by John McCain
When I went back in March 2008, the surge’s effects were undeniable, though politics being what it is, there were still plenty of critics who insisted on denying it. Most of the surged forces were still in country, and no one was claiming victory, but there had been a complete transformation from what the country had looked like in December 2006, and almost everyone in Iraq appreciated it except the bad guys. No one more so than me. I believed I could even turn Iraq to my advantage, and highlight my judgment on the surge against Hillary’s and Barack’s opposition to it. I sure tried. Alas, as we know, it wouldn’t be enough, and my next trip to Iraq and to Afghanistan would be as a defeated presidential candidate just a few weeks after the election, returning again with two friends who had stayed close by my side throughout the campaign, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman. No one was making much of an argument about the surge by then. It had succeeded. Not everyone wanted to credit it, but few wished to dispute it. The two men who had led the successful effort to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat had both been promoted. David Petraeus had been selected the commander in chief of Central Command, and Ray Odierno had succeeded him as commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq.
While we were there, the Iraqi government approved a new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) negotiated with the Bush administration, which called for coalition combat forces to withdraw from most Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, and from the country entirely by the end of 2011. There was a provision in the SOFA for a possible extension and renegotiated status, which presumably would be employed to keep a U.S. military presence in country to continue training the Iraqi security forces and help preserve Iraq’s hard-won stability. That wasn’t a universal expectation, however. Some Iraqis objected to the SOFA as written. And some Americans were adamant that an election mandate had been delivered, and its first command was to get all U.S. forces out of Iraq as quickly as possible. I hoped and believed that the new President wasn’t among them.
President Obama had campaigned on his early and consistent opposition to the Iraq War. He had argued that the necessary war had been in Afghanistan, which the war in Iraq had deprived of resources and attention. He mostly declined to acknowledge that the surge had achieved its objectives. But I put that down to politics. He’s an intelligent man, reasonable and cautious. He knew how much progress had been made in Iraq at such a high cost. I didn’t think he would want to risk squandering it, and that he could be persuaded to keep a force in Iraq after the SOFA mandate expired. Ten thousand or so, many knowledgeable military observers believed, would be sufficient to help the Iraqis keep the bad guys at bay, exert a positive influence on the government and the main factions in the country, and prevent a political vacuum Iran was likely to fill. I thought I should make a public case for it, and help the Iraq government and the Obama administration come to that conclusion, too.
My post-election trip to Iraq was an opportunity to begin that campaign. But I had another, personal reason for going. Right after my defeat, I had a strong desire to have Thanksgiving dinner that year with the Marines in Iraq, and with one Marine in particular. We weren’t able to get there in time for the actual holiday. Nevertheless, I traveled alone one day to a Marine base in Anbar, Camp Habbaniyah. I met in a conference room there with the camp’s senior officers, and after a while I noticed we had been joined by a young, skinny lance corporal, carrying his weapon as all Marines in Anbar were obliged at all times to do. Eventually my hosts excused themselves, and my son Jimmy and I sat down to a belated holiday dinner, and gave thanks for all our blessings.
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I didn’t have much success in the first year of the Obama administration. I had opposed and voted against the administration’s first ambassador to Iraq, Chris Hill. He was a veteran diplomat but had no experience in the Middle East. He had succeeded the peerless Ryan Crocker, who had been an ambassador in Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, and Pakistan, spoke fluent Arabic, had been a very active representative of our interests in Iraq, and influential with every major political player in the country. I felt the same about Ryan as I did about Petraeus and Odierno. I admired them, I learned a lot from them, and I felt privileged to have worked with them. Ambassador Hill and I didn’t have that kind of relationship. It wasn’t anything personal, just our differing views about Iraq. Hill appeared to be Crocker’s opposite. He took a more hands-off approach to helping Iraqis sort out their differences collaboratively. Hill believed the more of a role we played in Iraq’s national affairs, the more dependent on us Iraqis were, the longer we would be stuck with responsibility for the country. He wanted Iraqis to sort things out for themselves now. I appreciated his position theoretically, but not practically. Iraqis had too little experience with democratic politics, and were too captive to their sectarian identities to realize the vision of a stable, democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East without our continued influence, not to mention Iraq’s susceptibility to the machinations of their neighbor and our adversary, Iran. As the sectarian and tribal factionalism that always plagued Iraq’s politics intensified, I thought the American ambassador’s excessive restraint was counterproductive.
Hill didn’t strike me as overly interested in negotiating a new SOFA, either. Prime Minister Maliki had demanded that were American forces to remain in Iraq after 2011, the U.S. would have to assent to surrendering the immunity from local prosecution our troops currently had should they be accused of crimes. That was, of course, a nonstarter for the U.S. government and military. And while his position was politically correct in Iraq, I believed Maliki could be persuaded to drop or alter it enough that it would be acceptable to us. I didn’t get the impression that Hill felt similarly. Our exchanges on my trips to Iraq during his tenure were often contentious.
