"Her hands are soaked in blood and history will write her that way."

July 11, 2016 3:31 PM

In 2006, Emma Sky was a 36-year-old working for the British Council in the Middle East when she hired on as Political Advisor to US General Odierno, Corps Commander for Iraq. According to this writer, she is the "Mother of Daesh". A former colleague compares her to le Carre's Little Drummer Girl. Emma Sky speaks for herself in Slate (she blames Obama) and The Atlantic ("Iraq is Finished"). (NB: the first link goes to a very long article, which includes the entire testimony of Emma Sky before the UK Irag Inquiry. At the very end of the linked piece are a number of other links to more info.)
posted by CCBC (59 comments total)

Sky's got a book and has been interviewed in all the right places:
NY Times Sunday Book Review
The new Statesman
Foreign Affairs
from 2012, The Guardian
And getting published:
Politico: How the ‘Green Zone’ Helped Destroy Iraq
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:50 PM on July 11, 2016

I just don't understand how she ever ended up there. I don't have time to dig through everything at this moment but this eye opening and I am stunned to learn of this person now after all these years.
posted by Annika Cicada at 3:58 PM on July 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think a fair few people have that claim before her.
posted by Artw at 3:59 PM on July 11, 2016

I wonder whether it would be possible for her detractors to focus just a skoonch more on her being a tiny little girl.
posted by Etrigan at 4:01 PM on July 11, 2016 [18 favorites]

As much as I would have liked the surge to have worked, some of my older friends(and I'm not young) filled me in on Vietnam and Korea from their perspective. They heard the constant drumbeat from the government of "just a few more troops, just a few more bombs, just a bit more money and time, then we can win!" They knew it wouldn't take much to destroy even a brief lull in the violence.
Iran was happy to give us a carrot once in a while. Then we would get the feeling that everything might work out but really was to make us stay so we spend more and more lives, money and equipment. At their whim, they could just stoke sectarian conflict in Iraq with some attacks against either the Sunni minorities or various Sunni insurgent militias. They had plenty of Shi'ite militias to pick from who were willing.
posted by Muncle at 4:12 PM on July 11, 2016 [9 favorites]

From the first link: She is also prone to a constant comparison of herself to General Odierno's physical stature. This notion of beauty----by constantly comparing herself to a beast she conquered. He was a giant she petit.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:20 PM on July 11, 2016

I love some of the writing in this very mixed bag of a piece, especially the observation quoted above (and the naked stuff). But even as much as we agree to hate this person now for aiding and abetting the Iraq atrocity, someday, our grandchildren will look back at her and say, "What a remarkable woman to have made a place for herself at the top of the conqueror's army in the middle of a war far distant from her home and upbringing."
posted by Modest House at 4:27 PM on July 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

That first link (by Maniza Naqvi) is terribly written. I waded through as much of it as I could before giving up. The second link is a brief anecdote from someone who knew her before Iraq, and a reprint of a New York Times article that gives the best description of who Sky is, and why she's supposed to be important. Her own writing in the last two links is interesting, but probably not unpartisan. In the end I'm still not sure just who she is, or how she enabled the rise of ISIS.
posted by Kevin Street at 4:35 PM on July 11, 2016 [14 favorites]

Who's going to play Klaus Kinski?
posted by clavdivs at 4:36 PM on July 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

Mainly it seems like she willingly jumped into a dumpster already full of blood once others had set it on fire, but has nothing but good words to say about them.
posted by Artw at 4:37 PM on July 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

Note to self: stop checking Recent Activity during dinner.
posted by Etrigan at 4:41 PM on July 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

That 3QD piece is written in a way I don't really understand or like. Almost seems like there's a wannabe gonzo vibe there. I thought it was going to go into what went wrong with Gen. Odierno's strategy (and by extension Ms. Sky's) re: the "Sunni awakening" but it veered into a weird rant about her stature and age and whether she was actually naked on time her house was attacked because she spent too much time exoticizing the Iraqis.

