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...it would be of significant benefit to us both tactically and strategically."

By AcademicElephant Posted in Special Features — Comments (31) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

In our second interview, Jeff and I sat down with Colonel Michael Everett, who works on strategic effects for MNF-I. What this means is that he advises General Bill Caldwell and General David Petraeus on the development of the Iraqi parliament. So while Colonel Everett may not be a household name, he is deeply involved in encouraging the Iraqis to develop legislative tools to resolve their differences and advance their new nation. Colonel Everett has served 23 years in the army as an Infantry officer, as secretary to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and with the NATO training mission in Iraq. He then taught at the Army War College and returned to Iraq in May, 2006.

Given the nature of his appointment, Colonel Everett is in a position to focus on the thorny issue of developing a national Iraqi institutions from the perspective of someone who deals with the Iraqis every day, and as such it was an unusually informative and detailed interview--and not the sort of thing we could get in the US. So while I don't always agree with the Colonel's positions--notably on the implication that it is somehow beholden on us to decipher the motivation behind the deadly Iranian meddling in Iraq and engage in a "constructive dialogue"--I think you'll appreciate the thoughtful and candid way he shared his expertise, espcially on the significance of the provincial elections in Iraq, the ramifications of the supplemental bill as recently passed by congress, and progress in al Anbar.

Read on...

We started out talking about the disconnect between the way Americans seem, for the most part, to understand Iraq's democracy (or what is perceived as a lack thereof), and what is actually happening in Baghdad:

There's a couple of things we need to understand to put this in the proper framework. This is a brand-new democracy; if you look at our democracy, we had the preamble to our constitution, we had the constitution signing and then we had this thing called the Bill of Rights...The point I'm trying to make is that if you look at how long it took us to put our constitution together and when you consider that we were not fighting an insurgency, and let me just draw your attention to this, this is what we used to brief General Petraeus. And what I want to show you is that here we are at the end of April, and this basically tracks the top five key pieces of legislation...you have the hydrocarbon legislation to include the what I want to call the various supporting pieces of legislation that need to go along with this to make it something usable. The article 140 legislation and other disputed territories primarily focused on Kirkuk and redrawing the new boundaries of Kurdistan. And then you have the election legislation, de-Baathification and the constitutional review.

Now I ask you this: If our congress had in two months to do a constitutional amendment--let's pick one, one of the more interesting amendments, article two, the freedom of expression and owning a gun, and then pass a supplemental and address abortion and some other very emotional issues for the United States? Could we do it? The answer is probably not.

Now, I'm not making excuses for the Iraqi government. There are issues and I don't think I'm going to tell you anything new. There is this sectarian divide, and our biggest challenge is to get the Iraqis to start thinking nationally, and to get the Sunnis, the Shia and the Kurds--the political blocks--to start thinking nationally, and not along sectarian lines. In that perhaps is the greatest challenge in forming this democracy and you see that--their parliament as you know has only one cabinet so the passage of laws and the road to reconciliation starts at the Iraqi parliament.

So I think the American public, their concerns are very valid. There are some fundamental challenges with their constitution that need to be addressed to make their government more effective.

I then asked him to speak to the specifics of "constitutional reform" in Iraq. I think most Americans might say they think the Iraqi constitution needs revision, but I'm not sure how clear we are on the specifics:

When we reviewed the constitution we needed to figure out how many implementing laws the Iraqi constitution needed for the articles to become effective; in other words for those articles to produce a tangible event that causes progress. And there are 142 implementing laws that the Iraqi constitution needs to be effective.

And you see that here with the hydrocarbon legislation, which basically takes Iraq/s oil wealth and profits and distributes it equally among Sunni, Shia and Kurds. And again this is a key piece of legislation that the constitution did not address, or more accurately said did not fully address to resolve some of the key issues, the issues of revenue sharing. Current fields vs. unexplored fields, that's one example. But the issue is, and we have to be very careful with the Constitutional Review Committee, what we want is for the committee not to address issues that are much to divisive and you never reach an end point. Once the committee reviews the constitution it will make its recommendations to the CoR, the Iraqi Parliament, and the parliament will debate the recommendations of the CRC.

