In U.S. Exit From Iraq, Failed Efforts and Challenges

A series of car bombs throughout Iraq resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people. The attacks took place on September 9, 2012., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

September 22, 2012

In U.S. Exit From Iraq, Failed Efforts and Challenges

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
New York Times

The request was an unusual one, and President Obama himself made the confidential phone call to Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president.

Marshaling his best skills at persuasion, Mr. Obama asked Mr. Talabani, a consummate political survivor, to give up his post. It was Nov. 4, 2010, and the plan was for Ayad Allawi to take Mr. Talabani’s place.

With Mr. Allawi, a secular Shiite and the leader of a bloc with broad Sunni support, the Obama administration calculated, Iraq would have a more inclusive government and would check the worrisome drift toward authoritarianism under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

But Mr. Obama did not make the sale.

“They were afraid what would happen if the different groups of Iraq did not reach an agreement,” recalled Mr. Talabani, who turned down the request.

Mr. Obama has pointed to the American troop withdrawal last year as proof that he has fulfilled his promise to end the Iraq war. Winding down a conflict, however, entails far more than extracting troops.

In the case of Iraq, the American goal has been to leave a stable and representative government, avoid a power vacuum that neighboring states and terrorists could exploit and maintain sufficient influence so that Iraq would be a partner or, at a minimum, not an opponent in the Middle East.

But the Obama administration has fallen frustratingly short of some of those objectives.

The attempt by Mr. Obama and his senior aides to fashion an extraordinary power-sharing arrangement between Mr. Maliki and Mr. Allawi never materialized. Neither did an agreement that would have kept a small American force in Iraq to train the Iraqi military and patrol the country’s skies. A plan to use American civilians to train the Iraqi police has been severely cut back. The result is an Iraq that is less stable domestically and less reliable internationally than the United States had envisioned.

The story of these efforts has received little attention in a nation weary of the conflict in Iraq, and administration officials have rarely talked about them. This account is based on interviews with many of the principals, in Washington and Baghdad.

White House officials portray their exit strategy as a success, asserting that the number of civilian fatalities in Iraq is low compared with 2006, when the war was at its height. Politics, not violence, has become the principal means for Iraqis to resolve their differences, they say. “Recent news coverage of Iraq would suggest that as our troops departed, American influence went with them and our administration shifted its focus away from Iraq,” Antony Blinken, the national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said in a speech in March. “The fact is, our engagements have increased.”

To many Iraqis, the United States’ influence is greatly diminished. “American policy is very weak,” observed Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff to Massoud Barzani, the president of the semiautonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. “It is not clear to us how they have defined their interests in Iraq,” Mr. Hussein said. “They are picking events and reacting on the basis of events. That is the policy.”

Campaign vs. Reality

As a presidential candidate in 2008, Mr. Obama had one basic position on Iraq — he was going to bring a “responsible end” to the conflict. He vowed to remove all American combat brigades within 16 months, a deadline that enabled him to outflank his main rival in the Democratic primary, Hillary Rodham Clinton, but which the military said was too risky. Once in office, he adjusted the withdrawal schedule, keeping American brigades in place longer but making their primary mission to advise Iraqi forces.

All American forces were to leave Iraq by the end of 2011, the departure date set in an agreement signed by President George W. Bush and Mr. Maliki in 2008. Even so, Mr. Obama left the door open to keeping troops in Iraq to train Iraqi forces if an agreement could be negotiated.

The situation the Obama administration inherited was complex. Many Iraqi politicians were worried that Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, was amassing too much power and overstepping the Iraqi constitution by bypassing the formal military chain of command and seeding intelligence agencies with loyalists. Those concerns were aggravated by the political gridlock that plagued Baghdad after the March 2010 elections.

Convening a videoconference on Oct. 6, 2010, Mr. Biden and top American officials reviewed the options. The vice president favored a plan that would keep Mr. Maliki as prime minister, but which involved installing his main rival, Mr. Allawi, leader of the Iraqiya bloc, near the top of the pyramid. To make way for Mr. Allawi, Mr. Biden suggested that Mr. Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, be shifted from the presidency and given another position. “Let’s make him foreign minister,” Mr. Biden said, according to the notes of the meeting.

“Thanks a lot, Joe,” Mrs. Clinton said, noting that Mr. Biden had cast the Foreign Ministry as a consolation prize.

Mr. Biden also predicted that the Americans could work out a deal with a government led by Mr. Maliki. “Maliki wants us to stick around because he does not see a future in Iraq otherwise,” Mr. Biden said. “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend the SOFA,” he added, referring to the Status of Forces Agreement the Obama administration hoped to negotiate.

James B. Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, questioned whether Mr. Biden’s plan would make the already inefficient Iraqi government more dysfunctional, and suggested an alternative to Mr. Maliki: Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite and former finance minister. A quiet American effort to explore this option was made, but Iran opposed it and, thus, so did hard-line Shiite figures. Concerned about the need to seat an Iraqi government, Mr. Obama decided to accept Mr. Maliki as prime minister while pursuing a deal that would bring Mr. Allawi and other members of his Iraqiya bloc into the fold.

But engineering a power-sharing arrangement was not easy. After Mr. Talabani rebuffed Mr. Obama’s request, the White House decided to go around him.

In a letter to Mr. Barzani, Mr. Obama again argued that Mr. Talabani should give up the presidency and noted the help the United States would continue to provide to the Kurds. But Mr. Barzani rejected the proposal, complaining that he was being asked to solve a problem between Shiite and Sunni Arabs at the expense of the Kurds.

