Christopher R. Hill is currently the Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He previously served as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, the Republic of Korea, Poland, and the Republic of Macedonia, as well as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under President George W. Bush.

It was late April of 2009, and Hillary Clinton was coming to Iraq for her first official trip as secretary of state. Normally, visits by a secretary of state are a logistical nightmare for an embassy. As François Truffaut once said of making films: They start as an effort to create a masterpiece, and end as something you just want to get over with. But Embassy Baghdad was the visitor capital of the world. It had an entire “visits unit” staffed with former military personnel, more political and economic officers for note-taking than any embassy I had ever seen in the world, and logistical strengths in terms of a motor pool that were second to none. Managing the highly choreographed visit of a secretary of state would pose no strain on the embassy. I decided not to worry. After all, I was sure Clinton would be coming every few months.

I had arrived myself in Baghdad only hours before as America’s new ambassador, in what was to be my final posting after a three-decade-long Foreign Service career that had taken me from the front lines of the Balkans conflict and the historic Dayton peace conference to Poland and South Korea. Much of what I saw on my arrival was the the military’s effort to set up the State Department as the successor organization in charge of Iraq. But letting go is hard to do, and the military was clearly uncertain whether the State Department, much less Embassy Baghdad, was ready for the responsibility. The military and its civilian camp followers were used to running everything in Iraq. Iraqi national security meetings held on Sunday nights included U.S. military officials as well as (for civilian sensitivities) the U.S. and British ambassadors, even though the British had pulled their troops out and could not even agree with the Iraqis on a residual maritime patrolling mission. I was appalled by the idea that anyone but Iraqis should be in attendance at an Iraqi national security meeting, but was told to avoid thinking that anything in Iraq should be what is considered normal elsewhere.


I soon learned that the word normal, which I had always thought was on balance a good thing, was taken as a sign that the person did not really understand Iraq.

After she arrived, Secretary Clinton put herself through a grueling day: meetings with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and senior Iraqi officials, and women who had lost their husbands to war and violence (alas, sometimes at the hands of our forces). Also, a kind of holdover from her days on the campaign trail: the proverbial town meeting with all sorts of people—young, old, women, men, muftis, seculars in gray suits, sheiks in flowing robes and keffiyehs, women in black chadors and checkered shemaghs, just about everybody.

Finally, at the end of the long day there was a meeting with the U.S. Embassy staff in the large atrium of the half-billion-dollar embassy. Secretary Clinton, seeming to make eye contact with every person in the room, spoke eloquently and passionately, and with a sincerity that brought tears to some eyes. She said how important Iraq was to her, a top-tier issue, and how much she valued the staff at this embassy. She kindly introduced me as the ambassador she would leave behind, and said she would look forward to working with this embassy in the years ahead.

To thunderous applause, she walked the rope line—connecting, it seemed, with everyone she shook hands with or simply touched. She took photos effortlessly with people, waited patiently as employees turned amateur photographers fumbled to find the flash switch on their cell phone cameras. She finally made her exit out of the embassy to the waiting car, her nervous security detail beginning to breathe a sigh of relieve that it was all coming to an end soon. I said goodbye in the car on the edge of the helicopter landing pad, and she made clear that I should call her whenever I needed her help—and I would really need help, she said in mock seriousness.

Exhilarated and grateful, I stood on the edge of the landing zone in a line with a few other embassy personnel, all of us waving farewell to our secretary with the expectation she would be back soon.

Three months later, Vice President Joe Biden took the lead on Iraq policy and she never returned.

***

Soon after I arrived in Iraq, I was asked to produce a weekly memo for the president to update him on what was going on. This request turned into a month-long tug of war between the National Security Council staff and the State Department, because if I was to write a regular memo, surely it should be addressed to my direct boss, Secretary Clinton, first. Finally, in a decision worthy of King Solomon, it was decided that the memo would go to both the president and the secretary, but it would first make its way to the State Department, addressed “Madam Secretary,” so that the secretary could read and reflect on it, then forward it on to the president with her own cover note.

