As Islamic State Brewed in Iraq, Clinton’s State Department Reduced Eyes and Ears on the Ground
An investigation finds that Clinton initially pressed to keep civilian programs and listening posts after the U.S. troop pullout in 2011, but then scrapped or slashed them at the behest of the White House and Congress. 1 2Throughout this period, Clinton continued to campaign for what several aides called a “robust” mission for American diplomats in Iraq, preferably backed by a significant U.S. troop garrison. Her advocacy was recalled by numerous military and intelligence officials who participated in classified discussions on Iraq. It was also expressed publicly in news conferences and congressional testimony at the time.
“She was very focused on how to apply the full weight of the U.S. government to locking down that residual troop presence,” said Jake Sullivan, the State Department’s director of policy and planning who later became the top foreign policy adviser to the Clinton campaign. As prospects for U.S. troop garrisons began to dim, Clinton “insisted on a robust contingency planning process, to leave nothing to chance on how we protected our civilian presence and how we made sure that we were supporting the outlying posts beyond Baghdad,” Sullivan said.
State Department officials initially planned for taking control of more than a third of the 1,300 programs and missions run by the Pentagon in Iraq. That alone, as Clinton herself would acknowledge, constituted the “largest transition from military to civilian leadership since the Marshall Plan,” the extensive U.S. aid effort after World War II.
Contingency plans created in 2010 envisioned taking over key security missions, such as the tribal reconciliation program. Another initiative called for building new diplomatic and intelligence outposts around the country to give the United States a presence in cities that once hosted American military bases. These facilities, called “Enduring Presence Posts,” or EPPs, were initially planned for five Iraqi locales: Irbil, Diyala province, Kirkuk, Basra and Mosul.
State Department officials urged Congress to approve funding for the EPPs, saying the listening posts would help “mitigate ethno-sectarian conflict” while allowing the security officials to better “forecast, prevent or contain instability outside of Baghdad.”
“Spotting emerging problems early is going to be critical,” Clinton’s aides wrote in a 2010 staff report to lawmakers. The report raised concerns about the department’s ability to carry out some of its new mandates without U.S. military support, but it urged congressional appropriators to put up the necessary financial backing.
In Washington, both the White House and Congress viewed the plans with deepening skepticism. At a March 2011 Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) appeared to scoff at the idea of a civilian force of diplomats and contractors “trying to do business in Iraq all over the place with no troops.
“That is basically a private army replacing the American military,” Graham said to Clinton. “So I’d like us to think long and hard as a nation — does that make sense?”
The cost of building, equipping and securing diplomatic enclaves in Iraqi cities such as Mosul — a hotbed of Sunni terrorism in 2011 — struck senior Obama aides in the meetings as exorbitantly expensive and impractical, even more so because of Maliki’s growing antipathy toward U.S. interference in Iraq’s domestic affairs, according to current and former aides who participated in the private discussions.
The loss of a U.S. troop presence meant the closing of all U.S. military installations, including dozens of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, the smaller regional units from which U.S. military and civilian workers administered aid to local towns and tribes. Unable to rely on Iraqi help, State Department officials would have to hire an army of contractors to replicate the functions and services previously provided by the Pentagon. For U.S. diplomats, a routine journey along the 40-mile highway from Baghdad to Baqubah would now be a complicated and dangerous affair in which assassination or kidnapping would be a constant threat.
The decision to scale back plans for the post–2011 civilian mission was made by Biden and a faction of White House officials that included staff members of Obama’s National Security Council, who were given primary responsibility for managing relations with Iraq, according to accounts from current and former U.S. officials who participated. A team led by State Department Deputy Secretary Thomas R. Nides was put in charge of reviewing and implementing the reductions, with support from State Department officials in Washington and Baghdad. Clinton, having lost the argument for a larger force, was briefed about the developments but left it to her subordinates to decide how the cuts would be implemented, several former and current administration officials said.