I'm fully prepared to believe that she was an over-privileged dilettante, one of many the Bush administration recklessly let screw around in Iraq. The characterization from the Keith Johnson blog may be totally accurate! But I don't see how overheated rants about the blood on her hands are a useful thing to write. I'd rather have learned more about the details of how the failure to build off of the Sunni awakening in Anbar and the civil war in Syria enabled ISIL's growth.
posted by Wretch729 at 4:44 PM on July 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

Oh it's worse then that, she painted the dumpster first then sent up a high Tory flare declaring: we're are the life guards?
posted by clavdivs at 4:47 PM on July 11, 2016

Reading (well, skimming, there's a lot there) her debriefing interview with the English government people (the Baroness and what not) she sounds sort of genuinely remarkable and like she was part of a team that did a reasonable job under horrible conditions. Certainly her account of herself sounds a lot more cogent than her detractors. It sounds like she/they were doing the right stuff, given the situation, and that continued support might have made a difference. The basic view of Sunni/Shia politics also jibes with other opinions I've bumped into on Foreign Policy.
posted by emmet at 4:47 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wait...isn't she basically Annette Bening's character from The Siege?


Yeah- nice try there, vast and unknowable artificial and/or alien intelligence that is running the increasingly horrifying simulation we're all trapped in.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:49 PM on July 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

The Sunni awakening is not responsible for ISIS. The awakening was very effective at stopping Alqaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgency (the predecessor of IS). When the Americans left, Iraq's PM Maliki stopped supporting the awakening groups and the result was that the Sunni insurgency restarted.
posted by humanfont at 4:51 PM on July 11, 2016 [7 favorites]

i think the point is not that she wasn't competent or knowledgeable (she pretty clearly was), but that in C21 she was happy (apparently) to play the role of the powerful white orientalist. and then be surprised at how that worked out.

on the other hand, perhaps she would argue it would have been even worse without her.
posted by andrewcooke at 4:53 PM on July 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

Guys, why is this dumpster full of blood? Is it at an abattoir? I guess that might make sense, but then why is it on fire? Are abattoir byproducts also flammable? And why would people be painting the outsides? This is getting confusing.
posted by indubitable at 4:54 PM on July 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

Can anyone explain the thesis of the main article, seeing as it lacks one?
posted by Candleman at 5:20 PM on July 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

In the Iraq is Finished article she sounds as if she's channeling Tom Friedman. I half expected her to quote her taxi driver for local background and a pull-quote... wait, she actually did:

On my last day in Jordan, Jaber al-Jaberi, another tribal leader who had served Iraq as a member of parliament and had once been a candidate for minister of defense, drove me to Jerash [...]

"Iraq is finished," he lamented to me.

posted by Joe in Australia at 5:21 PM on July 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

That article is a hot wet mess. I gave it a valiant effort but was not able to complete it. That's too bad because the variety of inept and often corrupt war criminals that the Bush administration put in charge of things in Iraq has details that will be forthcoming for years, and is both important and angering.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:49 PM on July 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

Unlike in a Tom Friedman piece, the driver isn't some anonymous Everyman taxi driver with folk wisdom; he's a tribal leader now in exile who happens to be driving her around.
posted by humanfont at 7:09 PM on July 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

I found the first two articles to be oddly peevish. The author of the first one was criticized for her writing in the same online magazine that eventually published this one; the author of the second one was apparently still bitter about her treatment of him from back in 2000 (the article was written in 2009). In terms of whether or how much she's to blame for the situation, who really knows. Her Wikipedia entry doesn't seem to give much evidence, although it does give photographic proof that the size difference between her and Ray Odierno isn't that great. (Her own Slate piece doesn't really blame Obama, clickbaity title notwithstanding; the closest it comes is a statement from her Iraqi interlocutor claiming that Obama could have done something to put Nouri al-Maliki in check in 2010, rather than simply withdrawing from the country.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:26 PM on July 11, 2016

although it does give photographic proof that the size difference between her and Ray Odierno isn't that great.

It's hard to tell from the angle, but she looks like she is probably about armpit-height on him, maybe shoulder-high at best.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:29 PM on July 11, 2016

"Can anyone explain the thesis of the main article, seeing as it lacks one?"

