Eight Years On

The Middle East is a region that knows it cannot keep determined superpowers out. For hundreds of years, whether the French or British, the Russians or the Americans, they've muscled their way in. But while countries in the region don't have that hard left cross at their disposal to block outsiders, they've got a wicked counterpunch. Once you're in, then they go to work.

I learned this firsthand on April 18, 1983. I was sitting in my fourth-floor office in the Beirut embassy when a tremendous force—I heard no sound—slammed me into the wall. My wife, Christine, whose desk was right outside my office, got a nasty whack in the head when the windows blew in; the Mylar glued to them wrapped all the flying glass into a hard ball. Our injuries were superficial, but a truck bomb had ripped off the whole façade of one wing of the embassy, right up to the seventh floor. As I headed out of our suite of offices, which were at the back, I could see that the CIA station, which was on the same floor in the front, was just gone. I was looking out on open air.

In all, 63 people, including 17 Americans, were killed by that explosion, and less than a year later, after another bomb had destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks, the United States withdrew from Lebanon. Not only the Iranians, whose proxies had launched those attacks, learned from that experience. When I arrived in Baghdad, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias, as well as their backers in Syria and Iran, believed they were on the verge of driving America out of Iraq. We lacked—as they'd seen in Lebanon—strategic patience. But instead of stepping back, we stepped forward, and not just with troops. Christine came with me to Baghdad, and one day in March 2008, when Shiite militias were raining mortars down on the Green Zone, our house was shelled. A staff aide brought me a note during a meeting: "Your house was just rocketed, but wife is okay." Every single window in the upstairs of our Baghdad home had been blown out. Still, she stayed.

Like anything solid, the relationship between Dave Petraeus and me was built over time. We started working together before either of us arrived in Baghdad, when he was still stationed at Fort Leavenworth and I was in Islamabad. We never had what's called unity of command, but we were committed to unity of effort and we worked constantly at it. We understood that no issue in Iraq would be purely military or purely political.

In June 2007, a few months into the surge, the Golden Mosque in Samarra was bombed. A year before, a similar bombing at the mosque had set off a sectarian bloodbath. I heard the news, instantly thought I needed to talk to Dave—and he was already standing in my office. We agreed we needed to see Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki face to face, immediately. All this happened with a minimum of discussion; it was intuitive. In any event, as we worked with Maliki, we were able to stop the kind of reprisals that had led to such disastrous consequences the year before. History is made up of things that didn't happen, as well as those that did. And the fact that violence did not break out after the second Samarra bombing may well have been the turning point in the surge.

The strategy we followed was all about adapting our tactics to the society as it was, not as we thought maybe it ought to be, and proving to Iraqis that we would not simply give up on them and walk away. But as the United States turns increasing attention to Afghanistan—and talks about sending more troops—it needs to be careful what lessons it draws from Iraq.

In Afghanistan, too, the decision has been made to talk to people who have been fighting against us, and perhaps even to enlist their support. The question is not whether they have been shooting at us; it's whether we can get them to stop shooting. But relentless internal conflict is not endemic in Iraq. In Afghanistan it is. For most Afghans an effective central government isn't even a distant memory. Tribal identity is everything. And Al Qaeda and the Taliban have learned from the mistakes of the insurgencies in Iraq. They have not forced the people to turn against them. They know the hills and valleys of the political terrain as well as they do the killing fields of Helmand province or the caves of Tora Bora. They have learned strategic patience. I can't begin to predict what will unfold in Afghanistan, or in Iraq. But as I leave the field, I take heart from the fact that Dave Petraeus, my comrade from Baghdad who knows all about strategic patience, has oversight of both wars.

Today I find myself very far from those forbidding lands, back among Americans who might imagine that they are distant, maybe irrelevant. But then, above my computer there is a little piece of paper in a frame to remind me of the dangers when you turn your back on the world, thinking you can walk away.

With Christopher Dickey

Crocker served in the U.S. state department from 1971 to 2009. His last posting was as ambassador to Baghdad.

© 2009