Who Thought It Would Be Easy? From Optimism to Resignation in the Middle East
This is a long twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can’t wish it away. No strategy of winning “hearts and minds,” no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end. America can’t conciliate these furies.
—FOUAD AJAMI
ON MARCH 20, 2017, exactly one month after I entered the White House, Prime Minister of Iraq Haider al-Abadi visited Washington. I looked forward to seeing him. He was a respected friend whose country was in turmoil. Iraq was at the center of the fight to defeat ISIS, the latest version of the Sunni jihadist terrorist organizations that had inflicted so much pain and suffering not only in the Middle East, but across the globe. The country was also on the front line of Iran’s effort to extend its influence across the region. And along with Syria, Iraq was at the epicenter of a sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni Muslims that was strengthening terrorist organizations, perpetuating state weakness, and inflicting human suffering on a colossal scale. The 2003 invasion of Iraq did not create the centripetal forces that were tearing the Middle East apart. But the invasion, lack of preparation for the war’s aftermath, and precipitous withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 contributed to a contagious breakdown of security. Abadi’s visit was important because a stable and secure Iraq that was not aligned with Iran was essential if the Middle East was to emerge from multiple crises and we needed to understand better how the United States could support Iraqi leaders who shared these goals.
The day of Abadi’s visit was typical. There was a routine mid-morning Oval Office session with President Trump, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Mike Pompeo. I then sat down with Doug Silliman, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, in preparation for the Iraqi delegation’s arrival at 3 p.m. From 2011 to 2013, Silliman had been political counselor and deputy chief of mission in Baghdad as Iraq unraveled after the U.S. withdrawal. He returned to Baghdad as ambassador toward the end of 2016 in the midst of the campaign to defeat ISIS, the terrorist group that had gained control of large portions of Iraq and Syria to establish its so-called caliphate.
I returned to the Oval Office for the usually rushed briefing in advance of the visit. I made sure the president, who always stressed the need for partners to pull their weight, knew that Iraqis were taking the brunt of the battle against ISIS. The Iraqis had lost approximately 26,000 soldiers since 2014, compared to seventeen U.S. soldiers and marines killed in action against ISIS in Iraq during that same period.1 The president was concerned about Iranian influence in Iraq. I told him that Prime Minister Abadi was trying to strengthen Iraqi sovereignty and reduce malign Iranian influence. Abadi knew that if the Iraqi government aligned with Iran, another version of ISIS would portray itself to Sunni communities as a protector from Iranian-sponsored Shia militias. I stressed that a positive, long-term relationship with Iraq would not only assist with the defeat of ISIS, but also counterbalance Iranian influence there.
Iran was intent on keeping Iraq weak and divided. After the collapse of the Iraqi Army in 2014 and ISIS’s rapid seizure of territory there, the Iraqi government deepened its reliance on Shia militias to maintain stability. These militias were mostly commanded by Iranian agents, giving Iran coercive power over the Baghdad government. Militias under the influence of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the so-called Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), included groups that had killed American soldiers.2 For example, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), a group that operated in Iraq and Syria, had been equipped, funded, and trained by the IRGC. Shia militiamen were young; they and their commanders formed a new base of power. To further destabilize Iraq, Iran’s IRGC and its Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) also took advantage of divisions among Kurds and between Kurds and Arabs by supporting Kurdish factions sympathetic to Tehran.
As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Ambassador Silliman joined us in the Oval Office, I suggested that two members of the delegation typified the promise and peril of Iraq. Abadi represented promise. He worked with all of Iraq’s communities to reduce ethnic and sectarian divisions and shared the U.S. desire for a strong and independent Iraq. He was a unifying leader in a country whose complex quilt of ethnic, tribal, and religious communities had been torn apart many times since Saddam Hussein took power in 1979. Abadi’s foreign minister, former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, personified peril. Jaafari advocated for Iraq’s Shia community at the expense of others. He did Iran’s bidding, sowed division, and perpetuated conflict.
To illustrate the point, I told them about how Abadi had supported the regiment I commanded more than a decade earlier in Tal Afar, a city that contained the complexities of Iraq and the Middle East in microcosm. In 2005, Tal Afar was a training ground and staging base for Al-Qaeda operations across Iraq. The terrorists used sectarian or religious conflict between Turkmen Shia and Sunni populations, as well as ethnic rivalries among Kurds, Turkmen, Yazidis, and Arabs, to embed themselves in communities that needed protection. As U.S. forces reduced their presence in northern Iraq, the city had become a sectarian battleground between Shia police and Al-Qaeda terrorists. Civilians were caught in the crossfire. Sunni and Shia families who had been friends and neighbors were forced to choose sides. Normal life stopped. Schools and markets closed. People barricaded themselves in their homes. The police morphed into a death squad that operated out of a sixteenth-century Ottoman castle in the center of the city and ventured out at night to murder, indiscriminately, Sunni men of military age. The police actually helped Al-Qaeda terrorists portray themselves as protectors and rationalize the brutal form of control they had established. Terrorists forced parents to give up their adolescent and young teenage boys to join their organization. So-called imams who rarely had more than an elementary school education put young recruits through initiations often involving sexual abuse and systematic dehumanization. For example, in one unexceptional case in Tal Afar, a young teenager was repeatedly raped and given the assignment to be the leg holder in beheadings of Shia or uncooperative Sunnis.3 It was a dystopian scene.
Soon after the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment arrived in Tal Afar in May of 2005, I called Abadi to ask for his assistance in arresting the cycle of violence. Abadi, then a member of Iraq’s parliament, was influential in the powerful Shia Dawa (Islamic Call) Party. After I told him that the chief of police was fueling the cycle of violence in Tal Afar, Abadi arranged for his transfer to Baghdad and cleared the way for a Sunni Arab general who transformed the police from predators to protectors of civilians regardless of their sectarian, ethnic, or tribal identity. That chief, Maj. Gen. Najim Abed Abdullah al-Jibouri, was an extraordinarily courageous leader and effective mediator. After a successful counterterrorism offensive in 2005, Jibouri fostered understanding among Tal Afar’s ethnic and sectarian groups and a common commitment to preventing Al-Qaeda from returning. The city came back to life as schools and markets reopened once again, barricaded houses were no longer the norm, and the Iraqi Army and police barred Al-Qaeda from regaining a foothold. I wanted the president to know what often got lost in the reports of horrific violence and human suffering in Iraq: the perseverance of unifying leaders like Abadi and Jibouri, who wanted to forge a better future for all Iraqis regardless of religion, ethnicity, or tribal affiliation. But not all in Abadi’s party were conciliators.
I advised the president that some members of the Iraqi delegation might look rough, but the thin, balding medical doctor with the close-cropped gray beard was the most coldblooded. Jaafari was driven mainly by a depraved desire for revenge against former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. He was the perfect agent for Iran because he fueled the violence that debilitated Iraq. In the run-up to the Iraqi election that resulted in Jaafari’s prime ministership, Iran provided millions of dollars to establish Shia sectarian-driven political parties. At the same time, the United States stood aside and did little to counter Iran’s influence. As prime minister from May 2005 to May 2006, Jaafari used policies and actions to marginalize Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and Turkmen and aid Iranian infiltration of Iraqi institutions.