We then turned to the one-year anniversary of the Iraqi government, which is on May 30th. As Colonel Everett arrived in Baghdad around the same time, I thought he might have valuable perspective on how the al Maliki administration has developed:

I think that there has been a lot of criticism of the Prime Minister's inability to bring Iraq closer to reconciliation, however, and I want to go back to putting this in the proper context. I mean, here we have a nation that hasn't had a democracy in a long, long time, and we have a Prime Minister who is fighting an insurgency and who has a very divisive cabinet. As you know, there was a sectarian quota for his cabinet.

I think Prime Minister al Maliki is doing a good job trying to reduce sectarian tensions and getting his executive branch to start thinking on a national level rather than down sectarian lines. We saw that recently with the Sadrists pulling out of the cabinet and Maliki announcing that he will replace them with technocrats, which is certainly what this country needs.

But once again I don't want to put lipstick on a pig, here. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that oh, things are just wonderful. It has been a challenge for us to make him understand that you can't have leaders in the government either on the national or the provincial level who are aligned with militia or aligned with organization, people who are involved in nefarious activity. And I really think he understands that. I say that, because if you look at the support that he has rendered to us for Fahrd al-Qanoon it's quite remarkable. In the instances I'm aware of, when he is brought the intel of certain people in his government who are conducting nefarious activity he is extremely helpful and he's completely supportive of our actions.

It has occurred to me that in a way, the transition from al Maliki to the next prime minister of Iraq, whomever it may be, will be the moment of truth for Iraq. Will a leader hand over the reigns of power, possibly to a political rival, not at the point of a gun but because the voters say so at the ballot box?

Certainly it will be a litmus test of this new democracy. It's speculation on my part, but I think the Iraqis will handle it well and this is why I say that: the Iraqis are learning very quickly from us, I think, you're seeing a lot of former Iraqi politicians positioning themselves for Maliki's departure. So if that is any sign of how well they're learning, then it's potentially a good sign. But you know, I think that with regard to that question and to the whole question of what is going to happen to Iraq two or three years from now, perhaps the political plates, the fault lines will move. I think progress is being made politically. Unfortunately, an element that we don't have is time. It is going to take more time.

I asked the Colonel about the response of Iraqi politicians to the bill mandating a withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq beginning October 1 and ending no later than March 1.

They have not made an official response, but I would say that the Prime Minister is opposed to it because once again it plays into the hands of the insurgents. If Osama bin Laden stood up and said "Here's my timetable for withdrawing from Iraq" it would be of significant benefit to us both tactically and strategically.

In other words, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are playing into the hands of the insurgents, both tactically and strategically.

Lovely.

Colonel Everett went on to say that establishing a timeline is also the goal of the Sadrists:

So, of course the Sadrists, that's what they want. And there's some discussion, can you bring the radical Sadrists to the table if you announce a timeline. To me, that's really the benefit of announcing a timeline because potentially you could bring the Sadrists to the table. And quite frankly I don't think the Sadrists want to hear that we're leaving in 2009 or 2010. The Sadrists don't care when we're leaving, I think, it's a matter of making that announcement.

In the abstract I agree that it would be nice to bring the Sadrists into the political fold and negotiate with them rather than shoot at them, but I had to wonder if it would be possible to integrate them into a government not to their specific design:

Perhaps. We constantly struggle with--one of the things that makes democracy work is this concept of moderates. Whenever there is a debate over a huge issue we find the moderates that bring the parties together. And I think politically that's the challenge for Iraq, finding moderates and empowering them. Unfortunately we've learned a very hard lesson--every time we've tried to bolster moderates their lives become endangered. So I think the solution here is that you have to really encourage a moderate form of political leadership here.

Look at Anbar province. You may have read the Marine intelligence officer from about a year ago. We were ready to write off Anbar, to pull out and give it to AQI and we'll just do some type of containment. And then we engaged the tribal sheiks, they finally started to understand that the issue in Anbar was not the coalition but AQI. I'm sure if you talked to the Marines out west or some of our people in the Office of National Reconciliation, they'll tell you that if you can turn around Anbar, you can turn around any province in Iraq. So I think that we need to find these moderates and protect them, and protect their supporters.

