An Interview with Emma Sky

Yale Journal of International Affairs: You are well known for your service in Iraq as a British diplomat and as an advisor to the U.S. military. Prior to traveling to Iraq in 2003, you spent ten years or so in hotspots such as Jerusalem and you also served as a governance advisor for the British Council. How did these types of experiences and perhaps other experiences from your youth prepare you for what you experienced in Iraq? 

Sky: Prior to Iraq, I’d really been working in development and also in conflict management resolution. I had spent a decade living in Jerusalem, working in the West Bank and Gaza and helping build up the institutions of the Palestinian Authority but also helping people-to-people activities between Israelis and Palestinians. So for many people, going to Iraq was very alien for them. For me it wasn’t alien; I’d spent most of my adult life in the Middle East and I was very familiar with Arab culture. And also working in development, the conflict/post-conflict environments were familiar. I think for many people the only experience they’d ever had was in America; they’d never worked outside America. So Iraq was familiar territory for me, if you like, at one level. What was not familiar was being in a place with the U.S. military. That was what was alien.

YJIA: That leads itself well into one of our further questions: How did you go from basically an anti-war activist, ready to “apologize to every Iraqi for the war,” to working so closely with the U.S. military? 

Sky: I volunteered when they asked for people to come and run Iraq for three months— because it was going to be three months before we handed back to the Iraqis . . . or so we thought in 2003. So I volunteered to go and I thought this was a perfect opportunity to apologize to all Iraqis for the war and let them know there are plenty of people in Europe, in fact the majority, who are against the war. When I packed my bag and left the UK, I had no idea what my job was going to be.

So I arrived, I wandered around Iraq, and when I ended up in Basra, they said, “We’re not expecting you.” I then got on a plane, went to Baghdad, spent a week or so there, and they said, “We’ve got enough people here; try the North. We haven’t got enough people in the North.” After I wandered around the North for a bit and they said, “Oh, yeah, go to Kirkuk. We haven’t got anybody in Kirkuk.” I arrived in Kirkuk and then was told I am the senior representative of Ambassador Bremer, in Kirkuk. And so there was me, not exactly a whole large team of people. And then there was the U.S. military with three thousand paratroopers and they were doing everything. They were all over the place, they were involved in running the local government, education, health—doing everything. It was impossible to avoid them.

YJIA: And so you just started working with them? 

Sky: It was the 173rd Airborne Brigade. They thought they were leaving so when I arrived they thought, this is great; this is the beginning of the civilians who are going to takeover from the military. And I thought, “Okay, I can cope for a short period of time, find out what they’ve learned because they’re getting out.” And I was very fortunate. I got along very well with the brigade commander, and that built up a really good understanding. So I could say, “Look, some of the stuff that you guys are doing really isn’t helping. I know you mean well, but success is not you guys doing everything. Success is the Iraqis doing stuff.”

And we worked really well together to try and get the military working in a different way. They were very keen and they wanted to help but had to work in such a way that they didn’t disempower the Iraqis. We focused on turning people into advisors, rather than implementers of everything all the time. There were really talented people in the brigade. I saw all this energy, all this will to do stuff. We just had to focus the energy in the right direction, in the right manner. And I think we did it very, very well there. I think what we were doing in 2003 in Kirkuk was what came to be later called, “counterinsurgency.” For us, it was instinctive. I mean, my background is development, and in development, human beings are at the center of everything. So that was the way I approached things anyway, and I was fortunate to have a counterpart who was willing to listen and was willing to think, “Okay, how can we adapt the military so we’re doing the right things?” So it was a very positive first experience.

YJIA: I’ve seen you described as the “Governor of Kirkuk” for a period of time. Is that an accurate way to describe your role there? 

Sky: Each province in Iraq, under the Coalition Provisional Authority, had a governorate coordinator. We were Ambassador Bremer’s representatives in the province. So we weren’t crowned as governors but the title was governorate coordinator.

YJIA: What are some of the challenges you faced in Kirkuk over the time you were there? 

