General Graeme Lamb, the British deputy commander of coalition forces in Iraq 2006-7, was given the task of exploring outreach to insurgents. This was not an easy matter as it meant dealing with people who had killed our soldiers.
But “Lambo”, as he was known to all, had served as commander of the SAS and with his experiences in Northern Ireland and elsewhere he could not be accused of being soft on terrorists.
To those senior officers who said we should not deal with people who had blood on their hands, Lambo pointed out that he and others had very bloody hands.
There was only one General Lamb — and he was like no other. He would never have survived in the US military culture of political correctness. His emails were usually a stream of consciousness.
He frequently sent me words of advice: “Take a tip from the head of the bad ass and resident president of the bunch of bastards club — do not have friends. PS: you’re doing alright for a bird.”
Every six weeks Lambo announced he was heading back to the UK to “spank the wife”. General Ray Odierno, Lambo’s boss and mine, shook his head. He, like all US military, was permitted just a week off in a 15-month tour.
Strutting around, sleeves rolled up, swearing, Lambo looked and behaved like a thug. But it was all theatre, all an act, to make the Americans confront the need to change their approach and to take calculated risks. By the sheer strength of his personality, Graeme Lamb won over others to his ideas.
Lambo used his official residence at Maude House in the Baghdad Green Zone to convene discussions on how to get insurgents to stop fighting. He always included me. He had few staff of his own, needed allies and sensed that I could be a useful one. At one of these dinners I explained to Lambo that General O, who was seated between us, had encouraged his soldiers not to live like pigs, which made me feel guilty as I was untidy.
Lambo asked: “Have you heard my pig story?” I hadn’t, I admitted. “There I was on the eve of battle in 2003,” he said, “talking to the boys. I gave a rip-roaring address and ended with: never forget, the faint-hearted have never f***** a pig.”
General O looked at Lambo, then at me. I shrugged my shoulders. What could I possibly say?
Lambo appeared in General O’s office one day with his small team. He sketched out a diagram on a whiteboard, referring to a “squeeze box”, “pipe-swingers” and “wedges”. No one had a clue what he meant. When he lost his train of thought, Lambo would repeat “f***, f***, f***” as if he had Tourette’s syndrome until he remembered what he wanted to say.
He responded to General O’s questions with anecdotes that went off in all directions and left us more perplexed than when he had started. But the need to separate those who were prepared to stop using violence from those we deemed “irreconcilables” resonated. The question was how to do it.
Lambo had a range of ideas. One involved releasing insurgents from our detention camps if they agreed to try to persuade members of their group to stop attacking us. This approach was obviously fraught with risk. How was it possible to assess whether we had genuinely “turned” these insurgents?
General O was sceptical about releasing captured insurgents who had killed Americans, fearing it would only lead to the deaths of more US soldiers. He was also concerned that it would be perceived by soldiers as a “catch and release” programme, hence providing greater incentives for the US troops to kill rather than to detain.
I worked with Lambo and his staff to help them understand General O’s concerns and urged them to integrate their work within the main effort, rather than keeping it as a separate British initiative.
“This work at the moment appears to be a Lambo one-man show,” I warned. “It needs to be brought into the fold. And it must not be seen as a Brit thing (remove the Union Jack flag on the cover!) if it is to gain traction.”
Lambo responded: “Emma, How could you possibly suggest that we haul down the Union Flag — my dear girl we do not do that sort of thing. You have obviously spent too long in the company of Americans, but since I know how sensitive the female sex is to any ‘upset’ messages, we will in this case condescend and remove the offending symbol which we should not forget flew over an Empire on which the sun never set etc, etc.”
I wrote back: “General Lamb. I know it may be hard for you to come to terms with, but Great Britain lost Her Empire (as well as the Great) some years ago. These days we have to be more skilled and subtle, and rule indirectly through our cousins. We should therefore embrace the Stars and Stripes as our own.”
Once we were close to consensus, Lambo convened a session in Maude House with the top US generals. At dinner he seated General Stan McChrystal opposite me. It was the first time I had had a proper conversation with McChrystal, who was in charge of special forces in Iraq. I was impressed by how thoughtful, liberal and well read he was — for someone who specialised in hunting down humans.
He spoke to me about the effect of counterterrorism operations on those who prosecute them. He asked how I could participate in the work in Iraq if I did not believe in the whole premise of the global war on terror, the GWOT. I told him I could have remained an armchair critic in the UK. But I had chosen to be here on the ground trying to shape our approach. I recognised that working with the military was changing me. But if I wanted to influence others, I had to be prepared to change my own ideas.
On St Patrick’s Day, Lambo again invited us over to Maude House. We sat in the garden drinking tea while the bagpipes played in the background. General O lounged in a chair, smoking a cigar. Lambo reflected on his outreach to the Sadrists. It was not going well, he told us. “Skinny has been whacked and the Sadr City mayor wounded. (Lambo could not pronounce Arabic names easily so had given nicknames to the people he worked with.) He complained that he was short-staffed: “I only have five blokes and a bird doing all this ####.”
“One bird,” I reminded him, “is worth 10 blokes.”
Tony Blair paid his farewell visit to Iraq in mid-May. Lambo invited me over to Maude House to be part of a small group to meet him. “I will have my tomatoes ready to throw,” I said.
“And I have warned the guards to shoot you on sight and claim that you had a shifty look,” Lambo responded.
The British embassy was rocketed in the morning, minutes before Blair arrived — he was running 10 minutes late. Two vehicles were destroyed. At Maude House I stood in line waiting my turn. Lambo introduced me, saying I was a star and that I looked after the Big Man. There was no mistaking who the Big Man was as he was standing right there.
General O explained that I had been working with the US military since 2003. General David Petraeus, the overall commander, came forward and told Blair that I was “a national treasure”.
At this stage Blair got confused. “Are you British?” he asked. I assured him that I was British born and bred. “What are you doing working with the American military?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Stockholm syndrome,” I offered.
At that moment the sirens went off. “Incoming. Incoming. Take cover,” boomed the big voice. Everyone moved away from the windows. Blair’s security team took him off to the safe room. “Stay under cover.”
We heard a thud — the rocket landed close by. The “enemy” was fully aware of Blair’s itinerary. We found out how when Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who was now president of Iraq, phoned to apologise that he might have made a mistake in informing the Iranian ambassador about Blair’s visit. So in my one and only interaction with Blair I never did get to have a discussion with him about the decision to go to war.
Lambo left Iraq in style. At the battle update assessment, which was held daily at 7.30am in the large auditorium of the joint operations command and was attended by row after row of staff and liaison officers from multinational corps Iraq, he stood up on a chair and removed his shirt, revealing his muscular and incredibly hirsute torso.
It was not immediately clear that he was trying to show off the Texan belt buckle General O had given him as a farewell gift. He ended by saying, “One Team!”, flicked the finger at us all and strode out of the room.
Not Emma, one of her (splutter) friends
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