Zalmay Khalilzad, Jack Keane, David Petraeus and James Jeffrey on the Unmaking of Iraq

PBS Frontline

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Zalmay Khalilzad: Maliki and the “Unmaking of Iraq”

July 29, 2014

Let’s start with [Nouri al-] Maliki. It’s 2006. [The Samarra mosque bombing] has happened. There’s violence in the streets of Baghdad and elsewhere, unlike any other time. The president is looking for new direction. Tell us a little bit about what those days were like and how the United States turned its attention and interest to Maliki as somewhat of a surprising candidate for prime minister.

… The Samarra attack had a huge impact on relations between the Sunnis and Shias. Lots of civilians were killed. This was a huge setback for what we had been able to achieve with the participation of the Sunni Arabs and the elections and with the passage of the constitution.

The timing was that since the elections had occurred, there was a focus on formation of a new government. Because the system was parliamentary, there wasn’t a direct election of the prime minister. Parliament had to decide, and the biggest bloc had to nominate someone. …

Initially, the name of someone else was put forward, Ali Adeeb. Because Mr. Adeeb’s father was from Iran, he ran into difficulties in terms of acceptance from the Sunni Arabs in particular. The issue was how to unify Iraq to contain the violence particularly unleashed by Samarra, so you needed someone who could bring all communities together.

Then an alternative was Mr. Maliki. He had the representation of being more Arab. He had spent very little time in Iran. He was also known as someone who was relatively strong, had the leadership qualities. There was also no evidence of corruption.

So his name was vetted with the other two big communities of Iraq, the Kurds and the Sunnis, and they found him acceptable. Therefore, he got [elected], and there was then a lot of discussion about the program of this unity government — it was called the national unity government — what this program would be, how the various positions will be divided in the government.

Particularly there was a great deal of focus on the security ministries, that the ministers be acceptable to all three major communities, that they wouldn’t have ties to militias, because there had been a concern in the previous administration in Iraq that the ministers of interior and defence, particularly interior, tied with militias and militias that infiltrated the police force. They were entrusted by the Sunnis.

So the program and the personnel, as well as the prime minister then as a package, was presented to Parliament, and he became the prime minister.

Maliki comes to your office at one point, and you have a discussion with him about the possibility of becoming prime minister with the backing [of the United States]. … Tell us a little bit about that meeting, how you broached the subject to Maliki, and Maliki’s view about it.

… The first meeting took place in Parliament. Because he was a Member of Parliament, [he] asked whether I would come and meet him there, and I said I’d be happy to do so.

So I met him there, and I asked him in the course of our conversation, after saying, “How are things going? What’s going on with the process of government formation?,” I said, “I’m surprised, given that you are more senior in the party than Mr. Ali Adeeb, that your name was not put forward.”

And he told me that “Oh, there was an impression in Najaf” — Najaf, which is the name of the city, but is where Ayatollah Sistani resides — “Najaf had the impression that the United States was against me, and therefore they didn’t want to start with someone who was not going to be able to work with the coalition, besides with the Iraqis.”

And I said: “I don’t know where they have got that impression from. The United States has no position vis-à-vis individuals as such, that we are looking to Iraqis to choose someone who can unify and can lead in this time of great need.” And he said, “Oh.”

He physically changed when I said that, and he said, “Would you not object to me, or do you not object to me?” I said: “It’s not my place to object. Can you get the Shia coalition behind [you], and would the Kurds and Sunnis support you?” That’s the criteria for becoming prime minister based on the constitution of Iraq that I had helped facilitate agreements on, because there were differences of views earlier.

Then he went away, and he came back to the residence that night, and we had further conversations.

You talked to the president about this man. Did you describe him? What was his point of view about it?

President [George W.] Bush was very interested in having this issue of government resolved, because there was violence, there was instability, there was conflict, there was kind of a vacuum of leadership. …

So everybody was distracted by their own circumstances of what job am I going to have or not? Am I going to stay in my ministry? Am I going to be at a place lobbying for positions? And the prime minister was distracted as to is he going to stay, is he going to leave?

This wasn’t a good place for a country that had as many problems as Iraq had, particularly this escalation in sectarian violence caused by Samarra in part. So he wanted to know almost on a daily basis.

I remember having, during the period that I was there, a daily conversation at least once, if not more, with the key players in the administration, particularly the national security adviser, who reported to the president, occasionally a phone call with the president as well, and once a week participating in the National Security Council meeting where the president chaired and I participated from Baghdad.

So the president wanted a strong leader to be selected. He didn’t have a preference. …

So Maliki becomes prime minister. There were weekly teleconferences with the president. … Tell us a little bit about how the relationship grew. … What were those teleconferences like, and what was Maliki drawing from them?

The first thing was that the president wanted to get to know Maliki, because this was a prime minister that he would have to work with to deal with the challenges of Iraq, which was of great importance given the number of forces that we had and the casualties we were taking, the expenditure of resources and time and effort by the president and the country.

So as soon as Maliki was confirmed by Parliament, the president wanted to speak with him. The first conversation, I remember it very distinctly because of what happened.

Maliki came to my residence again. I had a small office upstairs in the residence which had a secure phone, and the president wanted to speak with him on a secure line, so Maliki came. The office wasn’t a luxurious office. It had lawn chairs in the office on the side where there was a desk and my chair.

So Maliki and one of his assistants were sitting on the lawn chair as I was calling the White House to connect with the president, or the White House was calling me; I don’t remember which way. Probably they were calling me.

As I answered the phone, the president came, and the president was being very friendly with me and nice, and we were having conversations about issues that didn’t seem to be of great significance to Iraq. I wanted to terminate that conversation to give the phone to the prime minister, who was sitting uncomfortably on the lawn furniture, but the president was prolonging it with me.

I said to the president that the Iraqi prime minister is waiting, and the president told me: “Zal, I’m trying to do you a favour. I want the prime minister of Iraq to know that you and I have very close personal relations, so that he would take what you say based on what he’s observing as representing my views, and this will be good for you.” And I appreciated it. That’s why I remember that incident.

That was the first time that they had the conversation, and I think, fortunately, the president wanted to know where Maliki was and what his thinking was, what his priorities were, what kind of a leader he was going to be.

But partially, also, he wanted to help him be a leader: what do you do, what don’t you do. For example, some of our military folks who began to interact with him found Maliki to be, if you like, a micromanager in terms of military operations. He wanted to be able to reach out to a captain or a colonel, bypassing everyone between him as the commander in chief and the colonel, to order him to do a specific operation, go inspect a particular house in this neighborhood based on the intelligence he had received, or go arrest this particular person, or go carry out this operation against this group that may have required a use of force.

Our military folks were very concerned about that. They thought that you should learn that the commander in chief doesn’t call an operator himself and order them to carry out an operation, because an operation requires a lot of different elements of security forces to get involved, and there is a chain of command. …

So the president saw, based on what he was hearing from us, his team on the ground, what he could do to help Maliki be a better leader, a more effective leader, or what a leader ought to operate like.

… [In] 2006, the other problem, of course, is the violence in the streets. So this leadership problem, I guess as it was seen, was hopefully solved?

Well, the government was formed. Maliki became prime minister. A Kurd, Mr. [Jalal] Talabani, was elected to a second term as president. There was a Sunni speaker of Parliament.

The Cabinet was divided with some ministers from the Kurds, some from the Shias, some from the Sunnis. And the securities ministries, the minister of interior and minister of defence, were people that were acceptable to all three communities.

So there was progress on the political track, but the security challenges continued.

And meanwhile our policies were being re-evaluated as well, and Gen. [George W.] Casey’s light foothold strategy was being questioned, so there was talk of a surge as a possible way to go. What was some of the debate about? Were you involved in some of that debate?

Very much so. There was a discussion going on as casualties were increasing. As the political environment in Washington and in the United States was being affected by that, people were questioning whether we knew what we were doing in Iraq.

The administration, responding to the situation in Iraq and the situation in the United States, wisely started a discussion of what should we do? Should we stay the course, which had been approached, until the results of the review became sanctified, or do we change, and change to what? And there was a variety of schools of thought, proposals, the end of which I think there was a change in the military strategy.

I don’t believe there was any change in the political strategy, which was to keep the three communities to cooperate, to build on the outreach that we were doing before with the Sunnis.

My approach had been first to bring them into the political process, that it was very important for their interests for them not to boycott the political process but to participate in it.

I argued with them that if they don’t participate in the political process, if their area becomes just insurgency- or terrorist-infested, there will be numerous security problems in their area: Their educated people will run away; economic development will not occur; that extremism will grow and all of that will change the level of prosperity against them, which they had been more prosperous than other parts of Iraq before, and that United States had not come on a kind of sectarian agenda.

Because some of them argued with me that since the 9/11 terrorists had been all Sunnis, that we had been motivated by the desire to take revenge on the Sunnis, and therefore we came to Iraq to take Iraq from the Sunnis, give it to the Shias, so that the Sunnis will be punished, I told them, “Don’t project your way of thinking onto the United States,” that we wanted an Iraq that worked, that all communities participated, that everyone’s rights were respected, because we were invested now in Iraq’s success.

Having convinced them to participate, then we were reaching to them to come to agreement on going after the terrorists together, and mainstreaming them by them participating also in the security system. So we continued with that and then even more with the surge.

But at the same time, we changed the military strategy by sending more forces and doing more population protection strategy besides going after the terrorists and us focusing on winning, if you’d like, or bringing about more security rather than purely focusing on transitioning the responsibilities for its security to the Iraqis. That was the big change in my view.

… Why do you think the president came to that point where he said: “Enough. We’re going in a very new direction”? …

I think that the situation on the ground and the consequences of that is what caused it. The [situation] on the ground was violence, Iraqis killing each other, violence against the coalition forces.

The consequences of that was the perception in the United States that we didn’t know what we were doing, that we were losing, if you like, and the pressure to disengage completely and accept defeat, if you like, in Iraq.

… We came to a view that the military strategy needed to change, and we needed to go to a more population protection-centric approach… [in which] you secure one area where the people live, and then you reduce the forces there to keep it secure, but then you move to another area to secure it.

Essentially that idea then was resurrected by Gen. [David] Petraeus during this period in a war college, and with support of others, the president embraced that and then that required more forces.

And after discussions with Maliki as to whether he would cooperate if the president was going to take this big decision, as he did, and Maliki agreed with it.

Then the surge happened, and I think the success was conceptual change at one level, then execution of the plan, but it was part of a bigger set of circumstances that became helpful.

One was the turning of the Sunnis away from supporting the insurgency and Al Qaeda. That had to do, in part, with our outreach to them. It had to do in part with the excesses of Al Qaeda in terms of treating the population in the Sunni areas. Their brutality, their backwardness, their oppressiveness began to cause a split.

Also important, in my view, was the Iraqi forces. We had invested heavily in them, and the numbers grew, and they began to play a bigger role. That also, besides our surge, was important.

And lastly, I think Maliki’s role was also important. He did take on some of the Shia militias that were feeding opposition in the Sunni area and getting the Sunnis to look at the resistance, as they called it, or the militias or even the terrorists as their militia.

I think it was a very positive, virtuous combination that came together. But clearly our decision, the decision of the president about the surge, was important.

… Sunnis were on the payroll basically, the idea being that number one, it was a way to defeat Al Qaeda; number two, it was a way to reintegrate Sunnis into the political system. Was that part of the thinking as this was developing?

The thinking of integrating the Sunnis into the political process precedes the surge. If you look at the 2005 period, we were heavily focused and engaged to bring the Sunnis, who had boycotted the election of January 2005, to participate in the election of December 2005, to engage them at all levels.

At the political level, I myself met with many of them in Iraq, in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia, … in Turkey. And then at the lower levels, at the military level, forces in Anbar, the Marines were engaging them to point out the benefits of participation and the risks of not participating and our kind of neutrality — or if you like, in terms of sectarian tensions, that we weren’t here to favour one sect over another — and to show sympathy and empathy for the legitimate aspirations.

For example, when they complained that they were being tortured, their prisoners, by the Interior Ministry forces, we raided the Interior Ministry and found what was going on and did a report and gave it to the government. Since we were investing so much money and resources into building these forces, the forces had to behave in a way that was acceptable to all Iraqis. …

But what happened during the surge was to build on it, to increase it, particularly this desire to bring the militias to work with us, of people involved in the insurgency or the tribes that were helping the insurgency to shift sides, to come with us to fight the extremists on the one hand, but also then to be integrated into the Iraqi security forces to make those security forces as representative as possible. …

How is Maliki in accepting these directions? … Some people say he undercut some of these initiatives. Some say that his heart wasn’t in it to some extent, because he had a more sectarian background. … Was Maliki cooperating?

There was, in the initial period when he became prime minister, a lot of doubt about him, because part of what our military wanted to do in order to increase security was to also do things in the Shia areas, because we thought that the conflict had become sectarian. …

We thought that the problem had become Shia militia who, especially in the aftermath of Samarra, had taken law into their own hands, carrying out operations against the Sunnis.

Of course some of the militias were also fighting our forces with help from some elements of the structure in Iran, but now they were also involved, the Shia militias, against civilian Sunnis.

So therefore we wanted to be able to act, for example in Sadr City, if cars carrying VBIEDs, vehicle-borne IEDs [improvised explosive devices], we wanted to restrict and search cars coming out of Sadr City into the rest of Baghdad.

That created political problems for him, because that delayed people getting into work and away from work by hours. So Maliki was coming under pressure from his political base saying, well, you can’t punish the entire population because of this.

And we were saying, well, if you want to control the explosion of these IEDs that are brought by vehicles, you need to do that. So that created questions about how serious he was.

Or when we saw militias organizing to carry out operations, raiding that area, again in a place like Sadr City, which was heavily populated, he objected to that, [his] saying the political implications of that had to be taken into account — he had to be informed; he had to approve those processes — raised questions in the minds of our officers and soldiers as to, is he serious about wanting to control these forces or not?

And when we wanted to bring more Sunnis into these forces, again, his base sometimes objected. He always feared and shared those fears with me that are we sure who we are bringing in? Because we may be bringing in [Ba’athists] of the Saddam era, and once they get into the security forces, they will carry out a coup and take over again.

And I used to keep telling him: “Mr. Prime Minister, the only [person]” — once half-jokingly — “who can carry out the coup is sitting with me. It will be either Gen. Petraeus or Casey before him.” So he should focus on other issues that are really far more important and more likely than a coup. …

Did you ever, while sitting across the table, look him in the eyes and wonder, what happens when the United States leaves? What happens when our forces are not here? Will he follow through on the commitments that he has made? …

I did not think of a situation in the foreseeable future that I was operating within that we wouldn’t have forces there.

I had a clear sense from my conversation with the president and with Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld before and Secretary [Robert] Gates — less so; our overlap was shorter– that we would want to maintain some level of presence in Iraq over time. So that was not a scenario that I considered seriously because of the directive that I had.

Because why? What was the importance of remaining there, having the troops there long term?

Because the perception, the belief, the policy was that we want to build a long-term partnership with Iraq, and that partnership involves political, diplomatic cooperation; that partnership involves economic cooperation, and that partnership involves security cooperation, and that in their realm of security, some level of security presence was envisaged to be part and parcel of that.

We weren’t using the terminology of “permanent bases,” because post-Cold War, we weren’t doing permanent bases. But having “forward presence,” having some presence in some facilities in Iraq for the long term as part of a security operation, as part of a strategic partnership, was very much envisaged. …

… Did the surge in any way resolve the Iraq sectarian divide?

I believe it mitigated it. It didn’t resolve it, because I think problems like sectarianism don’t get resolved. They get either increased or decreased, modulated, managed, contained. … I think we played a role of mitigating, containing, reducing the tension.

So 2009, a new president is elected. … What’s the lay of the land in Iraq? And what’s the effect of this new president, with a very different attitude toward Iraq, coming in?

The lay of the land in Iraq is security is improving, an improved level of violence. The number of casualties is way down compared to 2006.

There are issues, clearly, still. There is yet no oil law, no de-Baathification reform, some of the unfinished business of the earlier period. But production of oil is increasing. There are positive developments, particularly in the security area.

You’ve got the new administration beginning to discuss the SOFA, to reduce dramatically the force. There are the preparations for an Iraqi election and new election in 2009.

And there is also kind of the regional environment that is still unsettled. There are disagreements between Iran and Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Relations between Iraq and Saudis have not improved. …

And this new president, with a very new set of goals as far as Iraq, what kind of reverberations did that send through Maliki’s government?

I think Maliki was concerned as to whether he was going to be treated like a Bush appointee, and the relationship will be weakened as access to the president. The interaction with the Americans at the high level would continue, or was he going to be held at arms’ length because he had come to power during President Bush’s period and had developed a good working relationship with President Bush?

He was quite attuned to the domestic politics of the United States, how unpopular the war had become, and how in the presidential race in the United States the Iraq war was one of the defining issues; who stood where on this war even inside the Democratic Party. So he was concerned about what was going to happen.

And what does happen?

