Known and Unknown (59 page)

“Don't rush this,” Armitage urged in our NSC meeting. “We'll sacrifice legitimacy.”

Vice President Cheney countered that no one, least of all him, was pushing for a few Iraqis with Washington connections to fly in and take the reins of a nation of twenty-five million people. But he noted, “We can't leave the government to chance.” Cheney indicated that without Iraqis transitioning into positions of responsibility quickly, there would need to be a prolonged American occupation.

I continued to feel that doing little to cultivate a cadre of Iraqi leaders, as Armitage seemed to be suggesting, would be a mistake. “I believe legitimacy comes because the Iraqi Interim Authority is temporary,” I said. “How well it works will determine its legitimacy.” Nobody at the table was going to be able to determine in advance whether or not an interim Iraqi government would be seen as legitimate by the Iraqi people.

“We should take two or three months to consult all Iraqis before we appoint an Interim Authority,” responded Armitage. This too was a consistent message from State: delay.

“So you wouldn't have an Interim Authority at all?” Cheney asked. The reason for the Iraqi Interim Authority was that it would serve for a short time—probably no more than several months. But if it were substantially delayed, there would be no point in establishing an Interim Authority at all. The meeting ended without resolution.

On March 10, 2003, we met again to discuss the same issue—this time at the National Security Council level with President Bush chairing the meeting.

The President agreed with the framework of the Iraqi Interim Authority proposal. Though we had provided a detailed plan for implementation, the exact execution and timing were left to be worked out in consultation with the Iraqis, who would start by leading smaller ministries and in later stages take control of the more important ones.
³¹
Only after those on the Interim Authority had developed and demonstrated their leadership capability would they take over key government ministries such as the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Interior, and the Ministry of Oil. But it was not clear if this would be in days, weeks, or months.

The following day I went to see the President. I was concerned about unresolved issues in this planning and the lack of policy resolution. Even though Bush had decided in favor of the Interim Authority, it still was not certain whether State would support quickly transitioning power to the Iraqis as I favored and—I thought—the President had decided.

Because the Defense Department would have to implement whatever plans for postwar Iraq the President finally approved, I wanted to be sure we would have the necessary resources in place. I told the President I thought I should go to Iraq for two weeks after major combat operations to oversee the beginning of the Phase IV plan. I said I would work with General Garner to help ensure that we do whatever was necessary to allow the Iraqis to take leadership of their country.

President Bush didn't cotton to the idea. “What if we had a problem with North Korea?” he asked.

It was a fair question. As we were preparing for war in Iraq, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il was increasing pressure on the Korean Peninsula by flagrantly violating previous diplomatic agreements to end its WMD programs. The President was concerned that Kim Jong Il might view an Iraq war as an occasion to increase his troublemaking in the region.

“Well, Mr. President, if that happened,” I replied, “I would come home immediately.”

The President thought about that for a moment. Then he shook his head. “No, Don,” he replied. “You need to be here.”
³²

I should have pressed the point harder. It was clearly important to establish order in Iraq after Saddam was gone—after coalition forces would end three decades of Baathist rule. We would have to fill the resulting political vacuum with a mechanism by which sectarian and ethnic groups could join to govern in a peaceful way. The tensions from State officials pulling in one direction, toward a more lengthy U.S.-run occupation and the Defense Department in another direction, would have to be managed carefully. A top-level administration official in Baghdad might have made a difference in those early days. There would have been someone able to decide firmly in favor of one option over the other and extract additional guidance from Washington as required. I did not have a full understanding at the time, however, just how badly that was going to be needed.

I
n the weeks after Iraq's liberation, the Department of Defense was still pushing for an Iraqi Interim Authority with some independence. With Saddam's forces defeated, the Iraqi people were wondering what would come next. Given the region's pathologies and the propaganda aired on Al-Jazeera, I was concerned that people across the Muslim world would believe that the United States sought to establish a colonial-type occupation for the purpose of taking Iraq's oil. We needed to put forward a group of Iraqis as the core of a new interim government in order to avoid that perception. We were losing valuable time.

On April 1, I sent a memorandum to the President and the members of the National Security Council saying that the time for trying to craft “the perfect plan” was over. “We have got to get moving on this,” I wrote. “This is now a matter of operational importance—it is not too much to say that time can cost lives.”
¹
It wasn't often that I wrote the President in such unequivocal terms, but I felt interagency deliberation needed to come to an end. Absent “a fundamental objection,” I wrote, I was going to have General Franks announce the first steps to create the Iraqi Interim Authority as soon as possible.
²

State Department officials again objected. They argued that establishing the IIA so soon after the war would complicate things. They also contended that the situation in Iraq was different from Afghanistan, which is a poor country with little infrastructure in place, and therefore a new government could be established more readily. They believed that we needed to take some time to ensure we did it the right way.

