The Iraq war ended the idea of Pax Americana: Emma Sky

Emma Sky, an officer of the British Empire (OBE), served as the political advisor to the US General Ray Odierno during the Iraq war. She was in India recently as part of the ZEE Jaipur Literary Festival.

In an interview to DNA, she speaks about a host of things including her 2015 book, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq.

Here is an excerpt from the conversation:

In your book, you have spoken about the need for post-war planning, especially in a place like Iraq. Yet the American troops pulled out abruptly. What do you think could have been done?

It is very difficult to imagine how it is to rebuild a society such as Iraq — this is a country that has suffered from decades of war. The Iran-Iraq war claimed the lives of a million people in both the countries. And then, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, sanctions were imposed for a decade, impoverishing Iraq. Then there was a 'faith' campaign making the people more religious.

When we came in, we knew nothing. The society that we came across in 2003 was a very traumatised one. We knew what was told to us by Iraqi exiles, most of whom were trying to use the US to overthrow Saddam. The most famous of them was Ahmed Chalabi, who told America that Iraq was ready for democracy, if Saddam is removed. He said that all the countries in the Middle East will soon become democracies, and will make peace with Israel.

Then there was no international legitimacy in the support of the American invasion of Iraq, and people were waiting for us to fail. It just became a coalition of the willing, with the US and the UK leading this.

There were few options in front of us. We first tried to put the local administration in charge, and people said put Chalabi in charge. When we did an opinion poll, Chalabi was even less popular than Saddam Hussein. That option was ruled out.

Then came the option of UN's administration, but the UN did not want to be involved without the Security Council's endorsement. So they sent in an envoy, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, who was the best they had. Right in the beginning, he was killed in Iraq in August 2003 during an attack on the UN headquarters by the Al Qaeda. That led to the UN withdrawing.

So, finally the US decided to go for direct administration, saying that we have done it in Germany and Japan with good results. Yet, this was a very different situation; the Iraqis expected to be back in control right from the beginning. They did not expect to be occupied.

So, very quickly, things started to go bad. It's easy to say what the coalition did wrong, but very difficult to say what could have been right. Since Iraq was so damaged psychologically, the coalition needed to think. You can't do it on your own as a foreign invader. We created a security vacuum right at the beginning.

In one of the other panels at Zee JLF, India's Permanent Resident to the UN, Hardeep Singh Puri said that the US 'embroidered facts' about weapons of mass destruction. What's your take on it?

Most security agencies in the US, the UK, and Europe believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, because he behaved in such a way. Whenever the weapons inspectors went in, Iraqis behaved in a suspicious manner — they moved things. Even Saddam's generals believed that they had WMDs. When we caught Saddam and interrogated him, his explanation was that he thought we knew that he did not have any WMDs, and he pretended like he did, because it will be a deception. He wanted to deter Iran from attacking Iran. It was a successful strategy.

Do you think that America messed up in Iraq? Why do you think that America felt that it needed to be big brother?

After 9/11, people felt that Bush had failed tremendously by not being able to prevent this attack, and they feared that there will be another attack. So, the invasion of Iraq would not have happened if there was no 9/11.

As for the issue of should we do anything to dictators, Hitler mass-murdered 6 million Jews. That experience led the international community, to say that we will not stand back if someone mass-murdered their people.

Yet, because we went in Iraq on the basis of intelligence reports, it undermined the idea of an international community, which was led by the United Nations. That is one of the sad outcomes of the Iraq war. Look at Syria, half a million people have been murdered, and half the country is displaced.

Many US soldiers in Iraq, you share in the book, believed that Iraq caused 9/11.

The soldiers believed that they were keeping America safe. So, in the beginning, there was a sense of revenge after 9/11. But Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, it was Afghanistan.

How did you transition from a worker sent in by the British Council to a political advisor to US General Ray Odierno?

When I first arrived, I had no experience of working with the military, and my initial contacts were all antagonistic. They were arrogant, yet they knew nothing.

After the initial fight at Kirkuk, the American Colonel told me, that since I see things differently, he will give me a term. I was the nearest thing to a Middle East expert they had even though I had never been to Iraq.

The colonel's boss, General Odierno, saw how I operated. So, years later, when he was put in charge of all American troops in Iraq, he wrote to me, asking me to be his political advisor. I'm a British female civilian, and the American chief of staff was asking me to advise him. That's extraordinary.

He told me to go with him everywhere and help him prepare. He said that I need to tell him when he's screwed.

Why has the international community not been able to do anything in Syria? To top that, the political scenario in Europe is increasingly hinging on the issue of immigrants.

I think Iraq really brought an end to a sense of international community, and to the idea of Pax Americana. I think the symptom of that is the inability to deal with the Syrian crisis.

There were opportunities early on, which we missed. ISIS and Al-Qaeda are not course of the problem, they are just symptoms. The root cause is with the Arab regime. They failed to provide security, opportunity and transparent governance to their own citizens, which lead to people rejecting them. We all thought Arab Spring will change things, but it did not. I think Syria will be a stain on the conscience of the international community for a long time to come.

The debate around immigrants is a problem that is leading to the breakdown of the European Union, and the rise of Russia, exerting power. Russia wants to fill the vacuum, in the Middle East and in the Ukraine. And, wants to break up the European Union and weaken the NATO. And, now we have Trump who does not seem to understand all of these.