Episode 44. US Interests in the Middle East Part II: Yemen, Messaging, and the US competitive advantage with General Joseph Votel and Ambassador Barbara Leaf

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy (00:00): This is part two of our conversation with General Joseph Votel and Ambassador Barbara Leaf on US interests in the Middle East. I wanted to ask you both about the other war in the region, which is the civil war in Yemen, which began in 2015, when a faction overthrew the government. The UAE intervened militarily alongside Saudi Arabia to fight the Houthi faction, the US provided logistical support to the coalition and helped refuel aircraft. The refeuling however, was suspended, as I understand it in 2018. Joe, can I ask you during your time at CENTCOM, how did US objectives vis-a-vis the war in Yemen evolve? And what is your assessment of the continued involvement of Iran in that country?

Gen. Votel (01:00): As I stepped into CENTCOM in the early part of 2016, our activities, and certainly this war was already underway and we had some of our leadership and others dispersed across the region, trying to play a helpful role in advising, and then in accordance with some of the authorities that president Obama had passed along to us provide the logistical support and other things that we could and do that in the most effective manner. Frankly, I think as we looked at that, some of those mechanisms have kind of run their time, frankly, and so we began to look at more effective ways of trying to perform our mission. So we looked at putting some of our advisors in forward locations where we could assist them better with missions that we were authorized to support. And we took on a very significant effort in trying to address the problem of civilian casualties that were being caused by the Saudi led coalition. This was a significant effort, not only providing some training opportunities, but sharing lessons learned to make sure that they were adhering to all of the best practices and of course the law of armed conflict here as they prosecuted this. I would say we also were trying to assist them in helping to develop a coherent campaign approach to what they were trying to do, with a goal of trying to bring this to some kind of conclusion as quickly as we can. And of course we saw some of the reactions that were taking place with the proliferation of unarmed aerial vehicles, UAVs, missiles, and rockets that were coming out of there. In an attempt to help our partners protect themselves, we took a lead in helping devise methods and approaches where they can do that as well to a pretty good measure of success. So the military support definitely evolved as the situation on the ground changed. I don't think anybody anticipated that this war in Yemen would go on as long as it certainly has, but that's the case. I would say about the last 15 months of the time, I was the CENTCOM commander, a major effort that I was focused on was providing advice and assistance to the UN Special Envoy, Martin Griffiths, helping him understand what was happening on the ground, providing some advice on kind of our assessment of it and then, you know, using our influence and leverage with our partners in the region to be supportive of the things that he's doing. This was an important aspect of it. So it definitely changed over the time of the war here, but certainly was not a satisfying experience for anybody. And of course, the people of Yemen paid the biggest price for all of this and I remain very hopeful that we will get to something very, very soon.

Amb. Leaf (03:35): I would also add to that, one aspect, which has been overshadowed, not surprisingly given what Joe's laid out in terms of the course of the war that proceeded and casualties mounted, and the cost to the Yemeni population just increased substantially. One set of factors that brought the UAE into the operation was a desire to try to go after the counter terrorism threat that had really proliferated in Yemen in the preceding years. We've sort of forgotten it, but the Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, AQAP, franchise at one point was the most lethal piece of Al Qaeda as far as threats to the US Homeland. And it had propagated a series of near miss attacks on the United States. So the UAE working with US military forces in small numbers, but in a train and advise sort of relationship, went into Southern Yemen with the idea of trying to go after AQAP. And for periods of time were quite effective in doing so, really in 2016, in terms of pushing AQAP out of a major town along the coast, from which it had been garnering a huge amount of monies. That was one piece of the overall conflict that was in limited terms successful because it did disperse AQAP's efforts. And that was at a period of time when our own personnel were no longer resident on the terrain and couldn't get after the problem.

Gen. Votel (05:06): It also gave us a really good opportunity to work closely with the military forces, particularly the special operations forces of the United Arab Emirates. And they are a very, very capable force. And in the operations that ambassador Leaf just described, this was us advising and assisting the Emirates who also had their own advisory forces that they had put together on the ground to orchestrate this. So it was a very unique hybrid approach to this, but it worked well and it allowed us to bring some of the unique capabilities that we have that really can make a difference. What it did is it kept the fight on the ground in Arab hands, largely. And frankly, I think that was part of the reason this was so successful.

Amb. Leaf (05:47): And I raised it because if you remember Deborah, at that time, all US focus almost entirely was directed towards the Iraq, Syria, ISIS fight, which we reckoned from the outset was going to be at least a three year campaign. Meanwhile, ISIS was exploding in attacks globally across Europe, in Asia and so forth. And there was the beginnings of a seedling sort of element in Southern Yemen. So those efforts, again, within the wider context of a really tragic conflict, those efforts had a certain success in, again, disrupting disaggregating nascent ISIS Yemen, and then disrupting AQAP plotting.

