They stood out like a green leaf in fall, or a yellow daffodil midwinter, or a child wandering in a war zone, somehow indifferent to what surrounded them – these orange blossoms, sweet smelling, delicious, and delicate, a sign of hope not long after the assault on Baghdad, early 2004. I cannot forget them.
As I stood in Baghdad for the first time, first of multiple times, Saddam’s palace had been shelled, captured, and was now part of “the green zone,” with big holes in the ground, smashed roofs, crushed cars. Insurgent mortars still fell. Yet here they were, these defiant, young orange trees, oddly in blossom.
No one had told them we were at war, devastation the norm, that they had to conform. No one told these budding orange trees they were not allowed to bloom or to emit perfume. I wondered whether flowers bloomed in Normandy that terrible June of 1945. Does God send reminders, light candles in chaos?
I do not know, but it seems so. In 2004, America had overrun Baghdad. While also a Navy Intelligence officer, I was actually there in my capacity as Assistant Secretary of State, charged with setting up all US
training – in both Baghdad and Jordan – for Iraq’s almost non-existent police force.
The place was busy, but surreal…mission daunting. We needed to recruit, vet, train – without violent incident – thousands of Iraqis of differing religions and cultures, Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to Yazidi and Christian. We needed to do this as they processed decades of horrible trauma, loss, and exhaustion.
There are times in life when you think, “This is nearly impossible, but I have to start somewhere, so let’s start here.” As General Petraeus trained the Iraqi Army, my team set up and trained the Iraqi Police, slowly, methodically, and unremittingly. There were backsteps, recovery, and forward steps with purpose.
My team at State, top-heavy with former law enforcement and military, set up agreements with Jordan, Iraq, and other countries, then created a massive academy in the desert, secured it, recruited into it, and eventually trained, in Jordan and Baghdad, the 85,000 police who stabilized Iraq from 2003 to 2005.
The task was outsized, often fraught. It was a management, security, and political nightmare. US allies, agencies, contractors, and countless points of friction worked against us. The insurgents did not want us to succeed. Sectarian differences flared, but we kept at the mission until light eventually replaced dark.
There were, as there always are, backsteps. Stabilizing war-torn countries is never easy, less so when conflicts exist among allies, within our government, and among those on the ground with different priorities.
On the other hand, potential chaos, that thin line between rule of law and lawlessness, economic hardship everywhere you turn, a sense that things need to be made accountable, inspires cooperation.
Where the unexpected becomes a norm, decisions are life and death, with little room for error, people focus, concentrate, and learn to cooperate. Remarkable is the human capacity to falter, recover, and learn.
One day, forced to use commercial buses to get hundreds of police recruits to Baghdad airport, from there, C-130s to Jordan’s training academy, we were concerned over “force protection” – terrorism. A dog alerted on a bus, leading to a daisy chain of explosives in the bus ceiling. The explosives were removed.
On the training site in Jordan, we had to house sectarian groups together, keep them at peace, inspire learning, and get outcomes required by the American – and allied – governments. With the right approach, security, education, operational environments, incentives, and penalties, it all worked out.
In 2024, a Gallup poll found record-high confidence among Iraqis in their government and future, one of the top nations in the Middle East to enjoy such a finding, reduced poverty, and increased life expectancy. While a thousand critics exist when it comes to the Iraq War, I, among them, believe that what we did was huge.
Bottom line: Never lose hope. Look for the orange blossoms, or their like. They are there, and they have meaning. God does not forget us. He leaves hints, encourages. He is the orange blossom in our chaos.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!
