Robert Ford was one of the State Department’s leading Middle
East experts. He joined the Foreign Service in the 1980s serving across the
Arab world including appointments to Bahrain, Egypt and Algeria .
During the 2000s he served three tours in Iraq as
a political adviser and Deputy Ambassador before going on to be the Ambassador
to Syria from 2011-2014. Ford is now a resident scholar at the Middle East
Institute .
This is an interview with Ford about his time in Iraq and Syria and some
lessons learned for American foreign policy.
1. You first went to
Iraq in 2003 to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Paul Bremer’s
original plan was for a long term occupation that would include institutional
reforms to Iraq’s politics and economy. That contrasted with the view of many
in the American military leadership that believed the U.S. presence in the
country was the cause of violence and therefore advocated for a speedy
withdrawal. Was either of those a viable plan right after the invasion?
It would be generous to say that there was any detailed
American plan in 2003. The complete
meltdown of the Iraqi state was a surprise, and there was no detailed plan to
manage security after the state collapse.
In the absence of serious provincial or national security forces, had
the U.S. military withdrawn in 2003, most likely local armed groups would have
seized control of localities. We saw
this in the autumn of 2003 when the nascent Jaysh al-Mahdi seized control of
parts of Kufa, for example. It perhaps
would have come to resemble parts of Syria now under fragmented opposition
groups' control. Meanwhile, by the
summer of 2003 the CPA launched an effort to stand up in stages a new,
permanent government. Sometimes its objectives were laudable -- building up
institutions to protect human rights, for example -- but my own sense is that
American efforts were too broad and because all institution building projects
and draft laws were important, in the end nothing was. Above all, we failed to understand quickly
enough the latent divisions in Iraqi society that truly hobbled, for example,
American efforts to build new Iraqi army units.
2. In 2004 you went
to work as an adviser to Ambassadors John Negroponte and then Zalmay Khalilzad.
Both tried to come up with comprehensive strategies to take on the insurgency. Then
in 2007 you were a member of the Joint Strategic Assessment Team put together
by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to give advice on the
Surge. Despite the changes in personnel the U.S. goals in Iraq remained the
same, bring down violence to an acceptable level that would allow for a U.S.
withdrawal. The period of Negroponte and Khalilzad was considered a failure,
while the Surge is widely praised. What do you think were the big differences
between those two times in the occupation?
Ambassadors Negroponte and Khalilzad had the same
strategy: strongly support Iraqi efforts
to establish first a transitional and then a permanent Iraqi government that
would (a) take some of the wind out of the various insurgencies by including
representative political elements in political structures and (b) take the lead
in maintaining internal security such that American military and political
involvement could diminish steadily with time.
That was still the plan during the surge - the surge was simply a
complement to efforts to better ground the permanent government. Notably, the Jaysh al-Mahdi was still a
serious problem in 2008 but especially after then prime minister Maliki
confronted it successfully in Basra more of its moderate elements shifted their
attention to politics. Sadrist elements,
for example, were in the Maliki cabinet.
(This left out hardline groups like Asa'ib Ahl Haq, obviously.) We no
longer had the constant JAM incursions into Najaf and Karbala, for example. The
biggest strategy difference between the 2003-2006 period and that of the surge,
starting in the second half of 2007, was that the Americans understood that
they would need to be more serious about mobilizing Iraqi Sunni Arabs in order
to marginalize the al-Qaida in Iraq elements. Maliki's confrontation with the Jaysh
al-Mahdi in Basra helped the Americans make the pitch to the Sunni Arabs that Maliki
was not an Iranian pawn, and there were promises of Sunni Arab access to
government hiring, project largesse and power sharing all made to the
Sahwa. The goodwill among Sunni Arabs
that the Americans managed to generate started to dissipate as the Iraqi
government began to break these promises as early as 2009, and the Americans
didn't react much. It was striking how
Sunni Arab tribal figures from places like Diyala and Abu Gharieb who had been
helpful to us landed in Iraqi detention without any kind of judicial process. While I personally raised cases with Maliki's
chief of staff, overall we failed to react strongly. That was a harbinger of what was to come later. Also a lesson in the limits of institution
building.