Hillary Clinton with former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during a 2009 visit. | State Department Flickr

Yet despite the ferocious fight the State Department had put up to make sure these memos did not go directly to the White House, in 15 months of writing them, I never received a single comment on them from anyone in the State Department. President Obama was the only person I ever heard from.

It was increasingly unclear just who was doing what in the first six months of the Obama administration. An embassy, especially a large player like Embassy Baghdad, needs someone in D.C. to watch its back. I had had high hopes that Under Secretary Bill Burns would play that role, but he seemed to have been asked to do everything not Iraq, including taking on the task of ensuring that Iran policy would not be taken over by the White House with the creation of a special envoy position. Although special envoy Dennis Ross, a former Middle East envoy and an internationally respected expert on the region, was to sit at the department, the ease with which he enjoyed relationships in the White House (indeed, all across Washington) made it understandable why the secretary had wanted a crafty operator like Bill to shadow that issue.

The decision to pull Bill away from Iraq meant that our backstop would be Deputy Secretary James Steinberg. Although a political appointee, Jim had had vast experience in the State Department and the White House during the Clinton administration and could be counted on as a steady presence in the interagency process, often a microwave cookbook of bad, half-baked ideas (such as micromanaging what kind of candidate lists to have in the Iraqi election law). Jim had an appetite for facts and figures and a talent for taking any idea, good or bad, and analyzing the perils of it in such a way that soon everyone would want to wheel it back into the garage for further work. Jim saved people from themselves on a daily basis.

But within months, there were rumors that Jim was unhappy with his role at State. Jim was above all a foreign policy realist, especially on China, where he had delivered a thoughtful speech on the need to overcome “strategic mistrust” (during the first term of the Obama administration the word strategic was often married with another word, for example patience, to convey thoughtfulness in foreign policy), but his reflections on China were not necessarily what the administration was looking for at the time. He seemed increasingly unhappy with the more strident tone the Obama administration was taking on China and other issues. I knew he could not be counted on for long to carry water for us back in Washington.

The State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs Bureau leadership was often criticized for being inadequately seized with Israel’s agenda. Many of NEA’s leaders had already done their Iraq time and had no intention of doing any more if they could avoid it. Iraq, so the thinking went, was someone else’s problem—especially the military’s, and rarely did Shia-led Iraq help on any regional issues that NEA was concerned about. Assistant Secretary Jeff Feltman, a veteran Arabist who had had a career in the region in small but important posts, culminating as ambassador in war-torn Lebanon, seemed particularly distressed by Iraq, insofar as it caused him problems with the rest of the region and with the Pentagon suspicions that the State Department lacked commitment.

In the end it was increasingly clear that Iraq remained the military’s problem, not the State Department’s. It is not to say that Iraq was not on people’s minds in Washington. But it was increasingly a legacy issue, a matter of keeping faith with our troops rather than seeing Iraq as a strategic issue in the region.

Iraq got the bureaucratic reputation as a loser, something to stay away from. No question, Shia-led Iraq was the black sheep of the region, with no natural allies anywhere.

Shia-led Iraq also did not fit into any broader theme that the administration was trying to accomplish in the Middle East. The launching of former Senate majority leader George Mitchell’s mission as the Middle East envoy had been grounded almost immediately by the decision to press the Israelis for a settlement freeze as a precondition to the resumption of talks. In June 2009, Mitchell’s team began to consider options for how to approach President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus to explore whether there might be flexibility on the issue of the Golan Heights. CENTCOM commander David Petraeus had taken the view that the Syrians had in fact been helpful on the increasingly peaceful border with Iraq, and that this level of cooperation should be rewarded with a senior U.S. trip to Damascus and discussions with Assad about broader issues. A senior-level trip to Damascus on Middle East peace would be controversial enough, so a cover story was concocted in which the discussion would involve border stability with Iraq.