I think the president delegates the handling of Iraq. Generally the belief was there, and those of us in the United States felt it was delegated to Vice President [Joe] Biden, who had travelled to Iraq extensively as a senator, and the immediate focus was on coming to some kind of agreement on SOFA. And the president did say that he was prepared to keep a residual number of forces in Iraq.

Then at the same time, the Iraqi election was front and centre. And once the Iraqi election had occurred, Mr. [Ayad] Allawi’s party, called Iraqiya, won more seats than Maliki’s party.

I felt the success of those two parties also showed political progress in Iraq, the waning of sectarianism and the rise of cross-sectarianism, because Iraqiya was a secular party that had a lot of Sunni support but had some Shia support as well. For it to go from 25 seats in the previous election to 92 seats in the 2009 election showed increased support for secular or cross-sectarian and less support for sectarian parties.

And Maliki, who had been the leader of a religious party, a Shia religious party by one of its leaders, adapted by establishing a new party called the State of Law, which had nothing to do with a sect as such, and he was the second largest party. He too moved away from being sectarian.

These two were the two biggest political forces, the State of Law and the Iraqiya, afterward. So government formation became a preoccupation of the administration as well.

… [Maliki] was not having his weekly conversations with the president of the United States anymore. He knew that the president made a speech in January where he basically made it pretty plain that we were moving out of there no matter what. Did he in some ways decide that the Bush years are over, this is a very different world; I’ve now got to protect my power base? …

… I remember when I went to see him in it may have been sometime in mid-2009 to late 2009. We were talking about how things were going. It was just him and one of his ministers whose Arabic and English were good, because sometimes we would speak a little bit in Arabic, and then in order to be clear that we understood each other, we would use an interpreter.

We talked about President Bush and how is he relating to this administration, since I knew the interactions with the previous administration. He was quite nostalgic and said, “How is President Bush? I wish I could talk to him,” and so forth. I said, “Do you want to talk with him?” He was very enthusiastic. “Can I really talk to him?”

I had picked up my cell phone and called President Bush’s office in Dallas, and within a few minutes they were talking with each other. And I could tell that he missed the ability to reach out. …

I thought that Maliki was a little uncertain where things were going because of that absence of the kind of connectivity that he had with President Bush.

So the 2010 election takes place. The United States basically backs Maliki, is the one to sort of name the new government, despite the fact that he had less seats. Is that important? Some people say that’s a turning point, that if Allawi had been allowed to set up the government, if Maliki had been pushed out of the prime minister role, it might have allowed more of a chance for power sharing, more of a secure Iraq moving forward, alleviating some of what happens afterward that we’re seeing today.

It would have been very important, in my view, to follow the constitution of Iraq in order to maintain support for the process and to show that being cross-sectarian pays off. It has political consequence.

And to ask Allawi to form the government, he may have or he may not have succeeded in forming a government. Although he was the largest bloc, he wasn’t the majority, and therefore he would have had to convince some Shia, Kurds and some of the Sunnis who had separate parties of their own to vote for him.

But that did not happen. Instead Maliki manoeuvred, used the judiciary in a politicized way by getting a judgment from the court that said the bloc that even forms after the election, if it’s larger than the bloc that won the election, as they were before the election, can lead in forming the government. And we kind of bandwagoned with that, rather than pushing back and saying the constitution had to be followed.

And an even bigger mistake, in my view, was in retrospect, that once the government had been formed with Maliki leading, … the package that was part of the agreement on the staffing of the government — establishment of this new position of a senior group of a strategic council that Ayad Allawi was to chair — was never formed.

Some of the other agreements that were in place on policy issues did not occur, and we became much more disengaged after intense engagement in the formation of the government with a vice president and the president being hands-on, calling. Then we didn’t push, pursue, and cajole to have these other elements also be implemented.

Then add to that the absence of a SOFA and total withdrawal and the deterioration of the region, all of this then impacted Iraq.

We had secret meetings with them, and Allawi and Maliki were in the room. There were agreements that they would go in certain directions, and in the end they refused. It failed.

It didn’t work. It was not implemented. It failed. I think that was a serious setback, in my judgment.

And we no longer had the impetus to push harder?

I think there may have been a number of factors. One may have been that we declared victory when the government finally was formed. There was a sigh of relief, because it had almost been 10 months of wrangling without a government being formed, almost a world record. And so a government was formed, so that was a big success.

Then our level of engagement, the intensity of engagement necessarily declines, because we’ve achieved the big success with all the other grubby details to get the whole package implemented.

In my judgment we tried. It isn’t that we tried. We didn’t try hard enough, persistently enough to make those happen. And then our focus became more on the forces and the withdrawal of forces.

… What was the core reason at this point that we didn’t seem to have the influence that we had had in the past?

My judgment is that one; they probably did not see it as make or break in our relationship with them. If Maliki had believed that this was of great importance to the United States, that it would have severe negative implications if he didn’t, I think he would have listened. …

And second is that I think our agenda shifted to the SOFA issues much more, and I think that also affected Maliki.

… Did the Obama administration make a huge mistake there? What’s your take over the back-and-forth between Maliki and Obama and the final results there?

There are several factors that I think are important here. One is that in the process of government formation, after the elections, Maliki became more dependent on Iran, because he needed to keep the Shia support for himself to remain prime minister.

And Iran had its own conditions for support of Maliki, one of which was, it appears, not to have a SOFA with the United States, not to allow residual U.S. forces there. So that was one impression.

And I believe Maliki may have acquiesced during that period of government formation, perhaps believing that he can change his mind later on and get away with it. But he did make, it appears, that commitment to the Iranians to deal with the issue at hand, which was for him to become prime minister and have their support.

A contentious point some people say never happened. Other people say that it did happen.

Right.

Some people there were reporting that there was an agreement that our government actually had in their hands that defined that stipulation. You do believe it’s true?

I believe that there is merit. I’m not entirely confident. I think there is merit to this idea, because it was very clear that the Iranians did not want … that there shouldn’t be a SOFA agreement.

… So another reason for [Maliki] to stand by the idea that there would be no legal protections for soldiers…

I think he tried, in my own view, to find the middle path, to have his cake and eat it too, and to manage the various constituencies, which was that he would give executive branch immunity from prosecution in Iraq to the Americans but not to take it to Parliament, where he thought his rivals would score political points against him and put him in a difficult position vis-à-vis Iran as well. …

I think as these issues were being discussed, the numbers were coming down of how many troops we would really keep in Iraq. And based on my conversation with some Iraqis, they came to a view that for this few a number, should the prime minister pay the political price of going to Parliament to fight it out, and that we weren’t really working very hard to help him in getting support from the other political forces, some of whom were friendly with us. …

The troops have pulled out. There are grand ceremonies. It’s treated like a victory. The president speaks of it that way. The vice president speaks of it that way. How did you view it?

I thought, and I argued at the time, that this was not the right outcome, that we needed to maintain a residual presence, and that we weren’t taking any casualties; that Iraq was an important country; its future was important for us and for the region, and that given our role on the political-economic fronts, that having a security presence, it was going to enable us to play those roles more effectively.

And that the Iraqis had not developed, in terms of political and security relations, whether it was with regard to dealing with extremism and terrorism in the north part in terms of Kurdish forces and Iraqi forces, where we at times would have before three-way meetings to deal with problems as they arose, and that we were a kind of cushion, a mediator, that the removal of that would be negative for Iraq and therefore for our interest in Iraq in that region. So I was very concerned about it.

And the consequences long term from the decision is what, do you think?

I think the consequences are that a vacuum was created that was filled by regional rivals, with Iran coming in and gaining more influence in Baghdad and in the south.

Turkey, another rival for influence and a rising power like Iran, came into more influence in Kurdish region and among some Sunnis, and a variety of Arab countries also competing with each other for the Sunni areas and therefore pulling the country in different directions.

And you add to that then the issue of the unravelling of Syria a little later, and Maliki becoming more fearful with the challenge to Bashar [al-Assad], and the opposition being predominantly Sunni, and that if they succeed in Syria he could be next; and Iran, wanting to help Bashar, pushed Maliki as Iran gained more influence in Iraq to side more and more with Bashar, polarization further increasing inside Iraq, because the Sunnis did not support the policy of supporting Bashar, and as Maliki’s suspicion and fears increased, he became more sectarian in his approach toward the Sunnis.

And also, as his relation with Turkey deteriorated, his relations also with the Kurds of his own country began to deteriorate.

Some people point to the start of all of that, the day after the troops leave, [Tariq] al-Hashimi’s house is surrounded, his own vice president, and after that there are other crackdowns on Sunni leaders. What was that all about? … Was that the death of the power sharing that all of you had worked so hard to achieve?

I think that was a very negative signal. I remember that he was here, Maliki, in Washington, when the Hashimi issue was bubbling up, and he was getting instant messages and emails and he was expressing some happiness that this kind of evidence, as he saw it, against Tariq Hashimi was gathering or being gathered by security people.

I advised him that he ought to be very sad, not happy that he was coming across evidence like that; that he, Tariq Hashimi, whatever else one could say about him, that he had been one of the first Sunni leaders that had agreed to participate in the political process, and in that process his brother and sister were murdered by Al Qaeda because he had made that decision to participate, and that that was worth a lot, and that he needed to make sure that this wasn’t some manufactured thing, because from his demeanour, I suspected that he was pleased and that maybe somebody was feeding him things knowing that he would like to receive that kind of thing, and that would be very unfortunate for Iraq.

And it’s not only that one. It was after that those other moves were made [against] others –

Against Finance Minister [Rafi al-] Issawi. I used to tell him that one of the attributes of a leader is to be able to work with others, to give them credit, to make sure they also are seen as valuable, contributing, and that I noticed after a few months of observing him as prime minister that he had a hard time with that: giving credit to others, bringing them in and building a relationship with them.

And I remember one meeting which I think, who can you work with, because I was hearing so many complaints from other members of the government. And that has been, I think, one of the persistent issues with him.

But he did some great things in the earlier period. I think he showed enormous courage when he went to Basra to take on [Muqtada al-] Sadr’s militia. He took some tough decisions with to Sadr City. I think he rose to the challenge on those issues. But he has had some failings, particularly in his second term. …

… Do you think that Obama’s national security team was too caught up in domestic politics, that it wasn’t focused on the long-term importance of Iraq?

I think so. I think they were not that interested in Iraq. They weren’t elected, I believe, to do Iraq. And they have been, for the most part, not that interested to make a serious effort with regard to Iraq.

I think this is clear when you talk to Iraqi leaders generally until recently. I think with the ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] terrorist movement, there is again a perception of maybe re-engagement. But prior to that, there was a broad belief that the United States, the Obama administration felt that Iraq was behind us.

Was this a radical mistake for the administration?

I think so. I think the mistake was not only in Iraq but also in Syria. I believe that maintaining a residual force in Iraq would also have a positive effect on the crisis in Syria, because I think it would have been far less likely that Iran would have been able to overfly or use the land routes to support Bashar. It would have been less likely for the two wars to become intertwined or the two conflicts, Iraq and Syria. …

The radicalization of the Syrian opposition that ISIS is one of the manifestations of is the result of the desperate situation of the Syrian opposition, where in this brutal war only extremists can continue to fight, where you believe in life after death, where you believe everything is the will of God, or you have some extreme views.

Moderates don’t survive in environments where barrel bombs, chemical weapons and such things are being used. I think we will pay a price for that, what we did in Iraq and we did or didn’t do in Syria for time to come.

How dangerous is this situation?

I imagine that you get a terrorist group in the heart of the Middle East in the thousands, with people from all over the world participating in it, with access to huge and imaginable resources when you compare it to Afghanistan — where I also served, where the terrorists and extremists were there, but they didn’t have access to the kind of resources — and the geographic location is far more threatening, first to the area, of course, but then to the region and to the world. So I think this is going to be a preoccupation for some time to come.

Does it prolong the war on terrorism into the unlimited future? …

I think terrorism will be with us for decades to come. To overcome it, societies of that region need to be normalized, transformed. … And therefore, especially in this more integrated world, we can’t really isolate ourselves from [it] by coming home.

We need to deal with it, and we need to be involved, build the right coalition, the right presence, military posture to deal with it.

… The whole phenomenon of ISIS. A lot of people have come in and … said that there were warning signs for months, a year before, of what was going on. … And yet our government didn’t seem to want to react, didn’t seem to want to believe that it was possible that they would be dragged back into this thing. What’s your take on all of that?

Unfortunately, I’ve had the experience that sometimes wishful thinking can have a distorting effect. And the desire not do something has a distorting effect on how you see the facts, unfortunately. It does happen.

I believe, based on conversations with locals, such as the Kurdish leaders, that they have been warning for some months before about the rise of ISIS and the threats that they were going to present to Maliki’s government — they didn’t take it seriously — and to others, including ourselves. And I think we underestimated the rapidity with which the situation changed. …

… What’s the solution? …

We need to have a two-track approach, in my view. First track, we have to, as the president has done, work with the Iraqis to see if a true unity government can be formed.

The timing is good because the Iraqis have just had an election. They need to form a new government. This is an opportunity to put a government together — Iraqis obviously have the primary responsibility — that can address the legitimate grievances of the Sunnis, and then working with that government and with the local leaders and get the Sunnis to take on the ISIS terrorists.

To some extent, repetition of what happened the last time, we have to redo that. But on the other hand now, with no forces there, with much less of a footprint, how much do we know about the situation on the ground, who the leaders are, what arrangements can be made to turn them to work with us and with Iraqis government against ISIS? But that’s a necessary one.

Two, if Iraq doesn’t do that, if they can’t form a unity government, I think it’s likely that the Kurds would want to go in a separate direction to protect themselves from the Shia-Sunni civil war and all of the problems that this is causing.

And it may be that as a result of this, problems and not being able to cooperate, the Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, that we may not be able to work with the Baghdad government, as it may go more under the influence of Iran, because it could not meet our condition that there has to be a unity government before we do a lot with them on the security front, that we will have to protect our interests against this terror from Erbil, from the Kurdish region.

So we need to hedge by also being able to adjust the second track, being able to work with local forces if the centre ultimately, does not work. I believe that we need to take another look at the threat, which is very serious and growing, and adjust our posture, be agile enough to deal with it.

I think for Iraq the formula is power sharing at the centre; federalism, the Sunnis running their own areas, while participating in the central government; the Shia, they run the south and they obviously dominate in Baghdad; and the Kurds are looking more it seems like a confederal arrangement, even more autonomy to run their own affairs. So [produce] their oil, have their own recognized borders.

And it’s a tough challenge whether the Iraqis are going to be able to manage that, to come together even with our help and, given where we are, our influence. And so therefore, while we count on and hope for a unity government, we need to also prepare to protect our interest should that not happen.

In ’05, when you first arrived there, did you think that this might be the way this would all end, or did you have different hopes?

No, I had the hope that the problem of sectarianism will be a transition issue.

In fact, Prime Minister Maliki, I remember him telling me that “Look, you need to be patient with us. Because of Saddam and his brutality and his bad treatment of the Shia, we’re going through a phase of sectarianism. We’re going to overcome that. We have tribes that are half Shia/Sunni, and we have a huge number of intermarriages.”

This is just a problem of transition, and it has been a painful and too long a transition. It improved, and it’s gotten worst. I know looking at it from a historic perspective, these 10 years are a very short time, and terrible things have happened in the history of Europe based on religion, sects.

But now it’s playing itself out in front of the world, and it seems like a very long time. People are not as patient as they used to be. And then with the connectivity, we’re not as protected from the challenges that it poses.

So I have to say it has turned out far more difficult mostly for the Iraqis than I had hoped and worked very hard to avoid.

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/losing-iraq/zalmay-khalilzad-maliki-and-the-unmaking-of-iraq/

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Jack Keane: Leaving Iraq Was an “Absolute Strategic Failure”

July 29, 2014

Let’s start back with 2006, and the debate that was growing that a surge might be the general direction to go. The necessity of the surge was starting to be talked about. Explain why that happened. …

In 2005, in Iraq, the constitution was written. A new government was elected. That government was trying to take office in 2006.

The Al Qaeda and the Sunni tribal leadership, who were working together at that time, recognized the threat of a democratic, duly elected government to their political objectives, and as such, they wanted to undermine this government and break down any relationship that it would have to its people. They chose the Samarra mosque as the vehicle to achieve that end, and death squads on the streets in Baghdad killing Shia.

What their motivation was is to get the Shia militia — who had historically, the last three years except for one or two exceptions, been on defence — and get them out and come on offense. And they knew that they would attack Sunni people, and as a result of that, this would become a sectarian clash, a sectarian war, and the government would never be able to take hold as something that the people had confidence in.

They largely accomplished that objective. In 2006, in Baghdad, it was a bloodbath, with hundreds of people being killed every month and tens and scores of them every single week. The United States military, assisted by the Iraqi security forces, conducted two operations to push this back: Together Forward I and Together Forward II, the latter being in the late summer, early fall. As a result of that, the government fractured. It was heading toward a failed state.