New parliamentary elections in March 2010 ended in a political stalemate, preventing the formation of a new government. Ayad Allawi’s party had won two more seats than Maliki’s. By rights he should have been allowed to form a government, but the problem was that Allawi, who spent much of his time abroad, wasn’t nearly the political infighter Maliki was. Both sides seemed to prefer the impasse to a compromise. When Hill left Iraq in August 2010, the sides were no closer together. Hill’s successor, Jim Jeffrey, was an experienced Middle East diplomat, and we got along well. In addition, President Obama had recalled Brett McGurk, a skilled Iraq hand who had served in the Bush administration with distinction, back into service to help broker an agreement between the competing factions. When Lindsey and I came to Iraq in November 2010, Jeffrey and McGurk enlisted us in an administration plan to propose a compromise. Since the first parliamentary elections in Iraq, political spoils had been divided between the three main factions, Shia, Sunni, and Kurd. A Shia, Maliki, was given the prime minister’s job, the most powerful post. A Sunni was speaker of the parliament, and a Kurd, Jalal Talabani, was Iraq’s president. To break the current impasse, the Obama administration wanted to propose an alteration of that arrangement. Maliki would remain as prime minister, but Allawi would be president. A Sunni would remain as speaker, and a new position, head of the National Security Council, would be given to Talabani or another Kurd.
We were scheduled to stop in Irbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, and meet with Masoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan and leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). I had gotten to know Barzani well over the years, and we were on very friendly terms. He had once shown me the cave where he had hidden when he was on the run from Saddam’s goons. On another visit, when he was running for president, which is not quite the retail enterprise there that it is in the U.S., I suggested we “do a little campaigning.” We went to a shopping district in Irbil. His aides and security looked nervous, but Barzani seemed to enjoy it. We went into a shop, where I bought some spices, while the sidewalk outside filled with people waiting for us to emerge. I waded into the crowd, shaking hands, posing for pictures, and motioned for Barzani to do likewise. It had been fun.
In advance of our Nov
ember meeting, Ambassador Jeffrey had given Lindsey a letter from President Obama addressed to Barzani, proposing the political rearrangement in Baghdad the administration hoped would end the stalemate. We only discussed it for a few minutes, but we said we’d support it and agreed that Lindsey would give it to the Kurdish leader. Barzani was the godfather of Kurdish politics. If he went along with a new division of power and told Talabani to relinquish the presidency, it would happen. But we could tell as Barzani read the letter Lindsey had handed him, frowning as he did so and shaking his head, that he was put out by it. He and Maliki were estranged at that time, and he wasn’t disposed to help him stay in power. He said curtly that he would consider it, perhaps he could put another Kurd in the job, although he had promised Talabani his support. We knew he wasn’t going to agree to give Allawi the job, and both Lindsey and I regretted even raising it with him. I don’t think Jeffrey or McGurk had much hope that he would. But a few days after our meeting, Barzani relented, and a government was formed. Maliki remained prime minister, Talabani stayed in the presidency, and Allawi was made the head of the new National Security Council.
I would have another request to ask of Barzani when I was next in Iraq in May 2011. Lindsey and I had planned to go back then, but weeks before we left, Hillary Clinton, who was now secretary of state, talked with Lindsey and asked that we raise with the Iraqis the idea of a new SOFA that would keep U.S. forces in country after the end of the year when the existing SOFA mandated their complete withdrawal, and to try to gauge whether Maliki would relent on his insistence that U.S. soldiers in Iraq accused of felonies be tried in Iraqi courts. A little more than a month after his inauguration, President Obama had reiterated in a speech to Marines at Camp Lejeune that the U.S. combat mission in Iraq would conclude by the end of August 2010. We had already handed over authority for the Green Zone to the Iraqis, as well as Saddam’s al-Faw Palace, where coalition forces had headquartered. We had withdrawn U.S. forces from Baghdad, and handed over dozens of bases to the Iraqi security forces. The last British and Australian units had left the country, and Multi-National Force-Iraq was now the United States Forces-Iraq. The last combat brigade had left Iraq in August 2010. Fifty thousand U.S. troops continued training Iraqi units and conducting counterterrorism operations. The deadline for withdrawing the last of them was looming, and the country was suffering from renewed sectarian violence, a resumption in insurgent activity, and terrorist attacks by the successor to al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq. Through its growing company of proxies in Iraq’s Shia community, Iran was insisting on a complete withdrawal.
We met with Allawi first. He spent much of the time complaining about Maliki and the people around Maliki, and that the U.S. wasn’t doing enough to support him. But he was all in on a new SOFA. He wanted closer relations with the U.S. and saw support for a continued American military presence as instrumental to that end.
The meeting with Maliki was trickier. Ambassador Jeffrey was there, as was Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin, Ray Odierno’s successor, a very capable commander, whom I trusted. We were direct, and Maliki was evasive. The politics were difficult for him. He would take most of the heat from Iran, and anger his own political base, the Shia. I spoke first and then Lindsey, both of us making the same points. We told him Allawi had offered support for the idea. We stressed the security challenges facing Iraq and the need for a stabilizing force that could help Iraq fight terrorists. We expressed confidence that a solution to the immunity impasse could be found. The discussion had gone on quite a while with Maliki listening more than arguing a position. Finally, in answer to a question from Lindsey about what he needed to agree, Maliki indicated receptivity to the idea, and asked the obvious question. How big a force are you talking about? Lindsey turned to General Austin, and asked him to answer. He demurred and looked at Jeffrey, who answered that he didn’t have guidance on that. Then Austin interjected that they were still working on a number.