The department asked me to inform Maliki of our intention to talk with Assad, and to reassure him that the discussions were very preliminary, and that if they went anywhere they would surely not involve any requests made of the Iraqis.

I had already met with Maliki on several occasions in my first few weeks at post. He was intelligent and thoughtful, tending to get down to business faster than the average Iraqi politician. He had a dry sense of humor, and some irony that also eluded many of his contemporaries, not to speak of Washington visitors often frustrated at the lack of any English-language capacity. Apart from saying “very good” excessively to visitors, Maliki appeared to offer very little, though. Extremely thin-skinned, he devoted much of his interpersonal skills to detecting any slights, real or imagined. Fortunately, this extreme sensitivity did not appear to extend to the casual clothing sometimes chosen by Washington visitors to the war zone. Maliki wore dark suits and dark neckties seemingly every day of the year.

He listened to the reassurances I offered on Syria, and thanked me for the heads-up. Then, at first politely, and later not so, he got to the point, “You Americans have no idea what you are dealing with in that regime,” he said. “Everything for those people is a negotiation, like buying fruit in a market.” He gestured at the luncheon table. “If you even mention us [Iraq], Assad will see it as something you are concerned about losing and will make you pay in the negotiation for it. Please do not even say the word ‘Iraq’ to him. Just keep it on your Middle East negotiations. That is your business, not mine.” OK, I thought. That became a typical meeting with Maliki. Not a lot of fun, but at least I know where he stood.

So much, I thought, for the idea that Maliki had some kind of special relations with the Assad regime. I sent the cable in to the department. Within a few days I learned from the embassy’s political-military counselor, Michael Corbin, who was soon to become the Iran-Iraq deputy assistant secretary and briefly visiting Washington in preparation for that assignment, that the proverbial road to Damascus had been closed for permanent repair. Not that I had thought it a particularly good idea to go there in the first place, but I asked Michael why the idea had been shelved, and whether Maliki’s skepticism had played any role.

“No idea,” he told me, reflecting the chaotic information flow in Washington.

On June 30, 2009, Maliki gave a speech to announce a major development in the U.S.-Iraqi Security Agreement. The occasion was the anniversary of the 2003 assassination of the Iraqi Shia leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. After a few words in memory of the fallen ayatollah, Maliki shifted gears to describe the moment that U.S. forces would withdraw from populated areas as a great victory for the Iraqi people, which did not sit well with those who had backed the war effort. After all, Maliki was suggesting that what had happened was the U.S. forces had in effect been ordered to retreat. But as he talked more about the sacrifice that must attend such a great victory, I began to understand better what he was saying. In essence, Maliki was acknowledging that the Iraqi forces that would soon take over checkpoints and mobile patrols would have their problems doing so. He was bracing people for more casualties to follow.

I understood what he was saying, but it sure didn’t win him any friends in Washington. The U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, spoke with him soon thereafter to tell him he needed to make a gesture, suggesting that during his upcoming visit to Washington he visit Arlington National Cemetery and lay a wreath. He did so, but it was too little, too late. Maliki’s reputation never recovered in Washington, and complaints about him, whether in matters of human rights or relations with Sunni neighbors, or his attitudes toward Americans, or political alliances within Iraq, all seemed to reinforce each other with the conclusion that Iraq would be better off with a new prime minister, perhaps one who did not seem systematically to upset every conceivable constituent group. Nonetheless, Maliki was a formidable player who could outwork and often outthink his rivals. For years, U.S. officials had looked for a strong Iraqi leader, and having found one they objected to the fact that he didn’t do what he was told. As my late colleague from the Bosnian conflict, Amb. Bob Frasure, had once said about a certain Balkan leader, “We wanted a junkyard dog like this for a long time. Why would people expect him to start sitting in our lap?”