There was absolute bedlam. People were not receiving services. They were not going to school. They were just going to market to try to get the bare minimums of life. And the entire stability of Iraq was clearly in jeopardy, and the United States was about to suffer humiliating defeat.

So how does this realign, adjust the debate that is going on in Washington? …

The national security leadership team is represented by Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld in the Pentagon, and also in the field that is Gen. [George W.] Casey and Gen. [John] Abizaid. What they were talking about did not sync with what was taking place on the ground.

As late as August 2006, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, they were talking that the strategy was indeed succeeding. And I can remember the senators were almost coming across the table, figuratively, at them, because they saw the facts, and they knew the facts, and it didn’t square with what they were being told.

That motivated me to get involved, because I thought for sure they were not capable of changing the strategy, and we were going to head toward a terrible defeat. So in my own mind, I devised what was wrong, why was the current strategy failing, what did we need to do to fix it?

I shopped that around with [former Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger, [former Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz, [former Speaker of the House] Newt Gingrich [R-Ga]. I eventually briefed Secretary Rumsfeld on it, Gen. [Peter] Pace, and eventually the president of the United States.

What happens, then, as this is debated? You’ve got an election that takes place in November. Rumsfeld is out soon after. What’s happening? How are the stars aligning? …

In Washington, D.C., in 2006, Democrats had long since given up on the war in Iraq in terms of any tangible political support for it. The new factor was the Republicans were beginning to give up as well, and they were truly challenging the strategy and the lack of success.

I believe for a long time protracted wars test the will of any democracy to be sure, and people will underwrite a protracted war if they see some progress. But if they don’t see progress and it appears to be futile and useless, then that political support begins to evaporate rather quickly. That is what was taking place in 2006. …

Why does Rumsfeld have to go?

Rumsfeld has to go because one, he would not admit the strategy was failing, and two, he obviously wasn’t going to put in place something else to replace it. I think he was an inevitable casualty of the lack of political support for the president’s strategy.

And Casey’s light-footed strategy, how quickly had that dissolved? But yet why was he still fighting for it?

I can’t explain why Generals Casey and Abizaid were still arguing for a strategy that so obviously had been failing for a year to a year and a half. The casualties were increasing year over year, and the situation was so dramatic.

I just think they were so emotionally and psychologically tied to that strategy and the campaign plank that supported it that they were not capable of seeing the compelling facts that were arguing against that strategy.

Gen. [David] Petraeus takes over for Casey. Describe Gen. Petraeus. Here’s a guy who’s not your orthodox general in a lot of ways. He’s not liked by some in the military, and yet he’s given this important role at an amazingly important turning point for the war, for the United States, for Iraq. Who is he, and why does it end up that he’s the one that’s chosen to go over there?

I have a close association with Gen. Petraeus. … What you get in Dave Petraeus is a very unique officer, a combination of intelligence, extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding. And you couple that with his tactical savviness [sic] and his strategic sense of what is taking place and the depth that he has strategically. That’s very unusual for an officer to have such a grasp as an infantry leader and tactician who also thinks so favourably strategically. And you bring those things together, and that is a unique officer. …

Was there some resistance against him, though, in the beginning?

I don’t think so. … He had done three tours in Iraq, and clearly he had knowledge of the people, and he also understood counterinsurgency. He had just spent a year-plus of his time helping to write counterinsurgency doctrine for the Army and the Marine Corps, along with Jim Mattis from the Marine Corps.

So he clearly understood what the challenges were in Iraq, but more importantly, he understood what the solution was.

January through June [it] wasn’t going that well. … Define those early days in the surge when there was angst in Washington that it might not go in the direction that they were hoping for.

We had a plan. It was going to take us six to seven months to get the surge troops in, based on the Army’s fourth-generation model.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think of what we did in World War II, when we deployed multiple divisions in that time frame. But that’s the system that we had at the time, frustrating for anybody that was looking at it.

But certainly no one expected that you could get success in 30, 60, 90, 120 days. I was there a lot during that time frame. I saw it. … I was down there looking at it myself, company commanders and platoon leaders, and I saw the anecdotal evidence of the change in behaviour on the population.

As soon as they saw our troops staying there, sleeping there, patrolling day and night, protecting their children, protecting their way of life, and then getting hurt doing it, they invested in our troops. And that is the psychology of counterinsurgency, to protect the population.

They began to tell our troops where the arms are stored, where the ammunition is stored, who are the bad guys when they try to come back in. I saw that proof of principle immediately on my visit in February. And then that began to enlarge as we put more forces in.

In some neighbourhoods, it took us months to clear out the Al Qaeda and get that kind of trust. In other neighbourhoods, where they were not as infested, our troops were able to earn their trust a lot more rapidly.

That insurgency began to turn dramatically by the fall of 2007. We did not get all the troops in there until July. That is one of the most rapid turnarounds in counterinsurgency warfare that I’m aware of.

How does it evolve into this working with Sunnis, working with Awakening Councils and such? How does that transition happen, the importance of that part of the strategy?

Col. Sean MacFarland came out of Tal Afar, where counterinsurgency principles were put in play by now-Gen. H. R. McMaster.

[It took] sheer force of personality on the part of McMaster to employ it, because he was not told to do it. MacFarland was moved from Tal Afar to Anbar Province and to Ramadi. He began to employ the same. Sheiks came to see him and talk to him: “Maybe we can work together.”

His brigade was protecting the population for the first time ever in Anbar Province, as opposed to just chasing down bad guys. As a result of that, they were fed up with Al Qaeda, as is well documented now.

They reached out to MacFarland, and that began the Sunni so-called Awakening movement. That began actually in 2006, not very noticeable to anybody because of the hell that Baghdad was going through.

Petraeus comes on the scene in 2007, in February. He sees what is beginning to take place, and intellectually he knows immediately that this can work just about any place that Sunnis are. He brings all the commanders in with Gen. [Raymond] Odierno, and they go through an explanation, what this is and what the opportunity is for all of us.

That was promulgated all the way down to company commanders, who understood that where there were Sunni tribes who were assisting and supporting the insurgency, there was potential to reach out to them at your level and try to bring them into the fold. And then you use other examples of what is taking place in other provinces in Iraq.

So the emphasis that Generals Petraeus and Odierno placed on it helped to speed that transformation in other provinces and also, initially, throughout Anbar Province.

… Of course the huge problem is the sectarian divide in this part of the world and in Iraq. How much does this make the Sunnis feel that they are being reintegrated into the political system? Is this only something that is working in these locations, or is it the hope, is it the reality, that in fact what it is doing is it’s reintegrating the Sunnis into a society which is now run by the Shia?

Everybody wants to talk about sectarian conflicts of the war in Iraq, but the fact of the matter is, Sunnis have lived with Shias in harmony more in the confines of Iraq, in that land, than they have been in conflict. That’s an historical fact.

But nonetheless, I think President [George W.] Bush’s decision to commit and escalate our forces and change the strategy was significant.

I remember speaking to a sheik who came back into the political system in late 2008, laid down his arms. His troops became part of the Sons of Iraq, the so-called Sunni Awakening.

 said, “What made you come back into the political system?” Quick answer. He said: “When Bush occupied Baghdad, I knew we couldn’t win. I’m trying to achieve my political objectives while you Americans still have some influence over this government.” End of message. I said that was a mouthful in terms of what truly was happening in that country.

The Sunnis were attempting to get back what they had lost, driven by Saddam Hussein’s leaders to begin with. The Al Qaeda fell in on that, took advantage of that, and catapulted that movement much more than expected.

In the end, that was not a healthy marriage. Sunni tribal leaders and Al Qaeda are absolutely diametrically opposed to what they want to achieve in their lifetime and what they want to achieve for their children, and it was bound to come apart. And it did come apart. It was Bush’s decision that helped to catapult that separation.

… How hard was it to convince President Bush that this was the right direction to go?

President Bush, who I do not know well — I had briefed him a couple of times prior — I think knew that something fundamentally was wrong in Iraq and some kind of change was necessary. What they didn’t know is what to do about it.

In other words, there were advocates for more troops. The fact of the matter is, if you gave more troops to Generals Casey and Abizaid and they execute the same strategy, we still fail. The fact of the matter is we had to change strategy.

And if I did anything, it was to help operationalise that change in strategy so they could understand what it is and how you would employ something like that, and how it would make sense, and how different it is from what we had previously been doing.

So I think once he understood that, socialized that with his own staff and got feedback — “Does this make sense?” — I think his proclivity for change was there. He just didn’t know for sure what to change to. And thankfully he didn’t just increase the troops. He changed the strategy, which required an increase of troops.

The other thing that the government does at that point is back [Nouri al-] Maliki. … Give me your overview of this guy: who he was, who we viewed him to be at that point, and how cooperative he was.

We have to remember that in this system that the Iraqis were employing; a lot of their leaders who were talented had left Iraq. Maliki was one of the ones who was available, and he was not first, second, or third choice if I remember correctly when they settled on a new government.

So Maliki came out of that system as something the Shias, the Sunnis and the Kurds, someone who they could live with.

So he’s politically weak in terms of experience to be sure, but that probably would be true of most leaders taking over in Iraq given Saddam Hussein’s rule for 35 years.

I think also he expresses a viewpoint that many Shias expressed, and that is, after 35 years of repression, they were very frustrated with Sunnis. And the art of compromise was not something that was in their lexicon. Actually, “revenge” was a word, and the expression of that kind of emotion would be something you’d hear more likely.

So I always thought of Maliki as a nefarious character, to be frank, who needed to be influenced and sometimes guided and directed.

I don’t believe this is too dissimilar from what we experienced in post conflicts in other wars in Germany, in Japan and South Korea, in the Balkans and also in the Philippines, where we stayed and kept our forces there to have influence over a political system that was attempting to grow and develop into something that was real.

When you were working with Maliki and you’re across the table from him, did you ever look him in the eyes and wonder, what happens when the Americans are gone? … Are we going to have problems with this [guy] later on?

I always looked at Maliki as the beginning of multi-generations of leaders in Iraq, just as we started out in South Korea with actually no democracy but a dictatorship. So I thought he was the beginning.

What I was encouraged by the Maliki government is, when we sat down to do the Status of Forces Agreement [SOFA], they did not want to talk about it. What they wanted to talk about was a strategic and enduring relationship with the United States that was not just military, but it was social, economic, educational, scientific, open visa programs, a relationship with a sovereign state similar to any other state that was our ally in the region and also in Europe.

And they refused to get back on the page and talk about the status of forces until we, they agreed on the strategic partnership relationship for the long term. I knew then that they were serious not only about the relationship but also about status of forces and troops staying in Iraq because of their emphasis on that. I was encouraged by that.

I also knew that this would be very difficult moving forward. But the strategic relationship that I believe we were committed to at the time, President Bush signed that document that that would be an enduring relationship that transcends some of the political difficulties we would have.

What does Obama inherit when he comes to power? …

By the end of 2008, clearly the Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency had been relatively stabilized. And in the Al Qaeda’s mind, they were defeated. They actually said that in many of their transmissions that we were able to pick up.

And the Shia militia — largely those trained by the Iranians and also in Sadr City — had been defeated. Thus there was a transition of government between Bush and Obama.

I think what happened almost immediately that indicated major political change was about to take place is the new ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, told Gen. Odierno when he took office after Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker left in 2009, he told them that Iraq is going to be treated as a sovereign state. The example he used was like France.

And Odierno objected and said: “Listen, we finally have some stability and security. Violence is down significantly. But most of the work that needs to be done is to political growth and development of this fledgling democracy, and that’s going to require a significant effort on your part, and I’m prepared to assist with that because we have relationships and ties with these senior leaders.” And he pushed back and said, “No.”

So Maliki, after a number of months, comes to understand — despite the fact, as I’ve said, he is a nefarious character — he has a different political relationship with this administration than with the past one: no direct contact whatsoever head of state to head of state; an ambassador on the ground; the president’s personal envoy pushing back and creating distance between the Maliki government and the United States.

As those months go by, he understands unequivocally that this, in fact, is a different relationship. And of course the Iranians sense this, and they are going to try to advantage themselves in developing their relationship with Maliki.

Some people say that basically what took place was disengagement. Certainly the troops were going to be disengaged very soon, but also politically, that Washington was disengaging.

That’s what I’ve been saying. The fact of the matter is it began in 2009, long before our troops were pulled out, that we began a political disengagement from Iraq which was significant.

In other words, we were no long attempting to shape and guide their political maturation. A huge mistake. That’s what we did so successfully post-World War II in the countries that we defeated, and after the Korean War, and also in the Balkans and in the Philippines.

Here we were disengaging from that political growth and development and leaving Maliki to himself. Now, listen, I’m not absolving Maliki of responsibility here. He’s largely responsible for the crisis that we have. But the United States, make no mistake about it, contributed significantly to the crisis that’s unfolding in Iraq and Syria today by this disengagement, not just in Iraq.

The fact of the matter is it’s going around Iraq at this time that the United States is disengaging from the Middle East — not stating that’s our policy, but in fact it is happening.

Were you ever called upon for advice by this administration?

I was continuing to provide counsel to Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton during this period, mostly because of my involvement in Iraq and also in Afghanistan. …

Did you ever suggest to her that the directions we were going were possibly going to have blowback in the long run?

I did.

Can you tell us a little bit about –

No. Those conversations remain private. I just would say we had very frank and direct conversations.

So 2010, there’s an election in Iraq. Maliki doesn’t get as many votes as Allawi, doesn’t get as many seats as Allawi, and yet he’s the one that the United States decided to back along with Iranians on the other side. What’s going on as far as you can tell about that situation? …

I do believe the 2010 election that you’re thinking of, and the closeness of the vote and the fact that Maliki lost a vote by one, did provide an opportunity for us to influence an outcome.

And I don’t think we need to make any apologies about trying to influence this outcome. This is a fledgling democracy, and we have made a significant contribution to liberate Iraq and expended considerable lives to stop those who were trying to regain what they had lost.

And the fact of the matter is Iraqis themselves wanted a strategic partnership with the United States. So I think we should have been all in, behind the scenes diplomatically influencing this to get a better government solution than what we finally got, which was Maliki again. And that was, I think, a mistake.

What was the debate in Washington about Maliki? What were some of the concerns?

Everybody knew who Maliki was and what his problems were. But the fact of the matter is I don’t think that the United States’ diplomatic effort, given the fact that beginning in 2009 we had made a decision to disengage — now those diplomats are not going to admit that. Everybody who was there watching it believed that we politically disengaged that early. And then comes the election, and those relationships that we should have maintained diplomatically were not as strong as they were when Ambassador Crocker was there or Ambassador [Zalmay] Khalilzad was there. Those relationships had waned, so our influence was not as great.

Even given that limitation, I think we should have made a much more earnest attempt to influence that government, given the opportunity was there with such a close vote.

And the message sent to the Iraqi people was?

The United States was supporting Maliki unequivocally.

And the problems that could grow out of that?

I think that the problems that you got from that were some distrust by the Sunnis. And Maliki, before 2011 and the troop withdrawal, he began to take exception to the Sons of Iraq, which all came from the Sunni tribes.

That was the Anbar Awakening that grew to about 105,000, and there was a point where we would no longer pay them. It was right for them to pay them, and he admitted that he would pay them. And then he stopped paying them. Not only that, he began to purge some of them and actually attacked and killed some of them, particularly in Diyala Province.

He saw the Sons of Iraq not through the same lens that we did. We saw them as Sunni tribes that now were disenfranchised from the Al Qaeda because of their choosing, who wanted to come into the political system and support it and were interested in a stable and secure Iraq.

They had been promised that they would be integrated into the Iraqi security forces. Now, not every person there we knew would be qualified to do that, but assuming that most of them would eventually make their way into that as policemen or as soldiers after the required amount of training and vetting. That largely did not happen.

So those promises were broken. And that was actually before our troops pulled out in 2011.

Big red flag.

Yeah.

… How did we end up with the situation that at the end of 2011, that there are going to be no troops left behind?

I can’t speak to what the White House was thinking, but I do know this: Gen. [C. Donald] Alston, who was our last four-star commander in Iraq, had the requirement to develop the recommendation for the residual force requirement, just to become the basis for the Status of Forces Agreement. His number was around 20,000.

The envoy that came to negotiate the Status of Forces Agreement, I believe it was Brett McGurk, put on the table 10,000. Certainly Maliki and his entire leadership team was very much aware of what the number was in terms of what the American generals believed the requirement would be to sustain the momentum of the Iraqi security forces going forward and the missions that would be attended to.

I cannot speak for Maliki, but I can only deduce when he found out that that number was 10,000, in his mind he knew that was not a serious proposal. And it reflected an attitude that the Americans were not serious about a long-term commitment that was in the strategic framework agreement.

If you couple that with the disengagement that was taking place politically from 2009 to this time frame, which is 2010 after the election, then you can understand the frustration that Maliki and the leadership are feeling, that the United States is truly pulling away from us and not even giving us the forces that are going to be necessary to enable our continued growth and development from a security perspective.

But they’re the ones that put up the fight supposedly that they are not going to sign the agreement. … Maliki says that it will not be passed through the Parliament.