Jaafari spent the 1980s in Iran as a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an anti-Saddam organization thoroughly penetrated by Iranian intelligence.4 Later, he moved to London, where he became the spokesperson for the Dawa Party. Jaafari was pro-Iran and anti-United States. From 2007 to 2008, the former prime minister twice hosted me and then-Major Joel Rayburn at his home in Baghdad’s Green Zone, the fortified neighborhood at the center of the Iraqi capital. As Rayburn and I drank sweet tea, the doctor gave long lectures about the West’s many flaws. Jaafari shared the Iranian mullahs’ strange ideological blend of Marxist-Leninism and Shia millenarianism with an added dose of material from leftist American academics. He would occasionally pull books off his shelves and quote from them, as if to enter evidence in his case against the United States, one favored source being linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky and Jaafari shared the belief that all the world’s (and Iraq’s) ills derived from colonialism and “capitalist imperialism.” Jaafari seemed unaware that had it not been for the American invasion of 2003, he would have been quoting from Chomsky in exile.
As prime minister, Jaafari blamed the United States even as he helped the Badr Organization, a Shia militia, gain control of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior.5 The new minister, Bayan Jabr, who shared Jaafari’s deceptively gentle appearance as well as his inner ruthlessness, used the National Police to abduct, systematically torture, and sometimes kill Sunni prisoners.6 The atrocities were part score settling for Iran. Victims were often former members of Saddam’s government, or Iraqi pilots who had bombed Iranian territory during the Iran-Iraq War, or even university professors who were critical of the Iranian Revolution. But, then, Iran was seeding nefarious people across the Iraqi government, with the help of people like Jaafari. One example was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. In 2005, U.S. officials discovered more than one hundred suffering people whom Iraqi national police had illegally arrested and crammed into his basement. Previously, Muhandis had been sentenced to death in Kuwait for terrorist bombings in 1983. He was later killed in a U.S. strike in January 2020 that targeted Iranian IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani. And there was National Police general Mahdi al-Gharrawi, in whose headquarters U.S. Army soldiers uncovered a holding cell with 1,400 malnourished prisoners who clearly had been tortured repeatedly.7 Jaafari protected Muhandis and Gharrawi from prosecutors. While Abadi saw people like Gharrawi and Muhandis as corrupt and a liability to Iraq, Jaafari enabled their efforts to foment the sectarian civil wars that helped give rise first to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and, later, to its offspring, ISIS.8 As we walked to receive the delegation, I predicted that Jaafari would reveal his antipathy toward the United States by demanding more aid. He and others who acted as agents of Iran thought of American leaders as dupes whom they could fleece before turning Iraq fully toward Iran and against their erstwhile patrons.
Much of the discussion across the Cabinet Room’s long mahogany conference table was about military progress in the campaign against ISIS. Just four months earlier, Iraqi forces had liberated the ancient city of Sinjar from ISIS, where in August 2014, terrorists massacred an estimated five thousand Yazidis, tortured thousands of girls and women in rape camps, and sold women as slaves, forcing them to marry those who killed their fathers and brothers.9 After the White House and Defense Department removed unnecessary restrictions on U.S. forces put in place during the Obama administration, such as how far forward advisors could operate in battle and how many helicopters could be in Syria, the pace of operations against ISIS in Syria and in Iraq increased.10 Although tough fighting was still ahead, success in wresting control of territory and populations from ISIS seemed inevitable.
Toward the end of the meeting, the president asked if I had anything to add. I thought that the key questions were how to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS and prevent Iran from extending its influence across Iraq, into Syria, and to the borders of Israel. I asked Prime Minister Abadi what more we and others might do to help him break the cycle of conflict. He spoke of the need to pull Iraq’s traumatized society back together and convince all Iraqis that the government could secure them and provide them with a better future. When Jaafari, true to form, called for more U.S. aid, President Trump ignored him and ended the meeting. But before the table had cleared and the policy makers had dispersed, one of the prime minister’s aides slipped me a note. Abadi was asking me to meet him at his hotel after hours.
At around nine o’clock that evening, I went to see Abadi. It was late, but late-night meetings are an Iraqi custom. Joel Rayburn came with me. We had served together many times in Iraq and Afghanistan. A colonel and a senior director on the National Security Council staff, Joel had recently written an excellent book that put Iraq’s contemporary fragmentation into historical perspective. He had also edited a seminal critical study of the U.S. Army’s experience in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. We had both taught history at West Point and shared a conviction that to understand the present, one must first understand the past. On the way to Abadi’s hotel, we discussed how the prime minister had borne witness to the tragedy of Middle East politics and had somehow transcended the sectarianism that embroiled the region. Abadi could be candid away from his own delegation, many of whom, including Jaafari, he could not trust. He could help us understand what the United States might do to help him and other leaders overcome the decades of trauma in the Middle East.
BORN IN 1952, Abadi came of age in the postcolonial period of growing cultural awareness among Arab states. Socialist ideas were popular, especially state control of resources, such as oil, to achieve social justice and equitable income distribution. As new political movements emerged in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, dictators gained power and fostered cults of personality with pervasive propaganda. In Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and, with the support of the United States, prevailed over European powers in the crisis that ensued. He built the Aswan High Dam on the Nile, defended the Palestinian cause, and promised social reform. From Iraq, a young Abadi watched Pan Arabism (which envisioned a unified Arab world) and socialist experiments collapse as nationalist and Islamist ideologies gained strength.11 In 1958, as Abadi entered grade school in Baghdad, waves of nationalist sentiment washed over Syria and Iraq. In Syria, a series of weak civilian governments, military coups, and counter-coups had thrust the left-leaning Baath Party into power. The Syria Baath, in pursuit of a single Arab state, entered into a union with Egypt that would last only two years.
In Iraq, a coup ended the Hashemite monarchy that the British had established in 1921. On July 14, 1958, Faisal II, a soon-to-be-married twenty-three-year-old monarch who had ascended the throne at age three, found himself and other members of his family lined up facing a wall in the palace courtyard. A machine gun opened fire. The king’s bullet-ridden body was strung from a lamppost. Abadi remembered people celebrating the demise of the corrupt government but feeling remorse over the brutal murders of the king and his family. And he recollected how, after the king’s death, the freedoms, such as multiple political parties and a free press, began to evaporate. Over the next decade, authoritarian dictatorships were ascendant in the Arab world; foremost among them was Nasser, whose brand of Arab nationalism included strong anti-Israel sentiment. In 1967, when Abadi was a student in Baghdad Central High School, he witnessed a war motivated by that sentiment, the outcome of which would sound the death knell for Arab nationalism.
Abadi recalled high expectations as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria initiated a war against Israel, and a huge letdown across the Arab world when, six days later, the Israel Defense Forces not only defeated the combined armies, but also seized Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Jordanian West Bank. The rush to assign blame generated conflicts within and among Arab nations that would go on for decades. In Syria, Minister of Defense Hafez al-Assad, a member of the socialist Baath Party and the minority Alawi sect, a secretive Shia offshoot that blends religions, blamed Syrian president Salah Jadid for the defeat and loss of territory.12 As the president’s position weakened, Assad activated a network of friends and relatives. In 1970, he mounted a bloodless coup, but the three decades that followed were far from bloodless. The defeat in the Six-Day War empowered Islamists, who used the religious dimension of the Israeli-Arab conflict to grow support. Islamist challengers to the Iraqi Baath Party grew, spurred on by the brutality of the Baaths. In 1966, Abadi had met the founder of the Dawa Party, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr. Al-Sadr had founded the party in 1957 to combat secularist, Arab nationalist, and socialist ideas; to promote Islamic values and ethics; to increase political awareness; and, ultimately, to create a Shia Islamic state in Iraq.