The meat is in her testimony, where she's led gently down the path of saying that the provisional government was entirely disorganized, incompetent and run on the level of a small-town school board, all while she congratulates herself for doing a fantastic job. It's someone who was wholly unequal to a (to be fair, historic and perhaps impossible) task but delusionally thinks she nailed it. It's kind of appalling and she has no real idea as she preens.

The other articles kinda support this, and give a broader context as far as how she'd present herself, and the testimony is pretty long, but it's like taking credit for being on the emergency evacuation committee at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and talking about how well you managed all the different personalities with no oversight — and really got on well with the management, who would have loved to keep those doors open — all while ignoring the giant fucking fire that killed everyone.
posted by klangklangston at 8:39 PM on July 11, 2016 [14 favorites]

But, yeah, a dude focusing in on the how the little lady was little throws up all sorts of gross sexist flags.
posted by klangklangston at 8:42 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ah good, we've found a woman to blame for the Mideast mess. And it isn't even Clinton!
posted by happyroach at 8:54 PM on July 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

If she is the "mother of Daesh" then Cheney must be the father, grandfather and all the rest of the relatives of Daesh, all at once.
posted by ymgve at 8:59 PM on July 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

Still, and I don't mean to keep delmoi'ing this thread, the testimony could be a basis for an incredibly black comedy, where the Iraqis have hope and they get a useless, placating bureaucrat who tells them that amazing things are going to happen then never delivers for a shifting bevy of rationales. People want their homes rebuilt, so she puts together a forum where people can have their concerns heard!

She complains that people dubiously caught up in de-Baathification — it wasn't just a computer click to get their homes and jobs back! She was a part of destroying the Iraqi infrastructure, and just assumed that the CPA would have completely, immediately replaced that infrastructure. The CPA didn't know what the fuck it needed, it just had huge bales of cash to throw around, and she had no idea how to actually achieve any of the basic requirements that the Iraqi people needed — she might as well have been a self-empowerment career counsellor down there. "Oh, it says here you used to be in the Ministry of Oil — have you thought about call centre jobs? Put that on your vision board."
posted by klangklangston at 9:01 PM on July 11, 2016

People still come up to her and ask her "Do you remember that time?" because Kirikuk was so great! And that Britain was much more effective any time it was "With you, whatever," and not trying to influence the process or outcomes.

MS EMMA SKY: I think it's very, very hard for anyone who served there. You will see people who worked so hard, who tried so hard, and you can say there were many successes at a tactical level and yet the bigger picture didn't go as everyone hoped. Thousands upon thousands of people lost their lives because of it. You can look at the whole Iraqi endeavour. It has been hugely costly in blood and treasure. Can we judge it yet? What will Iraq be in the future I think remains to be seen. Nobody denies the huge cost or the mistakes, but I wouldn't look back and write it off like that yet. You know, it set up the conditions for all these different insurgencies. It drove the country towards a civil war. We lost hundreds, the Americans lost thousands, the Iraqis lost tens of thousands of people, but there is still a potential in the years to come that the Iraqi people have a much better future, much better lives than they ever had under a Saddam regime or what might have followed with his sons.

'Sure, we destroyed the entire country for a giant waste of money and lives, but who's to say we won't look back and laugh?'
posted by klangklangston at 9:05 PM on July 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

No Country For Its People - A short history of modern Iraq’s ethnic minorities
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:20 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

this is...so astounding to me and not in a good way. I think knowing what I know about that awful time is enough for me at current levels and I don't really want to fill In more spaces with all these details. Is that okay to not want to know this?

Shaking my head slowly.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:30 PM on July 11, 2016

I'd like to know how one person could be responsible for something this significant. Isn't that right there indicative of a deeper structural issue (which spreads the responsibility onto other people's shoulders)?
posted by mantecol at 9:34 PM on July 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

She was a part of destroying the Iraqi infrastructure, and just assumed that the CPA would have completely, immediately replaced that infrastructure.