Two things happen here that I think convolute what the status of forces discussions were about.

One is the immunity issue itself. I’m convinced in my one mind that Maliki knows for a fact that we have 40 Status of Forces Agreements around the world with our troops stationed there, and in every single one of those cases, we do not permit our troops to go into the judicial system of a host country. That is a fact.

And he knew this was not something that we would equivocate about. He knew that before negotiations ever began. He knew that before he was elected for this second time, as did all the other candidates who were seeking that office. So that’s number one.

Number two is, I believe Maliki used the immunity issue as face saving for himself, because the number was so ridiculously low — one time it went from 10 to six to three — that he threw that out there to take a stand on it, to provide political cover for himself. He was coming back empty-handed.

Secondly, the Obama administration insisting that this had to be approved by the Parliament in addition to Maliki signing the document, which was only the intent when this process began under the Bush administration, was an unnecessary requirement that presented huge political problems to Maliki that he certainly didn’t want to entertain.

What’s your take on the story that’s out there that during the 2010 election, one of the things is there was an agreement with the Iranians and Maliki to get their support? They would pressure [Muqtada al-] Sadr and stuff to support his remaining as the prime minister and such, and part of the agreement was that no U.S. troops would stay after 2011. You know this whole story that’s out there.

… On the surface of it, we know that the Iranians were supporting Maliki. There’s no doubt about that. I mean, what did Iran want in Iraq? They wanted a stable, secure Iraq, certainly, on their border with a relatively weak government that they could have influence in. And that government is not strategically aligned with the United States, who represents their number one strategic enemy in the region.

That is kind of what Iran had in mind with Iraq and with Maliki, so they are supporting and they are providing money for him. They’re providing political support for him.

What scheme they’re up to in terms of how to influence that, I can’t get into all of that intrigue. But none of it would surprise me in terms of what the Iranians are capable of doing to try to influence Maliki as a leader.

So the troops in December of 2011 pull out. Washington sees it as a victory, defines it as a victory. … What’s your view as you’re seeing the troops being pulled out?

I thought it was an absolute strategic failure on the part of the Obama administration that they could not see clearly through their own emotional and psychological issues dealing with Iraq and what they were running on in the campaign.

After all, what we had in Iraq is a country that now had some stability and security. It has an educated class of people who had wealth, and they are groping with a fledgling democracy and a not-too-capable and competent leader who happens to be the head of state.

ut the promise of Iraq in terms of being an anchor for stability and security in the region is significant, and the Obama administration just failed to grasp that incredible opportunity and incredible reality, and [they] let their past frustration over Iraq, and Bush’s decision to begin with in going, drive them to make incredibly poor decisions in terms of the overall stability not just of Iraq but the Middle East, because what takes place in Iraq has an impact on other parts of the Middle East as well. …

It’s the day after the troops leave. All of a sudden, Maliki has sent out troops to surround [Vice President Tariq] al-Hashimi’s home, threatening arrest. He escapes. Starts a Sunni crackdown of other political leadership. The day after, or almost the same time as the troops are out, the ambassador is gone. The highest ranking military man is gone. … What’s going on here?

Maliki sees exactly what’s taking place is the United States has disengaged and cut loose whatever relationships we had with them.

And Maliki, before this actually takes place, is beginning to undermine his political opponents. The [symbolism] of what took place with his own vice president the day after all of this takes place obviously is no accident. He planned that to happen. He wanted everybody to get the message.

And the other thing that’s not obvious to people but it is to those who were tracking this, and we were tracking it very closely at the Institute for the Study of War, and that is that he was purging his military leaders, those leaders who had distinguished themselves during the surge.

And I saw a lot of this up close: effective battalion brigade and division commanders, not all, some really good ones out there, and they were rising as a result of that in rank and stature, reputation, and actually some absolute devotion from their troops to them because they were personally courageous and talented.

He purged them, and he put in its place these cronies who were not effective military leaders. Some of them were just given rank. And it was tragic, because over time, over a number of years, the morale of the Iraqi military is collapsing.

But it is not visible, because the numbers are still there. The tanks are there. The helicopters are there. The weapons are there. The soldiers are there. But the fact of the matter is, they are not cohesive units. The AWOL or desertion rate becomes staggeringly high.

When ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] finally comes to Mosul, some of those units that were there were at 50 to 60 percent strength. That’s not a cohesive organization. Fighting forces, particularly ground forces, have to operate on the basis of unit cohesion. They had none of that, and they had ineffective leaders as well.

So Maliki begins to do this over a pattern of three to four years, and the result is what we saw when ISIS came to Iraq and came to Mosul.

Did Washington understand what was going on, what Maliki was doing? Did they understand that the divide was growing between Sunni and Shia again?

Absolutely. There was no way that anybody could not understand what Maliki was doing that he was clearly undermining his political opponents, in some cases purging them and clearly changing the security forces, which obviously is his power base.

He took to himself the power of minister of defence and minister of the interior even though, obviously, they had been Cabinet-level positions before. And he wanted to control those forces, and control them he did.

And he had all of his cronies put into key places in those forces. All of that was very visible to any observer that was taking place. The political purge was much more obvious and the media would write about that, but what was taking place on the security side was every bit as dramatic as the political purge.

You see this as the seeds of the insurrection, … the eventual ISIS coming down. …

Yes, … because when you look at ISIS and radical Islam, you have to draw back a little bit and take a look at the larger Middle East and what is happening.

The fact of the matter is in 2010, the so-called Arab Spring began, which was one of the most significant geopolitical transformational events the Middle East ever dealt with: people looking for political and social justice and economic opportunity. Nobody in the streets throughout the Middle East when that was taking place was demonstrating for radical Islam and jihad.

But the radical Islamists saw it as opportunity. If there is going to be political upheaval, then they see that as opportunity to influence that political outcome. So they fall in.

And you could see it happening in Egypt, you could see it happening in Libya, and you could see it happening in Syria. The same thing began to take place in Iraq.

The ISIS force, as we now call it, moved to Syria to establish a sanctuary, knowing we could afford to do that there and take up refuge and began to take control of territory. It was from Syria that they began to conduct operations in Iraq and gain the kind of foothold and influence that they finally were able to achieve.

The campaign in Mosul went on for two years, and that was mostly terrorist activities by a terrorist organization. Seizing Mosul was the same terrorist organization coming to Mosul as a terrorist army.

They only could come to Mosul as a terrorist army because of what they were able to achieve in Syria, where their staging bases were, where their equipment was, where their money was, where their sanctuary was. That is all about radical Islam taking advantage of the Arab Spring and the political upheaval.

The problem I see that we had, that was President Obama’s first strategic surprise. Every president has it, and this was the Arab Spring. And it was a significant opportunity for the United States to influence; not to control and certainly not to direct, but actually to influence.

After all, what did these people want? They wanted largely what we have in the United States and in the West, and we could help guide that to a certain degree in terms of our influence. And he chose to back away from it. Radical Islamists all in. …

… How does the Syrian civil war give rise to ISIS, and [what are] the ramifications for Iraq?

If you can remember at the beginning, when the people began to demonstrate against [President Bashar al-] Assad, as they had done in Egypt and against Qaddafi in Libya, many believed that that movement would get put down very quickly, because this is a brutal dictator and he’s learned from Tiananmen Square; he’s learned from Tehran in Iran in July 2009; he’s learned from a Qaddafi so-called failure in Libya. So he begins to put the movement down.

But that movement actually gains momentum, because there is something really special going on in Syria. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were willing to fight after years of repression. The Russians and the Iranians see it. They are going to lose a client state, and they’re all in. That’s what sustains Assad.

But that created space, because that regime did not go when it looked like it would. That creates the space for the radical Islamists to come in. And during this time frame, if you recall in the summer of 2012, the radical Islamists have already showed up.

[Secretary of Defense Leon] Panetta, Clinton and Petraeus all recommend to the Obama administration to begin to arm and train the Free Syrian Army that they can vet the moderates who are part of that, and the administration says no.

That begins to create an even greater vacuum, and the radical Islamic movement grows. The only people that have ever fought ISIS in Syria is not the regime; it is the Free Syrian Army.

So why did the administration say no?

I don’t know. I just believe in my own mind, based on all the other decisions that they made about the Middle East, that they saw any commitment as something that could lead to a protracted involvement in another potential war in the Middle East.

And actually, what you’re trying to do is prevent a negative outcome by helping people fight for themselves against a brutal dictator. They never asked for our troops. They never even asked for our airplanes then.

I spoke to some of them myself. They shopped for themselves all around Washington, anybody who would listen to them. “Give us the weapons to help us fight Assad. We can deal with him if you give us the weapons and help us with some training alongside of that.”

I asked Petraeus this, and [he] wrote about it recently. He said there was no surprise whatsoever in the rise of ISIS. What’s your point of view about it? … Were the warnings out there and just ignored, or what?

We had been tracking it at the Institute for the Study of War for two and a half years, ISIS, and reporting on every new town that they took over and imposed governance on. They began to expand what we all see as red line on a map now.

We were very much aware of what was taking place [with the] ISIS expansion in Syria. And that’s from open sources, … and intelligence services are very conversant with what ISIS was doing. …

The fact that they, one, organized themselves as an army to do it and, two, the speed of what they were able to achieve, namely due to the collapse of the Iraqi military is, in fact, a surprise.

Give me a summation here of who’s at fault. When was the die cast on this? What led us to the point where we are right now?

I believe in 2009, the administration made the decision that after fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq, leading to a war in Afghanistan that took far too long to resolve, mainly because Iraq and the war consumed the resources and put Afghanistan on a delay that those are mistakes, and we should never, ever make a mistake like that again.

I believe that paralyzed their thinking to the contrary, that it ignored the political upheaval that was taking place in 2010 with the Arab Spring. It ignored the clear desire of the radical Islamists. The radical Islamists were not about Al Qaeda senior leadership simply in Pakistan. This was a significant movement, and they used this to take advantage of it.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is making a strategic decision to pivot to the East and to disengage from the Middle East without stating its objective to disengage. That was a strategic decision that haunts us to this day.

… Do you look back and say, all that was accomplished, all the work that was done, all the lives that were lost, all the money that was spent to accomplish this, it has all been squandered?

In my own mind, it is profoundly disappointing to see what has occurred in Iraq given the sacrifice of our troops, given our commitment to removing Saddam Hussein and putting in place a fledgling government that would have a chance for a stable, secure Iraq.

What did we want out of Iraq? We wanted a country that was stable and secure, that elected its own government, that was not going to be a threat to its neighbours and also was capable of protecting and defending itself. That was our objective in Iraq.

And clearly what is happening now is a failure of that objective because we have external forces that came into Iraq from Syria. We have internal insurgency that is attempting to overthrow this government, and they are succeeding at that. I don’t think the situation is Iraq is over yet, and it remains to be seen what is going to happen there.

This much I do know is that ISIS should be our focus, because this is a menace to the region of the Middle East. Jordan is their next objective, and they certainly would go down that peninsula long term.

It is a threat to Europe and the United States eventually directly because of terrorism, and we need to focus on it. The fact of the matter is the vehicle to address that is through Iraq and through Syria, and we should be doing something about it through both of those countries.

And your thoughts on the path forward? What should be done?

One, focus on ISIS now, and while they are a relatively small force, under 10,000, although obviously they are the new face of Al Qaeda, they are the new face of radical Islam, they are what the 9/11 Al Qaeda dreamt about in terms of establishing a caliphate before they overreached and attacked the United States and as a result of it lost everything: sanctuary, leadership, operational reach and operational control of Al Qaeda.

They are symbolic figures to be certain. And I’m not suggesting that they can’t be a threat again. They could be. But this is a new threat and a new face, and we have to deal with it because it is in the Levant right now, established a bona fide caliphate.

The numbers are not that strong. They are not impregnable. They are something that can be dealt with. These are the same folks that we defeated once before. I think we’d know how to do this.

They’re going to gather in large groups, in large staging areas like they have in Syria, and move along routes with their equipment. That makes them very vulnerable to our use of air power. One, see where the targets are, and two, employ strikes against them.

We should be engaging them with air power. We should be robustly assisting the Free Syrian Army with equipment and also with training. And I mean, put it on fast forward — we have a tendency to do this in half measures — and move that thing forward.

And we have to look at the problem as ISIS in Syria and ISIS in Iraq. If we wait for a political coalition to develop, I think that’s a mistake. I think if we move now and start to influence this situation, I believe it would enhance the political coalition.

Right now, as we are talking, the Russians and the Iranians are assisting Maliki’s government, and that strengthens his hand. It makes it harder to move to a coalition government.

You know that privately he’s saying to his political opponents who want to form a coalition government with him: “Look, I’ve got international support. I’ve got Russian air power here. I’ve got Iranian pilots here. I’ve got airplanes that used to be Iraqis that the Iranians have given back to us. I’ve got Quds Force on the ground. I’ve got advisers assisting me. They are from Russia, and they are from Iran.”

He said, “I have been able to arrange this myself.” That is a smack in the face to the United States as we dither around waiting for something to happen politically. I think the Obama administration, while that rhetoric sounds good, I think it’s an excuse for them not to act until they get a coalition government that is in agreement with what our national objectives are.

… The Awakening Council, the Sunni that were working with the Americans during the surge, what are they doing? Why were they not supporting the Iraqi government when ISIS came through?

The fact of the matter is he undermined the Sunnis politically, and certainly the tribal leaders who were supporting the political apparatus were affected by that. They were so fed up with this government.

They knew after all these years now that there was no way that Maliki was going to enfranchise them in a political process going forward. Actually, he was doing everything he could to disenfranchise them. I believe the Sunni tribes supported ISIS as a huge wake-up call to everybody in the region and absolutely used military arms once again to attempt to achieve political objectives.

I don’t believe for a minute that this marriage between the Sunni tribes and ISIS could ever be a long-term one, for the same reason it was not with the Al Qaeda back in 2005 and 2006. They are diametrically, socially and politically opposed.

The fact of the matter is it’s one of convenience, and that means that we can reach out to these Sunni tribal leaders. Many of our Americans who have relationships with them, those relationships are still there, and we could use that to get back the dialogue with them.

I’m convinced what is absolutely needed right now is Ryan Crocker in Baghdad with a team of people that he would hand-pick based on previous relationships to assist him.

The United States could facilitate a coalition arrangement. We have the skill sets to do it, but most importantly, we have the relationships to do it. I don’t believe the current diplomatic team has those relationships and can come to the ball. You need this team that operated in the past to do it.

That would be a concession the administration would have to make, but after all, this is their number one objective in Iraq…. to achieve a political arrangement where everybody in Iraq is represented in a new government. Let’s put a team in there that can help them get that accomplished. The current team I don’t believe is going to get us there.

Do you think there is any chance of that happening whatsoever?

I don’t know. I was involved in some discussions [in the] last week or two along these lines, and these proposals have certainly been made. And I would like to think the administration is at least considering this proposal, because it is what their number one objective is: a new coalition government before they would furnish any direct, military support other than advisers.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/losing-iraq/jack-keane-leaving-iraq-was-an-absolute-strategic-failure/

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David Petraeus: ISIS’s Rise in Iraq Isn’t a Surprise

July 29, 2014

Gen. Petraeus, let’s start with 2006, the debate on the need for the “surge,” a very big change in strategy at that point. … Give me your take on … what the debate was about and why.

Well, 2006 was a very, very tough year for Iraq and indeed for our actions in Iraq. With the bombing of the Samarra mosque — the destruction of the third holiest Shia shrine in Iraq and indeed one that is in a Sunni Arab town of Samarra that took place in February — and you saw after that the steady escalation of violence that became very nearly a sectarian civil war. …

It reached such levels that in December of 2006, there were 53 dead civilian bodies due to violence every 24 hours. Just think of that. That is beyond the security forces. That is beyond the enemy forces. These are civilians in the capital of the country.

And essentially the strategy that had been proceeding along up until that Samarra mosque bombing, it was just unhinged. It was undone. And then over time, as the violence escalated, the concept of transitioning tasks to the Iraqi security forces so that we could thin out and go home was invalidated. …

Now, there were different ways forward, and there was certainly not consensus that the way forward was to provide additional forces to an effort that was seen by many as failing. But that obviously was the decision made by the president. I think it was a very courageous decision. …

We added, over time, a little over 25,000 additional American men and women in uniform to an existing [140,000 or so]. So it took it up to about 165,000. Clearly that 25,000 in and of itself was not key to achieving the dramatic results that actually were, over time, the result of the surge.

The surge that mattered was the change in strategy or the change in ideas, and the first of those ideas being that the priority had to be on securing the Iraqi population, and that this could only be done by living with the people.

So instead of consolidating on big bases — which is the direction we’d been going in — and handing off to Iraqi forces, we went back to the neighbourhoods in Baghdad and other areas that were also threatened by this ever-spiralling sectarian strife, this essentially civil war, Sunni on Shia. …

So we actually in Baghdad alone established 77 new locations for our forces. Each one of these invariably entailed a fight, but we had to go into the neighbourhoods. We had to be there with the people 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Over time, they began to realize that we weren’t going to leave, we weren’t going to clear and hand off, we were going to clear and hold and then build out Iraqi security force partners and then, over time, thin out.