Abadi remembers being “overtaken” by the charismatic imam and being struck by his “humanness.” Al-Sadr presented Islam as an alternative to Marxism and capitalism. Abadi joined Dawa in 1967, one year before the Baath Party seized power in Iraq, and he became part of a growing Islamist movement that encompassed the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood as well as Dawa and other Shia groups. Abadi’s educated, pious Shia family, like many others, rejected a secular government driven by power and avarice.
Abadi was completing a doctorate in London when events in Iran and Iraq thrust the Middle East into a new era of conflict. In February 1979, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the son and grandson of mullahs, overthrew the Shah of Iran to become supreme leader of the Islamic Republic. Abadi, who had become the leader of the Dawa organization in Europe, was hopeful. He thought that if the all-powerful Shah could be deposed, the same might be possible in Iraq, Syria, and across the Middle East. Abadi and other Dawa members met in cafés to talk about prospects for overthrowing the Baath in Iraq. Just four months later, there was a change in government in Iraq, but not the kind that Abadi and Dawa sought. Saddam Hussein, a man whose father died before he was born and whose mother abandoned him, mounted a coup in Baghdad and declared himself president. In Iran, the revolutionaries executed the Shah’s senior civilian and military officials at a steady pace while, in Iraq, Saddam executed hundreds in one week. His internal opposition either dead or quelled, Saddam then turned to the threat that the Islamic Revolution in Iran posed to his secular nationalist dictatorship. Just four months after seizing power, he ordered the invasion of Iran, anticipating a short war against a country still in the throes of revolution. The ensuing eight-year war took a heavy toll on both nations; it would end in stalemate after an estimated one million people perished.13
Those were hard years for the Abadi family. As Saddam invaded Iran, he ordered a brutal crackdown on Dawa and other Shia opposition groups. In April 1980, the founder of the Dawa Party and the man who inspired young Haider al-Abadi, Muhammad al-Sadr, was arrested by the Baath. The forty-five-year old cleric was tortured and forced to watch as his sister was raped. Saddam’s agents then drove a nail into his skull.14
Ayatollah Khomeini framed the stakes of the Iran-Iraq War as more than the defense of Iran’s territorial integrity—it was a war to uphold Shia Islam and spread the Islamic Revolution. The Iran-Iraq War rekindled ancient animosities rooted in historical memory of a battle in Karbala, Iraq in AD 680. After the prophet Muhammad died in 632, Islam split between Shia (which means followers of Ali, those who believed that Ali ibn Abi Talib, a cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, was Muhammad’s designated successor) and Sunnis (those who believed that Muhammad did not appoint a successor and who considered Abu Bakr to be the first rightful caliph after the Prophet). The Battle of Karbala pitted these factions against each other. The subsequent brutal defeat of the Shia forces is an emotional touchstone of their history, tradition, literature, and theology. Shia commemorate the battle over ten days every year, which culminate with the Day of Ashura, a day of mourning and processions that often entail self-flagellation. Khomeini made powerful use of Shia identity, especially historical grievances, to galvanize the masses.15
Religion served as justification for atrocities on both sides of the Iran-Iraq War. On the Iranian side, Ayatollah Khomeini sent unarmed teenagers into certain death, with instructions to pick up the rifle of the boy who fell in front of them. These young men wore red headbands printed with the words Sar Allah (Warriors of God). The Ayatollah gave them small metal keys that he promised would gain them admission to Paradise when they were martyred. Many were bound by ropes to prevent their desertion. On the Iraqi side, Saddam Hussein portrayed himself as the defender not only of Iraq, but also of the entire Arab world against Iran’s Shia Islamist revival and designs for expansion. His forces used chemical weapons and waged war directly on Iranian civilians. In January 1987 alone, his forces launched more than two hundred missile strikes on Iranian cities, killing nearly two thousand and wounding more than six thousand innocents. More than sixty thousand Iranian civilians died in the war.16
Abadi was lucky. He missed the maelstrom. He ran a small design and technology firm in London and continued to host Iraqi exiles in a popular café. When he became more vocal in calling for the liberation of Iraq, the Baath Party rescinded his passport.17 Meanwhile, in Iraq, Abadi’s family was under duress. Two of his five brothers had been imprisoned under Saddam, and their fate was still unknown.
Outside Iran, the Islamists did not get very far. Nationalist dictators in Syria and Iraq brutally repressed opposition. In Syria, Assad’s army put down a 1982 Muslim Brotherhood Islamist uprising in Hama, a city of around two hundred thousand, with a siege, bombings, and a tank assault. Between seven thousand and thirty thousand people died in the span of twenty days.18 Those not killed were imprisoned under horrible conditions; many were never seen again. The blood spilled made Syria fertile ground for growing future generations of Islamist terrorists. Hama was a harbinger of the brutality to come to Syria under Assad’s son, Bashar, an ophthalmologist turned dictator who would surpass his father’s grim record of murder, imprisonment, and torture.
The legacy of the Iran-Iraq War and earlier Syrian uprisings are apparent in the sectarian civil wars that engulfed the Middle East in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Iran cultivated relationships with Shia opposition groups and militias that became part of Iraq’s political and military landscape. During the Iran-Iraq War, Ibrahim al-Jaafari and many of Haider al-Abadi’s Shia contemporaries fled to shelter in Iran. Iran exacted a price, recruiting young Iraqi men into anti-Saddam groups, such as the Badr Organization. Iran used Badr and other organizations for assassinations and guerrilla attacks in a low-level war that went on for fifteen years after the end of the conventional conflict in 1988. The terrible costs of the war and the historical animosities it resurrected divided Sunni and Shia Muslims. The sectarian divide fueled violence and complicated efforts to develop coherent national identities and legitimate governance across the Middle East. And it intensified the political and religious power struggle between Shia-majority Iran and Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia while setting conditions for a sectarian civil war in post-Saddam Iraq. As Islamism rose from the ashes of Arab and secular nationalism, it brought discord rather than unity, pursuit of particular rather than general interests, and a preference for violence rather than representative political processes to settle differences or compete for power.
Some, like Abadi and Jibouri, would emerge from that era as conciliators who sought to bridge the sectarian divide. Others, like Jaafari, would deepen and widen that divide and, along with Sunni jihadist terrorist organizations like AQI, accelerate the destructive cycle of violence.
RAYBURN AND I arrived at the hotel and ascended the last two flights of stairs past several armed U.S. Secret Service agents to Prime Minister Abadi’s floor. He welcomed us into his suite, and we began a relaxed conversation. I reminisced about meeting him on my first day in Baghdad in May 2003. I had left a fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University to serve on Gen. John Abizaid’s staff at U.S. Central Command’s forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar. As I flew with Abizaid from Doha to Baghdad, I met an Iraqi American who would become one of Abadi’s assistants in the new Iraqi government. We talked about how, after the successful Coalition offensive that removed Saddam from power, the most difficult tasks lay ahead. Later, at the gaudy Republican Palace that Coalition forces occupied, I had helped Abadi receive his badge in time to attend a security committee meeting.
