Failed Efforts and Challenges of America’s Last Months in Iraq
Mario Tama/Getty Images
A ceremony in December 2011 at the Sather Air Base in Baghdad on the withdrawal of American forces. A bid to keep about 5,000 American troops in place failed.
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: September 22, 2012
The request was an unusual one, and President Obama himself made the confidential phone call to Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president.
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President Obama with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in 2011.
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 forAyad 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.
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