3. Your third and
final tour in Iraq was from 2008-2010 working as the Deputy Ambassador. That
covered the 2010 elections where Iyad Allawi’s Iraqiya came in first place, but
Nouri al-Maliki was able to maintain the premiership. Ali Khedery and Emma Sky
have recently written about there being a huge divide amongst Americans officials
over how to deal with the voting results and the government formation process. What
was your position in this debate, and what did you think about the final
decision that was made?
There was a disagreement among American officials for a time
after the 2009 Iraqi election, but when Vice President Biden decided we would
back Maliki, those disagreements didn't much affect U.S. policy. My sense at the time in 2010 was (a) we
needed a prime minister who would be much more supple dealing with Kurds and
Sunni Arabs and (b) who could better focus on the economy, and in particular
the energy sector so that Iraq could start to rebuild as the security situation
in 2010 was improving. I basically left
Iraq in February 2010 for my Damascus assignment but my colleagues told me that
the drive to back Maliki basically was that it would be faster for him to
assemble the needed confirmation votes in the Iraqi parliament than anyone
else, and as so often was the case with American policy in Iraq, we were in a
hurry; in this case the Americans wanted a new government stood up as quickly
as possible in order for us to have a partner with which to negotiate the
future of American military forces in Iraq. It is important for outsiders like us to
understand that Iraqi politics and consensus-building is not only difficult but
very time-consuming.
4. In 2011 you moved
on as Ambassador to Syria. The Obama administration’s policy there has been
roundly criticized.Could you clarify what the strategy was and was it sound?
The Syrian uprising started three weeks after I arrived in
Damascus when there was a spontaneous demonstration in downtown Damascus in
response to police abuse of a motorist. From the beginning of the uprising we urged in
public and in private for the Syrian authorities to (a) not use an iron fist
against what were basically peaceful protest marches and (b) to open a genuine
dialogue with opposition figures who would have some influence with the protesters.
I told senior Syrian officials at the
Presidency and Foreign Ministry specifically that they couldn't hope to repeat
the Hama tactics of 1982 and succeed in 2011 in an age of phones with cameras,
internet and satellite TV. At the same
time, we urged the Syrian opposition activists to eschew violence and I
constantly warned them to avoid provoking a Syrian government crackdown since
the U.S. would not respond militarily to such an iron fist. I urged the opposition to negotiate with the
government.
Some in the Syrian government said they wanted dialogue and
to be fair to the government in early 2011 they released some dissidents like
Haithem al-Maleh. A large number of key opposition
activists got permission to hold a first-time meeting in Qabun to organize
themselves to parley the government.
However, on the eve of the June 11 meeting Syrian secret police elements
occupied the meeting hall and arrested scores, thus forestalling the meeting. The most powerful elements in the Syrian
government clearly wanted any dialogue to be only with opposition it chose and
essentially controlled. As the
government cracked down harder and used more violence in late June and July, we
recognized that no matter what a few disingenuous Syrian officials might say,
the government was not interested in dialogue and negotiating reform. Thus, the US government tightened sanctions
and its rhetoric against Assad personally sharpened. I cannot see how we could have followed any
policy other than (a) and (b) at the start of the uprising in the spring of
2011.
Our publicly saying Assad has no legitimacy and should step
down turned out to hurt our credibility because we couldn't take steps to make
it happen. There were big international
and domestic pressures on the White House in mid 2011 for that statement, but
the end result didn't help us find a solution. More importantly, however, we didn't understand
in the first half of 2011 how hard the regime would fight not only to stay in
power but to avoid making any serious concessions. It was clear by September 2011 that the
country was headed towards widespread fighting and civil war; much of what I
saw on the ground reminded me of Algeria in the early 1990s [during the civil
war there]We still hoped to get to a dialogue and peaceful negotiation, but
without changing the military balance on the ground, there was never any hope
that would happen.
5. You ended up
resigning as Ambassador to Syria because you could not support the White
House’s strategy. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and ex-CIA Director
Leon Panetta also criticized the administration’s Middle East policy. A common
theme amongst all thee of you was that the president did not seem to want to be
involved in either war. Would you say that is a correct characterization of
Obama and what does it say about his stance towards the region?