The Americans had a fallback position: a new council on strategic policy would be established, with Mr. Allawi in charge. But Mr. Maliki and Mr. Allawi wrangled over what powers the new council would have, and it was never formed. Some members of Mr. Allawi’s party secured prominent government posts. But the most important feature the White House had pressed for in a power-sharing arrangement existed only on paper. The White House, a spokeswoman said, had not been “wedded” to any specific option and had achieved an “inclusive government.”

Internal Debates

As the process of forming a new Iraqi government dragged on, the Obama administration began in January 2011 to turn its attention to negotiating an agreement that would enable American forces to stay beyond 2011.

The first talks the Americans had were among themselves. Pentagon officials had gotten an earful from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, which were worried that the United States was pulling back from the region. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates favored leaving 16,000 troops to train the Iraqi forces, prepare them to carry out counterterrorism missions, protect Iraqi airspace, tamp down Arab and Kurdish tensions and to maintain American influence.

But the White House, which was wary of big military missions and also looking toward Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign, had a lower number in mind. At a meeting on April 29, Thomas E. Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, asked Mr. Gates whether he could accept up to 10,000 troops. Mr. Gates agreed.

Concerned that decisions were being made without careful consideration of all the military factors, Admiral Mullen sent a classified letter to Mr. Donilon that recommended keeping 16,000 troops. “In light of the risks noted above and the opportunities that might emerge, that is my best military advice to the president,” he wrote. He added that the recommendation was supported by Gen. Lloyd Austin, the American commander in Iraq, and Gen. James N. Mattis, head of Central Command, which has responsibility for the Middle East.

Admiral Mullen’s letter arrived with a thud at the White House. An angry Mr. Donilon complained about it in a phone call to Michèle A. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy. But she responded that Admiral Mullen had a professional responsibility to provide his independent advice. She did not see her role as ensuring that only politically acceptable advice was provided to the White House. Mr. Donilon declined to be interviewed, and his spokesman insisted that his discussions with the Pentagon concerned military issues, not politics.

Mr. Obama overruled Admiral Mullen, setting the stage for the negotiations over the troops.

Another Obstacle

In a June 2 videoconference with Mr. Maliki, the president emphasized that any agreement would need to be ratified by the Iraqi Parliament. But not everybody in the American camp agreed with this stipulation.

Brett H. McGurk, a former Bush administration aide whom the Obama administration had asked to return to Baghdad to help with the talks, thought that a bruising parliamentary battle could be avoided by working out an understanding under an existing umbrella agreement on economic and security cooperation — an approach Mr. Maliki himself suggested several times. But the White House wanted airtight immunities for any troops staying in Iraq, which American government lawyers, the Iraqi chief justice and James F. Jeffrey, the American ambassador in Baghdad, insisted would require a new agreement that was endorsed by the Iraqi Parliament.

The negotiations were complicated by the Americans’ failure to broker a power-sharing arrangement. With Iraqi leaders jockeying for influence and Mr. Allawi still out of the government, neither Mr. Maliki nor his rival wanted to stick his neck out by supporting a continuing American military presence, no matter how small.

The White House, meanwhile, wanted to avoid any perception that it was chasing after a deal to keep troops in Iraq after promising that combat forces would be brought home. By August, White House aides were pressing to scale back the mission and to reopen the issue of how many troops might be needed.

Mrs. Clinton and Leon E. Panetta, who succeeded Mr. Gates as the defense secretary, argued that talks should continue and that the goal, as before, should be to keep a force of up to 10,000.

On Aug. 13, Mr. Obama settled the matter in a conference call in which he ruled out the 10,000 troop option and a smaller 7,000 variant. The talks would proceed but the size of the force the United States might keep was shrunk: the new goal would be a continuous presence of about 3,500 troops, a rotating force of up to 1,500 and half a dozen F-16’s.

But there was no agreement. Some experts say that given the Iraqis’ concerns about sovereignty, and Iranian pressure, the politicians in Baghdad were simply not prepared to make the hard decisions that were needed to secure parliamentary approval. Others say the Iraqis sensed the Americans’ ambivalence and were being asked to make unpopular political decisions for a modest military benefit.

Ending the Effort

On Oct. 21, Mr. Obama held another videoconference with Mr. Maliki — his first such discussion since the talks began in June. The negotiations were over, and all of the American troops would be coming home.

The White House insisted that the collapse of the talks was not a setback. “As we reviewed the 10,000 option, we came to the conclusion that achieving the goal of a security partnership was not dependent on the size of our footprint in-country, and that stability in Iraq did not depend on the presence of U.S. forces,” a senior Obama administration official said.

It is too soon to fully assess that prediction. But tensions have increased to the point that Mr. Barzani has insisted Mr. Maliki be replaced and Iraq’s lone Sunni vice president has fled to Turkey to avoid arrest.

Without American forces to train and assist Iraqi commandos, the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq is still active in Iraq and is increasingly involved in Syria. With no American aircraft to patrol Iraqi airspace, Iraq has become a corridor for Iranian flights of military supplies to Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, American officials say. It is also a potential avenue for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, something the White House is laboring to avoid.

Ryan C. Crocker, the former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, offered his own perspective on the last tortured negotiations in the country where American troops fought for more than eight years. “I don’t think either government handled it as well as it could have been handled,” he said. “The U.S. side came to it late. You have got to leave a lot of latitude for difficulties, foreseen and unforeseen. On the Iraqi side, they should have said, ‘If you want this don’t try to determine our own procedures.’ ”

This article is adapted from “The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama,” by Michael R. Gordon and retired Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, to be published by Pantheon Books, an imprint of Random House, on Tuesday.