Biden’s office declined to comment on the reductions, though former aides said the cuts reflected the prevailing view at the White House and on Capitol Hill: that a large civilian force in Iraq would not be sustainable once U.S. troops were gone.
“The president made the decisions on the military drawdown, and it was the president’s directive that we were all executing,” Nides said. “On the civilian side, the White House’s big worry was the security of our people. Once the decision was made that we weren’t going to have the authority to keep our military there — and even before it was made — we knew we not only couldn’t afford to keep growing, but we had to reduce. At one point, we had the biggest civilian footprint in the world.”
Administration officials insisted that a smaller, civilian-led force could continue to provide critical support for Iraq’s transition, but the cuts were demoralizing to State Department and Pentagon officials who saw prized aid programs shrink or disappear. State Department officials tried to persuade other agencies, including the CIA, to split the costs of operating posts in Mosul and other provincial cities, but that idea withered as well.
“The robust presence we envisioned did not survive,” recalled a former State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private White House deliberations about Iraqi policy. “Things kept getting whittled down. We’d come back from each meeting with bad news about the latest thing to get scrapped.”
A Slow-motion Nightmare
Meanwhile, other programs intended to help Iraqis battle terrorism were facing a quiet death.
On Jan. 1, 2012, the first day after the U.S. troop era officially ended, 157 American military service personnel remained in Iraq as part of the State Department-run Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq. Pentagon and State Department officials sought and won authorization to expand the number by nearly twofold, from 157 to about 300, to be backed by a supporting cast of thousands of contract workers, according to documents and former officials.
Pentagon budget documents in early 2012 called the unit vital to counterterrorism efforts, facilitating the sharing of intelligence between military and civilian agencies in both the United States and Iraq. Among other missions, it provided support for Iraq’s elite terrorism-fighting unit, known as the Counter Terrorism Service.
But the program began shrinking almost immediately after the troop withdrawal, former Pentagon officials remembered.
“It started going away,” remembered Winters, the former deputy director.
A 2013 report by the Pentagon’s inspector general said the cuts amounted to unilaterally slashing such programs to meet budget goals. The department implemented a “primarily top-down directed initiative in which cuts were made based on percentages and targets across assigned agencies without sufficient consideration of their differing missions and resources requirements,” the report said.
An early casualty was direct U.S. support for Iraq’s Counter Terrorism Service. The number of embedded U.S. advisers to the elite terrorist-fighting unit dropped from more than 100 before the military withdrawal to just two, according to Winters and other former Pentagon officials who served in Iraq.
Another key Pentagon program that helped the U.S. government collect and analyze intelligence about terrorist activities was scrapped. Charles Bova, who ran the program, said the scuttling of the project resulted in the loss of an important window into Iraq that could have provided Americans and Iraqis with “a better awareness of what al-Qaida in Iraq was up to.”
A training facility in Kirkuk was shuttered, not only because of budget cuts but also because of resistance from Maliki’s Shiite-led government, which had begun to push back against U.S. assistance programs in predominantly Sunni and Kurdish provinces. Immediately after the U.S. troop departure, Maliki began ordering the arrests of rival Sunni politicians while replacing U.S.-trained Iraqi generals with Shiite allies personally loyal to the prime minister. Some of the same Maliki appointees would later abandon their divisions as the Islamic State began its assault on Mosul.
Sunni protests against Maliki erupted in 2012 and, almost in tandem, the number of suicide bombings in Iraq started to rise. The terrorist predecessors of the Islamic State began gaining strength across Iraq, aided by the worsening sectarian tensions as well as the fighting next door in Syria, where the civil war gave jihadist leaders a cause and a safe haven in which to rebuild.
“None of us thought the problem was gone — we thought we were leaving a void there,” Winters said. “We all expected that [al-Qaida in Iraq] would come back and get worse. But we didn’t think it would happen that fast.”