Once that was recognized, they started to come to us and say, “Here, let us tell you where the bad guys are, because we want them out of our neighborhood.” So that was the biggest of the big ideas.

But another huge idea — and not something separate, not something just lucky — was the idea of promoting reconciliation with disaffected Sunni Arabs who felt they had been cast off, cast out of Iraq, that they had been disenfranchised. …

There was one small case of this outside Ramadi, in Anbar Province, when the surge began. It had been going on for several months, and I immediately went out there, assessed it, recognized that this is the kernel of a huge idea, that if we could achieve critical mass and set off a chain reaction, first up and down the Euphrates River Valley and Anbar Province and then to Baghdad and then up and down the Tigris River Valley, each of these in the predominantly Sunni Arabs areas west and north of Baghdad, that we could really make a difference. And we set out to do that.

Over time this spawned the so-called Sunni Arab awakening, the Sons of Iraq. Ultimately we had 103,000 former insurgents, and actually over 20,000 former militia members part of that 103,000 to give you a sense of the magnitude of this endeavour.

But there were a lot of other big ideas. One was to stop transition, and the rationale was that the Iraqi forces couldn’t handle the level of violence that existed. We had to drive it down.

And by the way, they had been so damaged by the violence that in many cases we were going to have to seek new Iraqi leaders from the Iraqi government with their support; we were going to have to literally retrain entire units of the Iraqi security forces.

We had to do that for all of the police battalions and special police commandos, and we had to do it for a number of the army units as well. So until they could be developed, until the level of violence could go down to a level that they could handle, we could no longer hand off to them.

The same with releasing detainees. We’d come to recognize that in our detention facilities there were extremists in the midst of these detainee populations, and they were radicalizing the detainees. So what we were actually releasing was worse than what, in many cases, we had actually brought in.

Until we got those extremists out of the general population, put them in maximum-security facilities, and then had a rehabilitation process and a review process and even a job-training and education component that we could put them back in society without an enormous recidivism rate. So we overhauled that as well.

There was also much greater commitment — even more than what existed before, and that was considerable — between Gen. [George W.] Casey and Ambassador [Zalmay] Khalilzad. But with Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker, he and I dedicated ourselves to absolutely achieving civil military unity of effort, and we spread that message throughout our respective organizations.

So this was what really mattered. The additional forces enabled the implementation of these big ideas, this surge of ideas, much more rapidly than would have otherwise been the case.

And in fact, in that regard it was invaluable, because had we not had progress to report when Ambassador Crocker and I went back to Congress in September of 2007, it’s very possible that the policy, the residual, small amount of support on Capitol Hill would have evaporated completely.

Instead, in eight of 11 weeks prior to that hearing, … we saw a dramatic reduction in violence so that it was down by some 45 or 50 percent by the time [we] got to those first hearings.

And ultimately, over the course of the surge overall, by the time I left in September 2008, the level of violence was down by some 90 percent or so, and we were able to get on with transitioning tasks to Iraqi forces that were doing fine, that had been reinvigorated, rehabilitated, redeveloped.

And indeed other institutions had been rebuilt. Oil and electrical towers and pipelines were patched up. By and large, Iraq was functioning in a quite impressive manner by the end of the surge.

In the beginning of the surge, remind us, it seemed that it wasn’t going really well.

Before I went back, I said: “Get ready, because it is going to get harder before it gets easier. We are going to take away from Al Qaeda Sunni insurgents on one hand and then Shia militia extremists on the other, the areas in which they operate. We are going to fight them for these neighbourhoods. We’re going to interpose our forces between the sectarian, the rivals, the enemies that are in these fights that are ongoing in Baghdad and in the other areas there was fighting like this, and that was very, very tough.

Naturally the level of violence went up before it went down, and it continued to go up, and American casualties continued to go up to the May-June time frame. It was somewhere in mid-June where all of a sudden we started to see it come down. …

The Sunni insurgents, the over 100,000 that you brought onboard basically, where did the idea come from that we actually had to involve them, we had to put them on the payroll to really bring them within our realm?

First of all, you have to recognize that the Sunni Arabs were not going to reconcile. They were not going to have an awakening, if you will. They weren’t going to raise their hand and say, “We’ll take on Al Qaeda,” until they were assured that we could secure them. …

Once they saw that we were committed, once they saw that we were able to secure them, they’d gotten tired of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda had been abusive. It had been blowing Sunni Arabs up and Sunni mosques up in addition to Shia Arabs and mosques. So they were keen to get these individuals out of their areas and to reintegrate into an Iraq which has such bounty.

Let’s remember that Iraq can generate — even at that time it could generate $110 billion per year just in oil exports alone, if we could get the pipelines and all the production facilities and the electrical towers upright and operating again. …

Once they realized that this was possible, then they raised their hand. They said: “Let us help you. We will help secure our areas alongside your soldiers, and then what we’d like to do over time is of course we’d like to find employment for our young men.”

And what we said is, “OK.” In the meantime, we’ll give a modest part of a salary of what a soldier or a policeman got in Iraq, but it was something to keep them going. It was a relatively modest amount of money in the grand scheme of what we were spending at the time, and in my view was well worth it. It basically was to secure static sites as security contractors.

… Were they also feeling that within Iraq they were becoming part of the political system again?

… The initial reconciliation was really with us. Keep in mind that in Anbar Province and in particular Fallujah, Ramadi, these other very tough towns up and down the Euphrates River Valley, there were very, very few Iraqi security forces and relatively modest Iraqi authorities in terms of their ability to actually secure their areas.

So they were really reconciling with what some folks termed the biggest tribe, which was our forces. And then over time we worked with the Iraqi government, I would work with Prime Minister [Nouri al-] Maliki. We had other people. We had other organizations built, the Iraqis built elements, so that we could start to work together with the Iraqi government and there could be Iraqi oversight and, very importantly, Iraqi buy-in. …

Was Maliki supportive of this? Some people said that he stood in the way in some ways, that he had a more sectarian sort of attitude toward it.

Initially Prime Minister Maliki, understandably I think, had some concerns about the idea of reconciling. By the way, our own commanders had concerns about this. I had commanders come to me and say: “We can’t sit down across the table from these guys. They’ve got our blood on their hands.” And I’d say, “Yes, indeed they do.”

That’s how these kinds of fights typically end: You have the reconcilable. We want to get as many as possible again to be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem. Then that will identify the irreconcilables. These will be the leaders, the hard-core Al Qaeda elements, the hard-core Sunni insurgent leaders. And then we will go after them.

In fact, another huge idea was that we amped up, as we said, the tempo of operations against them, Gen. [Stanley] McChrystal and then Adm. [William] McRaven’s Joint Special Operations Command Forces, which were conducting an extraordinary number of operations every single night, really every 24-hour period over time against the irreconcilables of Sunni and, over time, the irreconcilables on the Shia militia extremist side as well.

But over time, Prime Minister Maliki came to see the wisdom in this, … so now Prime Minister Maliki then did reach out. I remember we were flying north to Tikrit to a case where there was the beginning of an awakening, now in the Tigris River Valley, and he had a couple of suitcases with him, and I said: “Prime Minister, maybe I wasn’t clear enough, but we’re not going to spend the night up in Tikrit. We were thinking we’d just go up there, spend the day, and then we’d come back this evening.” And he said, “Oh, these aren’t clothes.” It was money.

So he very much got into the swing of things, supporting what came to be known as the Sons of Iraq that were the outgrowth of the awakening or really the reconciliation process. The overall intent of this over time was to bring the fabric of society back together, a fabric that had been torn apart during the increasing sectarian violence of 2006, and to get a few stitches back into it by the end of the surge. Indeed I think it is accurate to say that that’s what took place.

… Did you ever wonder what happens the day we leave?

We were always thinking about what happened as we, first of all, reduced our forces, increasingly handed off tasks to Iraqi security forces and Iraqi institutions, and ultimately when we really slimmed down to what might be just a security assistance effort some years hence.

And that’s why we worked so hard with Prime Minister Maliki and his government during the surge and indeed beyond as well, because the progress continued beyond the surge. …

The progress did continue after September 2008. Violence continued to go down. The economy came back. Oil production was up. Electricity production was up. Basic institutions and infrastructure were repaired. There was new construction. So there were lots of good initiatives that were going on. …

There was a sense that this can move forward, that as long as there is a sense of Iraq, not just of one sect or ethnic group or another, that this endeavour can continue to progress.

President Obama takes over in Washington. What’s the lay of the land?

When President Obama and the new administration came in, I think the situation was quite good, frankly.

Gen. [Raymond] Odierno was still the commander at that time. I think the president showed a degree of flexibility, of good analysis and decision in terms of the way forward for Iraq that was decided on at that time, how to further draw down our forces toward what might be the end of our time there, although there was always a sense that perhaps there would be an agreement that you could continue with some forces in Iraq beyond that time of late 2011 that was mandated in the agreement, negotiated by the previous administration.

But again, it continued apace. And although I ended up being in Afghanistan now from summer 2010 to summer 2011, my sense was that that progress generally continued as well.

Was there a concern among some of the Iraqis? Because of course the president campaigned on the idea that we were leaving and there had been an agreement under Bush in 2008 that 2011 was the date that we would start moving out. … Did you see any problems because of that?

I’m just not sure I’m in a position, because again, I was focused on Afghanistan during the period of government formation in 2010. I guess it was, and I sort of missed some of the drama of that, candidly. …

I should point out that we should remember that part of the context in the later years, if you will, after the surge was a memory of Prime Minister Maliki making a very courageous decision in late March of 2008 to go after the Shia militia in Basra. …

This was a much more close-run affair than people realize at times. I think it very easily could have resulted in the defeat of the Iraqi security forces and therefore of Prime Minister Maliki personally. His own brigadier general who commanded his security brigade was killed during the fighting in Basra, to give a sense of how many indirect fire rounds were descending on the location in which he was positioned in Basra at the time. …

He then supported the fight in Sadr City, where we went after the militias that were in Baghdad, and then fights in other places of Baghdad. …

… What was your take on the debate in Washington going on about some concerns that some of the moves he made were too sectarian in nature? That was damaging because of his background. I mean, in 2003, he was running the de-Baathification program when he came back.

No, he wasn’t. Ahmed Chalabi was running the de-Baathification program. … He might have been a deputy. … He was a second-tier figure. …

And the point of view of Americans toward him coming in 2006 was?

I think in 2006 people just wanted to form the government at a certain point in time. …

… Why were you brought in to command in Iraq? You were not the normal general in a lot of people’s mind. You were an egghead in a way. You were from Princeton, and you were not seen in the same way as other generals were, and especially on this war. …

I have to leave it to others as to why they picked me.

We’d had a degree of success, if you will, in 2003, when I was privileged to command the 101st Airborne Division, although a lot of that unravelled when our reconciliation initiative there was not supported by the Iraqis who ran the de-Baathification and reconciliation commission. At least it went back because the three-star stood up the train-and-equip mission. So I knew that side of it as well.

So I guess, again, there is an amount of time on the ground at least that was useful. Then we’d thought about this intellectually quite a bit. And of course we did the Counterinsurgency Field Manual in 2006, when I was the commander of the Combined Arms Centre, Fort Leavenworth and oversaw the different schools and centres that were all preparing leaders and units to go to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I was a little bit different from a lot of others, and perhaps it was a sign of how desperate the times were that I got the nod. I don’t know.

So there’s a debate over when the troops are leaving, over the number of troops that will be left in 2011. There’s a difference of opinion from the DOD [Department of Defense] to the White House. Give us a little taste of what the debate was, why it was considered important, and where we ended up.

… I was in the CIA by just before Sept. 11, [2011,] and got into this particular, or at least observed the discussion at the Situation Room table.

I personally hoped that we could keep a force there but hoped that it could have a mission that would enable it to really contribute. I actually started to have my doubts that Prime Minister Maliki was going to allow that, frankly. … I was never sure that he’d allow our forces to really help, and I wasn’t certain what influence we’d had.

Having said that, I was a big supporter of keeping a force there on the idea that if it’s there, perhaps it can be useful. Perhaps it does have logistical bases. If push comes to shove, you have a footprint. You have individuals. You have people on the ground with a sense of what’s going on and so forth.

But at a certain point in time it was pretty clear that he wasn’t willing to take the agreement to the Parliament, which is what the bar was set. It had to have parliamentary approval. And thus, obviously, we ended up then removing those forces, although it’s important to remember we didn’t leave Iraq completely. We had hundreds of individuals that did stay with a three-star general, a two-star general, a one-star general initially, at least for quite a substantial security assistance effort.

This was the effort to bring well over $10 billion worth of U.S. equipment into Iraq, put it in the hands of Iraqi soldiers, ensure that they’re trained and understand how to operate it and maintain it and provide the logistical support for it.

When you saw the troops leaving, though, did you have any fears that it was too soon? …

My concern was what happened, literally, within days of the forces leaving. I actually happened to be in Baghdad at the time, or the day after Prime Minister Maliki pressed charges against the Sunni Arab vice president and his security detail.

Now, there were very few security details in Iraq by this point in time that probably hadn’t done something for which they could have been charged, so I’m not defending his security detail in the least. But to go after the senior Sunni Arab politician right after U.S. forces, the combat forces at least, depart sent quite a signal. And it was a real serious moment.

Ironically, the ambassador was not there. Everybody thought things were going OK. He had gone off on leave and was on his way back. The U.S. four-star was gone.

So here I was on the ground, as the director of the CIA, ended up shuttling back and forth between the different parties, the Shia-led government, Prime Minister Maliki, and then the Sunni leaders who were all holed up in one big compound with about 40 cameras waiting for them outside to make a statement, with M1 tanks all over the Green Zone pointed at different houses.

This was a very serious development. And tragically, what it did, of course, it started the process of undoing the process that we’d worked so hard to do during the surge and even in the years after the surge, which was to bring the fabric of Iraqi society back together, to get a few stitches in the hope that it could get more and more and more over time. And instead, this started to pull some of those stitches out and started a fraying process.

And then subsequent actions against the minister of finance, then years later a prominent Sunni parliamentarian and others, and really quite violent treatment of what started out as peaceful demonstrators in the wake of these different actions, it was a catalyst for a renewed sense among the Sunni Arab population that they, once again, didn’t have a seat at the table in their country, that they were once again going to be disenfranchised and cut out and that their leaders were targeted by the government. And that had a very, very harmful effect.

You add to that then, over the subsequent years, the replacement of a number of very competent military and police leaders with whom we not only worked but fought. We fought together with these individuals. We knew their capabilities, and they actually fought well, and a number of them were replaced by individuals that were really more sectarian loyalists frankly.

And then the chain of command was circumvented completely. Instead of the normal chain through military channels, operational area commands were created throughout the country, and each of those reported directly to the Office of the Commander in Chief, or the OCINC as it was called.

But as we saw in Ninawa Province and Mosul in particular, that was not an office that was trained, equipped, educated nor capable of commanding and controlling the kind of operational response that was necessary to what really was an ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] conventional force operation.

This is not just the actions of terrorist groups such as the assassination campaign that took place six months before the offensive. This was a real ISIS military action. The ISIS army is really the only way to think about it.

Of course that army became even stronger after they were able to capture a lot of the equipment that was surrendered by these individuals when they melted away.

… The day after our troops leave, as you said, the moves made against the vice president and some of the other Sunni leaders, and some of the other events that took place soon after in the months to come, … why do you think the powers in Iraq started making some of those decisions, which in looking back at it now created such a damaging situation?

These are questions that only can be answered, obviously, by the Iraqi government and its leadership. It was inexplicable to us.

At the time certainly some of this was playing to one’s base, if you will, to the core electorate of a Shia majority country. But at the end of the day, again, it’s not something that one can explain in a rational fashion.

Even the holiest Shia leader of Iraq, Grand Ayatollah [Ali al-] Sistani, has looked back and said that wrongs that took place must be righted. So even he has condemned what took place. He has noted the need for an inclusive government, and he’s noted the need for a government in an expeditious manner.

So when you have the most respected Shia cleric, one who is noted for his quietest tradition, not his activism — he’s not like the clerics of Iran who literally run the government; he is one who is generally removed from and doesn’t comment on politics — and here makes such a direct statement, which indicates that even to him it’s not clear why authorities did what they did starting in December of 2011.

Would it have happened if we had had 25,000 troops still on the ground?

No one knows whether forces there would have given us an influence. That’s the question for the ages. They were out of combat, out of the cities and out of the advising.

So you have to ask what the mission would have been. And again, without knowing what mission Prime Minister Maliki would have allowed them to do, it’s hard to say how much influence they might have achieved, again noting that there was a quite a robust security assistance force and that did not seem to translate.

As I said, I would have loved to have seen a force remain on the ground. I would have loved it even more if I knew that they were going to have a mission that would allow them to continue to contribute to the sustainment of the progress that was so hard fought and for which so many sacrificed so much during the surge and beyond.