Jeff followed up to ask what Colonel Everett, as an officer of infantry, thought the effect of the supplemental bill as passed by the congress would have on our troops:

The short answer is "It's not good." You go out with these units in the field and it's July, it's 120 degrees and they have eight pounds of armor on them plus ammunition, hand grenades, claymores and frags, and they've spent two or three days in their joint security station getting mortered and attacked and then they go back to their forward operating base and they log on to their computers and they see things like that--it is not very helpful. And I understand the political dynamic back in the states, however leaders need to be responsible, more responsible than average citizens when they make comments like that that could potentially help the enemy...You can say things to criticize a war in a helpful way, and that's not helpful.

We then moved on to the issue of provincial elections. Like "constitutional reform," "provincial elections" has become a catchphrase that is tossed around in condemnations of Iraq's government. So why are provincial elections, how would they serve to stabilize Iraq and when might they happen?

Two points. One is that it is important for reconciliation and bringing the Sunnis into the political dialogue, for as you know they did not participate in the elections. The most important aspect of the provincial elections is that you can finally bring the Sunnis to the political table and they can finally represent their constituents in a fair and impartial manner. That's the most important thing about the regional elections.

And then there's this whole thing about once again, it demonstrates the ability of the Iraqi government to create an important, tangible political event. You know, there's a lot of planning that goes into this.

The other thing that goes into this are the associated laws. As you know there's the Provincial Powers Law, it is still not very clear what authorities the provincial council has vis a vis the provincial governor. And the Provincial Powers Law doesn't necessarily have to pass, but to make the elections better the Provincial Powers Law should pass to define those authorities.

And so we look at the provincial elections as, okay, a demonstration of Iraqi democracy, and more importantly I think it sets an incredible foundation for the next big step in the progression of democracy, and that is again the relationship that the provincial council has with the governor and also the concept of federalism--the relationship that the provinces and council and governor have with the national government. What's interesting in a lot of the reports I've seen from the Provincial Reconstruction Teams is that the local government is almost completely divorced from the national government. And the reason for that is that the national government is still struggling with providing the services to the provinces that a national government usually would. So the provinces aren't seeing any benefits to having a national government with lots of authority and the ability to control the country.

So how can the PRTs help in this process?

Problem with the PRTs are that they aren't connected to the national government and there's a seam between them and the national government. The United Nations is trying to close that seam by putting United Nation officers at the provincial level with the primary responsibility of creating a dialogue between the governors and the national government. Whenever a governor comes into Baghdad we start setting up as many meetings as we can so we can finally make the provinces understand that the national government isn't just there to take your money and do other bad things; it's also there to provide services.

At that point in the interview, an energetic man with close-cropped dark hair strode up and asked us what we were doing (I should add that the interview took place in a kind of gallery overlooking one of the palace's grand halls--you can see it in the pictures--and so people were walking by from time to time). It turned out to be General Caldwell, and the following dialogue ensued:

EVERETT: Last Saturday we had this all hands and General Caldwell said "Everyone who hasn't done an interview stand up." This is it, sir.

CALDWELL: This is a real interview?

EVERETT: It's a real interview

CALDWELL: What are you talking about?

ME: Regional elections. I'm a blogger, sir.

CALDWELL: You all are really going to put this on the blogs after this?

ME: Yes, sir.

CALDWELL: Remember, it doesn't count if your name isn't in there. If your name isn't in there it's non-attributional. We don't want any of that State Department stuff--off the record, background.

EVERETT: Sir, we got it.

So that explains how we got the interview.

Oh, and I'll be talking to General Caldwell at the end of the week.

We returned to discussing the provincial elections:

The United Nations plays a very important role in this. The United Nations has two key missions in Iraq, the constitutional review and the provincial elections. And the trigger for provincial elections will be the elections law. Once the elections law is passed--and that gives the independent high elections commission its authority--elections can happen four to six months after that and it becomes a logistical exercise--getting the ballot boxes in place.

I must say I worry about the United Nations taking the lead on these two critical projects, and the UN staff I've encountered so far in Iraq has not filled me with confidence.

In terms of when the elections might take place, the Colonel said December was ideal, March was "the absolute red line" in terms of acceptability. He noted that this was not a done deal:

And once again it gets complicated because you have article 140 with Kirkuk and the Kurds and there's some discussion if you have to have article 140 before or after the elections because article 140 will redo the boundaries and just like in America where you have--I'm not accusing the Kurds of gerrymandering--but you redraw the boundaries depending on the voter demographics.