The Washington-based concerns about Maliki, reinforced by the complaints from other Arab countries, gave rise to the view that somehow we needed to replace him, as if this were our responsibility let alone within our capability. Foreign ambassadors in Baghdad, having heard the discontent reported by their colleagues in Washington, came to my embassy to ask me, “So, how are you going to get rid of him?” as if I had instructions to do so.

My sense was that these foreign ambassadors were hearing typical Washington grousing and were then pole-vaulting to the conclusion that we were hatching a plan. Obviously that was not the case, but I could tell that the talk was reaching the ever-paranoid Maliki and not helping our relationship with him. I could see that a similar process was unwinding in Afghanistan. Even if the United States were a latter-day Roman Empire as some neocon pundits seemed to want, we still have to work with local leaders like Maliki and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. Reports that we were trying to get rid of them didn’t help. But even if we wanted to topple Maliki, you can’t beat something with nothing, and the Iraqi political landscape was not exactly blooming with new political prospects.

As sparse as that landscape looked to me, I never lacked for advice coming from Washington, where some seemed to think that choosing Iraqi leaders was akin to forming a fantasy football team. People who had served in Iraq, and for whom time froze when they left, increasingly manned Iraq policy. Thus I was treated to suggestions, often in the form of admonishments, as to why I hadn’t recently visited such-and-such a politician, who, I was to glean, had been some kind of hot prospect back in 2004 and 2005.

***

The fall of 2009 was a daily grind in Iraq’s political corridors as we lobbied the parties for the passage of an election law, on the basis of which there could be an election in early 2010. The Iraqis understood they needed to agree on an election law, but they would do so on their timetable, not ours. Hurrying them, as was Washington’s instinct to do, seemed to reinforce in the Iraqi minds that what we really wanted was to get an election, a new government, and pull our troops out.

On Nov. 8, the Iraqi Council of Representatives overwhelmingly approved an election law, but two weeks later Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni representative to the collective presidency—which also consisted of the president, the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, and the vice president, the Shia politician Adel Abd al-Mahdi—used the power vested as a member of the presidency to veto the law.

Hashimi’s main line of concern with me was the perfidy of the Shia and Kurds, and with Odierno he spent the lion’s share of his time seeking the immediate release of nefarious persons inexplicably, in his view, picked up by U.S. forces and held in detention centers. Ray always politely agreed to look into the matter, and would send back his political advisor to Hashimi with the bad news that the individuals in question could not be released at this time. The British-trained Hashimi would take advantage of Ray’s British political adviser to give a further spin on how bad things were—and how they were getting worse—due, of course, to the Americans. He then would give her still more lists of persons in detention who in his view had done nothing wrong.

Hashimi vetoed the election law based on an issue that was very much a Sunni concern, but which had not played a major role during the parliamentary discussion of the law—the right of out-of-country Iraqis (read: Sunni refugees) to vote. Within weeks, a compromise was worked out. Vice President Biden, Washington’s point man on Iraq, and President Obama were pressed into service making telephone calls to senior officials, including offering a Washington visit for Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan.

I welcomed Obama’s and Biden’s direct interest, but I knew that these senior-level phone calls were adding to the perception that the United States was desperate for an election law so that U.S. troops could be withdrawn. By signaling our interest in withdrawal, we began to lose more influence on the ground.

The high-level calls had another unhelpful impact on our efforts. They became part of the toolbox, meaning that whenever there was an impasse on the ground, the idea of ginning up a telephone call quickly emerged on the to-do list. Senior phone calls also had still another negative impact on our efforts: Washington bureaucrats went operational. Thus we began to receive missives offering such nuggets of advice as “Never ignore Hashimi!” Of course, we had been in regular contact with him, but he wasn’t the great hope that some of these veterans of the early years had thought. Some of the Washington micromanagement extended to offering me advice as to who from the embassy I should bring along for meetings with Maliki and others. It all added up to an impression that Washington wanted out of Iraq.