Did you ever have a conversation with the president where you said, “Mr. President, I know we’re moving quickly toward pulling the troops out, but I’ve got to warn you that we’ve achieved an awful lot here, and it’s a very difficult situation, and there are stitches that are pulling this together that potentially could be torn apart”? …

I’m just not going to tell you what I ever told the president, and don’t infer from that something that I’m not willing to say.

OK, I’ll take it as –

And don’t take it as either. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say what I told the president, if I did tell him anything. …

Some people have pointed to the Dec. 12 meeting when Maliki was in the United States and met with Obama, and he told the president that [then-Vice President Tariq] al-Hashimi had ties to terrorism, and the president said, “That’s an Iraqi decision.” They point to that moment as being the green light for him to move ahead with what you’ve defined. What’s your view of that?

I have no knowledge of that, actually.

I will say there were other agreements with the government of Iraq that could have provided some other forms of assistance to them, that could have been very valuable, and those were not implemented either. …

Could we have pushed harder during any of this period of time?

You have to ask somebody else. Again, I was doing intelligence analysis at this point, not negotiating with the Iraqis. …

[What was] the view of the Iraqis, in the end, of our troops pulling out at that point? We viewed it as a victory. We had gotten to this point. We had achieved something. The president had promised that we would become uninvolved and we would turn our sights to Afghanistan. How was it viewed from the Iraqi side as far as you know?

I don’t know, actually. Again, my sense was they thought they had capable forces and leaders and they would get on with it. I just don’t know.

The impact of the Syrian civil war on what we’ve seen happening in the past couple of weeks in Iraq: Give us a little bit more background on what has taken place, why it’s happened, and what we understood and what our worries were.

The Syrian civil war played a major role in what has come to happen in Iraq, because it was in many respects in Syria that Al Qaeda [in Iraq], AQI as we called it at the time, really resurrected itself, rejuvenated itself.

Many of the elements and the leadership of course of what now is known as ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or the Levant, so it’s bigger than just Syria. It’s Syria plus Lebanon and Jordan.

That element really built itself in the Syrian war, where over time it was able to take control of certain of the oil production facilities and started generating revenue. It could capture weaponry. It got some funding, undoubtedly, from some individuals, although that was virtually impossible to prove, and I don’t believe there is any case of governments actually supporting them directly.

But again, ISIS really grew out of the growing flame of the Syrian civil war, and as it got bigger, more powerful, it started to push back into Iraq. …

You’ve written that you’re not surprised about ISIS rising up. Explain.

It’s not a surprise if you’re watching it closely. And I have watched it closely, albeit through open-source rather than classified intelligence. But there’s plenty of it out there. In fact, there is more and more and more as these groups themselves post videos on YouTube and have Twitter accounts and are constantly telling you what it is that they are doing. A number of the think tanks in this town follow that closely, the Institute for the Study of War in particular, on whose board I sit.

So we’ve watched as ISIS became more and more prominent in Syria, as it challenged the true Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra. Then, as it started to come back into Iraq, as it launched again, eight months ago now, an assassination campaign, very targeted hits on Iraqi security force leaders and members in and around Mosul, and then as it retook the city of Fallujah, six, seven years ago to take back from the Sunni insurgents at that time in the surge. So we’ve watched this.

What was a surprise was the pace of the collapse, really, of the Iraqi security forces in northern Iraq. I think that came about because of these factors I discussed earlier: the replacement of competent leaders with sectarian loyalists, and then the circumventing of the chain of command so that all major units reported to the Office of the Commander in Chief, an office that is not established as a core headquarters that can command divisions in a field fight, which is what was needed to coordinate an effective response, an effective counteroffensive to this offensive by ISIS.

Then of course you had individual failure by individual leaders who literally got on helicopters and flew away with their troops knowing it. And you can imagine the devastating effect that that has on morale of the rank and file, when the contract between leader and the led is just disregarded. It becomes meaningless, and that’s a critical element in soldiers continuing to fight.

You didn’t have Sunni Awakening groups that would defend the government?

Not only do you not have Sunni Awakening groups or Sons of Iraq that are helping the Iraqi security forces [ISF], you actually have a population that has become disenfranchised once again; that developed a feeling that they didn’t have a seat at the table at Baghdad; that the Iraqi security forces were putting them down, in some cases violently, when they raised objections to some of the actions of the Baghdad government.

And there was rejoicing in some areas as these ISIS forces came in and pushed out the Iraqi security forces.

… Was there any moment when you looked at what was going on and some of the specific moves that were being made by Maliki or others or by the United States and just sort of shake your head and say, everything that I was involved with in trying to build up, all the people that I worked with over there, that there were partnerships with, it’s all going to fall apart unless something happens? …

I don’t think you ever have a single point where a single action completely tips the scales one way or another.

What you have is a growing sense in this case of foreboding, of concern, of worry that indeed what was done in partnership during the surge and then in the years subsequent to the surge is now starting to be undone, and that actions are being taken that are undermining the enormously difficult, very hard work and enormous sacrifice of our men and women on the ground or coalitions and partners and, indeed, Iraqi security forces and civilians. And that developed over time.

Now keep in mind this has been a several-year process, with the first action against the senior vice president in December of 2011, a year later after the minister of finance, a year later the prominent Anbar politician, Sunni Arab parliamentarian, and then some months after that, six months or so, you have the collapse of the Iraqi security forces in Ninawa, when the ISIS army, not just ISIS terrorists, come at them in quite a significant offensive.

Could there have been anything done to have prevented it, … I mean, from the United States government?

I haven’t been in government since November of 2012. I certainly have talked to folks in government. They’ve shared concerns. We’ve discussed what could be done and so forth. But at the end of the day, if a government decides on a certain course, there are limits to what a country’s influence can achieve.

So you’re saying, basically, it was Iraq’s choice that put us in a bind on what we could or could not do.

I mean what I’ve said, is that very clearly these were choices taken by an Iraqi government and Iraqi leadership.

This is a country now that is unravelling. What happens next? What do you see happening? …

I think you have to think about Iraq in terms of several threats if you will, and I think it’s worth having an intellectual construct. And the first of those threats is the obvious threat to Iraqi sovereignty, to Iraqi territorial integrity, and that obviously has been threatened enormously.

It may be that Humpty Dumpty is never put back together again the way he was, the way Iraq was before this ISIS. Indeed I think certain aspects of it, where the Kurds are now and so forth, will never be returned to the situation prior to this offensive.

The question is whether it can once again, though, be a single country, albeit with greater devolution of powers perhaps, the different areas within it, different regions, perhaps even provinces.

But that right now clearly is threatened substantially, not just by ISIS but by resurgent Sunni Arabs who feel disenfranchised, who have also resumed their activities after being essentially defeated during the surge or incorporated during the surge but then have come to feel that there is not an incentive for them to support the new Iraq. Indeed there is an incentive to oppose the new Iraq. …

The second threat is a threat that is increasingly posed by ISIS as an extremist organization with designs beyond Syria and Iraq and even beyond the Levant and saying, for example, “We’ll meet you in New York,” or wherever. Whether that capacity is there now I think is in question. I’m not reading, obviously, the real-time intel assessments of what might happen.

I can tell you that our partners in London, in Australia, in Saudi Arabia, in a variety of other countries around the world are very, very worried about the attraction that ISIS has had, and indeed the civil war in Syria has had, for would-be jihadists who have gone there, have become more radicalized by that experience, learned bomb-making skills or other paramilitary-type tasks and skills and gone back to their home countries.

Saudi Arabia I think has arrested over 52 of them by now and counting. Again, other countries are worried as well, and I’m sure the same is true for the United States and that at a certain point that may eclipse the threat posed by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen, which has Ibrahim al-Asiri, the diabolical bomb maker who has tried so many times to get a bomb on an aircraft into the minister of interior’s office in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere to blow up and cause havoc. …

Then there is a third threat, … the threat that Iran has for the whole region and indeed for beyond the region: its efforts to maintain or to establish a Shia crescent from Iran through Iraq, through Syria and down to southern Lebanon, Lebanese Hezbollah; its efforts to achieve a degree of regional hegemony, or at least greater regional influence; its sponsorship of Shia militants in places like the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, in Bahrain, in southern Lebanon, and indeed in the fighting in Syria itself and now very likely in some capacity in Iraq as well.

We have to be wary of that threat while noting there could actually be some cases in which there might be a convergence of interests. But we need, again, to be very cognizant of what Iran is trying to achieve. And in many cases that is not the same as what we are trying to achieve.

It sounds like a total nightmare. … How dire is this? What do we do at this point?

The Middle East is clearly in one of those pivotal moments. We’re in a period of history where the organizing principles, the lines on the map drawn by British and French diplomats early last century are being erased. …

In many … cases, of course, the Arab Spring has brought about instability rather than greater stability. And rather than bringing about government that is more representative and more responsive to the people, you’re seeing, frankly, the opposite, or you’re seeing all-out war.

The fact is you could have a situation, which many of these countries do, actually fragment. … A number of these countries certainly are under enormous pressure and may or may not ever really become the unitary elements that they once were: Libya, Syria, Iraq, possibly Yemen.

When you were over there in your many roles, was this sort of the thing you were working against? Was this your nightmare? …

These are enormously challenging emerging developments, without question. These pose, each of them, some potential outcome that can be very challenging for our interests not just in the region but in some cases around the world.

Just having a grasp of all of these initially and then determining what is a reasonable way forward is, as they say, very hard government work.

Do you have sort of a game plan of the way forward? What would you like to see some of the first moves to be?

I strongly support the administration’s initiative to provide substantial assistance to the moderate opposition in Syria for two reasons. One is now to counter ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, and indeed perhaps to be able to change the dynamic on that particular battlefield, that particular civil war, to the point that people might actually be willing to discuss, to negotiate some kind of settlement. But certainly unless the momentum is shifted, there will not be any discussions in Geneva or elsewhere.

With respect to Iraq, I’m strongly supportive of what Grand Ayatollah Sistani has prescribed: rapid formation of a government, an inclusive government — i.e., shorthand for it has to have the trust of all three major elements of Iraqi society, not just the Shia but also the Sunni Arab and the Kurds — and then a government that takes actions to right past wrongs, that is willing to address the real and perceived actions against them, and it is willing to deal, to negotiate in an honest and transparent manner with the Kurds as well.

Back earlier on in history when you were there, what were the concerns the United States government had with the Iranian involvement in trying to pursue their goals within the Iraqi government?

I think it’s reality that Iran is going to have influence in Iraq. All elements of Iraq accepted that. It wasn’t just Shia that would go to Tehran and see the commander of the Quds Force and others and the legitimate government leaders. It was also Kurdish leaders and Sunni Arabs who would even link up with Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, maybe not in Tehran but in Turkey or somewhere else.

So there was an acceptance of a degree of Iranian influence in Baghdad. … They are co-religionists. But don’t ever misinterpret that for that reflecting an Iraqi desire to be the 51st state of Iran.

One speaks Arabic; the other speaks Persian Dari, what have you. One is Arab; the other is Persian. They fought a bloody, 10-year civil war that is not all forgotten.

Again, while accepting certain Iranian activities and influence and indeed assistance at times, not to mention the enormous trade that goes back and forth, there are limits to what Iraq will accept from Iran, although those limits become less, or become greater if you will, when they really need Iran to help, perhaps say on a battlefield if it comes to that.

Beyond that, though, what the Iranians were doing that was completely unacceptable, obviously, prior to the surge, during the surge, and even beyond for a period, was essentially training, arming, funding, equipping Shia militia extremists or blowing up our soldiers and Iraqi coalition soldiers.

Iraq did not welcome that. And one reason that Prime Minister Maliki went after the Shia militia in March and April of 2008 was to reduce their influence in certain, really critical cities like Basra and eastern Baghdad and northern Baghdad and so forth.

So that was beyond the pale, and Iran has done that throughout the region. The Quds Force has been very active. Indeed, they blew up a busload of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. It’s well known. They and Lebanese Hezbollah tried to carry out an attack in Bangkok.

So they’ve been active across that spectrum, even trying to hire a hit man in Mexico to take out the Saudi ambassador in Washington, as you recall. Thankfully, the hit man turned out to be a source of a U.S. government organization.

So Iran has had a very harmful effect in a variety of ways in the region, … fomenting unrest to a degree in Saudi Arabia, undoubtedly in Bahrain, and definitely in Yemen with Hamas, with Lebanese Hezbollah among other activities in locations. …

It’s been reported also that in the 2010 elections, Maliki was given the chance to set up the new government even though he had less votes than [Ayad] Allawi. Some point to the fact of an agreement made between Iran and him that specified that no U.S. troops would stay.

I don’t have knowledge of that.

Do you think that’s true?

I find it somewhat surprising. Again, you have to remember that Iraq and Iraq’s leaders have always had probably a slightly higher opinion of their security forces than perhaps was warranted. …

And lastly, the lessons learned? …

If you want to talk lessons learned, you have to go back to the beginning. I was asked, when I had my confirmation hearing as the Multinational Force Iraq commander, [had] we made mistakes? And I gave several pages of mistakes.

And among those is, don’t pursue policies, operations or actions in which you end up with more enemies rather than less as a result of the particular operation. If you don’t take more bad guys off the field than you create by conducting the operation or initiating the policy, then you should think twice about it.

And we did that early on with the firing of the Iraqi military without telling them what their future was, with de-Baathification, without having a reconciliation process nailed down. Ambassador [Paul] Bremer intended to do that, to be fair, but didn’t have it sorted out completely, and it never was actually established.

And there are many others over the years, but I’ll let the historians deal with that.

But as far as ISIS moving through Iraq right now, are there any other lessons that the Obama administration has learned that might alter the direction that they go in the new future?

You have to ask the Obama administration. I don’t know.

… Any other points that you think are important to understand about where we are in the history of this war?

A lot of those who fought so hard — among those who sacrificed so much, from what I believe rightly has earned the title America’s New Greatest Generation — have contacted me and said: “Was all what we did during the surge for naught? We fought so hard. We sacrificed so much. We spent so much in blood and treasure.”

I don’t think that’s the case. I think that what America’s sons and daughters did, what coalition troopers and Iraqi security force members and civilians and, indeed, our own diplomats, intel officers, development experts did during the surge was extraordinary. It gave Iraq and Iraqis yet another chance.

But at a certain point in time, it is Iraq and it is Iraqis, Iraqi leaders in particular, who have to take that forward. And sadly, what we have seen is Iraqi leaders take this forward in a way that both in real terms and in imagined terms was sectarian and increasingly authoritarian.

And that created fertile fields for the replanting of the seeds of insurgency and rejectionism. And it made ISIS’s task much easier than it should have been.

And there’s no part of you that doesn’t feel that if we had stayed another year, another 10 years, another 20 years, like in Korea, this would have germinated, that the seeds would have had longer to –

… That’s one of those enormous what-ifs. The fact that some other assets, that agreements were made and not honoured, at the very least makes one wonder. Again, it’s just a huge what-if. I would have liked to have seen it take place. Obviously it didn’t, and so we are where we are now. …

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/losing-iraq/david-petraeus-isiss-rise-in-iraq-isnt-a-surprise/

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James Jeffrey: Iraq Was a “Historic, Dramatic” Failure for Bush and Obama

July 29, 2014

How do we first come across [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki? Who is he? Why does the United States see him as someone who perhaps might get this train back on the track?

It’s very important to try to explain why we wound up with an unknown like Maliki. Our basic feeling was [Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim] Jaafari is failing. Now, I knew Jaafari. I was the chargé when Jaafari put his government together and became prime minister. I like the guy. I think that he’s much less sectarian than certainly Maliki; he’s a more trusting individual. He’s lived in the West. There are pluses to Jaafari, but he was seen, correctly, as not very effective.

And so, therefore, the embassy believed that we needed somebody stronger, somebody who could carry the fight to the enemy, run an efficient government, and that this wasn’t Jaafari.

…So Condoleezza Rice, [British Foreign Secretary] Jack Straw and our joint team flew out.

We had a series of meetings, including with Jaafari, and she and Jack Straw made it very clear that neither the United States nor Britain, who were providing hundreds of thousands of troops, could not support him anymore. … And after then, there was a scramble among the Shia parties, because they have the lead in providing the prime minister.

And Maliki, who as a political figure was really second- or third-tier when I was out there in 2004/2005, suddenly emerged as a guy who people respected, as a guy who was tough. He had been a leading Dawa politician. And Dawa is essentially a security organization, or was then; some would say a terrorist organization. And he seemed to be the last man standing. And so, suddenly his name was bandied about, and with a little bit of help from us he was able to muster a majority in the parliament.

It’s been said he was pretty surprised when it was first basically told to him that in fact the United States would back him.

Right. And because, again, he hadn’t had very much contact with us.

And the expectations for him were?

Well, the expectations for him were, anybody but Jaafari. If you have a prime minister who presides over the beginnings of mass ethnic cleansing, which was what was happening in the spring of 2006, then that person has to go because that person has failed.

