The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq
By Emma Sky, Atlantic Books, 400 pages, $24.12
Emma Sky’s book is an eminently sensible “tale of unintended consequences, both of President [George W.] Bush’s efforts to impose democracy and of President [Barack] Obama’s detachment”. A critical insider’s account, it undermines the too-easy assumptions of left as well as right, exposing the achievements and (more often) stupidities of both administrations’ approaches to Iraq.
In 2003, Sky was working for the British Council when she saw a Foreign and Commonwealth Office email asking for civilian volunteers. Despite opposing the war, she signed up, arrived into chaos, and improbably found herself governing the province of Kirkuk.
When Saddam Hussain was a Western ally, a quarter of a million Kurds and Turkomans had been cleansed from Kirkuk and tens of thousands of (mainly Shiite) Arabs moved in. Assyrian Christians and Yazidis added to the mix. “No group recognised the grievances of the others,” writes Sky, who refers too to “the American tribe” whom she at first railed against, “so out of place, running around in uniforms which looked like pyjamas, with their name tags on their chests”.
Sky witnessed the gallop from regime change to state collapse in the first days of occupation. The Coalition Provisional Authority and the governing council together institutionalised sectarianism: “The emphasis had been on identifying communal representatives rather than bridging communal divides.”
Unelected Iraqi elites set about seizing the spoils, excluding Sunnis and the Shiite working-class Sadrist movement. The sweeping de-Baathification programme led by Ahmad Chalabi — a darling of the neocons later discovered to be spying for the Iranians — exempted Shiites but not Sunni Baathists.
Most had joined the Baath not out of ideology but for career promotion, and the programme emptied schools of teachers and hospitals of doctors, impoverishing Sunni families. The closure of state-run enterprises and the dissolution of the military exacerbated the situation. The new Iraqi army, born into the task of fighting Iraqis, would never become a national institution.
Sky was called back as political adviser to the US general Raymond Odierno in 2007. The diminutive and bookish “internationalist” became an unlikely but firm friend to the oversized sports loving soldier during the dual “surge” — of US troops and of concrete for blast walls. Her section on this period is urgent and compelling, the only one in which the occupation finds some redemption.
Sky arrived in Baghdad during the worst of the civil war, with bombs exploding and corpses littering unlit streets. “If the head was cut off, it was Shia; if the head was drilled through, it was Sunni.”
Reversing the Rumsfeld doctrine, reinforced American troops moved off base and into Iraqi communities, constructing barriers and gathering intelligence to improve security and trust. Sunnis formed Sahwa militias to drive Al Qaida from their towns while seeking US protection from the new Iranian-backed government.
At the same time, the Shiite leader Moqtada Al Sadr froze the activities of his armed group, Jaysh Al Mahdi, which had lost popular support as it degenerated into ethnic-cleansing and crime. In the breathing space, economic life returned and community reconciliation began.
Through this comparatively successful period, Sky lived at Camp Victory, choking on a “parochial and paranoid” military worldview, ears filled with the inane propaganda of the American Forces Network, and negotiating an absurd realm of acronyms. Sometimes the acronyms serve as a reality-reducing mechanism — the carnage caused by car bombs in a marketplace becomes “88LNKIA” (local nationals killed in action).
“The Unravelling” reads almost like a novel: a detailed and darkly humorous account that tries to understand everyone involved, Iraqis and Americans, on their own terms. Sky’s character sketches are as tolerant as they are critical, and her argumentative, chirpy and intelligent personality is thoroughly engaging.
The book also has a great sense of historical context. At one point, Sky is accused by the Kurdish chief Massoud Barzani of being a latter-day Gertrude Bell; in Kirkuk, she reads the 1925 reminiscences of a British political officer, her sort-of predecessor. Throughout the narrative she weaves in Iraqi history since the collapse of the Ottomans, and she shows a genuine, unromantic affection for Iraqis, often escaping the security cordon to enjoy hospitality in the Sunni triangle or visit Shiite and Yazidi shrines.
Sky was present again for the drawdown of forces after 2008, a hopeful era when it seemed a more cohesive Iraq was preparing for a brighter future, and that the “former exiles ... and Iranian proxies” might finally slip from power.
In the 2010 election, with both Sunni and Shiite support, the nonsectarian, nationalist Iraqiya bloc won two seats more than Nouri Al Maliki’s State of Law coalition. But many MPs were disqualified by the de-Baathification committees, while Al Maliki demanded a recount and then manoeuvred to stay on as prime minister.
To his military’s disgust, Barack Obama ignored the deadlock for two months. Chris Hill, the new US ambassador, told Odierno that Iraq wasn’t ready for democracy and needed a Shiite strongman. An opinion poll disagreed: only 14 per cent of Iraqis thought Al Maliki should stay in power. But the Iranians lobbied hard to preserve him and thus to alienate Iraq from the rest of the Arab world.
Obama’s acquiescence led one of Sky’s Iraqi informants to complain: “Either the Americans are stupid or there is a secret deal with Iran” — a view that is still more widespread today. Where George W. Bush made democracy a totem, and thought it could be delivered via occupation, Obama gave up on it entirely. The results of this equally misguided (and orientalist) approach are painfully evident today.
Sky saw the start of Al Maliki’s slide into paranoid authoritarianism. His regime abandoned (or arrested) the Sahwa militias who had fought Al Qaida, detained thousands of Sunnis without trial, killed dozens of peaceful protesters, and appointed loyalists rather than competent officers to the army.
In November 2013, Obama praised “a strong, prosperous, inclusive and democratic Iraq”. By July 2014, Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) had driven the Iraqi army out of Mosul and set about cleansing religious minorities from the north. The confused response has so far been led by Iranian-backed Shiite militias. The US Air Force is back in theatre — and until now failing miserably. “The Unravelling” is an indispensable tool for understanding the background to this failure.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