The parliamentary election on March 7, 2010, was a peaceful day. U.S. troops, working with Iraqi counterparts, ensured security throughout the country, and the number of incidents was remarkably low. The election results took weeks to tabulate, and when they finally came in they were very close. Ayad Allawi’s Iraq National Party, or Iraqiyya, a party that was disproportionately Sunni, won 91 seats, while Maliki’s State of Law coalition had 89 seats. A total of 163 seats would be needed to gain a majority of the 325-seat Council of Representatives, and it meant that the two top coalitions would be off to the races. Many of those seats would be controlled by the Kurds, and therefore by Barzani, who mistrusted both Maliki and Allawi.

The difference between Maliki’s and Allawi’s approaches was striking. Maliki went to work, while Allawi went to CNN. Anytime I visited the prime minister’s office I would have to pass a row of tribal chiefs waiting their turn to be wooed with some political favor in return for their willingness to support Maliki. Allawi thought it was enough to get on CNN to accuse Maliki of becoming the “new Saddam.” Allawi also thought that what became known as the government formation period was a good occasion to fly around the Middle East and dump on Maliki.

According to a Kurdish leader with good connections to the Egyptian government, Allawi had gone to Cairo to complain to President Hosni Mubarak about Maliki, prompting the Egyptian strongman to respond: “Why are you telling me this? I don’t vote in Iraq. In fact, if the situation is as you describe, what are you even doing here?”

In a perfect parliamentary world, the party or coalition that garners the most seats is given the opportunity to form the government. If Iraq were part of that world, Allawi should have been given the right to form the government, having come through the elections with two more seats than Maliki. But the reality of the situation was that with both main coalitions in a statistical dead heat, neither was going to step aside for the other. We knew it would be a long, hot summer. In addition to working harder on the ground for additional seats, Maliki also outpaced Allawi in aggressively challenging the vote count, a decision that opened him to the charge of being a sore loser, and a possible cheater. His recount demands also exposed him to the charge that he was ultimately not going to respect the results of the voting and might, as General Odierno suggested in a teleconference with Washington, try to stage a “rolling coup d’état.” Ray surprised everybody with that comment. It was nothing he had ever said to me in private, nor had he taken that tone in any conversation with Maliki. I always tried to make sure we spoke with one voice on the teleconferences with Washington, but I fell silent when he expressed that opinion, especially as he as he hadn’t warned me. The effect of his comment on Washington was to heighten concerns about Maliki’s intentions.

Indeed, Maliki’s tough-minded behavior, his own bitter disappointment at not coming out ahead of Allawi and his increasing feistiness on every issue were making him a thoroughly unlikable and unlikely candidate to replace himself. The foreign press corps was completely against him. Most foreign diplomats were against him, including the U.S. Embassy’s own political section.

Maliki was far from my ideal candidate, but I had real doubts whether someone else was going to be able to unseat him. “Can’t beat someone with no one,” I kept repeating to Gary, Yuri and other members of the political section, who always seemed to fall silent when I asked the question, “If not Maliki, then if you were king who do you suggest for prime minister?” as if it were our choice to make. As the crucial postelection weeks of April and May 2010 rolled by, Allawi spent more of his time traveling abroad, using a jet provided him by the Gulf states, instead of building his political support back home. I also noticed that regardless of Maliki’s volatile and at times ugly behavior, there seemed to be no swing from the other Shia blocs toward Allawi.

The process suggested to me that much of what we were seeing from the other Shia was just bluster and an effort to give Maliki a well-deserved hard time, but that whenever Maliki was prepared to show some real respect and humility toward them, he could also gain their support.

Maliki’s Shia detractors had plenty of kind words for Allawi, but I could not see that any of them were truly prepared to support Allawi’s Iraqiyya. In Erbil, many Kurds describe Iraqiyya as a crypto-Baathist party. I became skeptical that the Shia and Kurds would ever allow Iraqiyya to become the governing party. He seemed to have no chance of increasing the number of seats through coalition-building beyond the 91 he had won in the actual election.