Now, in his Washington hotel suite, I began by telling him how much I appreciated his leadership under the most difficult circumstances. In 2014, it was under duress that the previous Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al Maliki, abandoned a postelection effort to remain prime minister and ceded leadership to Abadi. I asked him about our friend General Jibouri. When he assumed the prime ministership, Abadi had asked Jibouri who was then living and working in Northern Virginia and was on a path to U.S. citizenship, to return to fight the terrorists who had taken Fallujah and Mosul and were threatening the capital city. Abadi told me that Jibouri, as we had done in Tal Afar over a decade earlier, was helping to reconcile communities that had been torn apart. Abadi related the sad story that, when ISIS terrorists learned that Jibouri had returned to northern Iraq, they rounded up members of his extended family and his tribe, tortured them, and murdered them. Just a few months earlier, ISIS put six of Jibouri’s family members in a metal cage, chained them to its bottom bars, and submerged them in a pool until they drowned.
Our conversation then turned to the regional dynamics that were perpetuating conflict. Having witnessed the failures of Arab nationalism and Islamism, Abadi believed that only representative governments that were regarded as legitimate by the population could allow the people to escape the suffering associated with the cycle of violence. The sectarian civil war would not end unless there was accommodation among religious, ethnic, and tribal communities, yet outsiders were continuing to pour fuel on the flames of communal conflict. Away from the rest of Abadi’s party, Abadi and I discussed Iranian infiltration of the Iraqi government and especially of the formidable militias, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), or Al-Hashd al-Shaabi, formed by and under the control of Iranian agents. The Iranians had pressured Abadi to appoint a titular commander of the PMF, and Muhandis as the more powerful deputy commander. Muhandis was also commander of the Iranian-supported anti-American terrorist organization Kata’ib Hezbollah. Members of the PMF have additionally attacked local diplomatic and energy targets, carried out drone attacks in Saudi Arabia, and provoked Israeli air strikes through efforts to assist Iranian missile proliferation.19 Abadi knew that it would be very difficult for the United States to have a positive long-term relationship with Iraq under the conditions of Iranian state capture. It was clear to me that the United States and our partners in the region had to do more to strengthen Iraq’s sovereignty and counter the Iranian efforts.
Abadi described how the Syrian Civil War was the epicenter of the sectarian violence afflicting the region. He highlighted the Assad regime’s long history of sponsoring Sunni and Shia terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Kurdish terrorist organization the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Assad regime created a pipeline of foreign fighters to AQI to fight U.S. forces. I added that in Syria, Assad acted as an agent of Iran, stoking the flames of a broader civil war in the region designed to keep Iraq and the Arab world weak and divided.20
Abadi discussed how Assad, with the help of Iran and Russia, used radical Salafi jihadists to portray all opposition groups as terrorists aiming to create an Islamic caliphate in Syria. Assad released thousands of hard-line Islamists from Syria’s jails in early 2011 who would later become major leaders in AQI and ISIS. I responded that, tragically, Assad’s strategy seemed to have worked. As my friend the late Professor Fouad Ajami had observed as the war intensified, Assad was able to convince the Obama administration that his, Assad’s, tyranny was preferable to the opposition.21
We discussed the unresolved legacy of the so-called Arab Spring and how the Syrian insurgency began in March 2011, after antigovernment protests spread from Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya into Syria. The Assad regime’s arrest and brutalization of teenage demonstrators sparked riots across the country nine days later, the most violent of which occurred in Homs. And thus began an escalating cycle of growing opposition and brutal repression.22
We discussed how what we did together in Tal Afar, Iraq, was relevant to the problem set across the greater Middle East. While the United States was not going to deploy armored cavalry regiments across Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, Abadi stressed how the overall strategy must aim to help break the cycle of violence through diplomacy as well as military and intelligence support for local partners.
Jibouri and Abadi were threats both to Al-Qaeda and Iran because they were effective mediators, true humanists whose empathy allowed them to broker accommodation among parties in conflict. But the two men could go only so far without jeopardizing their lives and the lives of their families. The United States uses diplomacy and economic incentives to exert influence; Iran uses these tools as well as assassination.
UPON HIS arrival in Baghdad in April 2003, Abadi and his mother went immediately to the prison, where they hoped to find his long-lost brothers. After racing past the prisoners pouring out of the gates, he rifled through abandoned file cabinets in the office. There he found a document revealing that his brothers had been executed soon after their arrest three decades earlier. Across those decades, Abadi’s mother had borne witness to three wars. The first, Iraq’s war with Iran, killed an estimated six hundred thousand Iraqis.23 Saddam killed over a quarter of a million more of his own people, including Abadi’s brothers, in a country of twenty-two million. The second war began in 1990, instigated by Saddam’s belief that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states owed him a debt of gratitude—and cash to pay off his war debt. It was anger over their ungratefulness that led to the Iraqi invasion and annexation of Kuwait in August of that year. After the George H. W. Bush administration gathered a coalition of thirty-five nations and marshaled a force of 750,000 in Saudi Arabia, a thirty-seven-day-long bombing campaign and a one-hundred-hour ground war defeated Saddam’s army and evicted it from Kuwait in February 1991. The third war, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, ended Saddam’s brutal rule, but would not bring peace to Iraq’s traumatized society.
Abadi and I disagreed about what should have happened after the 1991 Gulf War. Abadi welcomed the liberation of Kuwait, but he wanted the United States to unseat Saddam so that he and fellow Iraqis could replace the brutal dictatorship with the virtuous Islamist government they envisioned. The vast majority of the 1.5 million Iraqi exiles at the time of the Gulf War, 500,000 of whom were in Iran, viewed the Gulf War as an opportunity for revenge against a weakened Saddam and his Baath Party. Ideological divisions, however, weakened the exile opposition and the opposition inside Iraq. I witnessed those divisions firsthand in the wake of the Gulf War, and would confront them again during my service in Iraq across five years from 2003 to 2008.
Unlike Abadi, I did not believe that the United States should have unseated Saddam in 1991. After our cavalry troop’s experience in An Nasiriyah at the end of the Gulf War, I wrote an editorial arguing that “although any alternative to Hussein would be an improvement, replacing him ourselves would have been problematic.” I cited the divisions among Iraq’s competing ethnic, sectarian, and tribal groups. In a post-Saddam Iraq, “justice and a responsible national leadership would remain elusive if not unobtainable,” and “we would assume at least partial responsibility for establishing a new government under these conditions.” In so doing, we would certainly encounter armed opposition, and “a new government would have to face the constant attack” from die-hard Baathists and Islamists who would attempt to cast our motives as “‘Zionist’ and ‘neo-imperialist.’” I concluded that removing Saddam would result in “a post-Hussein commitment of tremendous proportion for a project of indeterminable time” with “no guarantee of success.”24
In the wake of Operation Desert Storm, President George H. W. Bush encouraged a Shia uprising to topple Saddam, but then withdrew U.S. forces out of southern Iraq. Saddam’s Mukhabarat and Special Republican Guard swiftly inflicted large numbers of casualties on the Shia and weakened the opposition. Abadi called the 1991 experience in southern Iraq a “Bay of Pigs Moment,” referring to the failed CIA-supported invasion of Cuba thirty years earlier. Moreover, the subsequent sanctions placed on Iraq actually strengthened the Baath as they took control of smuggling networks to circumvent those sanctions. Sanctions made more Iraqis dependent on Saddam’s patronage as the Baath reduced social services to communities deemed disloyal. Caught in the midst of a rebellion and the brutal repression of it, Abadi’s father fled in 1994 to the United Kingdom, where he died of heart failure less than two years later. Abadi’s mother, originally from Lebanon, remained in Baghdad. She would live to see what must have been unimaginable after watching Saddam’s thugs drag three of her sons to prison in the 1980s: another one of her sons, Haider, sworn in as prime minister of Iraq in 2014. When I first met Abadi in Baghdad, neither one of us expected that we would work together in Iraq over the next several years in the midst of an insurgency and civil war, let alone meet again in the White House nearly fourteen years later.
