Ned Parker is a freelance journalist, a former fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Baghdad bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2009 to 2011.

Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero did three tours of duty in Iraq. The first time in 2003 in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown. Then during the U.S. troop surge as a key aide to Gen. David Petraeus and again from 2009 to 2011, overseeing the training of Iraqi security forces.

In November, he was in Baghdad as a business consultant. He sat face to face with a former Iraqi official in a heavily guarded palatial office. Their conversation was emblematic of all that has gone wrong in the relationship between the United States and Iraq since 2011.


“This … started out as a successful joint venture but you left too quickly and created a vacuum,” the former official told Barbero as the men sipped tea. The ex-official, a Shiite who has held important posts in the Iraqi government, took the retired general to task for America’s close relationship with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, whose critics consider him a budding authoritarian ruler, and warned: “It’s not only al Qaeda but also government measures that threaten democracy and democratic institutions.”

Barely two months after Barbero’s visit, and two years after the last U.S. troops departed Iraq in December 2011, ending an eight-year presence, Iraq is in flames. Al Qaeda has seized territory in western Anbar province; Maliki’s forces are fighting alongside some Sunni tribesmen against al Qaeda; while other Sunni tribes are in a full-scale revolt against both al Qaeda and Maliki’s forces, whom they see as oppressive as the Sunni radicals they detest.

It begs the question that many are now asking back in Washington: What went wrong? Did America lose Iraq? What happened to the country that President Barack Obama and his aides have described again and again over the last two years as stable, prosperous and democratic?

The president’s critics have one theory: “Obama did not want to stay in Iraq, and that’s what it was all about,” as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) put it this week. “If we’d had a residual force of 10- to 12,000 [troops], I am totally convinced there would not have been a rise of al Qaeda,” according to McCain’s fellow hawk, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.).

The White House has another message: We did all we could, but the Iraqis didn’t want an agreement. Besides, no one could have predicted Syria’s deleterious effect on Iraq.

So who’s right? Was the new violence in Iraq indeed the White House’s fault for not securing a troop agreement? Did Obama, who ran for president promising to end the war, ever really intend to sign a deal? And could the United States have done more to help stabilize Iraq once its soldiers left?

What happened is far more complicated than the critics contend. It’s the story of an administration that struggled to define its relationship with Iraq as it withdrew the majority of its forces, and that was unclear about what its future military presence should look like. It is the story of an Iraqi government whose politics were poisonous, where one’s stance on the status of American troops became another weapon for rivals to bludgeon each other. And none of it fits neatly into a tight Washington narrative.

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It was the April 2010 national election and its tortured aftermath that sewed the seeds of today’s crisis in Iraq. Beforehand, U.S. state and military officials had prepared for any scenario, including the possibility that Maliki might refuse to leave office for another Shiite Islamist candidate. No one imagined that the secular Iraqiya list, backed by Sunni Arabs, would win the largest number of seats in parliament. Suddenly the Sunnis’ candidate, secular Shiite Ayad Allawi, was poised to be prime minister. But Maliki refused and dug in.

And it is here where America found its standing wounded. Anxious about midterm elections in November and worried about the status of U.S. forces slated to be drawn down to 50,000 by August, the White House decided to pick winners. According to multiple officials in Baghdad at time, Vice President Joseph Biden and then-Ambassador Chris Hill decided in July 2010 to support Maliki for prime minister, but Maliki had to bring the Sunnis and Allawi onboard. Hill and his staff then made America’s support for Maliki clear in meetings with Iraqi political figures.

The stalemate would drag on for months, and in the end both the United States and its arch-foe Iran proved would take credit for forming the government. But Washington would be damaged in the process. It would be forever linked with endorsing Maliki. One U.S. Embassy official I spoke with just months before the government was formed privately expressed regret at how the Americans had played kingmaker.

After the government was seated in December 2010, the original deal for power sharing among the parties fell through, but the man who held the Iraq portfolio for Obama was absent. Biden, who visited Baghdad several times between 2010 and January 2011 in pursuit of a deal, was gone as the government fell apart. As tensions soared between Maliki and Iraq’s Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish political rivals over the prime minister’s failure to share the security ministries and implement greater power sharing, Biden didn’t touch down in Baghdad. Denis McDonough, then at the National Security Council, and Tony Blinken, a top Biden aide at the time, came, but for Iraqi politicians, used to the red carpet treatment by President George W. Bush, the two able technocrats were viewed as a pale substitute.

It was then, in early summer 2011, that negotiations for a new troop agreement began. However, the Americans paid the price for the collapse in all but name of the national unity government. Iraqiya, the main Sunni bloc, headed by Allawi, would not support Maliki in negotiating an agreement unless Maliki made political concessions, including letting their bloc choose the defense minister. Maliki also had to contend with anti-American cleric and rival Moqtada al-Sadr, whose movement now held 40 seats in the 325-seat parliament and was committed to blocking a renewal of the agreement.

A former U.S. official who was familiar with the negotiations described them as often rudderless. “There was never any clear guidance from Washington of what they wanted,” the ex-official told me. “If there had been more time, more patience and clear principles from D.C., there could have been some kind of deal.”

The ever-changing number of U.S. troops American officials presented confused Iraqis, the ex-official said, ranging as they did from 10,000 to as little as 3,000.

The other major problem was the insistence by Maliki’s lawyers, State Department lawyers, Pentagon lawyers and the White House that any deal giving the U.S. troops immunity had to go through the Iraqi parliament to be valid. The parliament had voted on the last U.S.-Iraqi security agreement in 2008, so a precedent was in place. The ex-official insists a solution could have been found, but the Iraqis and the Obama administration didn’t fathom what the other needed.

