Episode 6. Iraq: The Drawdown

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy: [00:00:14] Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders in discussions and conversations about their partnerships and tackling some of our toughest national security challenges. You can find all our podcasts and more information at the GeneralandtheAmbassador.Org. My name is Ambassador Deborah McCarthy. I'm the producer and host of the series. Today, our conversation will be on Iraq. And our guests are Ambassador James Jeffrey and General Lloyd Austin. Ambassador Jeffrey is currently special representative for Syria engagement and special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. When we taped this conversation, he was the Philip Solondz distinguished visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He served as the US ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012, but also as deputy National Security Advisor and as ambassador to Turkey. General Austin is the president of Austin Strategy Group and currently serves on numerous corporate boards. In his distinguished military career, he served as the commanding officer of US Forces Iraq vice chief of staff of the Army, and as commander of the US Central Command, serving in that latter capacity until 2016. He is the first African American general to have ever held these senior positions. Gentlemen, I wanted to start a little bit with just your relationship, where you met, how you met, and how you began what was an incredible partnership.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:01:46] We met in the Pentagon in August of 2010, just before I went out to Iraq. General Austin had been named. I was in the process of being named as the commander to replace Ray Odierno. And so we had a get together lunch, which happily General Austin paid for, I believe, in the Navy mess, mess in the Pentagon. And it was very nice. And we ate our salads and we talked about how we would work together, where we had both had tours as basically the number twos in Iraq I as the DCM in the time of John Negroponte and George Casey is a commander and General Austin as the Corps commander, essentially the tactical deputy to General Petraeus. So we both understood and had observed closely that relationship between the commander of forces and the ambassador. And I think that helped very much.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:02:37] Yeah, that's exactly right. Deborah, We had multiple tours each in Iraq, in the region in general, and so we understood what we were up against going into this. And we also understood the importance of the relationship between the ambassador and the commander. And not only did we understand it, but we committed ourselves early on, beginning with that initial meeting, to do whatever it took to work together as a team and cause our teams to come together. And so it's phenomenal when you think about it, that from that very first meeting, we never once wavered in terms of that partnership. The commitment to that partnership. And I think it was a foundation to everything that we were able to achieve thereafter.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:03:19] Well, in this long history that you both have had in Iraq, I wanted to focus a little bit on the partnership that you had in the transition from 2010 to 2011, from a military led US presence in Iraq, led by the Department of Defense, to a civilian led presence under the Department of State. Can you tell our audience why this transition took place from military to civilian?

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:03:43] It took place because technically in 2008 when the Bush administration signed what is essentially a Status of forces agreement, one of the stipulations was that US troops would depart the country by the end of 2011. The complication of what you just said is that neither General Austin nor I, and I think we agreed on this in the first luncheon, really were happy with that decision. And therefore our goal was while simultaneously and this is where you really need close coordination, we had to plan for the State Department taking over at the same time, we had to do everything in our power to convince of all people, Barack Obama, that his interest was in trying to keep a small US military presence on in Iraq. And I'll let Lloyd take it from there.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:04:31] The Ambassador is exactly right. What our government wanted at that point in time was to begin to transition to something that looked like a more normal relationship between the US and the government of Iraq. That would have meant a much smaller military footprint, and we didn't really fully appreciate or understand how small that footprint was going to be. And again, Ambassador Jeffrey and I really worked hard to try to keep some capability there because we thought at that point the Iraqis would need that for a bit longer.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:05:01] One aspect of this transition had major effects on the issue of security. The drawdown of our troops meant that our diplomats, working with the Iraqis became increasingly responsible for protecting the. Thousands of Americans in the country, not our military. Jim, can you explain what key security responsibilities the embassy took on in the transition?