So that was the main benefit of Maliki. It could have been a broomstick, to some degree.

It just showed that the Iraqi people were unhappy with not just the situation, but with their leader who they had elected a year before, Jaafari, and they wanted somebody new. And they got somebody new.

In the United States, there was also a change in power. What brings the president to the point that he realizes that things have to change?

What really made a difference was the elections in November 2006. President Bush always took the position that if you lose an election – the Republicans seriously lost that election in both houses – that that is a signal from the American people. And President Bush always felt that he worked for the American people. So his boss was telling him he was not doing his job.

That coincided with several other movements, both outside of government in several of the think tanks – Gen. [Jack] Keane was associated with this, several of the Kagans – and inside government, both in a cell in the National Security Council and among a group of colonels who were set up in the Pentagon to try to look at alternatives. All of them were coming up to one or another variant of the surge, which was a combination of more troops; a counterinsurgency mission for them, which in particular was going to focus on putting people out in small penny-packages of platoons and companies throughout contested areas; and thirdly, reaching out to the Sunni tribes.

The Sunni tribes, back in the spring of 2006, had approached our forces, particularly the Marines and some of the intelligence people out in Anbar, and said, “We’re ready.” And then the United States, not focused on a counterinsurgency strategy, basically said, “Fine, you can enlist in the regular army and the national police forces.” They wanted to form their local militias to defend their homes; we wanted them to sign up and perhaps go to Basra or Mosul.

so that failed. But nonetheless it left the idea in the minds of people that there could be a shift in the Sunni population of Anbar. And that all came together after the election, when we had new leadership in Baghdad with Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker and General [David] Petraeus. And we had new leadership in the Pentagon with Rumsfeld gone; we had a number of new characters appear.

Talk about what that created. I guess the hope was a reintegration of the Sunnis into the political system. But did it work out that way? What’s your overview about what the goals were, and how successful or not successful they ended up being?

As a military uprising against Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups, supported by the U.S. military advisers, air power, equipment, the surge was a brilliant success. As an effort to integrate the Sunni population into the larger fabric of post-2003 Iraq — an Iraq dominated by the 80 percent of the population who was either Kurdish or Shia Arab — the surge was only at its best a partial success.

The Sunnis saw themselves basically as pledging allegiance, if you will, to the United States, more than to a Shia-led government under Mr. Maliki. And the government in Baghdad was always a bit suspicious about what is an irregular force that had very close ties to the United States and very ambiguous ties to the Iraqi security forces.

So even then there were problems. Iraqis were, at one point they picked up the payment of these people, and throughout my time in Iraq, through 2012, they were continuing with fits and starts, like everything else in Iraq, to continue paying them.

So it would only work to some extent as long as the United States was still a partner within it all.

Certainly we were the essential element, both in ensuring the military and to some degree the financial success of the Awakening. And we were the guarantor that they would have a government in Baghdad that would not dismiss, would not discourage the Sunnis.

But I have to be careful here, because the implication is that it’s another case of a majority in power oppressing a minority because that’s what majorities do in all but the most advanced liberal countries. To a very considerable degree, that is true. But you also had the problem that the expectations of the Sunnis were extraordinary.

One anecdote: I went out to Anbar and all I heard was the lousy services that Maliki was giving the people of Anbar, particularly electricity. And I knew a little bit about electricity and I said, Hmm, I’m going to go back and check. And I went back and checked, and what I discovered was, of all the provinces of Iraq, the one that was receiving the most electricity per day. … So it was a perception problem as much as it was a reality problem.

The Sunnis simply didn’t like the order that was established in 2003. And any slight, any inefficiency, any hiccup it the political scene in Baghdad would produce a feeling that they were being oppressed.

Maliki, was he supportive or was he undercutting it?

Maliki was supportive of the surge, because first of all he trusted President Bush. Secondly, he trusted Gen. Petraeus and, as soon as he got there, Ambassador Crocker.

And they went in and made it very clear that if he didn’t support us — and there were certain criteria that we asked him: essentially to operate throughout the country and to be able to go after Shia groups as well as Sunni groups — he had to sign up for that. He did sign up for that. He executed it half-heartedly, but still, he was, quote, “on board.” And that was typical with Maliki. Everything we had done with him, including the 2008 SOFA negotiations, he would be the last person on board. He would be on board, to some degree with ill faith, but it would always be enough for us to continue forward. And that was Maliki in 2006, 2007, 2008.

So Obama comes to power. What’s the lay of the land at that point? What is Iraq like at that point?

Let me start with President Obama. He certainly feels that, I think, that he won the Democratic nomination because he was so adamant in opposing the war against Hillary Clinton who had voted for the war, and therefore he ran on an “I will end America’s wars” platform. And that had a lot of resonance in the Democratic base, and to some degree, let’s be honest, in the American public.

So he came to office. But on the other hand he’s now the president of the United States, the international 911 in a very messy world, and he’s got a situation he doesn’t like in Afghanistan, which he had termed the good war, the war he wanted to do something about, the war that had been neglected, in his mind, by President Bush.

And in Iraq the situation was very good. We had gotten a security agreement in 2008 that would allow troops to stay on for almost two more years when he entered office. Violence was down to historic lows. U.S. troop casualties were at a historic low. Basically, we were dealing evermore with a terrorist group, Al Qaeda remnants, rather than a real insurgency. And the country was holding together pretty well under a constitutional system. And oil exports were basically producing more than a billion dollars of income a week.

So with that cheery scenario, he basically signed up to, in essence, a variant of President Bush’s policy. In his Camp Lejeune speech in February 2009, he talked about an Iraq that his policy would be to be stable, to be secure, and to be self-sustaining, with a government that would be our partner in the fight against terror, and would be responsive to the population.

He also said — and this is classic Obama — that we couldn’t stay there until every street was cleaned up of terrorists, before everybody was doing everything right; that is, we couldn’t try to social engineer the entire country forever.

So he juxtaposed our goals, which were quite broad and very similar to President Bush’s, with our means, which he said we’re going to limit. And so, for the moment he basically left Iraq alone because it was on autopilot, seemingly, towards a good place, all of the things he had laid out. And he had other fish to fry and other problems to deal with.

… Here, a new president comes in that is basically saying, well, we’re moving out, and who cuts off a lot of the direct contact. What is Maliki reading from this? How does it adjust the way he works?

I think we might be reading too much into this based upon the situation as I saw it. And let me defend President Obama a little bit, because I criticize him in other areas. President Bush was totally dedicated to success in Iraq. He believed in this with an almost religious fervour. And so, he needed, because of the importance to him, and because of the dramatic developments that kept flying up, he needed close contact with Prime Minister Maliki, and before him Jaafari and Prime Minister [Ayad] Allawi.

But by 2009, when Obama came in, we were in a pretty steady state. President Bush, in negotiating the 2008 security agreement accepted that all U.S. troops would be out by the end of 2011. This wasn’t an Obama administration idea; this was negotiated by the Bush administration. And basically people were more or less OK with that. We thought that we might be able to modify that, to have a small training presence, but we would worry about that later.

The basic thing is, the Iraqis were building a large force, their political system was holding together, oil exports were rising, and so why did we need to either have a large force there indefinitely? Or why did the president have to talk to the guy every week?

And in fact, President Obama also decided that Vice President Biden would have the lead. And Vice President Biden put a great deal of effort into the Iraq portfolio, and he was constantly calling or talking otherwise with Maliki.

Did Maliki read it that way?

I think Maliki had a good relationship with Vice President Biden. I think that he was informed by everybody that Vice President Biden was the right-hand man to the president. From time to time, the president, including three times when I was ambassador for 22 months, President Obama had direct contact with Maliki. By the standards of presidents, that’s pretty good. By the standards that Maliki was used to, it probably wasn’t. But again, I don’t think Maliki felt that the United States was abandoning him at that point.

The 2010 elections, let’s talk about that. The way it’s been reported is Maliki is not as popular in Iraq. There’s some unhappiness with him. He’s alienated the Sunni population. The elections come. He doesn’t win as many seats as Allawi, but there’s a situation where he’s seen as the only one who can lead, can take the prime minister role. He goes to the courts to get the right to re-establish the government, or recreate the government. What’s going on there? What’s your view of the United States’ role there in backing Maliki at that point? Was there a missed opportunity to perhaps put more pressure on him to prevent some of what would come?

Again, Camp Lejeune, February 2009, beginning of the Obama administration, Iraq was looking like a success story. President Obama laid out a policy. He opted to keep a large number of combat troops in Iraq almost until the end. That is, he stopped the withdrawal at 50,000 troops in the middle of 2010 and kept them there almost to the end of 2011. So he was doing everything that he was being asked by his military leaders and by us in the field. And it seemed to be working.

The next time Iraq gained attention was the 2010 elections. … The result was, of a parliament with 325 seats, Allawi won about 28 percent of the vote and 91 seats. Maliki finished as a party, the State of Law alliance, finished just behind with 89 seats. But Maliki also won 600,000 votes, which was far more than anybody else. And so, Maliki felt that he had won, even though Allawi had two more seats.

Maliki was very upset at this, and he instigated various legal actions to try to disenfranchise people from Allawi’s party, and basically called into question that vote, calling for a recount and such, which tied things up for many weeks.

That was one of the first signs that we were going to have a lot of problems with Nouri al-Maliki. Up until that point, while he wasn’t the most enthusiastic supporter of a democratic system and outreach, he basically had gone along. But his behaviour after the 2010 election was not very good.

The next chapter in this drama was the appeal that he made to the court system over the question of who would have the right of first choice to form a government. Under the Iraqi system, when a new parliament sits, after the vote is verified and then it’s approved by the constitutional court, the first thing that has to happen is a speaker is elected, supposedly in the first day. Then within 30 days a president is elected. Typically the speaker would be, by tradition, from the Sunni Arab community; the president would be from the Kurdish community.

And only after the president was chosen would the president then turn to the party or coalition that had the most seats or had won the most votes — and this is where you get some question — and task that group to try to form a government. …

So it was not only prestigious, it was also strategically important to be the party that gets the first nod. People assumed that as Allawi had the most votes, even though they were only 28 percent of the seats, far below a majority, he would have the first option. That’s how I read the constitution, how anybody would read the constitution right after the election.

The situation was, Maliki then, with some help from the Iranians, forged an alliance with the other major Shia group. This now gave the Shia alliance, let’s call it, 150 votes. So when they went into the parliament, the first day when Parliament was open in June, they had by far the largest coalition or alliance in Parliament, 150; far more than Ayad Allawi’s 91.

Before that happened, but after the coalition, this alliance, was formed, Maliki then went to the courts and said: “Look, you need to rule on this. Is the determination who has the most seats when the parliament opens, or who wins the most seats in the election?”

I’ve gone back and looked repeatedly at the constitution. It basically says the president will select the party or coalition who has the most seats, or has won the most seats to attempt to form a government. And then it rolls to the next and the next.

And so, based upon that, it’s ambiguous. It could be at the time of the election or it could be at the time when Parliament meets. Logically, and in some other systems, it would be at the time the parliament meets. And there was no doubt it was Maliki’s bloc with 150 votes.

So people say that the constitutional court judge was influenced by Maliki. I can well believe that. But it’s also so that the finding itself, on its legal merits, is perhaps questionable, but it wasn’t an outrageous finding.

What does it show about Maliki?

Well, what it shows about Maliki is what it shows about any career politician I’ve ever seen – unrelenting, totally committed vision of ruling and ruling totally.

There’s different points of view about what happened with the Iranians. Was there a deal? Was part of the deal that all American troops will be out by the end of 2011?

I don’t think so, because the Iranians managed to help put together this coalition. The coalition then fell apart, very quickly after Parliament first met when they couldn’t immediately vote in Maliki.

In terms of whether the Iranians said that they didn’t want American troops in, they certainly didn’t want American troops to remain. And they certainly put the parties under pressure. But again, their means were limited, and in the end, all of the Shia parties, except the Sadrists, agreed that American troops would remain.

The hang-up was whether the American troops would be granted very broad legal immunity, such as in 2008. And while the Iranians might have been seized with that as a way to leverage the Americans to withdraw, frankly, given that less than 20 percent of the Iraqi public wanted American troops to stay, and given the great resentment in the Iraqi population – we have to be honest about that – about killings of Iraqis, about Abu Ghraib and such, there wasn’t much sympathy to grant Americans full legal immunities in the Iraqi parliament. So it was a very heavy lift. We knew it would be a heavy lift, irrespective of what the Iranians wanted or didn’t want.

There was an attempt to make sure there was power sharing after the election, and it failed. Why did it fail?

Okay. Again, when I arrived, I could see that among the Iraqi political figures and also in Washington, all the way to the top – I want to underline all the way to the top – there was a lot of concern about Maliki. People were not happy with how he had behaved after the 2010 elections.

[But] when we went in there, we didn’t have a lot of leverage. We couldn’t say, “We’re going to start giving you weapons.” They were paying for the weapons. And as we’ve seen today, if they didn’t get weapons from us, they could turn around and get weapons from somebody else, such as the Russians.

We couldn’t say, “We’re going to stop our aid programs.” We were giving them almost no aid, other than boutique programs, typically for democracy and rule of law. And they had plenty of money to purchase what they needed to develop their country at that point.

So our leverage, if they didn’t, quote, “behave” was very, very limited. And I was painfully aware of that.

On the other hand, we did have influence. People did trust us. We were seen as the honest broker. And we used every bit of that authority, or that influence, supported all the way up to President Obama, but most particularly by Vice President Biden to try to see if there was an alternative to Maliki.

Here is a problem: Everybody agreed that the Shia religious parties — almost everybody — should provide the prime minister. This was not only an internal deal where the Sunnis would get the speaker, a little bit like Lebanon, the Kurds would get the president, but this was also part of a deal that had lasted years, back before 2003, between the Kurds and the Shia Arabs. They represented 80 percent of the population. So in any democratic system, they are the determinant elements.

The Sunnis are only 20 percent, but because of the association, fair or not, of much of the Sunni Arab population with Saddam, they punched below their weight.

The Kurds also, while they were an important fact, punched below their weight because they were always dangling the possibility of eventual independence. And they had their own mini-state up there with their own army, their own economy, their own control of borders and such. And so, their influence was, again, less than their weight.

This meant that the primary political force in the country were the Shia Arabs.

So the question was, would there be a Shia Islamic candidate, other than Maliki. We looked at a number, and there several efforts that we were participating in behind the scenes, including in particular Vice President Adil [Abdul] Mahdi, who was from the Supreme Council, one of the other major parties. And there, the problem was his party only had nine votes. So it was a very small minority among the Shia. And we couldn’t get Allawi’s Iraqiya [party] to give a clear-cut agreement that it would support Adil Mahdi for the prime ministership.

What Allawi’s party wanted was the presidency going to Allawi. We looked at that, and the problem was the Kurds. Because Allawi’s 91 votes and the nine votes you could get from the Supreme Council still gave you less than a third. You needed at a minimum the Kurds to get even a bare majority of votes in the parliament, and thus succeed in a vote of confidence. The Kurds were not willing to give up the presidency.

The reason I’m going into this in as much detail is because people in a very superficial way say America had a lot of influence, it didn’t really try to use its influence, and so by default Maliki got it and the Iranians because the Iranians pushed it. (A) our influence was limited; (B) we looked at every possible scenario. After we looked at the Adil Mahdi prime minister, we looked at Maliki as prime minister, but as a counterweight, Allawi as president. Again, we went all the way to the president on that. He got engaged directly on this. And we still couldn’t get the Kurds to budge.

So we were in a position where we had no alternative. We were tying this thing up in knots to see if there were alternatives. There were none.

So the troops move out at the end of 2011. Where are you during the celebrations that take place? What is the view in Washington?

Everybody in senior positions in the American government wanted to keep a small residual force on basically as an insurance that we could maintain influence, we could maintain training, we could maintain the ability to act quickly if a terrorist threat developed, as we’ve seen now.

But when the Iraqi parties, after three major meetings, concluded that they could support a training presence of 5,000, but they could not support granting immunities by the parliament – and that was our requirement, and it was a valid requirement – then it was clear that the troops would not be able to remain.

So that decision came from the Iraqis in October. We had effectively four or five weeks to complete the withdrawal of most of 50,000 troops. So much of the focus was on that.

President Obama personally was involved in the decisions and in talking with Maliki twice on the troop presence decision. But once it was clear he wasn’t going to get it, he adopted the position – and we saw this in the debates with Romney – of: “I wanted to get my troops out. I got my troops out. I lived up to my commitment to the American people.”

Not quite what the reality was, but understandable because this was a blow to us, and most of us believed that it was very, very important to keep troops on. Nonetheless, you have to live with what you have, and what we had was an embassy-led effort to provide security support to the Iraqis.

And your worries about the future of Iraq?

Right at that point, my worries were the 16,000 personnel I had that I had to protect, I had to feed, I had to fuel, I had to keep the morale up. And the only person I could turn to was Maliki and his government.