Sky: Kirkuk was a very contested province. It had always been ever since Iraq’s incep- tion as a nation state. It was at a crossroads between the Ottoman Empire and Persian Empire. Everything came together in Kirkuk. And it also had large amounts of oil. As for the Kurds, they’d always dreamed of making Kirkuk part of Kurdistan. That was key not only because the city had a large Kurdish population but also because of the oil. And so the Ba’ath regime, for the very same reason, had tried to keep control of Kirkuk by expelling/deporting Kurdish residents and importing Arab residents from the South. After 2003, the struggle for Kirkuk went up a notch. Those who were de- ported came back and some of those who had moved there over the last thirty, forty years were forced to leave or left voluntarily. So you had big population movements and there was a big drive by the Kurds to incorporate Kirkuk into Kurdistan by using the U.S. military to help them because U.S. military framed the Kurds as the good guys. So things got a bit imbalanced in those early months.

YJIA: One of the major decisions post-invasion was to disband the Iraqi army and to initiate a program of de-Ba’athification among former members of the party. Looking back now through the lens of the one year anniversary of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, what impacts did those decisions have and what lessons might they entail for future conflicts? 

Sky: I think there are a number of lessons to be drawn from this. The most important one, or the two most important ones, are the maintenance of some form of state—what contributed to Iraq descending into civil war was collapse of the state. By dissolving the military, by de-Ba’athification, by removing the middle class and technocrats, the state collapsed. And in any society, if you collapse a state, people will form gangs to protect themselves and you will see violence. The second key point is you need an inclusive peace agreement. We tend to choose sides—“these are the good guys; these are the bad guys”—we’ve done this in Iraq and in Afghanistan. When, really, what you’re facing is a civil war. Unless there’s a peace agreement, those who are excluded will do everything they can to bring down the new order because they’re excluded from it. And, again, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can see that it wasn’t enough just to have elections and deliver public services. That didn’t create a legitimate government. Unless the elites come together in some form of pact, some groups will work against the new order—and they will work against it violently.

YJIA: You recently returned from a trip to Turkey. What would you like to share about your experiences on those trips and what kind of policy lessons you think can be derived from those experiences? 

Sky: I went to Turkey during mid-semester break [in early October 2012], and I went down to the Syrian border to get a better sense of what was happening in Syria. I went to Syria as a tourist last year and in the year that had gone by about thirty thousand people had been killed. Whenever you see these things happening, your first instinct is, “what can we do to stop it?” And there’s always that feeling “we want to stop it, we want to stop it.” But the realist in me, after these experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, makes me want to understand the problem better. Why is there violence? What is driving it? How to bring down the violence and how to create something more stable?

Syria has turned into a proxy war. What was very clear was that ordinary Syrian civilians are victims of both sides—of the regime, of the opposition groups—no one is looking at their welfare, no one is looking to protect them. And the longer this conflict goes on and the more that Saudi Arabia and Qatar and whoever else provides support to a particular faction within the rebels, and the more that Iran and Russia continue to support the regime, this could be a very, very long, bloody civil war. If this goes on like this, the Salafi/Wahabi elements will rise to the fore from within the opposition because they’re better fighters, they’re more experienced, and they’ll gain legitimacy through their roles in the struggle.

The longer it goes on, the less of a future the Alawites will have in a post-Assad Syria. So trying to stop the proxy war, trying to get an international agreement on what a future settlement might look like, trying to get the Syrian opposition to get their act together is critical. I think through the Arab Spring there was a sense of, the guys who protest are the good guys, the regime are the bad guys, and that’s too simplistic. There’s a real governance problem throughout the Middle East. The regimes aren’t good regimes but you don’t have mature political parties, you don’t have a strong civil society in many of these countries so sometimes what comes afterwards is a very long, difficult struggle. So I got to see some of that when I went into Turkey.

YJIA: You’ve mentioned Syria as well as the fallout or the continuation of the Arab Spring. What do you expect the regional fallout to be from the Syrian conflict and do you see it as a microcosm for the broader Shi’a/Sunni conflict moving forward? You mentioned it as a proxy war. As it is this long, drawn out war, what does it mean for stability in that region and what are the next concrete steps that might be taken and by whom? 

