Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir - Hardcover

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Christopher R. Hill is currently the Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and a monthly columnist for the online journal Project Syndicate. He was a career diplomat, a four-time ambassador, nominated by three presidents, who served as Ambassador to Iraq, the Republic of Korea, Poland, and the Republic of Macedonia and as President Bush’s assistant secretary to East Asia. Hill has received many State Department awards including the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award and the Robert S. Frasure Award for Peace Negotiations. He is the author of Outpost—Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir. Follow @AmbChrisHill.

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Outpost

PROLOGUE

It was July 2009 and I had never been to the capital of Dhi Qar Province before. Nasiriya lies in south-central Iraq about 185 dusty miles southeast of Baghdad. It looked like other impoverished southern Iraqi towns I had seen in my first few months in Iraq, neglected for decades by Saddam Hussein, left out in the desert sun and sandstorms to fend for themselves. The motorcade trip up from Tallil Air Base, where I had arrived in a small military prop aircraft earlier in the morning, took about an hour and a half but seemed much longer as we passed endless two-story buildings, dilapidated fences, and dry riverbeds and canals. Men wrapped their heads in traditional keffiyeh and moved slowly along the side of the road, as if to conserve energy in the July heat, not appearing to notice the added dust caused by our six black armored Chevy Suburbans as we made our way to a meeting with the Provincial Council. Signs and posters bearing Muqtada al-Sadr’s dyspeptic glare didn’t seem to add to or detract from the décor of the otherwise drab surroundings. His image, too, was cloaked in dust. I stared out the window from my seat in the back of the vehicle, my mind wandering at times to the broader project of Iraq, what it had done to us, what it had done to the Iraqis, and thinking perhaps not so literally: when are we going to get there?

I had come from Baghdad to Dhi Qar Province to do what U.S. ambassadors do all over the world: meet with local officials and get a sense of what is on people’s minds outside the confines of the capital city. U.S. forces had liberated Nasiriya in their triumphant march to Baghdad in 2003. The province was almost entirely Shia, the majority sect in Iraq that included some of the most trod-upon victims of the Saddam Hussein regime. Our forces expected jubilant crowds to greet them with rose petals, as our vice president at the time had predicted on national television with his confident tone of matter-of-fact certainty that fooled some and infuriated the rest. Instead, when our marines burst through Nasiriya in spring 2003, scattering Saddam’s forces, they saw pretty much what I saw: no joy in dustville, just ordinary people who, all things being equal, would probably have liked us to leave as soon as possible.

We arrived at the city hall and slowly piled out of our vehicles. I had taken my flak jacket (required attire on these trips) off in the car, not wanting to be seen by the staring Iraqis as if I expected one of them to shoot at me. It seemed so lacking in trust. I glanced around at the five-story apartment buildings surrounding us, wondering how the security advance team could possibly manage to deal with the kinds of random threats that could come from behind any one of those numerous windows. I looked around at the shops and the people on the streets, whose languid pace was in sharp contrast to the frenetic movement of the taxis and pickup trucks that seemed to be in a perpetual drag race. I walked up the half-dozen steps and met the Iraqi protocol official, who greeted me warmly (as Iraqis do so well) and escorted me and a few others into the building, while the rest of the security team waited in front of the building inside the SUVs, their motors still running to ensure a fast getaway, and, perhaps more practically, to keep the air conditioners going.

The head of the provincial assembly was not in town that day, so I was greeted as I emerged from the coffin-sized elevator with the leader of my security detail by the deputy head of the provincial council, Abdul Hadi Abdullah Mohan. The elevator had grunted and groaned the three-floor distance as if it had been asked to do something utterly beyond its capabilities. Mohan, perhaps out of shyness or something else, didn’t appear any more enthusiastic about greeting me than the elevator had been in conveying me, so I set to work to try to put him at ease, and say how pleased I was to be in Dhi Qar Province for the first time.

We sat down in his small office and were soon joined by several members of the provincial assembly, who together with the embassy and provincial reconstruction team staff made the office seem even smaller. Iraqi staffers dragged extra chairs through the door, their wooden legs screeching on the hard marble floor as if, like the elevator, they were being taken to a place they didn’t want to go.

After initial pleasantries, a ritual I knew all too well from my years living in the Balkans (the western part of the same Ottoman Empire that Nasiriya had spent so many centuries under), I opened with a point I would often make in such settings: the United States desires a long-term relationship with the people of Iraq, provided that the people of Iraq want the same. Our troops would be drawing down, but our interest in the well-being of the Iraqi people is enduring. I told him that while it is true the United States is very far away, Iraq would always be very close to our hearts. The war was a very difficult time for all. I described the agreements we had put in place with Iraq, the first governing the presence of our troops, and the second setting out our civilian relationship with Iraq. Thin gruel, to be sure, but nonetheless the documents could show the Iraqis that somebody had at least taken the time to put down on paper the accoutrements of what a normal relationship could eventually look like.

I always thought that our “Strategic Framework Agreement,” as it was called (or SFA, as it was inevitably abbreviated—in U.S.-military-occupied Iraq, everything under the sun seemed to be known by its abbreviation or acronym), looked very much like a 1950s-style Soviet “friendship” agreement with an Eastern European satellite. I had served in Poland during the early 1980s and could recall the government exhortations—often expressed in banners unfurled over streets and roads and on large billboards—to “implement” the friendship agreement, whatever that really meant. For the communist authorities it was an agreement to remind the public that the Soviet Union was their friend and would protect them. For the Soviets, it was an effort to legitimize their subjugation of Poland, but not a particularly successful one. As a Pole once explained to me, it is very bad manners to draw up a treaty with a country you have just invaded.

The U.S.-Iraqi SFA was, of course, none of the above, but it did represent an attempt to show there was a future in this odd relationship. But for each side it represented something very specific—and different. For the Americans, it was a document that took the relationship beyond one based only on military ties. Those were to be addressed in an instrument called the Security Agreement (SA), whose purpose was to serve as a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), much like the ones many countries have with the United States to provide the legal basis for troops on their soil. Needless to say, not all SOFAs are equal. Having worked in Japan on my previous assignment, I knew very well the complexity of the security agreement there, and the obvious fact that the U.S.-Japan SOFA, for example, does not permit U.S. forces to set up roadblocks and checkpoints in downtown Tokyo, or anywhere else in Japan for that matter. The U.S. military in Iraq welcomed the framework agreement, the SFA, as an agreement whose ultimate purpose would serve as a follow-on agreement that would put the U.S.-Iraqi relationship on a “normal” basis, even if there were to be further SOFA agreements to govern the future basing of U.S. troops.

Diplomatic agreements work best when both countries have a similar level of experience dealing with them. The SFA didn’t pass that test. For Iraqis, at least...