The UN has a map that shows the voter demographics from the national elections. What's interesting is that it's an example of how all the issues divide along these ethnic and sectarian fault lines. If you look at these ethnic fault lines, that's where all the violence is. If you look at the ethnic fault lines in Baghdad, all the violence--you can look at the voter demographics and you know where the violence will be. And that's why Baghdad has become the battleground because you have all these strong ethnic mix neighborhoods.

So getting back to your election question there's still a lot of discussion if you need to have article 140 and Kirkuk and these Kurdish questions--if you have to have these boundaries drawn before the elections, because if you don't have them drawn before the elections and then you have the Kirkuk 140 re-elections and you have the boundaries redone, and do you have to have new provincial elections?

I found this an interesting proposition because it would absolutely inflame the Kurds, for whom the resolution of Kirkuk has become a crucial symbol. Reviewing the interview tape, I wondered if the Kurds would even participate in provincial elections without article 140, and from the rest of his answer it seems to me the same thing had occurred to Colonel Everett:

But it's interesting--there's some discussion, and this just came up a week ago, if you can't do nation-wide provincial elections, do you want to just do them in those sections where the Sunnis are under-represented? The question is, can you piece-meal this? Can you just do certain provinces and the whole issue gets back to security. For us it's very important, and for the Iraqi army, but in theory, though, as the Iraqi army develops their capability and they become larger, when we do have provincial elections you will have a larger Iraqi security footprint, which may reduce our footprint.

This seemed an opportune moment to ask for his assessment of the ISF:

The police have issues, lots of issues. And if you look at counter-insurgency doctrine, it's the police force that has to make the difference. Why? Because it's the police force that's walking the beat, and that's the challenge right now. You've got national police and local police that are corrupt and are participating in nefarious activity. And that's where the effort needs to go right now.

As part of the overall surge in Iraq we've expanded the number of the NPTTs ("nippets"), National Police Training Teams. We've increased the number of NPTTs and the number of local police trainging teams.

The intersting question goes right back to legislation and that's the provincial authority law because the authority of the govenor is not clearly defined. So if the govenor wants to fire his corrupt police chief, he can't do it and it goes over to the provincial council and there are sectarian issues there. A good example is in Basra, where there are issues with the police chief down there. He has some issues, the govenor is trying to fire him and it just hasn't happened. So again, clearly [the priority should be] outlining and deliniating the authorities of the govenor and the other members of the Iraqi governement so they can make on the spot decisions and get on with them.

Given his recent travels around the region and the announcement that the Kuwaitis are prepared to open an embassy in Baghdad, I if the Prime Minister might be beginning to form a coherhent foreign policy:

I hate to sound like a pessimist, but I'm always very careful with the Iraqis--as Gen Petreaus says, be careful when you spike the ball. It certainly is an interesting study in cultural differences and Iraqis and Arabs tend to be overly optimistic sometimes.

I think what Maliki is doing is good, and once again there are signs that he is trying to form a cohernat regional policy, but the real issue is the Iranians and the Syrians, and until Maliki deals with those two issues directly there's going to be significant issues.

The Iranian government and Prime Minister Maliki have had a relationsip for a long time, and I'm not trying to imply that it involves nefarious activity but that relationship is there, and in fairness to Maliki the Iranians aren't going anywhere. They're his neighbor, and traditionally there has been a great deal of friction between the Iranians and the Iraqis.

I guess the short answer is that our governement and the Iraqi governement--we're going to have to deal with the Iranians eventually--now I'm not implying a military solution [I suggested here that this might be a way to get his name in the news; the Colonel responded that he wants to go back to the States, but not that way...] but I sense that Maliki has perhaps turned the corner with the Iranians because it did seem at first there was some resistance, but as you may know, and God I hope this is open source, we have held some senior Iranian officials that were involved with nefarious activity. Unfortunatley the Iranians are bringing into this country some very deadly ordinance, some EFPs.

What we want to see is--and it's amazing how we measure this and how we track it. It's a decrease in the use of EFPs and other things that we know are coming from Iraq. And from a military standpoint, it's very clear: Stop bringing in Russian ordinance and Syrian ordinance and rockets made by the Hezbollah into Iraq. And I think you've seen the numbers--a significant number of our soldiers are being killed by EFPs. You take that out of the equation and I want to say we could probably reduce our casualties almost in half.