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:05:22] You had the classic security of the embassy that is basically the same anywhere that Iraq was still, at least intermittently, a war zone. We still had al Qaeda elements there. And certainly at the beginning of the period that we had finished the transition December 2011 through January, February of 2012, we also had intermittent attacks by Shia terrorists who were clearly on the pay or on the orders of Iran. So we had nothing like what I'd seen before, but we still had a certain level of active attacks on us that required the usual very heavy security. But in addition, when the US military had left it left behind what had been forward operating bases, most of them co-located with Iraqi forces, and there we had thousands of us FMS contractors for weapons program for Iraq. That was more than $10 billion. When you add it all up, F-16s, Abrams tanks, 155mm Howitzers and other things. And we had an Office of Military Cooperation at the embassy under Title 22, to use the legal term under diplomatic and State Department. But it was a military organization and it had people out in these areas essentially serving as a de facto command and control. And the security for those areas was actually done by the DOD. But all reporting in a way to us. But this sounds more complicated than it actually was in practice. We all worked very well. I had helicopters that would support these people. They had security contracts. That meant that we didn't have to send our people out for various things. And step by step with the Iraqis, most of the time helping. We worked our way through a whole series of security problems, but this was the number one concern we had.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:07:06] Lloyd, can you explain a little bit in how you directed this turnover of the security elements and also how our own troops viewed this handover?

Gen. Lloyd: [00:07:16] Well, certainly there was always continuous concern on the part of the military and our diplomats that the Iraqis would be up to the task. When the time came, the first thing we had to do was to ensure that the Iraqis were trained and equipped and had the right command and control architecture to be able to, in fact, control the security throughout the country and not just in and around Baghdad and the Green Zone, but throughout the country. In terms of how we went about this, it was a phased operation. It's very deliberate. And again, this is Countrywide, enormous operation going back to the beginning of our efforts, Jim and I got together and said we're going to pull our teams as close together as need be in order to make this happen. So we committed to that in all of our planning sessions. Jim's people were at the table and not just looking on. They were active participants in planning the phased operation to turn over security to the Iraqis, but also turn over responsibilities to embassy personnel. We not only planned in detail, but we rehearsed each and every step. And so each phase we would go through detail, significant rehearsals and sometimes to the point where my State Department brethren were not so amused. But nonetheless, they understood the plan as well as we did. And so there was never any doubt or lack of confidence in our ability to execute our plan there. All of this was based upon a tremendous relationship that Jim and I had formed early on in our staffs. And our subordinate commands mirrored that relationship throughout.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:08:50] Much of the initiative was taken by General Austin based upon his prior experiences, and that was he arranged for facilitators to come out. And we had a, I think, two day exercise of all of the senior staffs working together in teams to solve problems, basically to get to know each other.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:09:07] We started this on the day that was a day off for the embassy personnel.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:09:12] Oh, I'm sure they were happy.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:09:13] And they were not only happy, but, you know, you could cut the skepticism with a knife as we walked into the room there. But Jim and I were committed to this. And by the time that we walked out, we had laid the foundation for what I thought was a pretty gosh darn good team.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:09:26] This team idea is so important, but it starts at the top. Having a good relationship between the military commander and the senior State Department representative is a necessary but not sufficient. You also need to have the team integrated and understanding each other's culture, understanding each other's mission, understanding each other's way of doing things to make this all work. But if the people at the top are not signaling in every way, shape or form that priority one for them other than keeping people alive is to get this done in a collaborative way. You will have natural bureaucracies fighting with each other, i.e. you'll have Washington on the Tigris. We didn't want Washington on the Tigris. We had both escaped from Washington.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:10:12] Didn't want to be micromanaged.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:10:13] And so our subordinates will listen to what we say, but they will watch what we do. And so in every step of the way, Jim and I, at every meeting, we both sat side by side at the head of the table.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:10:24] That sends a signal right there.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:10:26] It's important. And when we had a conference with Washington, it was Jim and I sitting side by side at every secure VTC when we went back to Washington to engage and make points. Same thing Jim and I working together.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:10:40] You did joint testimony, if I recall?