Amb. McCarthy (06:28): Well I wanted to turn now to two last issues. And the first is strategic communications. And the second is a more general question about our overall priorities in the region. We know that Iran has a strong well-oiled modern propaganda and disinformation machine operating across the region. How did you both coordinate messaging and what special techniques did you use to counter this machine.

Amb. Leaf (06:53): To be frank, I think within our own domain, within the Gulf, within the UAE, this was just not really an issue. I didn't worry that Iranian messaging anywhere in the Gulf had much traction. What I was focused on was public and private messaging in terms of US commitment to the region. There was a constant question in the leadership's minds across the Gulf, unfortunately, as to whether is the US really here to stay in the fight, the fight being against Iran, but also against what had become a very unstable region for all the reasons we've talked about. So I had to really focus on that message. Now, of course, you're right, there is an Iranian counter message, but I didn't worry about the Iranian counter message. I think we have to worry about that frankly, much more in a place like Iraq.

Gen. Votel (07:41): Yeah, I think Ambassador Leaf is exactly right on this, certainly between the military and our diplomatic corps and the Gulf States, this was not a big challenge. I mean, our normal interaction allowed us to make sure that we were coordinating among ourselves and we were sending common messages with this. And it didn't take a lot of convincing for any of them to understand the threat that Iran was posing here with this. And so I think among ourselves, we were very well coordinated, but Barbara also talked about Iraq. Now that is an area where we did have some challenges. And, you know, I found myself as we were orchestrating the campaign against ISIS, particularly in Iraq, that we were executing a campaign plan in the presence of militias that were also engaged in fighting the same enemy that we were, but that were very beholden to Iran. And so were answering back to other folks. And so we had that, for lack of a better phrase, we had to coexist in this common environment where we found ourselves. And it was very important for me to work with our embassy there in Baghdad, to make sure that we had a very clear message with the Iraqis in terms of this, that, hey, we're here, we're focused on ISIS. We have concerns about this. And we certainly had ample time to discuss that with our Iraqi interlocutors, but it was really important for us to be very clear and address that, but not allow that to get us focused off of the mission at hand that we had, which was very clear, and that was the defeat of the ISIS caliphate. So that proved to be a little bit more tricky, and, this, I can recall on a number of occasions, of Prime Minister Abadi and myself and the ambassador having this discussion and being reminded by the Prime Minister, who frankly, I think was a pretty wise politician, a good leader, frankly, about, hey, this is a difficult neighborhood. You have to understand the pressures on us as well. We are appreciative of the great support we get from the United States and the coalition, but this is a difficult neighborhood. You have to understand that. So it requires a very sophisticated understanding and approach as you message your way and operate in these environments where you find yourself, in my words, coexisting in the same environment.

Amb. Leaf (09:43): And Deborah, I think that goes back to something that Joe touched on earlier in our conversation, which is the sort of the asymmetrical nature of the way Iran contests the US and its perspective, contests the US, contests, Israel, et cetera. And in Iraq, it is so much more complicated a domain in which we operate diplomatically as well as militarily. During the fight against ISIS and certainly afterwards, because of the earlier work, the earlier investment that Iran made in the early days of the Iraq conflict, which was seeding the battlefield, but seeding the terrain with these militias and these militias have had staying power. They've morphed into political entities. They're in the parliament, they're deeply embedded in sectors of the economy, they own media. And so there is a sort of a structural problem there now. I've always been in the long term optimistic about Iraq, not because we will be able to do a better job than Iran, the Iraqis themselves and Iraqi nationalism will right the balance. But for us, it's very difficult to cut through in terms of the media environment. At least it was until the beginning of what Iraqis called the October revolution, which was the beginning of the protest movement, which has a decided anti-Iranian flavor to it.

Amb. McCarthy (11:02): Well, to wrap up, I wanted to ask a question about us priorities in the Middle East region. Joe, you wrote recently that quote, "Our priority should be focused on preserving an overall favorable balance of power in the region when compared to other great power competitors or would be regional hegemons." Can you elaborate a little bit on this?

