Returning from the Middle East, Michael Baumgartner reflects on Iraq’s progress since he left in 2008

WASHINGTON – When Rep. Adam Smith asked his counterpart from across the Cascades to join him on a trip to Iraq, the Democrat from Bellevue got a response he hadn’t often heard before.

“I told him, ‘Adam, I would love to go back to Baghdad,’ ” recalled Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican who worked at the U.S. embassy in the Iraqi capital in 2007 and 2008.

After returning home on Saturday from a trip that also included stops in Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Baumgartner said in an interview that Iraq has made real gains since he last set foot there 17 years earlier. But his meetings with government officials and U.S. troops also made it clear that the region still presents major challenges that the United States must confront.

“On a personal level, I had a lot of emotions about returning to Iraq for the first time since 2008,” he said. “Iraq has really stabilized since that time, so it was just really great to see some of the progress Iraq has made.”

It was the first congressional trip abroad, known as a “CODEL” in Capitol Hill parlance, for the freshman GOP lawmaker. Along with Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, the delegation included Democratic Reps. Sara Jacobs and George Whitesides, both from California, and Wesley Bell of Missouri.

Baumgartner was the only Republican in the group, which began its trip in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, before going to Baghdad, then to the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar and the U.A.E. They met with several leaders and top officials, including Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani of Iraq and Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani of Qatar, who also serves as his country’s foreign minister.

Baumgartner said his biggest takeaway from the trip is that as the United States deals with the rise of China and other strategic threats around the Pacific Rim, Americans shouldn’t be “naive or reckless with the ongoing threat of Islamic extremism in the Middle East.”

“As we have produced more energy resources here at home and diversified our access to energy across the globe, the Middle East matters less to us from an economic standpoint, but it still is an extremely turbulent area where America will need to stay thoughtfully engaged,” he said. “And I think it’s important that the American people be reminded that we have men and women serving in harm’s way, facing very dangerous challenges right now.”

Baumgartner said the recent degradation of the Iranian proxy groups Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon – coupled with the fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December – present “a real opportunity” for Iran’s influence in the region to wane. But he said the group still heard a lot of concern about Iran developing nuclear weapons.

In 2018, Trump pulled out of a deal the United States and other world powers had struck three years earlier to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for lifting sanctions that had crippled the Iranian economy. Tehran has since enriched uranium to a higher level, and the Trump administration is now in talks for a new deal.

Baumgartner said he is happy to see the United States and Iran talking, but he said Trump was right to withdraw from the previous agreement – negotiated by the Obama administration along with leaders from China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and Germany – because it didn’t do enough to prevent Iran from developing ballistic missiles and backing proxies throughout the region. Smith disagreed, arguing that the previous deal had been working.

“Yes, Iran has a malign influence in the region,” Smith said. “But they can have a malign influence in the region without a nuclear weapon or with a nuclear weapon, and we’d be much better off if they didn’t have a nuclear weapon.”

Iran also continues to support militant groups like the Houthis, according to the Pentagon, whose attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea have prompted ongoing U.S. strikes on the group that controls much of Yemen.

Baumgartner arrived in Baghdad in 2007, which he called “a very tough time but a very rewarding time,” during a troop surge the George W. Bush administration hoped would stabilize the country amid an insurgency that arose after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 toppled the government. The United States withdrew its forces from Iraq under then-President Barack Obama in 2011 but re-entered the country just three years later to counter the militant group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and maintains a presence there today.

The lawmakers met in Iraq with Maj. Gen. Kevin Leahy, the commander of that mission, known as Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve.

In an interview, Smith said he sees four major issues the United States must address in the Middle East: the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; Syria’s new government; Iran’s malign influence in the region; and the ongoing U.S. military campaign in Yemen.

While U.S. and allied forces have retaken virtually all of the territory once held by ISIS, Smith said about 8,000 ISIS fighters and 35,000 of their family members are detained in camps in Syria, which are secured by American troops with the help of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

Smith said President Donald Trump will soon need to decide how many U.S. troops should remain in the region. American forces currently include about 2,500 people in Iraq and 2,000 in Syria, according to the Pentagon, in addition to smaller numbers stationed in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and other Arab countries.

“If Trump makes a big decision to significantly cut our troop presence in Syria and Iraq, it could undermine our ability to contain ISIS and it could also empower Iranian proxies in Iraq,” Smith said.

One of Smith’s main takeaways from the trip, he said, is that the United States needs to help the new government in Syria stabilize that country, including by lifting sanctions that were placed on the previous regime.

In addition to what he learned from the meetings and briefings, Baumgartner said the trip was a rare opportunity to get to know some of his fellow lawmakers away from the hustle and bustle of the Capitol.

In Baghdad, Baumgartner asked the U.S. embassy for permission to visit the famous arch known as the Crossed Swords, where he had taken a photo during his previous tenure in Iraq. He noticed that the helmets of Iranian troops killed during the Iran-Iraq War that had adorned the base of the monument in 2008 were gone, he said, but signs of Iran’s influence in neighboring Iraq remained.

Images of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian military leader assassinated by the United States in 2020, were displayed at all the major intersections in Baghdad, Baumgartner said. When he shared his disappointment at the sight with al-Sudani, the Iraqi prime minister told the congressman they had been put up by private citizens, not his government.

Baumgartner emphasized that Iranians are good people, both in Iran and the diaspora, and he lamented that the country’s “extreme” leadership continues to cause so many problems for the United States and its allies.

“I think the Trump administration is going to take a much more realistic view at the region,” he said, adding that the killing of Soleimani “has brought a lot of credibility” to its approach to Iran.

In Trump’s first administration, the United States facilitated a series of agreements to normalize relations between Israel and Arab countries, known as the Abraham Accords. But Smith said Trump’s proposal to annex Gaza and kick out all the Palestinians was a strategic blunder that hurts the chances of forging a security pact between Israel and its Arab neighbors like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia that could counter Iran.

“The way to get to a more stable Middle East is to get the Arab countries, Israel and the U.S. into a security partnership,” he said. “But you’re not going to get that extension of the Abraham Accords if there’s no future for the Palestinians.”

Smith also criticized the Trump administration for “gutting” American influence in the region by eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development and effectively shuttering the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, an Arabic-language news organization created and funded by the U.S. government.

“It’s a major challenge right now, because China, Russia and Iran, they are aggressively messaging against U.S. interests and trying to push the U.S. out of various regions of the world,” he said. “We need to make the case for why it’s important for countries to still do business with America.”

Baumgartner said he couldn’t speak specifically to Middle East Broadcasting Networks – whose board is led by retired Ambassador and Spokane Valley native Ryan Crocker, with whom he worked in Iraq – but the Republican said U.S.-funded media in the region is important so long as it doesn’t inadvertently push anti-American views.

“In general, I share Ambassador Crocker’s view that it is important for America to be engaged in the public-affairs sphere for our values,” he said. “Because if we don’t, there are Iranian influences and Russian influences and Chinese influences that can lead to significant impacts on U.S. interests across the globe.”

As threats and challenges in the Middle East continue to evolve, Baumgartner said, the United States needs to do a better job of listening to its partners in the region and working with them, to avoid putting American boots on the ground in places like Yemen.

“As the old saying goes, ‘America might be done with the Middle East, but the Middle East is not done with America,’ ” he said. “So we have to be realistic about the ongoing threats from that part of the world.”