Gen. Lloyd: [00:10:42] We did exactly. I would go one step further and drill down a little bit, Jim. I think that our deputies did yeoman's work in terms of making sure that our intent was realized and they had bonded likewise. And the folks that worked for us began to buy into what we wanted them to do. And it was marvelous.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:11:01] This was year number seven of our experience in Iraq and year number nine of our experience having huge military and political forces in the Middle East. You look around at those people, including my deputy, Stu Jones, who had been in Iraq before, all of Lloyd's people who had been in Iraq before and up and down. And throughout both missions. We had people who had been out there doing this before, seeing what worked, what hadn't worked. This was a highly experienced, highly select team of people who wanted to make this work and knew how to make it work. And frankly, we had a Washington that had learned the hard way to listen to the field. That was very important, too. And we got tremendous support all the way up to Barack Obama, including the most incredible thing he actually agreed to try to keep troops on.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:11:46] I want to turn a little bit to the provincial reconstruction teams, the PRTs, where our diplomats and our military worked at the regional level to project the US presence. Can you explain to the audience what these PRTs were? Are they a good practice for the future?

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:12:02] They are a good practice for the future. There are several not cautionary tales, but several things to understand. We basically were conducting emergency surgery on a society in a political system. That's not a normal job either for the US military or for the Department of State. The US military's normal subject of its activities is some enemy force or a friendly military. You're trying to train advise. In our case, it's governments. But in the case of an internal conflict like that of Iraq, we had to try to work at the local level. That was the genius of the counterinsurgency strategy that the US military had worked out. Putting people in the field with the military did several things. First of all, it brought a second look at how to deal with local provincial councils, local economic figures, policy planning, the deployment of assistance, both military assistance, which was very significant, and USAID and other civilian assistance. How do you integrate all of that in a given province and division commanders who typically were paired with the PRT chief would work in an area with the civilian authorities? It's intrusive. It's very, very intensive. It's very, very broad. And you do need civilians who can advise the military, but also can work as a second set of eyes with the civilians that both military and civilians are working with on the ground, the local civilians.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:13:32] These were extraordinary circumstances. But having said that, I think the PRTs were invaluable to our overall efforts. And in my view, and I think Jim would probably agree with this, this is where the real work got done. And from a military perspective, it was clear to us that our job was to set the conditions so the diplomats could do their work. And in that overall effort, we learned a couple of things early on. Number one, there can't be several overall objectives. Everybody's got to be working off the same page. And so the bond that Jim and I had formed really kind of transmitted down throughout the ranks there, what it is we're trying to accomplish and we need to all work together. And that's the other thing that it did was it created relationships between State Department personnel and military personnel that created a tremendous understanding of each other's capabilities and shortcomings and that sort of stuff. And I think because of that, we've created young diplomats and young troops that will, as they mature throughout the ranks, they'll have a greater appreciation of, you know, how we can complement each other to better accomplish our goals and objectives.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:14:44] We also had a clear mission that President Obama gave at the Camp Lejeune speech in 2009 on the way ahead in Iraq. At that time, we had well over 100,000 troops there, and he at that time was contemplating having them all leave by the end of 2011. And he laid out a vision of an Iraq not all that different from President Bush's, but with a few minor tweaks. He emphasized that you cannot fix everything, that there will still be problems with Iraq, but that he wanted Iraq that was stable. That was unified, that could defend itself with our help and be a positive player in regional issues, particularly counterterrorism. Surprisingly, that was in 2009. Nine years later, we still have that. When you look around from Yemen to Libya to Syria to Iran, considering all of the violence that Iraq has seen, the place is still holding together with that basic mission, which, as I said, was a continuation of President Bush's mission with some tweaks by President Obama. It's very important to have from the top down an idea of what the country wants us to do when we're out there risking ourselves and risking the people who are working with us.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:15:53] While we work with the country, that sometimes has to be emphasized. I wanted to turn now to the issue of Iran in Iraq. During your time together, what was Iran's influence and how do you see it today?