An unequivocal order from the President resolving the differences was not forthcoming, so those of us in the Defense Department resigned ourselves to what we thought might be a delay of a month or two. Rice was pushing for a senior diplomat to head up the reconstruction effort, so I understood that it might make sense to wait until he was chosen and had a chance to assess the situation. As I would learn, a delay of a month or two was not what Powell and his colleagues had in mind.

 

A
t the end of April I traveled to the Gulf region. As I wrote to the President in a report summarizing my meetings, the leaders I met with unanimously believed that a quick transition to Iraqis would “help ease the apprehension of their people of a long-term U.S. occupation.” It was, I added, a good reason for us to move forward on the Interim Authority.
³
I noted the remarkable consensus among our Arab partners of the threats posed by that perennial irritant in the Middle East, Syria. That regime's behavior had not changed since I met with Syrian leaders in the 1980s. They were still aiding terrorists and still causing trouble.

The liberation of Iraq engendered a feeling uncharacteristic for the Syrian regime—fear. Their leaders appeared to be rattled by America's ouster of Saddam Hussein. They might have been wondering if they would be next. When I arrived in Kuwait, the foreign minister said that a Syrian official had asked him to pass word to me that they were not harboring terrorists or facilitating the entry of jihadists into Iraq—the very things we knew they were doing. “We need to keep up the pressure,” I wrote the President.
⁴

On April 28, I took off from Kuwait International Airport and in fifteen minutes was over newly liberated Iraq. Only eighty miles of arid desert and some of the densest oil fields in the world separate Kuwait City from the southern Iraqi city of Basra. But in another sense the two countries seemed a universe apart. Moving from Kuwait to Iraq reminded me of leaving democratic West Germany and entering totalitarian Eastern Europe back in the 1970s. The modern Kuwaiti cityscape gave way to dusty, one-story buildings barely discernible from the thousands of square miles of sand that surrounded the Euphrates and Tigris river valleys.

Saddam's legacy to the Iraqi people was an economic system that combined the worst elements of Stalinist central planning with organized crime–style enrichment for the fortunate few. Iraq had billions of barrels of oil and one of the Arab world's most educated populations. Yet the dictator had cut off the Iraqi people from the rest of the world, brutalized them, eviscerated their sense of trust in one another, and denied them the fruits of economic progress.

It had been just over nineteen years since I was last on Iraqi soil. The regime I had visited back then had been swept away: Saddam and his top lieutenants were on the run.

On my first stop, in Basra, I thanked the British forces who had once again proven the value of America's special relationship with the United Kingdom. The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair had been one of the first to lend support to America after the 9/11 attacks. When the President delivered his historic speech to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, Blair had flown to Washington from London to express his country's solidarity. Blair and his secretary of state for defense, Geoffrey Hoon, had sent more than forty thousand troops to help topple Saddam's regime and to secure southern Iraq. I found Blair to be the most eloquent public voice explaining the rationale and sense of urgency for the coalition effort. Though he endured relentless domestic criticism, he stuck by his decision.

The British had engaged in difficult close combat with the Fedayeen Saddam in the cities of the south. Some Fedayeen had climbed onto the advancing British tanks and had to be removed with bayonets in hand-to-hand fighting. The job of the American forces would have been infinitely harder without them. The British had the correct perspective about the postwar situation we faced. As the commander of the British 1st Armored Division told me, “There is no humanitarian crisis, except the one the regime caused by turning off the electricity and water.”
⁵
The surprise and speed achieved by our invasion forces prevented the environmental and humanitarian catastrophes we had feared.

Coalition commanders had declared southern Iraq “permissive,” meaning that the enemy forces had been rooted out. Farther north, and in and around Baghdad, there was still resistance. For much of our C-130 flight into the capital, as we traced the path inscribed by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, we flew low over the riverbanks to reduce the risk from surface-to-air missiles.

In the polished marble rooms of one of Saddam's many palaces, I met with General Jay Garner and his staff for a briefing on the activities of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Garner was optimistic about the progress being made and hopeful for Iraq's future. As we drove through liberated Baghdad in the late afternoon traffic, cars raced forward to pull alongside and honk and wave. In one car the driver gave us the thumbs-up, but a passenger in the backseat gave a thumbs-down. I mused that in Iraq only Saddam won 100 percent approval.