What was clear to me in that instant was that the administration hadn’t made up its mind about a residual force. I knew the number the military wanted. I had talked to scores of senior officers over the last couple years, and they all agreed that you would need ten to fifteen thousand troops for the force to be effective. That seemed a reasonable number to me, and I bet it did to Maliki, too. I think some of Obama’s civilian advisors, and probably Obama himself, had been entertaining a much smaller number, a few thousand, perhaps. We were asking Maliki to do a very hard thing, and he was going to catch hell for it. He wasn’t going to do that for a force too small to do him or us any good. I wasn’t happy to be surprised by the administration’s indecision in the middle of our discussions. But I didn’t make a fuss about it. Instead, we went home to let the administration know that a deal was reachable, and to start pushing for a force level sufficient to make the deal worthwhile. Our last stop was Irbil, and though Barzani acknowledged that he and Maliki hadn’t been on speaking terms for months, he promised to go to Baghdad in support of the idea.
If memory serves, I put a call in to the White House as soon as we got back, and asked to speak with the President. I ended up talking several times with National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. I talked to his deputy, too, Denis McDonough. Lindsey reported to Hillary. We both insisted there was a deal to be had, including an accommodation on the immunity question. Donilon and I had one exchange about how big a force to keep there. I posited the ten to fifteen thousand estimate, and he said something like, “You know, Senator, the military always asks for more than they really need,” which kind of stuck in my craw. Nevertheless, we were encouraged. We assumed a deal would be negotiated, and we were pleased to have lent a hand. I talked during the summer to friends in the administration and at the Pentagon. I didn’t get the sense that there had been a lot of progress made on a deal, but I assumed it was probably in the hands of a small, tight-lipped circle, and they would close it before the end of the year.
In late October, I saw a news report that the President had abandoned the idea of negotiating a residual force, and that all U.S. troops in Iraq would be out of the country by January. The next day, the President made the announcement in the Rose Garden. I watched it on television. No one in the administration had warned Lindsey or me that the announcement was coming. Administration officials attributed the decision to the Iraqi government’s intransigence on the immunity question. That was bullshit. Maliki would have relented. More likely, the administration hadn’t wanted to keep a force in Iraq big enough to make the political pain it would cause the Iraqi government worth it.
I was furious. I believed then and I believe now that a modest but capable American military force in Iraq that wasn’t involved in day-to-day combat operations was indispensable to preventing resurgent terrorist activity, intensified sectarian divisions, a spreading Sunni insurgency, and a growing Iranian influence over the Iraqi government. I issued a harshly worded statement that predicted dire consequences for a decision I considered a failure of leadership on the part of both governments.
Today marks a harmful and sad setback for the United States in the world. I respectfully disagree with the President: this decision will be viewed as a strategic victory for our enemies in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime, which has worked relentlessly to ensure a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. It is a consequential failure of both the Obama Administration—which has been more focused on withdrawing from Iraq than succeeding in Iraq since it came into office—as well as the Iraqi government.
I share the desire for all of our troops to come home as quickly as possible. But all of our military commanders with whom I have spoken on my repeated visits to Iraq have told me that U.S. national security interests and the enduring needs of Iraq’s military required a continued presence of U.S. troops in Iraq beyond 2011 to safeguard the gains that we and our Iraqi partners have made. I am confident that no U.S. commander of any stature who has served in Iraq recommended the course of action that has now been take
n.
On December 18, 2011, five hundred American soldiers crossed the Kuwait border, the last of U.S. Forces-Iraq. “Nearly 4,500 Americans have given their lives for our mission in Iraq,” I concluded in my October statement.
Countless more have been wounded. Through their service and sacrifice, the possibility of a democratic state in the heart of the Middle East has been opened to millions of Iraqis. I fear that all of the gains made possible by these brave Americans in Iraq, at such grave cost, are now at risk.
It started falling apart almost immediately. On December 22, eighty Iraqis were killed in a series of bombings and hundreds were wounded. Suicide bombings, insurgent attacks, and crime spiked in the weeks and months after our withdrawal, and were regular facts of life in Iraq for years to come. Maliki cracked down on the Sunni opposition and concentrated power in his hands. The last American soldier had just left the country when Maliki had an arrest warrant issued for a prominent Sunni politician, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, who fled to Qatar. Arab Spring protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East encouraged Sunni protests in Iraq, and Sunni politicians were boycotting parliament by the end of 2011. A government-ordered raid on the home of another prominent Sunni official, Finance Minister Rafi al-Issawi, triggered protests in Fallujah that rapidly spread to all Sunni communities in Iraq. Even Muqtada al-Sadr blamed the unrest on Maliki, whose supporters staged protests in response. In December, Maliki ordered the military to break up a camp of protesters in Ramadi and violence ensued. The Kurds, too, were increasingly alienated by the Maliki government. Iran’s influence over the Baghdad government grew. It was starting to look like Iraq might split into three countries.