Abadi shared my surprise over the lack of preparation for the ambitious endeavor to remake Iraq. In the years following the 2003 invasion, as the cost and difficulty of stabilizing Iraq became apparent, Americans would debate endlessly whether the United States and United Kingdom’s invasion was misguided. Much of that debate centered on whether Saddam actually possessed weapons of mass destruction, the primary casus belli that the United States presented to the United Nations. But as the war morphed into an insurgency, a civil war, and a sustained counterterrorism campaign, I thought that a more useful question to debate might be, who thought “regime change” in Iraq would be easy, and why did they think so?
ON THE day I first met Abadi, I was serving as General Abizaid’s executive officer. When Abizaid assumed command of Central Command (CENTCOM) two months later, I would become the director of the Commander’s Advisory Group, a small team charged with helping the commander understand better the complex challenges in the Middle East and how U.S. military forces in the region could best contribute to U.S. policy goals.
I carried with me a dozen copies of a study that Col. Conrad Crane and Professor Andy Terrill had recently completed at the U.S. Army War College. The report warned that “the primary problem at the core of American deficiencies in post-conflict . . . is a national aversion to nation-building, which was strengthened by failure in Vietnam.”25 The study listed tasks that, after the invasion of Iraq, the military would have to perform initially and then hand over to civilian authorities or to a new Iraqi government and security forces. It was clear from the moment I arrived in Baghdad that the U. S. military and the hastily assembled civilian Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) were woefully unprepared for these tasks. Failure to consider what was required to turn military gains into ambitious political objectives led to many of the difficulties encountered after the invasion of both Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.26 A post-Vietnam emotional aversion to long-term military commitments combined with faith in America’s technological military prowess had overwhelmed historical experience, suggesting that the consolidation of military gains was an optional, not an essential, part of war. But those lessons of history that I carried with me lay inert in that unread study as those unprepared for the stabilization of Iraq reacted reluctantly, slowly, and often too late to circumstances much different from those they imagined in that complex, traumatized country.
Some seemed unaware of how ambitious their goals were: Operation Iraqi Freedom was to free the Iraqi people of a brutal regime, ensure that a hostile dictator did not possess weapons of mass destruction, and create a democratic government in the Middle East that would serve as an antidote to extremism. Leaders optimistically pursued those objectives despite the lack of broad international support for preventive military action. Warnings that a state-building effort in Iraq would be difficult, costly, and long-term were ignored. Optimists listened to the wrong people—many of whom were Iraqi expatriates with agendas of their own.
AS IN Afghanistan, the neglect of the very nature of war made an already challenging mission more difficult. Strategic narcissism is what conjured up the pipe dream of an easy win in Iraq. It did not imagine war as an extension of politics and a profoundly human endeavor in which the future course of events is uncertain. Although the Coalition and the Interim Governing Council adopted a United Nations–sponsored time line for the political transition of Iraq, the politics of the ballot were unfamiliar to those who had only experienced the politics of the gun. The Coalition vanquished Saddam’s government, but a clandestine Baathist network and a well-funded external Baathist organization survived the invasion. What began as decentralized, hybrid, localized resistance against occupation coalesced over time into a highly organized insurgency. Disparate Sunni insurgent groups drew on the intelligence infrastructure that Saddam had designed to subjugate his own people. Agents of the former regime benefited from external support from Gulf states as well as relationships with Islamist groups. Foreign fighters and suicide bombers flowed across Iraq’s unguarded borders.27 The U.S. mission was far from accomplished.
U.S. leaders did not consider the degree to which Iraq’s people were traumatized or Iraq’s social fabric torn by the brutality of the Saddam regime and costly wars. The country’s youth were vulnerable to recruitment into terrorist organizations due to poor education and Saddam’s “Return to the Faith” initiative, designed to direct public anger toward Israel, the United States, and a grand “Zionist-Crusader Conspiracy” to keep Iraq, the Arab world, and Islam down. The middle class had eroded under the pressure of UN sanctions as the regime used corruption and patronage to stay in power. In the wake of the Coalition invasion, the institutions of Saddam’s government fell apart. As looters tore down the remnants of the Iraqi state, criminals and a developing insurgency moved into the vacuum. Removing Saddam without a plan to secure the country unleashed the centripetal forces of sectarian violence that grew out of the failure of Arab nationalism, the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, and the brutality of Baath Party dictatorships.
Sunni Arabs feared Shia Arab and Kurdish encroachment and extrajudicial retribution. Those fears grew due to the composition of the mainly Shia and expatriate Interim Governing Council; severe “de-Baathification” that disenfranchised former military officers, government officials, and even schoolteachers; and the potential for retribution from vengeful Kurdish and Shia militias. Some feared the new government would simply divide the country’s oil reserves and richest agricultural lands between Kurds and Shia and leave a destitute Sunni population in an impoverished rump state. Many Sunni Arabs concluded that they could protect their interests only through violence; the insurgency strengthened.
Sometimes it seemed to me that those in Washington and the newly formed Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad were deliberately making the ambitious mission as hard as they could. In addition to severe de-Baathification, decisions not to recall at least a portion of the Iraqi Army, limits on the numbers of U.S. troops similar to those imposed in Afghanistan, delayed justice for the Baath party’s worst criminals, and the composition of an Interim Governing Council that Iraqis regarded as inept and corrupt fueled discontent and prevented an effective response to a growing insurgency.
As in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led Coalition was too slow to adapt to the evolution of the enemy and its strategy. For the first year of the conflict, insurgents directed violence primarily at Coalition forces, nascent security institutions, and political leaders. Initial attacks were not very effective, but the insurgents learned to employ deadly roadside bombs and car bombs. In the summer of 2003, insurgents also destroyed infrastructure to frustrate progress and foster popular discontent. Terrorism was central to the strategy; civilian-targeted attacks aimed to undermine international support for the Coalition effort, such as the August 2003 bombing of the Jordanian embassy and UN headquarters.
As in previous wars, there was insufficient civilian capacity to stabilize the country. Establishing rule of law, providing basic services, and building local governance fell into the military’s purview. Military units had not been trained for those tasks or for counterinsurgency operations; many were overcome by the unanticipated scope of responsibility. A few overreacted to the growing violence and generated more enmity through heavy-handed tactics and breaches in discipline. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal and other instances of Coalition abuses reinforced insurgent propaganda that Coalition forces were twenty-first-century “Crusaders” or “Mongols” who intended to subjugate or destroy the country. Over time, the growing Baathist resistance subsumed nationalist and tribal recruits and forged an alliance with Islamists affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Iraq. By 2004, the conflict was morphing into a sectarian civil war.
