunni concern, but which had not played a major role during the parliamentary discussion of the law—the right of out-of-country Iraqis (read: Sunni refugees) to vote. Although the Council of Representatives (COR) could have easily overruled Hashimi, more Sunnis would have supported this “Sunni position,” and the result would have been a sectarian divide in the COR, not something we wanted to see as an outcome. The narrative at the time was that somehow back in 2007 the U.S. had faced down the insurgency and in so doing singlehandedly put a thousand years of sectarianism in the rearview mirror (in some ten months of work), and we certainly didn’t want to see its ugly head again. Of course, endemic centuries-old sectarianism could hardly have disappeared in a matter of a few months. Iraq’s future would tell whether politics became more “issues based” rather than sectarian based, but for now, Sunnis supported Sunnis and Shia supported Shia, and the Kurds generally found ways to support the Shia against the Sunnis, whom they had mountains of reasons to distrust over the centuries.
Within weeks, a compromise was w
orked out on out-of-country (Sunni) voters. Gary Grappo and the rest of the political section convened direct talks between the Shia and Sunni caucus with our own deputy political counselor, Yuri Kim, sitting in the middle of lengthy discussions that went late into the night. I worried, as did Gary Grappo and the rest of the embassy’s political section, that in reopening the text, now the Kurdish delegation to the COR would use the opportunity to gerrymander some districts in Kirkuk to make sure they would become Kurdish districts, and encroach on the dialogue about the status of the Kirkuk area, a subject of UN mediation. In turn, this move pitted some of the smaller minorities in the area, including the often put-upon Turkomans, with whom I had personally spent hours in a basement room of the COR. Vice President Biden, Washington’s point man on Iraq, and President Obama were pressed into service making telephone calls to senior officials, including offering a Washington visit for Kurdish president Barzani.
I was pleased that Barzani was being offered a visit to Washington, but the motivation—to urge him to support the election law—was misplaced. Barzani was always working with us. “We want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem,” he often told Ray and me. His problem, in Iraq’s fractious political scene, was that he did not have absolute power over the Kurdish delegation in the COR, and like the rest of us could only cajole and try to convince this most stubborn of COR caucuses. The fact that even immediate postconflict societies have intense politics seemed lost on many people in Washington (and, alas, sometimes on our military), who believed that the issue was all about simply imploring people to do what we told them to do.
I welcomed Obama’s and Biden’s direct interest, but I knew that these senior-level phone calls were adding to the perception that the United States was desperate for an election law so that U.S. troops could be withdrawn. By signaling our interest in withdrawal, we began to lose more influence on the ground.
The high-level calls had another unhelpful impact on our efforts on the ground. They became part of the toolbox of our efforts, meaning that whenever there was an impasse on the ground, the idea of ginning up a telephone call quickly emerged on the to-do list. Senior phone calls also had still another negative impact on our efforts: Washington bureaucrats went operational. Thus we began to receive missives offering such nuggets of advice as “Never ignore Hashimi!” Of course, we had been in regular contact with him, but he wasn’t the great hope that some of these veterans of the early years had thought. Some of the Washington micromanagement extended to offering me advice as to whom from the embassy I should bring along for meetings with Maliki and others. It all added up to an impression that Washington wanted out of Iraq.
The parliamentary election on March 7, 2010, was a peaceful day. U.S. troops, working with Iraqi counterparts, ensured security throughout the country, and the number of incidents was remarkably low. I barnstormed through the country on March 6 to meet with our Provincial Reconstruction Teams, from Mosul in the north down to Basra in the south. All had impressive plans for monitoring the vote the next day. Whether the Iraqis were ready or not, I knew that the embassy and our twenty-two reconstruction teams scattered around the country were prepared to do all we could. The rest would be up to the Iraqis.
And of course, as in the Balkans and elsewhere, we also had visiting American delegations to help monitor the elections. One group, the National Foundation for Women Legislators, had monitored elections all over the world, and, thanks to the military, were to be taken around in heavily armored vehicles to monitor a few polling stations in Baghdad. I hosted a reception in my home two nights before and found myself in a pleasant conversation with one of the members from Texas, who, perhaps reflecting some of the concerns of her constituents, asked me, “Do the Iraqis have a plan for repaying us for introducing democracy to their country?”
Unfortunately for him, Foreign Minister Zebari stood nearby, and I pulled him over and repeated the question for him to respond to. I moved over to another part of the room before I could hear the answer.
The election results took weeks to tabulate, and when they finally came in they were very close. Ayad Allawi’s Iraq National Party, or Iraqiyya, a party that was disproportionately Sunni, won 91 seats, while Maliki’s State of Law coalition had 89 seats. A total of 163 seats would be needed to gain a majority of the 325-seat Council of Representatives, and it meant that the two top coalitions would be off to the races.
The difference between Maliki’s and Allawi’s approaches was striking. Maliki went to work, while Allawi went to CNN. Anytime I visited the prime minister’s office I would have to pass a row of tribal chiefs waiting their turn to be wooed with some political favor in return for their willingness to support Maliki. Allawi thought it was enough to get on CNN to accuse Maliki of becoming the “new Saddam.” Allawi also thought that what became known as the government formation period was a good occasion to fly around the Middle East and complain about Maliki. According to a Kurdish leader with good connections to the Egyptian government, Allawi had gone to Cairo to complain to President Hosni Mubarak about Maliki, prompting the Egyptian strongman to respond: “Why are you telling me this? I don’t vote in Iraq. In fact, if the situation is as you describe, what are you even doing here?”
In a perfect parliamentary world, the party or coalition that garners the most seats is given the opportunity to form the government. If Iraq were part of that world, Ayad Allawi should have been given the right to form the government, having come through the elections with two more seats than Maliki. But the reality of the situation was that with both main coalitions in a statistical dead heat, neither was going to step aside for the other. We knew it would be a long, hot summer.
In addition to working harder on the ground for additional seats, Maliki also outpaced Allawi in aggressively challenging the vote count, a decision that opened him to the charge of being a sore loser, and a possible cheater. His recount demands also exposed him to the charge that he was ultimately not going to respect the results of the voting and might, as Ray Odierno suggested in a teleconference with Washington, try to stage a “rolling coup d’état.” Ray surprised everybody with that comment. It was nothing he had ever said to me in private, nor had he taken that tone in any conversation with Maliki. I always tried to make sure we spoke with one voice on the teleconferences with Washington, but I fell silent when he expressed that opinion, especially as he hadn’t warned me. The effect of his comment on Washington was to heighten concerns about Maliki’s intentions.
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 Gu
lf 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.
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