The President is rightly cautious about getting involved in
other countries' civil wars. And after
the terrible losses and problems in Iraq, and Afghanistan, the American public
is extremely reluctant. The President is
also keenly interested in the legalities of what we do abroad, and much of our
Syria policy stems from the interpretation of administration lawyers that we
can't intervene military across the Syrian border and thus violate Syrian
sovereignty no matter how many people the Syrian government kills inside its
borders. There is a good study to be
done one day on the humanitarian ramifications of existing international law
and the shortcomings of responsibility to protect resolutions.
6. What do you think
the U.S. should be doing about the wars in Syria and Iraq?
The administration now has a bifurcated approach. It is backing a wobbly Iraqi state, and I
sincerely hope it will be tough about the conditionality linked to political
progress in return for American military support. I worry about that because my experience is
that once we get into these military situations in Iraq we tend to focus more
on military angles rather than being tough on the politics. Will we really be ready to withhold help if
the Iraqis won't make the hard political decisions and concessions to each
other? I get concerned when American
officials praise the Popular Mobilization Units without also warning that we
can't work at all with fighters who viciously violate any community's human
rights.
In Syria, by contrast, the administration has always avoided
working with the Syrian state or the opposition. It is not a secret that we have given a few armed
opposition groups limited aid, but the accent has to be on the word
"limited". Meanwhile, we have
countenanced other countries' giving material aid to their client groups. The overall levels of aid have been far too
small and thus armed opposition groups have competed with each other for scarce
resources and foreign patronage. That is the key reason they are divided;
withholding aid from them and allowing different countries to operate in a
patron-client relationship has made them divided.
In Iraq we have declined to provide direct aid to Kurds and
Sunni Arab tribal elements, insisting upon respect for a central Iraq
command.
In Syria we have consistently done just the opposite. We
could have built, and could still build, an effective Syrian armed opposition
that would fight the Islamic State and Asad.
The advances the armed opposition groups have made on the ground in 2015
after other regional countries increased their aid sharply shows what might
have been done far earlier. But the most
important thing to remember about our strategy in Syria that whatever we do has
to aim at building support inside the Syrian government, inside the Syrian
opposition and among the various international actors for a national political
negotiation.
7. Emma Sky who spent
just about the same amount of time in Iraq as you did has written that what
happened in Iraq after the 2003 invasion was not inevitable. She argued that
there were many possible paths the country could have followed. That challenged
the conventional wisdom that the U.S. made so many mistakes for so many years
that Iraq was doomed to become a failed state. Where do you fall in that
debate, and what kinds of lessons do you think Iraq and Syria can teach the
U.S. about how it deals with the Middle East?
I worked closely with Emma on many issues in Iraq and have
huge respect for her views. Absolutely
mistakes we made in Iraq aggravated the situation. For example, by excluding Saddam military and
intelligence officers entirely, and leaving them destitute without even small
pensions, we were bound to push some of them into the insurgency. We stood by as then Prime Minister Maliki
stood up military chains of command that excluded national structures and other
community representatives that alienated both Kurds and Sunnis and even many
Shia. Most importantly, we often pushed
the Iraqis to unsustainable political agreements, or to skip needed political
agreements, in the interest of American time schedules. Look at how many issues related to the 2005
Iraqi constitution are unresolved, ranging from oil to human rights to
decentralization. That is above all
because of our interest in keeping to an American timetable. So, I conclude that there are three key
lessons we must learn going forward.
First, Americans are not now and won't be the key actors in
these countries. Indigenous leaders,
indigenous forces, indigenous factors will always be determinant. We can influence but we cannot control and
sometimes when we think we have a deal we discover it's not sustainable because
we didn't consider or understand the local factors of the situation.
Second, for whatever engagement we have in the region,
because we must work with local partners who themselves need to generate broad
support, we have to be patient. Syrians
won't fix their country's problems in a year.
Iraqis won't. Egyptians
won't. Moreover, being patient is not
the same as giving blank checks.
Third, although it should be obvious, I want to highlight
that we MUST be aware of unintended consequences of our military action. We didn't plan to melt down the Iraqi state,
but we did. We didn't intend to set in
train the establishment of a Kurdish separatist region in northern Syria, but
we are doing just that in our drive with the PYD/YPG against the Islamic State.
Lastly, I have a perhaps naive hope that we as Americans
will stand up for the dignity and rights of the peoples and communities in the
region. It is the moral thing to do and
over the long term it is the best thing to do in terms of our own national
security.
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