Worried that Iraqi security was unraveling, Clinton and other senior Obama advisers quietly lobbied Iraqi leaders to accept new forms of assistance unfettered by State Department legal and budgetary constraints. Beginning in late 2011, Clinton joined then-CIA Director David H. Petraeus and other White House officials in seeking to persuade Maliki to host a joint U.S.-Iraqi “fusion cell,” consisting of intelligence experts and Special Operations forces from both countries, according to officials who participated in the talks. The White House also offered Maliki non-lethal surveillance drones to help track the movement of suspected terrorists, the officials said.
The Iraqis appeared open to both ideas but made no move to implement them. The possibility of U.S.-supplied drones in Iraq was nixed by Maliki after news of the offer leaked to the media. Both programs were eventually implemented, but only after waves of Islamic State suicide bombings began to threaten security in Baghdad.
“It was like one of those slow-motion nightmares,” said Blinken, the State Department official. “We were moving our own system, trying to move Congress, trying to move the Iraqis. We saw this thing coming, we were acting on it, but the problem outran the solution we were putting into place.”
The budget cuts did achieve one positive, and perhaps unexpected, result: a budget surplus. By May 2012, the State Department was sitting on $1.6 billion in funds that Congress had appropriated for Iraq, but which the department no longer intended to use there. Department officials had the option of redirecting those funds, and did so, shifting some of the money to other conflict zones, including Libya, according to public documents and former officials.
A large chunk of leftover cash was initially earmarked for the construction of a new diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, the restive Libyan city which Clinton had planned to visit in late 2012. That idea abruptly ended after the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, assaults on the Benghazi compounds that left four Americans dead.
Prized Targets
On June 4, 2014, the Islamic State, in a quick strike, captured Mosul. The black-flagged terrorists blew past Iraqi army defenders, aided in many cases by Sunni tribesmen who saw the jihadists as preferable to Maliki’s Shiite-led government.
Whether the additional security assistance could have helped prevent the collapse of Iraq’s security services is impossible to say with certainty. Many current and former administration officials, including some who strongly favored a residual U.S. troop presence, argue that Maliki’s inept management of the military and repression of the country’s Sunni minority inalterably weakened the country and made it vulnerable to collapse. If a few hundred Americans had been stationed in Mosul in 2014, these officials say, they might have become prized targets for the terrorist army that overran the city that summer.
“People have an illusion here,” said Nides, the former State Department deputy secretary. “From a practical perspective, what you actually get is 20 people with a big security footprint. Are they going to be getting in their cars and driving around talking to tribal leaders? I don’t think so.”
In any case, the Islamic State’s takeover prompted a rush by the Obama administration to restore military-led security assistance programs that had been quietly curtailed after the military drawdown. Within weeks, 475 U.S. troops were sent to advise Iraqi security forces. Today, the level is more than 10 times that. The concern over tight budgets has faded as well: Congress has appropriated billions of dollars to deal with the jihadist threat.
Clinton, the presidential candidate, responded to the crisis as well, putting forward a detailed plan for defeating the Islamic State. She has primarily blamed Maliki, the former Iraqi leader and her former partner during the transition, for the resurgence of the Sunni terrorists. Some of her proposed solutions have called for improving tribal liaisons and intelligence collection programs that were cut or abandoned three years earlier.
“We’ve got to do a better job of getting back the Sunnis on the ground,” she told ABC News in an interview in 2015.
Clinton has stressed her experience and track record in the national security arena as a key selling point on the campaign trail, echoing themes from her memoir, “Hard Choices,” which chronicled her experiences as secretary of state. The book came out a few weeks after Mosul fell to the Islamic State.
The book made news upon publication because of Clinton’s admission that it was a “mistake” to have voted in 2002 to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq the following year.
On the rest of what happened in Iraq during her tenure as America’s top diplomat, the 635-page book is silent.
Jeff Gerth, a senior reporter at ProPublica, previously worked as an investigative reporter at The New York Times. He has twice been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Joby Warrick covers national security and terrorism for The Washington Post. His book “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS” was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
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