So the day after, al-Hashimi’s compound was surrounded. Soon after that, other Sunni leadership were arrested or bodyguards were arrested. What was going on? How did you view that? What was the message that was being sent by Maliki?

We were terribly disappointed. I spent many months looking into this, and two conclusions. First of all, people who were as unbiased as anybody can be in Iraq, friends neither of Tariq [al-]Hashimi nor of Maliki basically said, you know, there may be some truth to the allegations against the bodyguards. There was a lot of problems with Tariq Hashimi. We had had problems with him. I’d had problems with him back as early as 2005, when I was attacked by an Al Qaeda assault after leaving his compound. And we felt that his movement at a minimum had been infiltrated.

But certainly the actions of the Iraqi government, which seemed to have had Maliki egging them on, or going along with it, were absolutely unprecedented, and frankly wrong.

Now, in point of fact, the president really didn’t enjoy parliamentary immunity, per se. Only members of parliament enjoyed parliamentary immunity. So he was legally a target of investigations. And this was a flaw that we had helped install some years before.

So when Maliki supported these arrests and said that he would carry them out and argued “That’s my constitutional responsibility,” we all felt that there was a real undercurrent of repression that we would see developing further. Therefore, the U.S. government, at very high levels, talked to Maliki, tried to explain to him that he needed to really look into this. Maliki again said: “Hey, this is a one-off thing. We have evidence. The courts processed this. They issued the actions.”

But then there’s the Rafi al-Issawi situation and there are others that it seemed that this was more of a Sunni crackdown.

There is no doubt, and I’d left by the time Rafi al-Issawi [the Sunni former finance minister and deputy prime minister] was charged. There is no doubt that these are bogus charges. Maliki had threatened many times to arrest Rafi based upon all of this kind of intelligence. Maliki had set up these off-budget intelligence services and relationships, and they were constantly reporting outlandish stories about all of his political enemies. And he was believing these rather than the reports of his intelligence services, whom he thought were infiltrated by us and serving our interests, not his.

Once Maliki did that, my own personal view was Maliki is finished as the leader of an inclusive, multiethnic, multi-religious Iraq.

Did the Obama administration understand? Did you talk to them about this and say this is a real problem?

Many of them understood that Maliki was becoming a problem. On the other hand, the president and the country had taken the position [that] Iraq was a mistake, we’ve ended our war in Iraq. The country is on its own. It has a democratic system. We’re providing security assistance to it. If we see things we don’t like, we’ll do démarches, we’ll do calls from the vice president. Just like we do with 50 or 100 or 150 other countries that have similar situations.

So the disengagement first of the troops led really to a total disengagement politically.

The United States isn’t disengaged politically from any country in the world. Gradually – and this wasn’t a mistake, this was the whole intent of our efforts ever since 2003 – the ward of the United States status of Iraq was to be ended. They were to be weaned from this idea that every time they did something bad they’d get a call from us and with a somewhat threatening, avuncular tone, “You’ve got to stop doing that,” the implication being our tanks are going to surround your Green Zone tomorrow, or all of the aid programs are going to stop. We’re going to sit back and let the Al Qaeda guys run amok.

We didn’t have those tools; we didn’t have those threats, even if we wanted to make it. And, as I said, we had a world full of people who were acting pretty much like Prime Minister Maliki.

In 2012, as you’re leaving, you warn DC that Maliki needs to be contained. Tell me about that.

This was a constant warning that I had made and that others had made before me, that Maliki was a problem. But that was also an admonition to have a better position with the other political forces.

They were hell-bent on trying to get rid of Maliki. There was an effort for a vote of no confidence. We didn’t see this succeeding, and in fact it didn’t succeed, in part because President Talabani was opposed to it. But it was an all-or-nothing approach. And there were other ways to clip Maliki’s wings. Neither the Kurds nor Allawi’s people would –- nor Muqtada al-Sadr’s people, at least initially — would go along with that. They wanted to just get rid of Maliki. It didn’t work.

So essentially, what we were urging was Washington to use whatever influence it could to narrow Maliki’s options and to put him under as much pressure as possible.

Do we understand the dangers at this point of a furthering of a Shia/Sunni divide after the surge and the work of the politicians and the diplomats had done to stitch that alliance together?

That’s a good question, but it’s a very hard one to answer. It wasn’t unravelling in any particularly obvious way. That is, you had additional elections, including the 2010 elections. The Sunni members of the Awakening were still getting paid. Often the payment would be delayed; there would be a lot of hassles with the payment. We would go in and make démarches and talk to people and jump start things. But we were doing that on everything from electricity to legal issues and rights of minorities and refugees.

You didn’t have any significant rise in terrorism. You didn’t have any turning point in relations between the Kurds, Baghdad and the Sunnis that would make us all sit up and say, gee, something totally different is going on. That didn’t happen until Issawi’s arrest, and then afterwards the fall of Fallujah.

ISIS, the rise of ISIS, the impact of the Syrian civil war, the policy of America towards it. What do you see happening, from all your knowledge of defence and what’s taken place? Was this surprising? Was it expected in some ways?

The situation in Iraq today is basically driven by two major forces. The first is the underlying contradictions in the Iraqi constitutional state system and Maliki’s exacerbating those contradictions. I would term that an almost expected or normal situation in that part of the world in those kind of political systems.

The second element, and the element that is totally unexpected, was that the United States allowed what was clearly an extremely dangerous situation in two dimensions – an Iranian/Russia/Hezbollah/Assad military victory in the middle of a region surrounded by our allies and friends; and the rise of extreme Sunni Islamic elements, al-Nusra, and then the ISIL, without acting in any significant way.

The Middle East, since our 1973 engagement in the Yom Kippur War, has operated on the expectation that when things get really bad, the United States in some way, shape or form steps in to bring things back to the closest thing to normal you can get to in that region. For the first time in my recollection, we did not take any action whatsoever, of any consequence, with Syria. And we got what we have today.

Why did we not take any action?

I think that, first of all, taking action would have been difficult. Secondly, I think President Obama, in looking at all of his speeches, most notably the West Point speech and his quasi-speech in Manila a few weeks before, has a fundamental either belief or an educational point with the American people, that any military actions — whether it’s firing cruise missiles on the Syrian chemical weapons front or aiding local fighters — will lead to almost inexorably 150,000 troops on the ground like Iraq, or 500,000 like Vietnam. Slippery slope. Down the drain. Huge disaster for America.

I think he believes that. I think he’s absolutely wrong. But I think that that drove him, along with the pivot to Asia and a general feeling that no matter what we do in the Middle East, it doesn’t turn out well. Look at Libya. That persuaded him not to act.

Does the NSC at this point … [have] got blinders to what’s happening in Iraq, Syria, because of what we’ve gone through already?

Well, the NSC itself, I mean that at the time was Hillary Clinton. It was Gates. It was Petraeus. They certainly know what’s going on in the Middle East and they were very committed to us engaging, particularly in Syria. … But I think that the feeling they got from the president was, at least as concerns the Middle East, he did not want to get engaged.

And nobody could explain to him how we could give him a guaranteed winning strategy with Syria. But on the 15 or 20 major American commitments I’ve been involved in, from being a soldier to an ambassador in the Middle East over 30-plus years, I’ve never seen one that we’ve gone into — and we’ve been successful in most — where we could answer those questions fully. You basically have to go in and rock and roll, and try to stabilize the situation.

The naysayers now sort of say this all stems back to the fact of pulling out the troops. If we hadn’t pulled out the troops, this wouldn’t have happened. Number one, the Iraqis wouldn’t have been able to allow the Iranians to fly over and send Assad support. They wouldn’t have been able to march through the country as quickly as they did. What’s your take on that?

My view on most of that is unprintable in this forum. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Any troops we kept in Iraq – and I was, as we’ve talked about, a very strong advocate of keeping troops – would have been under the terms of the 2008 agreement, as modified, but whatever agreement we got. That agreement said the United States will take no action without the prior approval of the Iraqi government.

The people who think this have no idea how you deal with a sovereign country. They think that when we have troops in there, we run the place. We don’t. And that was not the intent. You have to adhere to the laws.

What those troops would have done would have, first of all, given us insight into the erosion of Iraqi military capabilities. We had that to some degree, but having more troops there out working with them all of the time, we could have seen this and we could have advised Maliki and others better.

Secondly, the troops would have helped the training, and they would have made the equipping of these forces a higher priority. When you have troops in a country, particularly when they’re facing some danger, you will get a lot more attention out of Washington than when you have an ambassador yelling for help.

But finally, if we’d had troops in Iraq, we would have been much more concerned about the situation next door in Syria, because if that went belly-up, which of course it did, then we would have to worry about either do we reinforce the troops, or do we pull the troops out. That is, having troops in a situation changes dramatically the attention level of Washington, and the compulsion to act. And that’s one argument for doing them.

How could ISIS have taken Fallujah and Mosul so easily?

In the case of Fallujah, it was not unexpected. What happened was, after Maliki’s latest outrage against this Sunni Arab Member of Parliament, the Sunni Arab population of Anbar rose up and said, OK, we’re sick and tired of you; you’re oppressing us. Get the troops out of our cities.

Maliki typically put troops in cities, which under the constitution and under the laws he was only supposed to do with the provincial councils’ approval. He was basically acting in violation of these strictures or rules. And when they said pull the troops out, for reasons unbeknownst to me, he pulled his troops out of Fallujah and Ramadi.

As soon as he did that, leaving security in the hands of the local police who are ill-armed, limited in numbers, not very sympathetic to Maliki, and infiltrated to some degree by Al Qaeda, what happened? This ISIS element roared in from across the border in Syria and from the desert, where they had been operating as a kind of terrorist force, in some hundreds, and seized key strategic locations in Fallujah and in Ramadi. They were held onto control and basically defeated in Ramadi with the help of the tribes. And Maliki’s forces re-engaged. But in Fallujah, they basically took the city almost entirely.

So that wasn’t a military defeat of the Iraqi army. That was a political decision by Maliki to pull the forces out.

The lack of support of the Awakening councils, for instance, that had been formed during the surge — what does that say about the divide that had grown since we had left?

Well, first of all, they did fight effectively on the side of the government or on the side of themselves in Ramadi against Al Qaeda, which is a major reason why Al Qaeda or ISIS is not controlling Ramadi today. They’re still fighting, from what I’ve heard. And you see fighting between tribes and ISIL up in the Haditha Dam area and further north in Saladin Province.

The problem is that they’re getting no support from either us or the Iraqi government, and they’re facing a foe that is far better armed, far better experienced and far larger than they had to face in 2007.

So I think the outcome of this if we don’t hurry up and provide support is going to be the piecemeal defeat of these tribes.

Are we back in a situation that’s similar to 2006?

Not entirely, because as I said, some of the tribes can, are fighting against ISIS. But just as in 2006, 2007 — and they’re quite open about this — they’re not fighting for the Maliki government.

But they weren’t fighting for the Maliki government in 2006, 2007; they were fighting first for their own families and neighbourhoods and for their own control of economic resources, from smuggling to power generation, against Al Qaeda. And secondly, they were fighting because they believed in us. Very few were fighting for an inclusive multiethnic, multi-religious government in Baghdad, then or now.

But far fewer of them are fighting against ISIS now than we had in 2006/2007, because they’re much angrier at the Maliki government than they were then, and they don’t have any support from us. And ISIS is a much more formidable foe.

How did we get caught with our pants down like this?

Mosul was totally unexpected. But once they went into Fallujah and we had ample experience, because we sent teams out after Fallujah to look at the Iraqi army, to realize that ISIS had developed itself into a quite formidable, conventional, if lightly armed, force capable of moving rapidly with pickup trucks, and engaging aviation with antiaircraft guns, and holding its ground against the Iraqi army, including Iraqi armour and artillery.

That should have been a sign that things could degenerate rapidly. The administration not only was warned by everybody back in January, it actually announced that it was going to intensify its support against ISIS with the Iraqi armed forces. And it did almost nothing.

We worked for months and we finally succeeded in getting Congress to lift the hold on six Apache helicopters, which still haven’t gotten there. And we decided we would provide drone flights, according to the Wall Street Journal. We got those up to about one drone flight a month. Right now, we’re doing – again according to the newspapers – 35 a day. That’s what you need.

But is that enough?

That may not be enough, but that’s a lot. But certainly, one drone flight a month is simply checking the box and saying, See? We have increased our support. It has absolutely no significance on the ground. But you can’t say we’re doing nothing.

You wrote at one point that the idea of remaking Iraq was never realistic, that we never had a sustained enough endeavour. And that the influence that we had was basically frittered away. What’s your take on that?

Iraq, in part because of it being nestled in a very contentious part of the world, with a very ambivalent attitude towards the West, and the particular history of Iraq, sundered between various communities, extraordinary levels of violence over decades, made it about the worst soil in the world to try to plant a democratic system. And when you do this, particularly when you do this on the backs of American tanks, you’re going to have a countervailing effect. People aren’t going to believe you’re coming there to make their lot better. They’re going to believe that just like the British, just like the Mongols, just like the Ottomans, you’re coming there to occupy their country and take their oil.

And secondly, people in the region, from the Iranians, to Assad, to the West, are going to think the Americans are trying to plant a new set of bases to put pressure on us. And we’re next. So therefore better fight them through indirect means now than to have to fight them for real, like Saddam did in 2003. And saw what happened to him.

So therefore, you generate automatically tremendous countervailing forces, as we did when we went into North Korea in 1950; as we did when we went into Vietnam. It wasn’t just the locals rose up against us, it was neighbouring countries decided they didn’t want to have an American military presence on their borders.

So you’ve started off on a war of choice, in the case of 2003, that the American people did not fully understand, because they weren’t fully told what the motives and what the goals were. A war of choice. You suddenly are encountering tremendous opposition, and you have U.S. forces fighting without anybody being able to define, in a set of words, in one sentence, what is the goal of the American military? In 1991, in the first Gulf War, it was: Drive the Iraqi military out of Kuwait, inflicting as much damage on their offensive capabilities in the process. That is not only a one-sentence definition of what the mission was and what was accomplished, it also is something that is inherently capable of having the military do.

The idea of working with the Iraqis to build up security forces, inculcate democratic systems, help form an inclusive government, jump start economic development — these are all generational endeavors that more often than not, when we’ve tried them around the world, haven’t succeeded under far better and more peaceful circumstances than Iraq.

So to go in and try to do this is absolute folly. And all of the specific mistakes – and I could list dozens, including many of my own – aren’t really all that relevant. Because whether we had made those mistakes or not, we were going to wind up in the same place.

You’ve been at every level of this since the beginning. Thirteen years ago, could you have imagined that we’re at this point? What’s the lesson learned on where we are today?

As I mentioned, since being placed on alert in 1973 as an Army company commander during the Yom Kippur War, all the way up to the present, American presidents and advisors have known that the most volatile part of the world is the Middle East.

Thus, from administration to administration, the United States has tried to do what we would call economy-of-force operations to manage the crisis. Small, large, we’ve done this score of times.

After 9/11, through two administrations, we decided to go in different directions, diametrically opposed, but both of them different from what we have been doing for 30 years. The first was, we no longer were going to manage the problems of the Middle East; we were going to fix them. We were going to do transcendental operations using the extraordinary capabilities of the American military to do rapid, decisive warfare – as we saw first in Afghanistan, and then even more dramatically in Iraq in 2003 – to overthrow evil, corrupt, violent, dictatorial regimes and allow democracy to flourish.

This was followed, as a reaction to this, not by a return to these economy-of-force operations — firing a few cruise missiles because the Syrians, for example, are using chemical weapons — but rather a dramatic withdrawal from our role as the 911, the regional policemen that would work with the local forces, that would make limited, purposeful commitments to keep the lid on the situation.

President Obama felt that that would lead inexorably to new Iraqs and new Vietnams. Or he felt – and this is my personal view – that in the end it doesn’t produce anything. And if we leave the region alone, it will kind of manage itself. Maybe we’re not a force for good, maybe we’re not a force for peace and stability. Maybe we’re just either having no effect, or we’re having a deleterious effect.

But it certainly is a radical change, not just from President Bush, but a radical change from Bill Clinton in the Balkans the Middle East, a radical change from George Bush, Sr., a radical change from Reagan, and even Carter.

And the result is the Syrian situation and how it is morphed into two huge dangers: A victory by an ascendant Russia, Iran and Assad; and a kind of Chechnyan-type battle for the populated areas of Syria – watch what’s going to happen in the days ahead in Aleppo – and the rise of a radical Islamic, crazed group that’s trying to pull the whole region into a conflagration of Sunni versus Shia; modernists versus traditionalists.

And both of these developments could have been blocked. Both of these developments create huge dangers for the United States, for our position in the world, and for our allies, and ultimately the homeland.

So is it your contention then that history will look at both administrations and find that they failed?

I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. I think the question is the degree of failure. And I think it is dramatic, and it is historic.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/losing-iraq/james-jeffrey-iraq-was-a-historic-dramatic-failure-for-bush-and-obama/

URL: https://newageislam.com/interview/zalmay-khalilzad,-jack-keane,-david/d/98344