Gen. Votel (11:23): Yeah. And it kind of goes back to what we talked about in the beginning. We talked about the fact that when I went to West point, I had a roommate who came from Tehran American High School, and you know there was a time when we had a balance across both sides of the Gulf in our approach. And I'm not so pollyannaish to think that we're going to be able to get to that very, very quickly. But I think it's important to always recognize that the list of people that are aligned with the United States is longer than the list of people and countries that are aligned with Iran or China, or Russia, and this is in kind of basic influence speak, that's kind of what I'm talking about. We have to be perceived and believed to be reliable partners for our partners in the region here. And we have to do that. I've long believed that we, our main effort after we got to wind down these fights that we're in here and our main effort needs to really be heavily into the security cooperation area. This is the long and lasting relationship builder that we have in the region, and we have to put folks on and we have to be seen as doing that. And I am on record as saying, I recognize that in our National Defense Strategy, it is about maintaining our competitive advantage against states like China and Russia. I absolutely agree with that, but I think it's also important to recognize those states are present in the Middle East and the Middle East is a place where we compete and we have to compete. And one of the principle ways we do that is by having good relationships and having good partnerships in the area. And I really think this is important and that's gotta be backed up with strong diplomatic efforts and other things. I would just throw in for you when I left CENTCOM in the end of March of 2019, I want to say that, you know, we have diplomatic relationships with 18 of the 20 countries in the region. At that time, in only seven of them did we have confirmed ambassadors. So it's important for our nation to send a strong message by confirming ambassadors and getting them places, direct relations. The chargés were excellent. They were excellent men and women absolutely dedicated to our country and to all of our interests, and doing just a fantastic job, but they don't carry the throw weight that an ambassador does. And I think this is really important. So we've got to develop strong military relationships, but we've got to have the other things that go with that to make it really, really powerful. And I think when we do that, when we create the impression and the reality that, hey, we're thinking about you all the time, we're concerned about the situation, we want it to be strong. Do you want it to be strong as well? This really, I think, sets us up and it helps us protect the interests that we have in the region.

Amb. McCarthy (13:49): So Barbara, what are your views on US priorities in this volatile region?

Amb. Leaf (13:54): Well, look, I would endorse, you know, everything that Joe has just laid out so eloquently. And I would say also that I've watched with a certain amount of chagrin the accumulation of voices on both sides of the aisle, Republican and Democrat, but not necessarily affiliated either, people in the Middle East watching community who have all begun to sing a similar tune, which is, we're just done with this region. It is exhausting. We're exhausted. We've got other things to do. We've got to go to Asia, we've got to do this. We haven't been able to foster a settlement of the Israeli Palestinian dispute. A pox on both their houses, et cetera. And to use a phrase of a Biden adviser who said, you know, it's sort of Middle East minimalism. I would say both parties are chasing Middle East minimalism, but what do they mean by that? Okay, I would readily agree that we need to be looking very clear eyed and in a hardnosed fashion at how we reallocate military resources globally. We need to push more assets East. The reallocation of military assets is not a reallocation of US interests or US interests in the region. We have abiding, I would argue permanent, national security interests in that core disordered region. It's been the crossroads for millennia for foreign armies, the field of contests, of battles, and it remains so today. You have Libya, Syria, and Yemen, which are pulsing, terrible conflicts, which have certainly extra regional consequences, including for us. We remain the power that has convening authority, the convening power, if we choose to use it. And I hope that we will get back to that and more assertively put ourselves, in diplomatic terms, put ourselves into the fight. But I think in terms of the region, we have to first look to do what we can to bring these conflicts, if not to an end, at least to a very low boil. That's for the good of the whole region. It's for the good of Europe, it's for the good of the globe in terms of the extremism that it breeds, and reassert our leadership and our commitment to these relationships. Joe made a very important point about just the symbolic nature, but in an operational importance, of having ambassadors manning these missions. We haven't had an ambassador, a US ambassador in Jordan for three years. Nor in Qatar. And nobody can explain why that is. And for almost as long a time, we didn't have an ambassador in Cairo, as well as a number of other important posts across the region. The Jordanians certainly take a message from that. So do the Qataris, so do their neighbors. And there is an operational loss at the helm of that mission when you don't have somebody with the stature to go in and essentially do battle with the friendly or not so friendly head of state and the cabinet and so forth. So a recommitment of ourselves to all of those relations is long overdue, but that does not come at huge fiscal cost to us. In fact, quite the reverse.

Amb. McCarthy (17:07): Well, this has been fantastic. I truly appreciate you sharing with our listeners and unwrapping what is the very difficult area to understand for many Americans. And I think that your relationship also is very key to conveying the importance of using our diplomatic tools and our military tools to advance US interests in this very important region. Thank you.

Amb. Leaf (17:33): Thank you, Deborah. Great to see you Joe.

Gen. Votel (17:35): Thanks. Great to be with you.

Amb. McCarthy (17:42): This has been a new episode in the series of The General and the Ambassador. 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 our podcasts on all major podcast sites. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook, as well as visit our website generalambassadorpodcast.org. We very much welcome input and suggestions in this series, you can contact us at general.ambassador.podcast@gmail.com.