Sky: This region has been home to many different minorities for generation upon generation, and, for most of the time, relations between Sunni and Shi’a have been fine—much better than Catholics and Protestants in Europe. Just because you are Sunni, or just because you are Shi’a, doesn’t mean to say that defines your politics or outlook. Everyone has multiple identities. There have been dramatic changes in the region particularly since the 2003 war. Saddam’s regime was the bulwark against Iranian expansionism. Since the fall of that regime, Iran has been resurgent because there’s nothing to push back on it. The sectarian civil war inside Iraq poisoned the environment, poisoned the neighborhood. And you can see with the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq and the way in which they departed, it created a power vacuum in which Iran is becoming more prominent. This creates fear among Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries, and Turkey about the rise of Iran. Hence, the backing of different sides in all of this.

There’s nothing inevitable about this. It wasn’t inevitable that Iraq was going to turn out the way it has turned out—none of this was preordained. But it’s unfortunate. The 2003 war was supposed to bring dramatic changes, introducing democracy across the region. It’s brought about dramatic changes but not necessarily towards democracy promotion. The fallout from this will continue for years. This is not going to go away very soon. The U.S. reputation, U.S. ability to do things has been also hindered not only by the Iraq war but also by the position the U.S. takes on Israel. So the major players are in the region and will determine the outcome of the region. I hate to say it, but it’s not all about us.

YJIA: To go off of that a little bit, how does Israel play into the calculus of Syria or of the continuing situation in Iraq and the ongoing regional instability? 

Sky: There are a couple of things about Israel. One is that America’s relationship with Israel undermines America as an honest broker in the Middle East because it is not seen to be an honest broker in the Israel/Palestine situation. So that undermines the U.S. as a player. With the Arab Spring but more so with the resurgence of Iran and Iran’s nuclear program, Israel can now portray itself as the victim again. Everyone is concerned with Israel’s security, concerned with nuclear Iran. So it means there’s going to be very little pressure on Israel to make any concessions or progress with the Palestinian issue.

YJIA: What is your assessment of the Arab Spring, related to its gestation and now in the subsequent leadership changes in North Africa, specifically Egypt and Libya? 

Sky: Across the region there is a demonstration effect. People speak the same language, you’ve got TVs that spread the same news. So there is a demonstration effect, but each country is different, and I think they’ll each follow their own path. In Egypt, some feel that the revolution has been taken away from them. That the young people who went out to protest who bravely defied the regime police by standing in Tahrir Square acted in vain. There are some who feel that the democratic process hasn’t really enabled them to move forward, that it’s been taken over by the Islamist organizations because they were organized, while secular ones aren’t organized and are not well funded. And a sort of deal between the Muslim Brothers and the Egyptian army could make some sort of status quo. The army was prepared to sacrifice Mubarak almost in a coup in order to protect themselves. So what sort of regime will Egypt become? Will it be quite similar to what went before? Will the U.S. continue to build up the Egyptian army? Will the economy stay as it is? A huge challenge for any regime in Egypt is to provide jobs . . .

In Libya, there’s a sense that those who brought about the change are leading the change but there’s a lot of lawlessness. There wasn’t much of a state in Libya. Libya also has oil and in any country that is reliant on oil—solely reliant on oil—there’s a struggle to capture the state. And countries with high dependence on oil have great difficulty in transitioning towards democracy. I think Tunisia’s got the best hope: a small population, educated middle class, no oil, close to Europe, heavily influenced by Europe, a sense that Tunisia is almost European.

YJIA: Related to the role that oil is playing in Northern Africa and the Middle East, there have been some vast improvements in Iraqi oil infrastructure over the past couple of years and there’s a strong possibility that Iraq will soon be the world leader in oil output. What do you see the potential role Iraq could play in the world economy in the next ten years? Do you see it having the associated governance infrastructure to take advantage of that potential?

Sky: Well, the key problem is the governance structure. Iraq has increased its oil exports; it’s now the second largest Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) exporter. But what oil does to the internal dynamics in a country is key. A big battle in Iraq right now is over federalism—federalism and oil go together. Often there’s talk of Basra separating from the rest of Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan has a dream of being independent, if it could find a way to export its oil. So some would argue its oil that keeps people together because that’s the lifeline of the country, and that they’ve got to come together to negotiate over it. It’s been ten years so far and they’ve still not agreed on an oil law.

Others will say oil is what drives internal conflict. It provides incentives for political class to develop not towards democracy but more towards autocracy. There’s so much to steal. Ninety-five percent of the government’s income is from oil. So the elites have these nice cars, the lifestyle they enjoy, the travel, because they don’t really see this as people’s money; they see it as rents from abroad. It affects the political class. It fuels corruption and smuggling. It also makes Iraq prey to external interference.