This really seems to have been a base job requirement for anyone and everyone in the CPA.

That last bit of her testimony that you excerpted may be the nut graf for understanding both Sky's attitude toward the whole mess, and the antipathy toward her. "there is still a potential in the years to come that the Iraqi people have a much better future, much better lives than they ever had under a Saddam regime or what might have followed with his sons"--maybe a minute from now, maybe an era, who can say? Now it's clearer what she meant by blaming Obama for pulling out too soon, because maybe if the US had stayed in a bit longer they could have fixed the mess.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:58 PM on July 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Don't worry guys, Iraq wasn't Bush or Blair or even the military's fault- it was just letting a LADY advise! And a tiny one at that."
posted by corb at 10:06 PM on July 11, 2016 [8 favorites]

That first piece is some incoherent but sexist writing. Good heavens.

A name like Emma Sky invoking Jane Austen, cornflowers and both Mrs. Peale and James Bond's virtue and sex oozing Bond girls.

She chuckles, simpers and purrs in interviews available on youtube

Her boarding-school girlish self-deprecation is complete with its requisite relentless self-promotion, boasting and preening in which she characterizes herself as a fearless adventurous intellectual

Twice he manages to work in a quotation where she was naked in bed, and attributes it to a desire to be ravished by "Asian, Arab or an African" despite her mentioning nothing of the sort.

I am also dubious about his claim she talks about her slight figure next to Odierno; he quotes nothing from her, but every other source does seem compelled to mention it - look at the Goodreads reviews!

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure she's responsible for untold bloodshed, but the relentless sexism of all these critics really erodes their credibility.
posted by gingerest at 11:37 PM on July 11, 2016 [7 favorites]

Without getting into whether the portrayal of her as an orientalist "little drummer girl" is fair, her idea that Obama gave up on a chance to save Iraq has echoes of the partisan cold war politics of "who lost China" (wikipedia loss of china) that gave us the McCarthy Era. I think the idea that Iraq could be saved (at least at a price the American public was willing to pay) is highly debatable
posted by C.A.S. at 11:40 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oooo, patriarchy fairy tales with a circular-firing-squad twist! Sign me up!
posted by a power-tie-wearing she-capitalist at 11:47 PM on July 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Just for the record, Maniza Naqvi is female, Pakistani, and works for the World Bank in trying to rehabilitate (if that's the word) places ravaged by war. That doesn't exempt her from accusations of sexism, of course, but should be noted. Also, someone pointed out a takedown on 3 Quarks Daily of her attack on Christopher Hitchens, which had a tone somewhat like the first link. I think this is standard for Naqvi, who is also a novelist and herself a target of acidic commentary from other Pakistani intellectuals. I believe that this style of writing is not uncommon in her circles.
posted by CCBC at 4:36 AM on July 12, 2016 [4 favorites]

Now it's clearer what she meant by blaming Obama for pulling out too soon, because maybe if the US had stayed in a bit longer they could have fixed the mess.

It's like a sunk cost fallacy. Same logic behind those that blamed the banking crisis not on lax regulations, but too many of them. See, if the banks could have screwed even more people, they could have sorted themselves out!
Likewise, if a few more thousand armed troops and hundreds of thousands of locals died, Iraq would be perfectly stable. Eventually. Maybe.
posted by lmfsilva at 4:45 AM on July 12, 2016 [4 favorites]

As has already been commented on - The piece by Maniza Naqvi is absolute drivel. I am astounded that Ms Naqvi makes her living as an author. Made ten times worse by the fact that she genuinely seems to believe what she is saying. I see she has previous form however in writing such turgid diatribes against individuals.

That aside, it is interesting to witness the dynamic that seeks to explain hugely complex situations as the result of actions of individuals. Having no knowledge of the Ms Sky previously I felt she gave a reasonably good account of the insanity of the situation she was confronted with - to put it simply, I would suggest she made the best of a very bad situation - a situation need point out that was not of her making. In fact she appears to have been against the Iraq War. Her post-hoc observations of the delicate nature of the tribal foundations of the society, of the arrogance of the British Military, of the lack of planning, and the dammed if you do/don't reality, all seem realtively astute. I genuinely feel like I must be missing something here? What warrants such unabashed vitriol (Mother of daesh / hands soaked in blood etcetera)?