“It was the disconnect. People [in Washington] didn’t have a real feel for what was happening on the ground. No one took it seriously,” the ex-official said. “Nobody realized what the repercussions [of not reaching a deal on troop levels] would be.”

Barbero, who had left Baghdad by January 2011, remembered an episode in the summer of 2010 when he gave his own presentation to Iraqi officials about why they still needed American military capabilities including air defense and counterterrorism. “To a man, each Shiite, Sunni and Kurd would say, ‘General you must stay.’ I would tell them, ‘You need to make it easy for us. Iraq is not a popular story in America,’” Barbero recalled. “Between Washington and Maliki, the fault lies in both places. We couldn’t do it and we left.”

At the time of the withdrawal, U.S. officials believed Iraq would manage any threats. Colin Kahl, a former senior defense official handling Mideast affairs, served his final day in office in Baghdad in December 2011 watching the last U.S. troops depart Iraq. According to Kahl, the administration believed that the Iraqi security forces could counter al Qaeda, and that the Sunni population had given up its insurgency. The administration realized there was a long-term risk that either a failure to politically accommodate the Sunnis or provocative behavior by the Iraqi security forces could revive Iraq’s Sunni armed resistance. But that was distant. What they didn’t foresee was the rise of al Qaeda in Syria and the prolonged sectarian war next door to Iraq. “No one could have anticipated the battlespace of Syria would merge with western Iraq,” Kahl said.

Through early summer 2012, when I spoke to officials inside the White House, they described the state of Iraq as “Iraqi good enough”—there could be violence and even authoritarian behavior by the government and abuses by the security forces; but as long as those excesses stayed within a certain level, it was tolerable. Iraq had always been an unstable and violent country with cruel leaders, so if its troubles didn’t spiral out of control, Iraq could muddle through.

In the meantime, the transition from a joint Pentagon-State Department venture in Iraq had been costly. Iraqi officials regularly complained that the Americans were absent. One senior government official warned me last February that the state was unraveling. The Americans had forged a consensus between the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis—and now they had walked away from the bargain, this official said.

That same month, Sheikh Asfi Wasfi Obeidi, one of the most senior Sunni tribal figures in northern Iraq, complained to me no American official had come to meet him since the U.S. troops exited Iraq. “Where are the Americans?” the sheikh asked. “They abandoned us.”

American efforts in promoting human rights in Iraq have also suffered. U.S. officials who had protected Iraq’s human rights ministry from interference by Maliki, due to the ministry’s exposure of secret jails run by the prime minister’s military aide, allowed the ministry to be handed to Maliki’s Dawa party at the end of 2010. The ministry has effectively been muzzled. Several rights inspectors who had enjoyed support from the Americans have fled the country, or, if they stayed, been harassed by the Iraqi courts. The lack of checks on Maliki’s powers and security forces has stoked the despair of Iraq’s Sunni minority, helping create an atmosphere a resurgent al Qaeda could exploit.

Intelligence sharing between the Americans and the Iraqis also stalled. Barbero had warned the Iraqis that they didn’t have the tools to analyze intelligence and develop targets for raids. The Iraqi counterterrorism forces had relied on American helicopters to carry them on missions; American intelligence analysts would collect the intelligence and put together information on suspected terrorist networks so the Iraqis could carry out the assault. Those capabilities disappeared when the Americans left. “Without the capability to analyze and understand these al Qaeda networks and without the capability to effectively attack these networks, what happened in Anbar is predictable,” Barbero said.

Whatever intelligence the Americans passed on was minimal, or was not disseminated effectively. But efforts have been made to improve intelligence sharing in the last six to eight months, according to a U.S. official.

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The challenge for the Obama administration now is how to revisit its decisions on Iraq and its close association with Maliki, who visited Washington in early November with a long wish list of military hardware, but made few promises about recalibrating his political strategy for isolating al Qaeda. Arguably, his actions have fueled its rise.

The administration has publicly praised Maliki’s stewardship and appears reluctant to revisit the relationship. U.S. officials have vowed to support Maliki in his fight against al Qaeda, but refrained from criticism of how this round of violence started when the prime minister arrested a top Sunni lawmaker and attacked a protest camp, providing an opening for al Qaeda.

As America ships Hellfire missiles and surveillance drones to Baghdad to fight al Qaeda, the danger is that U.S. officials remain blind to the complexity of the fight in Anbar. There are tribesmen aligned with Maliki fighting al Qaeda, and then there are tribesmen fighting both al Qaeda and Maliki after his attack on their protest camp. U.S. officials could end up assisting Maliki as he kills off Sunni opponents under the banner of the war on terror.

A senior administration official made clear that the Americans see the situation now, regardless of how Maliki contributed to its start, as a war with al Qaeda in Anbar. “It’s a fight between the Iraqi government and its army against al Qaeda, a terrorist group,” the official said. “It is born of a horrible conflict in Syria.”

Another U.S. official, grappling with the criticism of supplying Maliki with weapons, warned that if Washington doesn’t do it, a less savory country will. “As for leverage, [if] we hold up a [weapons] system, the Iraqis go elsewhere—no Apaches, they buy 24 Russian Mi-28s,” he said. “Do we want Iraq to have Russian air-to-ground missiles, where we have no insight into the targeting? … It’s not a zero-sum world here. I wish it were.”