I witnessed the evolution of the conflict firsthand as I traveled across Iraq multiple times during the first year of the war. In February 2004, the Commander’s Advisory Group I led prepared a memo for General Abizaid that began with the observation that “the specter of civil war is haunting Iraq.” A month later, the leader of AQI, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, proposed “the Afghan model” for Iraq. Just as the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate arose from the Afghan Civil War, Zarqawi’s emirate would rise from the chaos in Iraq. Zarqawi would jump-start civil war with mass murder attacks on Iraq’s Shia communities, inviting retribution. He would then use retribution attacks on Sunnis to portray AQI as the protector from Shia militias and Shia-dominated security forces. Ultimately, the Islamic Republic of Iraq would become a “jihadist state” for Al-Qaeda to use as a launching pad for attacks against the “near enemies” of Israel and the Arab monarchies as well as the “far enemies” of Europe and the United States.28 To gain strength, nascent insurgencies require time and space when security forces either are not aware of them or are unable to quash them. Tragically, our strategic narcissism—which resulted in lack of preparation, an inability to consolidate military gains politically, and poor adaptation to an evolving conflict—gave the insurgency in Iraq such a respite.
A YEAR later, in February 2005, I returned to Iraq in command of the “Brave Rifles,” the U.S. Army’s Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. I visited Abadi in Baghdad as our regiment received a new mission to conduct counterinsurgency operations and develop Iraqi Security Forces in Nineveh Province across a 22,000-square-kilometer area that included a 220-kilometer-long border with Syria. In and around the city of Tal Afar, our troopers would experience in microcosm the problems that dominated the next and most destructive phase of the war. Abadi had friends among the Shia Turkmen tribes in Nineveh. He described the situation as consistent with Zarqawi’s “Afghan Model,” explaining how Al-Qaeda took advantage of sectarian, tribal, and ethnic divisions to foment violence. The terrorists used the ensuing chaos to gain control of territory, populations, and resources. That is how the city of 250,000 people astride an ancient route that Alexander the Great used on his conquest of Persia quickly became the main training ground and support base for Zarqawi and AQI.
When our regiment arrived in Nineveh, our troopers alongside Iraqi Army soldiers isolated AQI from sources of support in the region, interdicted the flow of foreign fighters and supplies from Syria, and eliminated support areas in the surrounding countryside. We strove to counter enemy propaganda and clarify our intentions with our deeds by pursuing the enemy relentlessly while protecting civilians. It was also important to expose the terrorists’ inhumanity, criminality, and hypocrisy. Our regiment, alongside the Iraqi Army’s Third Division and U.S. and Iraqi special operations forces, arrested the cycle of sectarian violence by moving into the city and protecting the population. Once the pall of fear over the city had been lifted, our soldiers gained access to intelligence. Locals were able to cooperate with U.S. and Iraqi forces. Terrorists could no longer hide in plain sight as our forces tracked them down in Tal Afar and the surrounding areas. In late 2005, after the enemy was defeated, mediation between Tal Afar’s communities restored trust among them. Those returning to the city had renewed confidence in reformed local government and police forces. Schools and markets reopened. Abadi and Najim al-Jibouri, who had become mayor of Tal Afar, helped forge the accommodations between the Sunni and Shia communities essential to sustaining security. The sectarian civil war centered on Tal Afar in 2004–2005 was a harbinger for what was to come across the entire country from 2006 to 2008 and the cycle of sectarian violence that would again afflict the region after 2011.
PRE-INVASION WILLFUL ignorance about the complexity of stabilizing Iraq evolved into post-invasion denial about the growing insurgency and, later, into the refusal to acknowledge the evolution of the conflict into a sectarian civil war. Strategic narcissism produced the same depressing behaviors. Some leaders based strategies on what they preferred to do rather than what the situation demanded. The short-war mentality persisted; some generals and admirals seemed more interested in getting back to peacetime priorities than winning the war. By 2005, commanders had shifted the strategy in Iraq to one of “transition” to Iraqi forces as an end in and of itself. It was a rush to failure, as it vastly overestimated the Iraqi government’s and security forces’ ability to assume full responsibility. The drive to transition even as the security situation worsened was based in part on the rationalization that more Coalition troops were actually part of the problem rather than part of the solution; more troops would incite additional natural opposition to a Western occupying force, the thinking went. Yet, AQI would use the occupation as a recruiting tool as long as there was even one Coalition squad in Iraq; the numbers did not matter. Despite the country’s clear drift toward civil war and the example in Tal Afar of what approach was necessary to forestall that drift, strategic narcissism persisted.
In February of 2006, AQI bombed the al-Askari, or “Golden,” mosque in Samarra, one of Shiism’s holiest sites. Until that bombing, the presence of Coalition forces and Shia restraint acted as brakes on the downward slide toward civil war. Afterward, Shia militia attacks on Sunnis mounted. Death squad killings became nightly occurrences. Sunni militias sprouted and affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Mixed neighborhoods underwent ethnic cleansing as one group or the other moved out or was forced to leave. More than 1,300 Iraqis died in sectarian killings in March alone. By mid-summer, the death toll was over 100 per day. U.S. and government forces could not control the violence even after the killing of AQI leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June. By the end of 2006, the chaos of civil war had strengthened the influence of Iranian-sponsored Shia militias and accelerated the cycle of violence. The Iraqi government not only lacked the capacity to help pull the country back together; it had become a sectarian battleground itself and lacked the will to do what was necessary to stabilize the situation.
It was during this period that Rayburn coined the term “My-raq,” to describe the tendency of U.S. civilian and military officials to describe the situation in “I-raq” as they would like it to be. It was a funny play on words, but strategic narcissism is dangerous and costly in wartime. The transition strategy continued to brief well on PowerPoint; bulletization of the situation in My-raq masked the reality that the strategy was failing. Metrics measured the successful execution of a flawed strategy. Ultimately, the Iraq strategy was wrested from the Department of Defense as the disconnect between Pentagon briefings and the actual situation in Iraq was undeniable. By the fall of 2006, several reassessment efforts were under way in Washington.
I was part of one of those assessments, one that became known as the “council of colonels.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Peter Pace assembled a team of us to help the Joint Chiefs prepare recommendations to the broader White House assessment run by Deputy National Security Advisor J. D. Crouch. General Pace, a gentleman of great integrity, was unable to shake his and the JCS’s tendency to base recommendations on their preferences rather than what the situation in Iraq demanded. Our deliberations revealed that the JCS and the secretary of defense suffered from cognitive dissonance in not grasping that the transition strategy was utterly inconsistent with the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
On Veterans Day weekend, my colleagues asked me to write the memo for the chairman’s recommendation to the National Security Council staff. I tried to expose for the chairman and others the disconnect between the nature of the problem in Iraq and the recommendation to continue with the same strategy. The memo made what had previously been implicit assumptions explicit.29 They included:
I concluded the memo with the observation that the principal advantage of the recommended strategy was that it did not require any additional U.S. troops or resources. When General Pace’s executive officer, Mike Rogers, who would later become commander of Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, came into the Pentagon to read the draft, the always calm navy captain was exasperated with me. He wanted me to redraft the memo, but I argued that there was not anything in the memo that was untrue or did not reflect the chiefs’ discussions. I asked him to forward it to the chairman as drafted. I would take full responsibility and, of course, make any edits or changes that General Pace directed. General Pace, an officer committed to giving his best military advice, forwarded the memo to the White House as it was drafted.
Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney was developing his own reassessment to provide an alternative perspective to the government process. The American Enterprise Institute, a think tank, conducted a war game and planning session under the direction of Drs. Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, good friends of mine, fellow historians, and particularly astute critics of Iraq War strategy. I would not participate with the Kagans’ project, but what our regiment learned from the experience in Tal Afar informed their effort. Two recently retired officers, our cavalry regiment’s deputy commander, Col. Joel Armstrong, and plans officer, Maj. Dan Dwyer, structured a war game and developed a “surge” option to adapt the Iraq strategy to the evolving nature of the war. Soon after I drafted the memo for General Pace, Vice President Cheney invited me to his home. In response to his questions, I described how our strategy in Iraq had been, from the very beginning, disconnected from the character of the conflict there. During a second meeting, I brought with me a handwritten list of the “Top Ten Reasons We Do Not Deserve to Win the War in Iraq,” to highlight the effect of strategic narcissism on the war.
As I got home to London for Christmas, where I was working at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, President George W. Bush directed a dramatic shift in the strategy for the war in Iraq. I returned to Iraq less than two months later. Along with Ambassador David Pearce and a talented interdisciplinary and multinational team, we helped draft the strategy for the new commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and the new U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker. Prior to the invasion in 2003, Pearce, an exceptionally talented and experienced diplomat, had produced a largely ignored study of Iraq that predicted many of the difficulties we would encounter after Saddam’s removal. Pearce knew a civil war when he saw one. Before joining the State Department, he had been the chief Middle East correspondent for United Press International during the Lebanese Civil War. Pearce and I agreed that we needed a political strategy to address the causes of the violence and ensure that all activities, programs, and operations in Iraq, as well as diplomatic efforts in the region and beyond, were directed at addressing those causes.
I HAD last seen parliamentarian Haider al-Abadi in Tal Afar in early 2006. As we in the Joint Strategic Assessment Team, or J-SAT, started our work in March 2007, I borrowed Petraeus’s plane and took Abadi back to Tal Afar. Rayburn, by now my trusty sidekick on these projects, joined us. The city was flourishing. Despite Al-Qaeda’s best efforts to restart the cycle of sectarian violence, the peace held. Residents in Tal Afar did not want the horror to return. Mayor Jibouri was a superb leader and mediator who kept communications open between the communities and insisted on professional police forces. A small U.S. force, less than one battalion, remained to continue advising and assisting Iraqi security forces. Iraqi soldiers and policemen had good relations with each other and with the population. We walked through neighborhoods that had, two years earlier, been battlegrounds. But this time, we wore no helmets and no body armor. Marketplaces were thriving. Schools were full of happy children. Mothers watched their children play together in the city’s parks and playgrounds. The people greeted us and thanked us. Tal Afar, once wracked by horrible violence, now seemed a sanctuary from the death and destruction across mixed sectarian areas of Baghdad and the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys.
Tal Afar was a model for what was needed across Iraq: political accommodation between communities. To foster this accommodation, the United States needed more than reinforcements—it needed a fundamental change in strategy. That strategy would aim to extend a Sunni tribal “awakening” against AQI, defeat that terrorist organization, and nurture local cease-fires. Isolating not only AQI but also Shia militias from popular support required convincing communities that they could protect their families and their interests through a political process rather than through violence.
But it is difficult for political processes to take hold when factions are shooting at one another. The military headquarters in Iraq, III Corps, under Gen. Raymond Odierno, was already directing its forces to physically break the cycle of violence, establish security, and help broker local cease-fires as a first step toward “bottom-up” reconciliation efforts. Special operations forces under Lt. Gen. Stanley McCrystal were focusing on irreconcilable factions within AQI and Shia Islamist militias. The idea was that reconcilable factions, witnessing the fate of those targeted, would be incentivized to join the political process. The utter brutality of AQI helped. Rather than patrons and protectors, Zarqawi and those who flocked to Iraq to fight with him were beginning to be seen by the Sunni population as a foreign pathogen that needed to be excised.30 All programs, from development assistance to development of security forces, were aimed at reducing malign sectarian and foreign (i.e., Iranian) influence. It worked. In the year following the complete deployment of surge forces, violence in Iraq fell to the lowest levels since 2004.31
Abadi, Rayburn, and I returned to Tal Afar again in early 2008. Abadi believed that the surge had pulled Iraq away from the precipice of utter mayhem. As we walked through a peaceful Tal Afar, we recognized that the success of the surge was fragile and reversible. What was needed to ensure that Iraq remained stable and was not aligned with Iran was long-term military, diplomatic, and economic engagement. Unfortunately, this was not to be.
AT A crucial moment in 2009–2010, the new administration would drive U.S. policy based on a new version of strategic narcissism, one based in pessimism and resignation to any outcome in Iraq as long as the United States disengaged. Candidate Barack Obama campaigned on a sixteen-month time line for withdrawal from the country. When the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, endorsed that time line and Obama won the election, the momentum behind complete disengagement proved irresistible. Whereas the Bush administration’s overconfidence led to underappreciation for the risks and costs of intervention, the Obama administration’s pessimism led to underappreciation for the risks and costs of extrication. Whereas the Bush administration’s strategy betrayed the conceit that U.S. decisions in war would produce the desired outcome, the Obama administration saw U.S. presence in Iraq as the principal cause of problems. Both approaches lacked strategic empathy because they failed to consider the agency that others, especially enemies and adversaries, had on the future course of events. In December 2011, President Obama declared, “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government.”32 Like the announcement of the withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan even as additional troops deployed there in 2009, the Obama administration equated American withdrawal to the equivalent of the end of the war. Vice President Biden called President Obama from Baghdad to say “thank you for giving me the chance to end this goddamn war.”33 Key officials in the Obama administration saw American disengagement from not only Iraq, but also the Middle East, as an unmitigated good.
Sadly, U.S. diplomatic and military disengagement from Iraq removed checks on the worst inclinations of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government and cleared the way for the return of large-scale sectarian violence, the extension of Iranian influence over the Iraqi government and Shia population, and the growth of a new version of Al-Qaeda in Iraq—ISIS, the most potent jihadist terrorist organization in history.
As it disengaged, America failed to contest the Iranian-led effort to hand the 2010 Iraqi national election to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, even though a secular Shia with broad appeal among the Sunni community, Ayad Allawi, had won the popular vote. Maliki seemed to do all he could to restart the civil war. His government purged Sunnis from the army and key governmental positions and reneged on the promise to keep Sunni tribal militias on the payroll, instead dismissing them and providing Al-Qaeda with well-trained recruits who were convinced that the political process was hostile to their interests. After his reelection, Maliki arrested the Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, on terrorism charges based on coerced testimonies, and in 2012, Hashemi was sentenced to death in absentia. Even as he alienated Sunni Arabs and Turkmen, he released large numbers of prisoners who, upon return to their home villages and cities, elicited a hostile response from those who feared the return of Al-Qaeda. The alienation of Iraq’s Sunni population, Iran’s subversion of the Iraqi state, and the effects of the Syrian Civil War propelled the rise of ISIS and the collapse of Iraqi security forces during ISIS’s June 2014 offensive.34
Anyone paying attention should have seen ISIS, or AQI 2.0, coming miles (and years) away. For those of us who knew Iraq, the ISIS train wreck had already happened, but the world had not yet heard the sound. In 2011, I was in Afghanistan when the situation in Iraq was unraveling. After receiving calls and emails from concerned Iraqi friends who saw the accommodation between Sunni and Shia populations crumbling, I read a report predicting exactly what would happen in the coming months and years. The continued sectarian policies of the Maliki government, combined with the release of Al-Qaeda prisoners, would result in the Sunni communities again concluding that they could protect their interests only through violence. A new version of Al-Qaeda would again portray itself as a protector of those communities and replicate the Al-Qaeda offensive of 2004 to 2006. The report predicted that this renewed offensive would collapse Iraqi security forces already hollowed out by sectarian purges.