At a power plant in southern Baghdad, Iraqi and American military engineers briefed us on the sorry state of the country's infrastructure. The power grid, manufacturing base, water and sewer systems, and oil drilling and refining capacity all were on the verge of collapse. Pipes and wires in many facilities were literally being held together by duct tape and string. The Department of Defense had expected that there would be a need to fix what might be destroyed in the war, but our intelligence had not prepared CENTCOM and interagency planners for an entire infrastructure that was crumbling at its foundation from years of underinvestment and neglect. It was clear from those earliest days that it would take many hundreds of millions of dollars to reestablish basic services.

The Iraqis who were in charge of the Baghdad power plant, and those in the facilities and ministries, were Baathists; they had been privileged under Saddam Hussein. Retaining these professionals could be problematic, because many others were reluctant to work with anyone who had received favors from the regime. Ideally, senior Baathists would not be allowed to stay in place. But we did not have the luxury of being doctrinaire. The coalition and the Interim Authority that followed would need many skilled people to keep a dysfunctional country running, even if they were Baathists. With regard to the technocrats, at least, I wrote to the President, it would be best to find a way to work with them.
⁶

My visit offered a sobering look at the challenges ahead. As I warned our troops at a meeting in a huge hangar at Baghdad Airport:

At General Franks' request, President Bush would formally declare the end of major combat operations the following day, on May 1, 2003. This would mark the beginning of Phase IV—posthostilities stabilization and reconstruction. Franks had hoped that announcing the end of combat operations would encourage those of our allies who preferred not to be part of the invasion to now feel comfortable enough to support reconstruction.
⁸
He had notified me in a cable that, after the President's declaration, Army Lieutenant General David McKiernan would be the senior commander in Iraq for ninety days.
⁹
McKiernan and the senior officers at his headquarters, dubbed “the dream team” in some Army circles, would be tasked with the command of the many thousands of American troops.

On my flight heading back to Kuwait City I was startled to see McKiernan onboard the C-130 aircraft. I asked him where he was going.

“To my headquarters back in Kuwait,” he said.

“Well, aren't you in charge of what's going on in Iraq?” I asked.

McKiernan told me he went in and out of Iraq once, sometimes twice a week to check on things. It struck me that in the crucial weeks following the fall of Saddam, McKiernan did not seem to think of himself as the commander in charge of the ground operations, and didn't seem to be preparing to take over command of all coalition forces in the country, as Franks had indicated in his cable. That meant that the senior American military leadership in the country consisted of Army and Marine division commanders. To be sure, these were some of America's most talented war fighters: Army Major Generals Ray Odierno and David Petraeus and Marine Major General James Mattis. They each reported to General McKiernan, but McKiernan seemed to have removed himself from the critical daily responsibilities in the country.

 

T
he following day—May 1, 2003—President Bush flew in a U.S. Navy S-3B Viking onto the deck of the USS
Abraham Lincoln
. He stood under a sign that said “
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
” and announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”
¹⁰
Bush was correct, but those in charge of his public affairs team did not appreciate the sizable difference between the end of major combat operations and “mission accomplished.” The phrase would haunt his presidency until the day it ended.

I had seen an early draft of the President's speech while flying to the Gulf. It seemed too optimistic to me.
¹¹
As I discussed my thoughts with Bush over the phone, I suggested edits to tone down any triumphalist rhetoric. He was receptive to my concerns. From the transcript I read of the delivered remarks, it was clear the speech had been muted. It was not the words in the President's speech that left the public perplexed when tough fighting in Iraq continued, but the unforgettable banner behind him.

The next day, when asked about the President's speech, I tried to strike a note of caution:

I had another issue with the President's remarks. “The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort,” Bush had said. “Our coalition will stay until our work is done.” That was not the way I understood our plan. A nation that had suffered under decades of dictatorial rule was unlikely to quickly reorganize itself into a stable, modern, democratic state. Deep sectarian and ethnic divisions, concealed by a culture of repression and forced submission to Saddam, lurked just below the surface of Iraqi society.

I hoped Iraq would turn toward some form of representative government, but I thought we needed to be clear-eyed about democracy's prospects in the country. Even the United States, though it had been the heir of hundreds of years of British democratic political development, did not evolve smoothly or quickly into the liberal democracy that we benefit from today. Millions of African Americans were considered property for more than seventy-five years after our country's founding. Women couldn't vote until nearly one hundred and fifty years after independence from England. I was concerned that the President's remarks suggested that the United States might remain until Iraq had achieved democratic self-sufficiency which might take decades. I doubted whether the American people would have the patience for a protracted, multiyear occupation as Iraqis fumbled their way along the road toward something approximating a free, nondictatorial government. And I assumed the Iraqi people would be even less willing to put up with a long American occupation, which could become a rallying point for rebellion.