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:16:05] Now, there's no one who can start off on that question better than not Iran's best friend in the region, General Lloyd Austin.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:16:12] The Ambassador, says that I'm not Iran's best friend for good reason, and that is that Iran was the source of a lot of mischief which caused us to lose a number of our troops there. They want to be the big guy on the block there in the region. The problem is Iran went about doing things in a horrible way. I mean, they resourced, trained, equipped Shia militia, which attacked our troops and our diplomats frequently and were the source of a lot of our losses there. Iran funneled rockets, mortars and those horrible improvised explosive devices called EFPs or explosively formed penetrators into the country. We had to deal with that routinely. And so because of Iran's mischief, it just made this a lot tougher than it otherwise would have been. But again, Iran has not changed in its outlook. It still desires us to leave Iraq altogether. And again, we recognize that Iraq is going to have a relationship with its neighbor, Iran, but we also feel that we deserve to have a relationship with Iraq as well.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:17:19] Exactly. And here's the interesting thing. As diplomats and as soldiers, we have to understand what an opponent or a competitor is trying to get. But that doesn't necessarily mean that even for the opponent or competitor, it's a good thing, even if he or she gets it. And thus it turns out that it really wasn't in Iran's best interest for us to totally leave Iraq. The force that we would have kept on beyond 2011 would have not had a power projection capability against Iran, certainly not like the force we'd had for almost a decade there, which hadn't projected any power into Iran despite daily provocations from them. You know, a rocket hit my residence, a rocket hit my deputies residence, and they came from Iran. So there were all kinds of reasons to be angry at Iran, but we were trying to keep it calm. But the point is, it's hard to imagine that ISIS would have so quickly and effectively seized almost half of Iraq, smashed much of the Iraqi army, forced Iran to have to intervene in a desperate effort in the summer of 2014 to save Baghdad. Had we had some more troops there. Now that's something you can debate because the troops wouldn't have done the fighting, but we would have had eyes on in a different kind of way and attention on in a different kind of way had we had that force. So Iran brought that on itself to some degree. And it was we who went back in CENTCOM specifically with an international coalition and then has destroyed ISIS. It wasn't Iran.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:18:46] It was a huge accomplishment. Well, General, as you moved to CentCom and obviously these issues were front and center, what would you say coming out of the partnership that the two of you had in Iraq? What were the lessons or what were the techniques that you used as you became the commander of CENTCOM?

