Iraq and the limits of American military power

Bremer rejected the idea without any discussion. The Americans, he said, had not come to Iraq to build a socialist economy. It was not a surprise that by the end of 2003 Ramadi and Anbar province were on fire, and the Jaysh al-Mahdi was expanding quickly in Najaf, Karbala and other cities in southern Iraq.

Al-Sistani's power underestimated

American security forces could deal with security problems, but that didn't give us unlimited political power. Bremer and his team, including Meghan O'Sullivan, now dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard University and lawyer Brett McGurk, now in Biden's White House, developed political plans and a temporary constitution that were excellent intellectual achievements inappropriate for Iraq's circumstances.

For example, the Americans decided that the Iraqis who would write the country's permanent constitution should be chosen by consultations among local political elites. Ayatollah al-Sistani insisted there should be national elections to choose the representatives to a transition parliament that would prepare the constitution.

I remember my colleague in Karbala, an American diplomat who was supposed to be a public relations specialist, publicly stated in Karbala in November 2003 that al-Sistani was wrong and there would be consultations only.

Large demonstrations in Karbala and other cities answered the Americans who had to retreat and accept elections – the elections of January 2005. We never challenged al-Sistani again.

Strange American ideas about Iraqi politics continued, however. The temporary constitution Brett McGurk and colleagues wrote and imposed in 2004 included two national elections and a constitution referendum in 2005 as well as resolving the Kirkuk problem.

Unrealistic timeline

The timeline was extremely unrealistic. As the American military struggled to control the expanding insurgencies in Sunni and Shiite communities in 2004, the new American embassy warned Washington that Sunni Arabs would not vote in the January 2005 election.

The security situation was too dangerous for them after al-Qaeda said they would kill voters and destroy voting stations. President Bush rejected our recommendation that we delay the elections until after January 2005.

Instead, the Iraq team in Washington gave me its ideas about how to manage the situation during secret video conference late one night. They proposed that Iraqis in cities like Anbar could vote by cellphone. Iraqi voters would use a personal password and then dial a specific number to vote for a candidate.

I had never heard of such a thing and asked if voters in a place like California – the mother of technology – vote by telephone. They did not, the Washington employees acknowledged, and they could not answer my question about why Iraqis would accept something Americans do not accept.

Then the Washington side suggested the Iraqis could vote by computer by entering a special election website. I reminded them that Anbaris could not vote by computer because there was no electricity! The video meeting ended with everyone frustrated.

Twenty minutes later my telephone rang and the director of the Iraq office at the State Department reprimanded me for being unhelpful. But we couldn't convince or compel Sunnis to risk voting. Most boycotted the January 2005 election, and the Sunni Arab representation on the new Constitution Committee was very weak, one of the reasons for problems with the existing constitution to this day.

Escalation of violence

Meanwhile, the violence in Iraq escalated. The American military response was harsh but initially not effective.  We didn't understand how Iraqis feared each other and feared the Americans too. The Americans committed atrocities, such as at Abu Gharieb and worse at al-Haditha in 2005. And our forces arrested tens of thousands of Iraqis, often without reason.

We put most of the detainees in a prison camp called Bucca. We thus unintentionally gathered extremists so that Bucca became a university for jihadism. Abu Bakr Baghdadi and Abu Mohamed Jolani (who later established the Nusra Front in Syria) were two graduates.

At the same time the Iraqi security forces the American military was building also were committing terrible human rights violations. In late 2005 we discovered the Jadriyah bunker prison which was far worse than Abu Gharieb. We took evidence of Ministry of Interior involvement to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari who refused to punish any official.

The Americans grumbled but continued to provide billions of dollars to the Iraqi army and police. By 2011 we spent over $25 billion rebuilding Iraqi security.

The Americans wanted to show the Iraqi government that we were committed to success in Iraq. And the Iraqis knew how to exploit that American commitment.

Short-term victories

When President Bush after the December 2005 election ordered our embassy to remove al-Jaafari  from the prime minister seat, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and I visited him late one night in March 2006 to give him the news.

In a three-hour polite but difficult argument with many cups of sweet tea, al-Jaafari stubbornly refused to resign and pledged he would win support of the majority of the new parliament to remain prime minister.

Tired and frustrated we returned to Khalilzad's office where Khalilzad hit his desk in anger and asked how al-Jaafari could refuse the American demand when we had 150,000 soldiers in the country. I told him the simple answer: al-Jaafari  knew we would not withdraw our soldiers and admit failure.

Khalilzad could not impose, but he could maneuver. He encouraged ambitious Shiite rivals to al-Jaafari to compete against him for the prime minister job. Our embassy political office prepared a list of five Shiite politicians whom our many Iraqi political contacts thought could win parliament approval.

Of the five, Khalilzad liked Nuri al-Maliki the best. He thought al-Maliki would be independent of Iran. In many meetings with more glasses of sweet tea we lobbied very hard to convince Iraqi politicians to support al-Maliki who became prime minister in May 2006.

Khalilzad had exploited divisions within the Shiite Islamist camp to defeat al-Jaafari. This was a political victory in the short-term for the Americans, but Iraqis paid a terrible price in the longer term.

The Americans also enjoyed a short-term security success beginning in 2008 but the political effect was always limited. General Petraeus started paying and equipping young Sunni Arab men to fight al-Qaeda in their neighbourhoods with American soldiers' help.

This programme that the Americans called Sons of Iraq, together with the completion of much of the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighbourhoods, helped reduce the violence in Sunni Arab parts of Iraq.

