Shifting Gears

Ryan Crocker — our former ambassador to Iraq and half of the dynamic duo with Gen. David Petraeus, both credited with bringing stability to Baghdad and beyond — would like to come home to Spokane Valley. But he may have to walk the final few miles from the state line.

His civilian ride, a cherry red 2009 Mustang convertible, isn’t legal here.

After donning body armor to go jolting through the streets of Baghdad for two years in high-speed armored SUVs, Crocker was looking forward to being just another American behind the wheel of a hot car.

“And what could be farther away from rolling through Baghdad in a convoy of armored Suburbans than slipping into fifth gear on an empty highway in Montana?” he asks in a recent e-mail. “But the sequel is, Washington state won’t let us register it  — it seems it wasn’t built to California specs. And I thought the whole point was that we are not California here!”

Oh, Mr. Ambassador. Things have changed while you’ve been abroad.

“The way the Valley has changed is extraordinary. Open fields and wooded acres are new houses now,” Crocker says. The 59-year-old Spokane Valley native is temporarily back in his old family house  — for the first time since college  — as he and his wife, Christine Barnes, prepare to build on 13 acres off Highway 27 in the south Valley.

In a weird way, the Valley appears to have been awaiting his return. The childhood house, sold in 2005, was on the rental market recently.

“I got into town, checked Craigslist, and there it was. This time, I don’t have to sleep in the basement,” he says.

Today, Crocker is finally pulling the pin on a 35-year diplomatic career. In two interviews and several e-mails, he assesses Iraq and looks forward to what’s next. Patience is his watchword for both.

Iraq has been crumbling for decades, he says, enduring three wars and 13 years of economic sanctions since 1980. It will take years to restore any kind of normalcy, Crocker says.

As for his future? “I am too soon out of this to make any sensible decision.”

The Senate finally confirmed Crocker’s successor, Christopher Hill, in a 73-23 vote on April 21.

Crocker has been at the intersection of many key events in the Middle East. He was in Baghdad in 1979 when Saddam Hussein seized power, was inside the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 when it was destroyed by an enormous truck bomb and was lauded for aiding the wounded despite being bloodied himself. In 2002, at the behest of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Crocker wrote a six-page analysis of the likely aftermath of invading Iraq, bluntly predicting much of the chaos.

Crocker spent four months in Iraq in 2003 during the early stages of the occupation and insurgency, but was stateside and ready to retire in 2007 when President George W. Bush tapped him to be ambassador.

“I grew up with a father who was a career Air Force officer. I learned early that when you are called to serve, you don’t say no,” Crocker told Whitman College Magazine (he’s class of ’71) during a 2007 interview.

His first week in Baghdad in March 2007, Crocker wanted to get out of the Green Zone and see some of the city. As a fluent Arab speaker, he looked forward to some street talk with ordinary Iraqis.

“Iraqis have the reputation of being the toughest guys on the Middle East block. It’s so great because they don’t get intimidated at all, you know? Here comes the American ambassador with his security detail and they elbow each other and say, ‘Look at that.’ You walk over and they don’t head for the exits. They are perfectly ready to tell you what’s wrong with American policy and American implementation,” Crocker says.

His most memorable excursion was his first, a visit to the Sunni neighborhood of Dora the week he arrived.

“It looked like Berlin in 1945,” Crocker says. “The pucker factor was pretty high. Al-Qaeda was very much present and you could hear explosions and gunfire.” An American brigade was just moving in that day to set up combat outposts, part of the surge strategy to get troops closer to the people.

Only a dozen shops were open in a market that is on the scale of Seattle’s Pike Place. There was not a single doctor left in Dora, residents told Crocker.

“I asked how did they get to a hospital, and their answer was they don’t. To get to the nearest hospital meant crossing a bridge over the river and the bridge is controlled by a National Police checkpoint,” he says. “People would disappear. It was a devastating experience. I followed the news. I read the reports. I had the briefings. But to go down and talk to the people … I came back and thought, ‘Oh my God. I don’t think we can do this.’”

Soon after, a rocket hit his office window in the Green Zone. “Except we removed all the windows a long time ago and replaced them with sheets of steel,” Crocker says.

So his office was like Fortress America, and it’s where Crocker, by all accounts, helped steer Iraq away from the brink of civil or sectarian war.

He is sanguine about the future, but adds, “There is a lot to worry about out there. There are huge complications that cannot be understated.”

He does not foresee a return to full-scale insurgency, but says a critical factor is the Iraqi government’s ability to create real jobs. Crocker says the bloodshed between 2004 and 2007 “was payback” against members of Saddam’s military or political machinery. “And then it was payback for the payback. In the last year we are seeing far more tolerance. Given the legacy of the past, you’ve got to go through some pretty ugly things.”

Iraqi reality is complex. The electricity grid was near collapse even before the invasion and electrical engineers are scarce.

Electricity may still appear to be at 2003 levels, but generating capacity is much greater. That’s been swamped, however, because demand has quadrupled.

The Iraqi government is funding scholarships for 10,000 Iraqis a year to study abroad, especially in the U.S.

“So it’s a way of educating the next generation of Iraqi leaders who, because of their exposure to our society, are going to be looking at us in a far more positive and complex way.”

Crocker went back to Dora 18 months after his first visit.

“The market had gone from a dozen shops to 400. [A week earlier] tens of thousands of Shia pilgrims walked through Sunni Dora on their way to the shrines at Karbala. In 2007, that would have been insane. The people of Dora, and they are very proud of this, set up stands and provided food and water to the pilgrims just out of hospitality. For free.

“Does that mean everything is good forever and always? No, it doesn’t. But it does show that significant, positive change is possible.”

The only thing that’s not, it seems, is getting his Mustang registered in Spokane.