Gen. Lloyd: [00:19:05] You know, I watched Jim as the ambassador in Iraq work through a number of tough issues on a daily basis, and he's just really good at what he does. And he made it look easy. But I know that it wasn't easy. The first lesson that I learned from that experience was transparency is important. And as I work with my State Department counterparts, and so I took that into my future jobs there. Another lesson that I learned was that frequent communication is also very important. I conducted secure video teleconferences with the ambassadors and country teams routinely so that I could get an update on what they were concerned with and give them an update on what was going on around the region that they may not be aware of.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:19:49] And that's a tremendous plus in terms of flow of information.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:19:52] Fortunately, we had the communications capability to be able to do that. And when I couldn't do a secure video teleconference, I would do a secure phone call. And the ambassadors really, really appreciated that. And then once a year, I would ask the ambassadors to come together for a conference and we'd spend a couple of days together and they would update us on what they're doing in their particular country and what their concerns and challenges were. And our senior military leaders would update them on what we're doing with the military campaign in the region. And that was very, very beneficial. So a lot of great lessons learned from a guy who was a master at running things inside of a very challenging country.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:20:31] Well, I recall when I was at EUCOM, the meetings that were done there pulling the ambassadors in or including the visits and vtcs were hugely important in terms of having a clear picture of the common mission and the common goals.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:20:45] Having these structures, communications meetings, frequent back and forth is a necessary but not sufficient. You have to have the right attitude. And I've watched General Austin also lead CENTCOM with that right attitude to indicate the wrong attitude. I'll have to cite a two Remain unnamed former secretary of state who was want to say we need less military and more diplomacy. That's baloney. The two work hand in hand. Yes, the military is by far the most powerful tool of foreign policy, but it brings with it a whole lot of collateral damage. As President Harry Truman, President Lyndon Baines Johnson and others could talk about, there are problems with using military force. It's very expensive. It can lead to a lot of American deaths. And it has obviously, as any powerful instrument, secondary and tertiary effects. On the other hand, everything we do in the world, or almost everything, is based upon collective security. And at the center of that is the idea of common defense against the threats of which we now have once again many around the world. And that requires being able to integrate the military seamlessly into the overall foreign policy plan that we have, not only with a country but with a region at the global level. And that requires much experience and much understanding of each other's points of view, because there are things that for General Austin to function effectively in Iraq with 50,000 troops, there were things he needed and these weren't negotiable or debatable. There was support he needed from us and from Washington. There were things I needed that weren't negotiable, and he was very generous in giving them to us. But it was this understanding that there are certain areas where you have to yield to the other person because the other person is the person that you have given the mission to, and that person has to decide how to execute the mission. This is a concept that the military inherently understands. I learned it in my eight years in the military. It's a concept that the State Department does not train or treat its people.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:22:53] To a lot of Americans, they understand what our military do, but they don't always understand what our diplomats do. And a term has been used about expeditionary diplomacy. Could you explain a little bit how you see the role of diplomats and what their work really consists of today?

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:23:09] Part of it is when you have an internal conflict, you have parts out with the US military, but it's also Chris Stevens in Benghazi trying to negotiate ceasefires among warring factions. It is trying to get to the root causes of security threats not only between states but also within states. That's complicated. It requires real diplomatic delicacy. We're talking about, you know, internal conflicts like Ukraine, Syria, like Yemen, like Libya, where you have to have people on the ground trying to figure out who's who, who's shooting at me today, or why don't these people sit down and just negotiate a cease fire so we all can go home? And there are reasons for that. And we have people who are trained and certainly now people who are experienced in doing just that, that we need to deploy side by side with our military so that we can get a result that meets our overall national objectives. But there was another reason for having Lloyd Austin there under any and all circumstances. Prime Minister Maliki knew that he was a dead duck in Basra in 2008. Had President Bush not sent an army of one. Lloyd Austin and his rifle down to rescue him when Maliki had courageously but somewhat rashly decided to declare war on Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and almost came out on the losing end until General Austin showed up. I think that's something that Maliki never forgot, let me put it that way.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:24:32] That story is almost accurate, Jim. The truth of the matter is that I was going to go down there by myself with a number of troops, but my staff said, General, you can't go down there unless you take a State Department person. I was not in agreement with that initially. You know, again, at this point, I'm a young three star commander, totally focused on fighting and getting Maliki out of trouble at this point. But they insisted and we talked to Dave Petraeus, who was a four star commander at the time, and he also said that you really do need to take a State Department person. So we asked for volunteers, and I expected to see this strapping, six foot five huge person stand up. And be willing to go with me. But actually, the person that volunteered was a young lady by the name of Marcy Reese, who is in her own right, a hero in the State Department. So, Marcy, as most of you know, Marcy weighs about 100 pounds soaking wet. And at the time, her husband, Charlie Reese, was also working in the embassy. And so Marcy volunteers to go down to Basra with me. Understand that when we flew in to see Maliki, he was surrounded by enemy forces. Marcy volunteered to go on this mission, which was very dangerous and a bit risky, but we got in to see Maliki.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:25:46] You know, I walked through the door first, and Maliki just kind of stared at me. And then Marcy Reese walks through the door and she said, Mr. Prime Minister, I bring you a message from the president of the United States that one sentence I will never forget, but it changed the tenor in the room completely. Now, that's something that a military guy couldn't do. I could set the conditions to get that State Department personnel in to deliver that message. But that message coming from the State Department representative directly linked back to the president of the United States was incredibly powerful. But again, that's just one example of how the military and the State Department work together to get things done. Another important thing that both our diplomats and our military does is that we help to create capability in various countries. Now, we've learned over time that violence will migrate to ungoverned spaces. And so we've seen that with al Qaeda, with just a number of different elements. And so our goal is always to try to increase stability in various places by helping people create their own capability to secure themselves, to govern themselves and those sorts of things. And if that can happen, then that's less work for us to do going forward, because there is an Al Qaida that's able to occupy an ungoverned space and export violence.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:27:11] Here's an example. Let's take the Iraqi elections that just happened. Of all people, Muqtada al Sadr partnered with the Communist Party of Iraq to run on a non-sectarian, almost secular platform, while Prime Minister Abadi from the Shia Dawa Party won most of the votes from Mosul, the city that he had liberated at very great cost, with a great deal of help from the US and the Coalition. These are the kind of things that we spent much of our time and effort trying to encourage people to do. Now we can't take credit for this. This is what under very difficult circumstances and very rarely the people of Iraq do themselves. But certainly we helped hold open the possibility of something that's very, very rare in the Middle East. Democracy is pretty rare, but I've seen it in several different places, such as Lebanon, but it typically comes with a sectarian flavor to it in Iraq. There is actually some hope that at least part of the body politic and certainly many of the population want to move beyond that and see Iraq as a unified country with a unified population. That is the final victory for trying to preserve the country as a stable and unified and peaceful land going forward.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:28:28] Thinking out into the future, what would you recommend to the rising generation of leaders in both our military and diplomatic corps about the need to work together to advance US interests overseas?