From my office in Kabul, I forwarded the paper to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, at the Pentagon. Dempsey, who understood Iraq and regional dynamics in the Middle East well, found the paper compelling and circulated it across the JCS staff and Department of Defense. Senior intelligence officials gave it a tepid response. Its predictions did not conform to U.S. leaders’ self-delusion that AQI had been defeated and that Iraqi forces were resilient. Some in the U.S. military were unwilling to believe that after over a decade of training, Iraqi security forces would collapse. Strategic narcissism turns fantasy into perceived reality even if a preponderance of evidence is presented to the contrary. Less than thirty months after the December 2011 “end of mission” ceremony for the U.S. command in Baghdad, Mosul fell and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had in December 2004 been released from Camp Bucca prison in Iraq, climbed the stairs of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, in Mosul, to declare the formation of a new caliphate.35
TWO THOUSAND eleven was a pivotal year not only in Iraq, but also across the Middle East. Eight years after the invasion of Iraq, the United States withdrew its forces from that country and declared its intention to leave the troubled region behind. The so-called Arab Spring began in Tunisia in late 2010, when a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi publicly self-immolated to protest socioeconomic injustice and autocracy in his country. Bouazizi’s act inspired a series of antigovernment protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions across the Arab-majority regions of the Middle East. The protests highlighted the severe power imbalance between heads of state in populations such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria—eventually leading to the resignation of the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents, a full-scale insurgency that toppled Muammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya, and a civil war that nearly felled the Assad regime in Syria. It was in response to the Arab Spring that the Obama administration, as it disengaged from the Iraq War in a final repudiation of George W. Bush’s invasion in 2003, intervened in Libya in a way that replicated the fundamental folly of Iraq: the use of military force without a plan to influence what happened next. The protests in Tunisia toppled President Zayn al-Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled Tunisia since 1987. The political awakening spread via Twitter and Facebook across Tunisia and then moved east to Egypt, home to eighty-six million, the largest Arabic-speaking population in the world.
Egypt had been run by Hosni Mubarak, a powerful president who assumed office in 1981, and who maintained power through rigged elections and imprisonment of political adversaries. Stirred by Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia, on January 25, 2011, Egyptians took to the streets to protest the oppressive security regime that denied them freedom of speech and assembly. On February 1, Mubarak conceded to the protest movement. Appearing on national television, he announced that he would step down when his six-year term ended in late 2011. It was not enough to satisfy the protesters, who refused to disband until he resigned. Mubarak did so on February 11, 2011. In eighteen days, the wave of demonstrations rocking the Middle East had forced the resignation of the most powerful leader in the Arab world.
On February 15, the protest movement poured over Egypt’s western border into Libya, an Alaska-size nation of six million inhabitants. Since taking power in 1969, Gaddafi had maintained power in Libya via an iron fist, control of revenue, and an extensive patronage network. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, where presidents were toppled with a relatively minor death toll, Libya descended into a full-blown civil war.
After the fall of Ben Ali, the resignation of Mubarak, and Arab Spring-inspired uprisings throughout the Middle East, Arab strongmen in palaces, such as Gaddafi, suddenly appeared seated within houses of cards. Arab monarchies such as those in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates grew nervous while many in the United States and the West saw the Arab Spring as an inevitable burst of freedom from long-suppressed peoples. The relatively new medium of social media was credited with catalyzing the protests and changes in government and extolled for enabling a wave of freedom across the Middle East.
ON MARCH 17, 2011, the Obama administration succeeded in getting the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1973, authorizing military intervention in Libya with the goal of saving the lives of pro-democracy protesters from the forces of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. Besides, Gaddafi was endangering the momentum of the nascent Arab Spring. Like the initial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the NATO-led air campaign was at first declared a tremendous success.
With the help of NATO airpower, the Libyan rebels over the course of several months were eventually able to depose Gaddafi, who was forced out of a hiding place on October 20, 2011. While his convoy raced across a potholed Libyan highway, American fighter jets zoomed in overhead. American aircraft fired air-to-surface missiles that disabled the convoy. As the shock of the explosion wore off, Gaddafi’s entourage departed their vehicles. Gaddafi’s son hurried him through the desert to the shelter of a nearby drainage pipe underneath a road. Rebels soon pulled Gaddafi from the ditch and tore off his shirt. Two rebels held him upright while another plunged a sharp metal rod through his pants and into his anus. A fourth man videotaped the sodomy while onlookers jeered the violence. Finally, the seventy-year-old dictator, bloodied, bruised, and disoriented, was led to a waiting ambulance. Accounts vary as to what happened next, but Gaddafi did not depart the vehicle alive.36
The day after Gaddafi’s death, President Obama addressed the world regarding U.S. operations in the Middle East. The president was not committing additional ground forces to the region. Rather, turning to Iraq, he declared that “the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.” The president elaborated: “Over the next two months, our troops in Iraq, tens of thousands of them, will pack up their gear and board convoys for the journey home. The last American soldier[s] will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support of our troops. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”37
Due to the success of the Libyan aerial campaign, American denial syndrome returned. The purported lesson was not to repeat the mistake of Iraq and put “boots on the ground” in Libya. But without any effort to establish security in post-Gaddafi Libya, NATO actually repeated the mistakes of Afghanistan and Iraq in the extreme, again neglecting the very nature of war as an extension of politics and as driven by human emotion. Chaos and a smoldering tribal conflict ensued. Islamist groups and terrorist organizations thrived in the lawless environment. Eleven months after Gaddafi’s death, a branch of Al-Qaeda commemorated the anniversary of that organization’s 9/11 mass murder attacks on the United States eleven years earlier with an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The well-respected Middle East expert and newly appointed ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was visiting from the capital, Tripoli. Terrorists attacked the consulate and another compound. Security was inadequate, in part due to the desire to keep a light footprint in the country. Ambassador Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith were killed at the consulate. CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty died at a government annex about one mile away. Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. Libya became both a source and a waystation for refugees desperately seeking the safety of Europe’s shores. Meanwhile, the Syrian Civil War was exploding into a cacophony of violence and, in Egypt, Mohamed Morsi was consolidating power to replace Hosni Mubarak’s nationalist dictatorship with a Muslim Brotherhood Islamist dictatorship. Seasons change. In the Middle East, spring was over.
DURING THE Cold War, Iran and Saudi Arabia served as the “twin pillars” of the U.S. effort to contain Soviet influence in the Middle East. The Iranian pillar collapsed during the 1979 revolution, and the Saudi pillar proved to be structurally flawed based on Saudi Arabia’s production and export of a virulent strain of Islam. The countries that had been seen as sources of stability created conditions for a sectarian civil war that would wrack the region for decades. Abadi and other leaders across the Middle East tried to bring communities together, but the legacy of the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, brutal dictatorships, and the emergence of a destructive perversion of Sunni Islam overwhelmed their efforts.
As frustrating as the American experience in the Middle East was after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, disengagement from the region made a bad situation worse. The United States and other nations are not going to solve the region’s problems, but outsiders can support those, like Abadi and Jibouri, who are determined, despite the daunting tasks before them, to create a future for the region that allows it to emerge from the serial failures of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If the free and open societies of the world turn their backs on the people of the region, they will not be immune to the problems that emanate from it.