Spook or not - surely the very fact she was able to with very (seemingly) very little effort walk into such a role speaks volumes about the outrageous lack of post-conflict planning by the actual instigators of the war. Clue - their surnames both begin with B.
posted by numberstation at 4:53 AM on July 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

Seems like Adam Curtis has found a character for his next project anyway.
posted by treblekicker at 5:20 AM on July 12, 2016

the testimony could be a basis for an incredibly black comedy, where the Iraqis have hope and they get a useless, placating bureaucrat who tells them that amazing things are going to happen then never delivers for a shifting bevy of rationales.

Called it ...
posted by octobersurprise at 5:44 AM on July 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm sorry I misgendered Ms. Naqvi.
posted by gingerest at 5:48 AM on July 12, 2016

She reminds me a bit of a more highly ranked version of someone I knew (studied Arabic at Oxbridge, worked as an intelligence contractor in Iraq for the US until quitting to teach English in Italy where rocket attacks didn't happen, had a weird obsession with Israel, of all places)
posted by acb at 6:20 AM on July 12, 2016

if anyone feels like they do understand the links here i'd love a comparison with this case which feels similar to me, but was met with a very different response.

had a weird obsession with Israel - there's a reference to le carre's little drummer girl above somewhere, which is similar, iirc.
posted by andrewcooke at 6:41 AM on July 12, 2016

Well, when you imply sole responsibility for genocided it might be that a different standard comes into play.
posted by Artw at 6:47 AM on July 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

there's a reference to le carre's little drummer girl above somewhere, which is similar, iirc.

The last I heard of her (which was 6-7 years ago, IIRC), she was working (in a not particularly senior capacity) at a strategic think tank in London. Not sure what she's doing these days, though in retrospect, not much would surprise me.
posted by acb at 6:54 AM on July 12, 2016

Some recommendations for better writing: Imperial Life in the Emerald City (previously on the blue) is a good account of the folly of the CPA in general, and there's the recent biography of W, Bush, which sums up the author's opinion of the Iraq War thusly: “Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated,” the author concludes, “but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:57 AM on July 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

Not sure what she's doing these days, though in retrospect, not much would surprise me.

Work'n at some school in the colonies.
posted by sammyo at 7:00 AM on July 12, 2016

surely the very fact she was able to with very (seemingly) very little effort walk into such a role

The wikipedia page says she'd spent a lot of time in Gaza, perhaps she'd developed a few contacts?
posted by sammyo at 7:03 AM on July 12, 2016

The CPA didn't know what the fuck it needed, it just had huge bales of cash to throw around

I mean there are lots of war crimes to go around but she very casually admits to looting Iraqi government bank accounts to help fund her activities in Kirkuk.... which is a war crime.

1) the interview between Baroness Ushar, Sir Chilcott, and Ms. Emma Sky is like some weird lost appendix from Dune.

2) the heart of this is that she was POLAD to Odierno without any chain of authority to the state department. it's a mistake to get distracted by Sky as a personality, the role she played was created by the very purposeful dysfunction of the military administration.
posted by ennui.bz at 7:21 AM on July 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

Also worth noting that Sky was not a supporter of the invasion of Iraq.
posted by humanfont at 7:22 AM on July 12, 2016

This reminds me of how Judith Miller operated in the region. I remember reading God Has 99 Names in 2000-something-ish thinking "wow, there really were Marion Ravenwoods traipsing across Dar Al Islam with incredible access to power."
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:16 AM on July 12, 2016

Testimony transcript in the first piece was interesting, but the bits before it -- am I the only one thinking "he doth protest too much?" She may not have helped, but there's a LOAD o' blame to go 'round on that outcome.