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:28:40] I would start with training. The military does a better job. The Department of State has a tendency of taking officers who've served almost 20 years as what we call FS-1's or the colonel equivalent and sending them to one of the war colleges. The problem is the war colleges basically exist to train US military officers to how to be part of the national security bureaucracy, which is exactly what our people know. I would switch that and send people off to go to the command and general staff, college level schools that the military has when they are FS-2 the equivalent of majors. My special assistant had done that when she had been in the Foreign Service for five years while she had a military background anyway. But she also gained a tremendous insight into how the military operates as an institution, and that really helped. The military, on the other hand, does send people as liaison officers to university programs, foreign area specialist programs. They do a better job.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:29:37] I was just out at Fort Leavenworth, and we have maybe 2 or 3 people out there. That's all, which is not a lot.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:29:43] I also think you need to be willing to span boundaries. It's interesting that early on in our relationship, one of the things that we did this exercise that kind of walked us through some boundary spanning issues and it really highlighted a number of things. And we can't be successful by establishing silos of excellence. We have to be willing to work together. And sometimes that means the other guy is going to span your boundary or you may have to creep a little. Bit beyond your boundary into the other guy's space. But if you're if you're working together as a team, that never creates chaos. I would also say that you need to be willing to help your teammate accomplish his or her goals and be willing to share your resources as well. And finally, I would say beware of the bureaucracy. Left to its own devices, our bureaucracies told both of us that there were certain things that we couldn't do. You know, you can't help this person do that. You can't help that person do that. And Jim and I would attack those issues head on. And as we fought through a number of issues, it always turned out that there was some mid-level staff guy trying to protect his or her turf, and there was no real reason why we couldn't share and help each other.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:30:54] Here's an example of that. Part of the people look at the size of our respective operations, and it's Iraq and said, This must really be tough. Well, yeah, it was really tough. But remember, we were doing two things simultaneously, planning and trying to persuade Washington. And then the Iraqis to keep on an American military force in which with significant changes but still, all in all, a continuation of what we've been doing since 2003 and this dramatically different mega embassy with some 18,000. But I didn't want to frighten Washington with that number. And as part of the fallback, we had worked out very extensive ways to maintain military and intelligence sharing, counterterrorism, training and equipping with the Iraqis. Even if the military left, I watched much of that fall apart, not because anybody wanted that to fall apart, but simply because if you do not have a four star general who everybody in Washington is, I hate to say it a little bit, afraid of who will.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:31:55] And I've seen it.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:31:56] Take on the president of the United States and the president of the United States just may be wrong. You lose. No ambassador can deliver that sort of troops and danger approach to Washington. So what happened was many good ideas. We had to put field grade military officers as part of our military mission out along the what was called the green line between Kurdish Peshmerga areas and the Iraqi army areas. Lloyd had 22 platoons out there. While the platoons obviously had to go away. We wanted to keep people in the various tri command centers that we had set up trying to do the same thing that ran afoul of a state DOD debate over who would pay their per diem costs. And we we had a $6 billion budget and we couldn't decide that. At one point, DOD decided that their military personnel who were part of the mission under the Office of Military Cooperation, could not operate in these former FOBs. But they were our entire command and control there, and we had to pull them back because the Vienna Convention didn't cover them and the Iraqi government wouldn't acknowledge them. Well, we got the Iraqi government to acknowledge them, the lawyers. This was the lawyers this time, not the budgeteers complained and complained. And so this went all the way up to in ruined Barack Obama's Christmas holiday in Hawaii. But I'm happy to say that on this one, he did come down on our side because the whole operation would have collapsed. But anything short of something that was critical and anything below the president of the United States weighing in, it was a constant mush of bureaucratic combat to try to get anything done to maintain a reasonable security relationship with Iraq. And part of the result is what happened with ISIS.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:33:41] And I suppose based on your partnership, it's not a question of just leadership at the top, but sustained leadership, joint leadership in any theater that's important as we tackle issues around the world. Well, I wanted to ask you one last question, which is more of a fun question. What was the best meal you ever had together?