Why is Iraq so much coveted? It’s not only because of its geographical location in between the Persian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, it also has to do with its oil that allows it to be such a dominant player and to build up a huge military. Today one million Iraqis are in the security forces out of a population of twenty-five million, so many people see the new Iraq returning to the type of the old Iraq where the regime lives off of its oil rents, builds up its big military, extends patronage and crushes opposition. Oil: a blessing or a curse?

YJIA: You’ve mentioned a few times the Kurds, Kurdistan, and especially Kirkuk as such an interesting city. Do you actually foresee the Kurd and Arab relationship in Iraq coming to any kind of a head, maybe in the form of a hot war, and what kind of timeline does that look like? Is oil the main issue that would ignite this? Or is there something different now than has been happening since the Kurds started looking toward autonomy?

Sky: Previously there were many Kurds who related to Iraq and identified as Iraqi. That changed really in the 1980s with the Anfal campaign and the mass gassing of the Kurds by Saddam. And so now by far the most dominant voice is of the Kurdish nationalist movement—of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) who rule Kurdistan. Now relations between President Barzani and Prime Minister Maliki are very, very poor. And this poor relationship, the mistrust between them, has hindered any compromises being made on the powers of central government versus regional and provincial government. Sometimes when things are very bad, you see fights between Peshmerga and Iraqi Security Forces in the disputed territories. So both leaders will use their different security forces to try and resolve what are inherently political problems between them.

YJIA: And do you see that happening in the near future? As relationships heat up between Maliki and Barzani—do you anticipate any kind of actual organized violence happening in the region? 

Sky: It depends on dynamics taking place in other countries. That will have a big effect on Iraq—on the Sunnis in Iraq and on the Kurds in Iraq. Some Kurdish lead- ers see that their future, the future independence of Kurdistan can only come about through the disintegration of Iraq. But where would the borders be between the Arab Iraq and Kurdish Iraq? There’s that whole area of disputed territories in which live Christians, Yazidi, Shabak, Kurds, Turkmen, Arab Sunnis, Arab Shi’a, a broad range of people, and there’s oil and gas there. So nothing separates easily and there could be struggles over internal borders particularly if those internal borders become international borders.

YJIA: Have you done any work or seen any progress with the role of women in the area? During the early days of Saddam and the Ba’ath regime, there was a strong push for gender equality, mostly for economic reasons, and since 2003, this has very much fallen as a priority. I imagine this is also the case among many countries that have recently come through the Arab Spring where women were very active in demonstrations and protests and now have had a much less integrated role in the new regimes that are taking hold. Do you have any thoughts on how that’s moving? 

Sky: In Iraq, as you were just saying, when you look back to the 1970s and ‘80s, the position of women was really one of the highest in the Arab world: highest literacy rates for women, highest employment rates for women. It was a secular country. Women did quite well within the Ba’ath Party. We saw women nuclear scientists, such as Dr. Germ. Women were taking prominent positions. But that was two or three decades ago now. During the wars so many men were lost that women became heads of household—that was very common. Sanctions really, really hit the society hard.

Since 2003, the levels of violence have obviously hindered the role of women in society, and the society has become more and more conservative, more and more religious. So those trends are not trends which advance the position of women. Also in the economy, oil doesn’t create jobs, meaning you’re not bringing women into the workforce. There have been attempts to put quotas for women, for instance, in the Parliament. But some people think that’s good, others say it’s not right, that lots of those women aren’t at the right level to be in Parliament, and that’s given women a bad name. So it’s difficult to judge. It’s really not an easy time. In the rest of the Arab world I think it’s still too early to see if the position of women is going to go backwards or forwards.

YJIA: Final question: I know you’ve said it’s “not all about us as the United States or the Western world,” but as President Obama has recently been reelected, what role do you see his Administration playing in the next four years? 

Sky: In the Middle East, we need to try to move beyond an obsession with the ‘security state.’ Our whole relationship with the Middle East for a long time has really been defined by buying oil and selling weapons, and even though America talks the language of democracy, there’s a rather large gap between rhetoric and action. Look at Obama’s Cairo speech he made in 2009—it was fantastic. People have waited decades to hear an American say such things. It’d be nice if there was action behind the words.