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

by Christopher R. Hill

  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 of
ten 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.

  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 an
d 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.