Gen. Lloyd: [00:33:59] I think some of the best times that we had were when Jim and I would go out and eat dinner with the troops on the holidays. And it doesn't matter what the food tasted like, it's just being there with folks, troops and diplomats that were out there on the edge. And we're happy, happy that they were contributing and being successful and taking care of each other. So in my mind, those were probably some of the best meals.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:34:23] And when those troops and our PRT teams were, of course, out there with them chowing down on Thanksgiving, saw that the four star general was flying in on a State Department airplane.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:34:33] That's collaboration.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:34:35] Granted, it broke down in Kirkuk, but we got another one. But the point is that is the kind of signal that everybody gets. And there's no way you can replace these personal signals in leading. Again, that's something that the military are taught as second lieutenants and corporals. It's something that we have to learn the hard way if we do it all as diplomats.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:34:57] Well, thank you. Thank you, General. Thank you, Ambassador. This has been an excellent conversation and I really appreciate the insight into your collaboration, which was extraordinary.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:35:06] Thank you. And I just want to add that my most extraordinary experience in almost 50. Years of service in and around government has been working with General Austin, first in Iraq and then off and on as he commanded the whole region as CENTCOM commander. It was Poetry in Motion.

Gen. Lloyd: [00:35:21] Jumps being an invaluable teammate. I call upon him routinely when I'm facing tough issues or trying to figure things out, and Jim's always there to help. This has been great. I really appreciate the opportunity to participate and once again be in the same space with Jim Jeffrey. And thanks a lot for inviting me.

Amb. Jeffrey: [00:35:38] Thank you, gentlemen.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:35:46] This has been a new episode in the series. The General and the Ambassador, A Conversation. Thank you for listening. The series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy with the generous support of the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. You can find the podcast on all major sites and on our website, GeneralAmbassadorPodcast.Org. We welcome input and suggestions on the series. Please let us know your thoughts via General.Ambassador.podcast@gmail.com.