THE UNRAVELING
High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq
Emma Sky
Atlantic Books
383 pages; $28.99
Emma Sky has a lovely sense of irony about many things, from her evocative name to her frustrated dreams for Iraq, where, in the first decade of this century, she spent what she thinks of as the most important years of her life advising senior officers in the American military. "Amidst the horror of war, I had experienced more love and camaraderie than I had ever known," she writes. "I had become part of their band of brothers."
Many soldiers have felt that way, but Ms Sky was no soldier, and not even American. She had been among those who opposed the war, an Arabist in her mid-30s working for the British Council, a cultural and educational organisation. She thought she would go on temporary duty to Iraq after the shock and awe of 2003 to apologise, if she could, and try to help the Iraqi people. This was a common sentiment among Western Arabists at the time: We shouldn't have done this, but having done it, we must make it work.
Almost against Ms Sky's better judgment, as she writes in her important and disturbing memoir, The Unraveling, she quickly found herself sucked deep into the business of occupation as she tried to sort out the chaos after the fall of the tyrant Saddam Hussein. She thought she would be working with the British in the coalition forces that had participated in the invasion, but they told her to talk to the Americans running the show. She also thought she would be in Baghdad, but wound up about 150 miles to the north in Kirkuk.
This very slight woman, who had spent a part of her childhood as the lone girl in a British boys' school where her stepfather worked as a teacher, had developed a fascination with the Middle East when she spent a gap year as a kibbutznik in Israel. She went on to study at Oxford and in Egypt, and emerged an "internationalist" who was "dedicated to fighting injustice and promoting peace." Yet she managed by dint of her knowledge and her personality to make quite a reputation among the macho American commanders in 2003 and 2004 as someone whose political acumen was all but indispensable.
When General Ray Odierno was about to begin a new tour in Iraq in late 2006 he asked Ms Sky, who had gone back to Britain, to return to Iraq as his political adviser, the sort of position usually taken by United States State Department employees. The hulking six-foot-five officer and the petite adviser at his side became a famous duo in Baghdad and around the country. At the beginning of their time working together, in early 2007, all hell was breaking loose and the Bush administration was preparing to send 20,000 more troops in a desperate surge to restore order. These were savage days of terror and ethnic cleansing that pitted Sunni against Shia and everyone, it seemed, against American soldiers.
Ms Sky and General Odierno worked closely with the United States ambassador, Ryan Crocker, an accomplished Arabist in his own right, and General David Petraeus, whose name had become synonymous with sophisticated counterinsurgency. General Petraeus told Ms Sky he saw her as a "kindred spirit." But Mr Crocker and General Petraeus were gone by 2009, and when the Obama administration pushed forward with plans to withdraw American forces by 2011, everything started to go to hell again. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his coalition were defeated in parliamentary elections in 2010 but Mr Maliki, by playing his many sectarian cards, managed to hold on to power, and in the process reignited the hideous intercommunal violence most Iraqis hoped was behind them.
Mr Crocker's successor at the United States Embassy-cum-fortress was Christopher R Hill, a career diplomat with a long track record in Asia but no feel for the Middle East. He had the backing of Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, but he emerges from Ms Sky's book as the individual most responsible for forfeiting the gains of the previous years when he decided to throw Washington's weight behind Mr Maliki.
Still, the real villain of this book is not Mr Hill nor, for that matter, Mr Maliki. It's Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran's Quds Force, the section of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for covert and overt operations in Lebanon, Syria and, above all, Iraq. By the middle of the last decade, Mr Suleimani was effectively Tehran's proconsul in Baghdad, and so he remains today.
The result has been the transformation of the United States-trained Iraqi fighting machine into a hollow sectarian military that has proved itself impotent when it goes up against the so-called Islamic State (or ISIS or ISIL). Indeed, the betrayal of the Sunnis by the Baghdad government the Americans left behind has been crucial to recruiting by the selfproclaimed caliphate.
Every so often, as if in passing, Ms Sky mentions a famous predecessor who landed in Iraq almost a century ago. Gertrude Bell was an unlikely British colonial officer, a woman who made herself indispensable in the man's world of 1916 just as Ms Sky did in 2007, and who is sometimes credited, sometimes blamed, for trying to build a nation called Iraq out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
Bell wrote in 1916 that Britain had rushed into what was then called Mesopotamia with little forethought and then tried to muddle through. "Muddle through!" Bell said. "Why yes, so we do - wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed." What Ms Sky did, as Bell had done, was to work terribly hard under near-impossible circumstances to build trust between Iraqis and the military power occupying their nation. But Bell wondered early in her first tour in 1916, "Can you persuade people to take your side when you are not sure in the end whether you'll be there to take theirs?" That was a problem neither Bell nor Ms Sky was ever able to solve.
© The New York Times News Service