However, al-Maliki had his own political agenda. He and his advisors rejected our requests that he approve Iraqi salaries for the Sons of Iraq and jobs in the security forces that we were financing. The Americans kept begging.

The prime minister also didn't trust the Iraqi intelligence service that the CIA supported and began to build a parallel intelligence operation with Sherwan Waeli. We also watched and complained but didn't try to stop al-Maliki consolidate control over the Iraqi Security Forces.

And when American special operations forces captured some Jaysh al-Mahdi commanders in Maysan in 2009, the prime minister was furious. He was building relations with the Sadrists.

US 2009 withdrawal

By 2009 it was clear that President Obama would withdraw American forces from Iraq unless he got guarantees of immunity for the soldiers. Immunity was politically impossible in Baghdad, especially after the horrible massacre committed by Blackwater guards at Nasr Square in 2007.

As American troops numbers decreased, we had to close detention centres and release thousands of prisoners. One prisoner generated special concern: Qais Khazali whose Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq had killed Americans and Britons. We refused to release him to al-Maliki's government without guarantees that the Iraqis would keep him in detention.

Al-Maliki had no such intention. He was building his political base for the next election and understood he could simply wait. Finally, in recognition of the impossibility of gaining concessions from al-Maliki, the Americans released Khazali in an exchange deal for a British hostage in January 2010. Khazali is now one of the biggest militia and political leaders harassing the Americans in Iraq.

Final act

The last great show of American influence in Iraq before the withdrawal of troops was Washington's support for another term for al-Maliki after the March 2010 election. The election result was essentially even between al-Maliki and long-time American friend Ayad Allawi. We knew about al-Maliki's sectarianism, his corruption and his consolidating power in contradiction to the constitution.

Obama's administration, however, wanted to finish negotiations about the future of American forces, and it decided that al-Maliki, not Allawi, had the best chance to assemble a government and win parliament approval quickly.

Al-Maliki gained support of the Sadrists first. Then the American Embassy pressured skeptical Kurdish region president Masud Barzani to back al-Maliki whose new term started in November 2010.

Al-Maliki was not grateful for American help, and he offered no concessions about the American troops. Obama happily accepted al-Maliki's refusal, and the last American soldiers left Iraq in December 2011. Washington's attention shifted from Iraq to the eruptions in Egypt, Libya and Syria.

Incubator for sectarianism and the birth of IS

In Iraq eruptions started also. Reacting to al-Maliki's sectarianism, cities like Fallujah, Ramadi and Hawija started protests against the prime minister less than a year after the American soldiers had departed.

And unknowingly, Americans had created another problem with their Sons of Iraq programme. The American army had chosen winners and losers among the tribes in Anbar for its programme jobs and money. Some clans and tribes got the jobs and US reconstruction aid while other clans and tribes received nothing.

The Islamic State exploited resentment from this American discrimination, and from al-Maliki's sectarianism, to capture Fallujah in January 2014. It then captured Mosul easily in June 2014, exploiting the corruption inside Iraqi security forces that the Americans had seen but never confronted.

As IS fighters approached the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2014, the Obama administration's last card produced brief success but not long-term influence. Obama conditioned military intervention against IS on Baghdad ejecting al-Maliki.

Haidar al-Abadi quickly became prime minister in the emergency, and the American air force and special operations fighters indirectly cooperated with Iranian proxy militias against the shared IS enemy.

Limits to American 'friendship' realised

At this point, however, the Americans, and Iraqi prime ministers, could not control the militias. Meanwhile, like Ayad Allawi, America's friends in Erbil learned the limits of American friendship. Washington denounced the Kurdish region's independence referendum and did not stop the Iraqi army capture of Kirkuk from the Peshmerga.

Erbil's economic weaknesses also became visible, and the referendum became a disaster for the Kurdish region that is the part of Iraq most friendly to the Americans.

Present-day outlook

The Americans still have 2,500 soldiers in Iraq undertaking training for Iraqi counterterrorism forces exposed to attack from pro-Iranian militias and even Iranian ballistic missiles. The American killing of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 reduced Iranian control over its proxy militias in Iraq and Syria, and usually there is a sort of truce between Washington and Iran.

The Iraqi government welcomes the small American training programme to contain IS and ensure some American support for Baghdad. Indirectly, Tehran has accepted the American training programme. However, the truce between Iran and America in Iraq could end suddenly. We just saw a new eruption recently in Syria.

Baghdad does not want to be in the middle of the America-Iran conflict, but in reality, it cannot escape. For example, in response to the Iranian nuclear programme, the Biden administration began restricting flows of dollars earned from Iraq's oil sales going to Baghdad in order to impede dollars going from Iraq to Iran.

Read more: The Iraqi dinar is fine

The dinar dropped sharply, and Iraqi consumers now face higher prices. For now, Iraq has no choice: the oil market still uses dollars. In a multipolar world, however, Iraq will probably remember this bitter dollar experience and turn to countries like China and India for energy and infrastructure projects, not companies like Bechtel and General Electric.

What gives me some hope is a project arising on the site of a former Saddam Hussein palace near the Baghdad airport that was formerly the US military headquarters. A new American University is using a modern curriculum and later will open an American-style medical school and hospital.

If that university has freedom to operate as an independent education facility free from corruption and government interference, it could, along with American-style universities in Sulaymaniyah and Dohuk, help the new Iraqi generation that never knew Saddam Hussein gradually change modern Iraq.

As I look at 20 years of American efforts in Iraq, I conclude that American soft power, not hard power, is what can most help Iraq, and the region.

-Robert Ford was Paul Bremer's representative in Najaf and head of the US Embassy Political Affairs Office.