Allawi was a Shia himself, but he was secular. Those foreigners, and especially those foreigners who had not seen these political patterns in other countries, who believed that a Shia without Shia constituents could become prime minister in Iraq’s current circumstances didn’t understand the game being played. During the hard-fought campaign, Allawi never ventured into southern Iraq, where most of the Shia lived. He did not make the slightest effort to gain Shia votes. I concluded that the government formation period was not going to be even close, but I hedged my comments to Washington, not wanting to seem pro-Maliki or anti-Allawi.

I concluded we needed to focus on making a better Maliki than he had been in his first four-year term, rather than engage in a quixotic effort to try to oust him.

As the summer wore on, Maliki, who unlike Allawi rarely left the country or even, it seemed, his office, started making progress with the other Shia and some small Sunni parties. While no one was overtly committing to him, it was clear that he was building the momentum to expand well beyond the 89 seats he already controlled. Allawi, still stuck at 91 seats, at one point met with the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Damascus, a bizarre meeting evidently arranged for Allawi by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who probably had tired of Maliki and his public allegations against the Syrians for terrorist attacks in Iraq. Allawi’s meeting with Sadr didn’t lead to anything.

In the meantime, Barzani, the Kurdish leader, began to say that Maliki might be an acceptable choice after all. Barzani had no interest in a Kurdish-Shia alliance that would isolate the Sunnis, but he had realized, just as I had, that there were no good alternatives to Maliki.

In early August Barzani invited me to his hometown of Barzan, up in Kurdistan. We talked nonstop about the political deadlock and about Barzani’s welcome decision to invite Maliki to his palace in Sulahaddin, just north of the Kurdish capital of Erbil, the next day. By prearrangement, at 4 p.m. my cell phone rang and a voice, identified as “Joe,” was on the other end of the line. It was Vice President Biden. I gave the phone to Barzani, who sat down on a folding chair cupping his other ear to reduce the roar of the river. He and “Joe” had a good discussion about the importance of the next day. We knew that the upcoming meeting with Maliki would be crucial to forming a government.

I said farewell to Barzani that evening outside the guesthouse. I knew it was my last visit to Kurdistan, and given that I was leaving Iraq a few days later, and my career in the Foreign Service a few days after that, I knew it was my last chance at diplomatic deal making. The odds are often stacked against these deals working out, and when they do they are sometimes short-lived, but the feeling that one has done everything possible is a very good one. And better yet was the appreciation for someone like Barzani, who, unlike a visiting diplomat, has to live with the consequences that any political deal would involve. We performed our awkward hugs and kisses before I headed to the helicopter for the trip back to Baghdad.

I met Maliki in the morning and told him I thought the road was open to a rapprochement with Barzani, provided he was willing to address Kurdish concerns about their oil contracts and previous understandings about disputed territory with Arab Iraq. Much later that day, word came from Erbil that the meeting between Maliki and Barzani had gone well. They pledged to work together for “inclusive” government—i.e., there would be a Sunni component as well.

***

Open In New Window Chris Hill's book, Outpost, is out on Oct. 7.

Three days later, I climbed in my last Black Hawk helicopter, strapped myself into the seat next to the window, and rose up from the embassy landing pad. We crossed out over Baghdad, its bright city lights shining in the gathering dusk. In Washington a day later, Secretary Clinton asked to see me in between appointments. She was busy that day, and even though it was my last day in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer, I knew she had other things going. I quickly briefed her on the embassy operations, and said how pleased I was that a very good successor, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Jim Jeffrey, had been named to follow me. I told her about my next career as dean of the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. She warmly said goodbye and thanked me for my 33 years of service. And then she asked me a question as I started walking through the outer door of her office.

“Who could have ever thought Maliki should have a second term?”

“Beats me,” I answered.