... she very casually admits to looting Iraqi government bank accounts to help fund her activities in Kirkuk.... which is a war crime.
I stand to be corrected, but if she was "trying to raid the banks which had Ba'ath funds" (wording from the transcript), wouldn't that be "no longer government" funds?
posted by milnews.ca at 8:35 AM on July 12, 2016

I stand to be corrected, but if she was "trying to raid the banks which had Ba'ath funds" (wording from the transcript), wouldn't that be "no longer government" funds?

I believe the Geneva convention have specific rules about how the funds of a captured enemy country must be managed eg. when France was occupied by Germany in WWII or Germany afterwards. Sky says that she was regularly going to Baghdad in search of funds, by hunting for prewar bank accounts to empty out. this implies a real lack of accounting and control (something which is confirmed amply by other sources.) in this situation, this lack of accounting and control is a direct violation of the Geneva conventions and it's clear that Sky could have vastly "misappropriated" funds for whatever she was doing in Kirkuk. if she didn't, then others did. various sources say that they amount of officially unaccounted funds in the CPA tallies in the billions. But that only deals with money they knew about, but how much was taken from bank accounts that were never accounted for?

people talk about "war crimes" and think blood and death. But the occupation of Iraq was a festival of financial crime both against the citizens of iraq and the citizens of the us for which few have been held accountable.
posted by ennui.bz at 9:35 AM on July 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

I am going to dive much deeper into this one (thanks for the awesome link collection, FPP), but my first reaction having read a bit of it is that assigning a bunch of blame or credit to Ms. Sky is more about the shock value or the novelty of blaming a pretty little white civilian lady for the catalog of horrrors that is Iraq, as opposed to the usual (and much more obviously blameworthy) suspects: Messrs. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bremer, Bush, et. al., and of course the Saudi royal family and the crazed Iraqi mid-level sunni jihadis and the Shi'ite party-political hierarchy post-invasion, et.al., ad nauseum.

In other words Maniza Naqvi, when she builds so much of her discussion of post invasion Iraq on Sky's role, and Sky's persona as the "essential qualification of an Arabist –or an Orientalist or a racist[...] To be the naked white woman in harm's way," she is sort of indulging in a kind of anti-feminist orientalizing of her own.

As I said though, this is a discussion worthy of real attention, so that's just my first, visceral reaction.
posted by jackbrown at 9:59 AM on July 12, 2016

"That aside, it is interesting to witness the dynamic that seeks to explain hugely complex situations as the result of actions of individuals. Having no knowledge of the Ms Sky previously I felt she gave a reasonably good account of the insanity of the situation she was confronted with - to put it simply, I would suggest she made the best of a very bad situation - a situation need point out that was not of her making. In fact she appears to have been against the Iraq War. Her post-hoc observations of the delicate nature of the tribal foundations of the society, of the arrogance of the British Military, of the lack of planning, and the dammed if you do/don't reality, all seem realtively astute. I genuinely feel like I must be missing something here?"

You seem to be missing that she volunteered to be there. She wasn't "confronted" with the insanity — she was part of it. "Making the best" of the situation seems to have been mostly playing toady to an American general, attempting to navigate complex social relationships with neither the language skills nor the cultural skills to understand them, and enjoying the lack of oversight that was part of the problem of her inability to be effective. She assumed that a good attitude and effort were a substitute for competence and planning, and as such is a microcosm of the tremendous failure of the Iraq Invasion. "Mother of Daesh" is overselling it, but Pangloss of the CPA seems fair.

At a certain point, if you realize that you are in over your head, the best choice is to resign, not to muddle through. She chose muddling, which worked out great for her and disastrously for the Iraqi people.
posted by klangklangston at 1:24 PM on July 12, 2016

I believe the Geneva convention have specific rules about how the funds of a captured enemy country must be managed eg. when France was occupied by Germany in WWII or Germany afterwards.
It sounds offbase f**king about with occupied governments' cash (even if you're giving it back to the occupied government' citizens), but I can't find anything under the Geneva Convention covering that. Happy to be educated, but this may just be a crime, not a "war crime".
posted by milnews.ca at 7:22 AM on July 13, 2016