By half?

So, at what point does this become an act of war?

It's a very thin peice of ice, but absolutely--and I hate to use this war because everyone gets excited, but during the Vietnam war you had sanctuaries in Cambodia, where the North Vietnamese brought their stuff down the Ho Chi Min trail, and it was only later in the war when we began aggressively went into Cambodia and started attacking these sanctuaries. Am I recommending we do this? Absolutely not. But as you know, wars are fought at all levels--tatical, operational, strategic. And you have to fight conflict in that matter. And you have to reduce predominantly the Shia but there's also evidence that the Qod force is supporting the Sunnis. You have to approach this along all lines. You have to have the means to counter the IEDs. You have to do cordon and search missions to find the caches, and you must reduce or eliminate the ordinance and weapons coming in from Iran. And if you don't address this conflict along all of these lines, you're not going to be decisive.

That "absolutely not" was not entirely convincing. "Decisive" was much more so.

I wondered if there is any way to detach Syria and Iran, and so to diminish that alliance?

I think you can. I think you can make the Syrians understand that they have more to lose in the relationship with Iran than they have to gain. I think we can split that relationship or alliance.

Jeff asked if domestic politics were a barrier to taking action against Iran:

I think it is. The overall strategic question is what do the Iranians really want? They don't want to come into Iraq and kill Americans--I mean, they're doing that, but that's not their goal. What is it that they want vis a vis their nuclear program? Do the Iranians really want a dialogue with us? And this whole issue that if you look at Iran they don't have any allies in the region. They have the Russians and the Chinese in the north, Afghanistan to the east and Iraq to the west. So what is it that they're trying to communicate to us by doing this? And once we figure that out, it will lead to a constructive dialogue.

For me, this was the most problemmatic answer of the interview, and to be fair to Colonel Everett the foreign policy question was not on our prepared list, so it came a little out of left field. But I am concerned by the proposition that we can see terrorist violence as a sort of prelude to a conversation, and that if we can just decipher the subtext, it's possible to have a "constructive dialogue" by the perpetuators of such actions.

To conclude, I asked how vested the Iraqis are in the notion of a representational government?

It goes back to a question that I was asked at the War College--define what a government is for the average citizen. And it's a simple answer: basic, essential services. And as long as the Iraqis don't feel that they're receiving the basic services--security, electricity, water etc., then their confidence in their government is not going to be where it should be. Now it's improving--and I understand looking at the recent poll data things are getting better for the average Iraqi. Now once again, the violence is focused in Baghdad If you look outside of Baghdad, yeah there are some bad things that happen but for the most part, there's not that much violence outside of Baghdad.

In Iraq, it simply gets back to "Can the government protect my family? Can it provide those essential services and create an environment that allows me to go to work and provide for my family. And I think for the most part in Iraq the answer is--let me back up for a minute--the issue in Iraq still is that you still have for the most part because of this sectarian relationship, for most Iraqis their basic services are being provided by the local community. I personally don't think they have seen the importance and significance of a national government.

Now part of that is because of the culture. The Sunnis tend to align themselves along tribal lines while the Shia tend to be along religious lines and around religious leaders in the community. But I think the essence of the problem here is that many, most Iraqis are still aligning themselves along sectarian lines because they're not sure of the future. And once we can assure the Iraqis that Iraq will be a stable nation you will be a stable nation--that you'll have a strong national governement that will provide the services your family needs--you'll see them drift away from the sectarian blocks.

So can we see Anbar as a microcosm of what's possible in Iraq?

Yes--and it can happen. Again, I'm not going to sit here and say "Everything's great and all these thing will pass and we're going to come home in October anyway!" There are significant problems here, but once again if we look at the challenges this governement has you have to appreciate what they have done and what they are doing.

When you go to the War College you teach the elements of national policy: diplomacy, military, communication, and this is sort of my little thing--there's an element of national power that we dont' have, and that's time. Democracies don't have time, and that is the one capital that we need that we don't have.

Colonel Everett has an important and ominous point there. By cutting off not so much the supply of funds as the supply of time, congress proposes to suffocate this mission. It seems to me the measured, distinctly non-partisan opinion of experts like Colonel Everett could go a long way towards opening eyes to the peril of this course of action.

Better watch out, Colonel--by giving an interview like this, you risk being asked to do it again!