CHAPTER 32

A Failure of Diplomacy

“War is a failure of diplomacy.”

—source unknown

President Bush believed that the key to successful diplomacy with Saddam was a credible threat of military action. We hoped that the process of moving an increasing number of American forces into a position where they could attack Iraq might convince the Iraqis to end their defiance. On January 11, 2003, I approved the deployment of an additional thirty-five thousand troops, with aircraft and warships, to the Gulf region, sending still another signal that the time for cooperation was dwindling.

For a year, officials from both France and Germany had said they were looking for a diplomatic compromise with the United States that would open the way for them to support the use of force in Iraq, if it proved necessary. On January 22, President Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder announced that they would oppose ousting the regime.

It was a regrettable position for two longtime U.S. allies, not to mention historic rivals themselves, to oppose America’s diplomatic and possible military effort as strongly as they did. In the United States critics used France and Germany to claim that “Europe” was opposed to the administration’s stance on Iraq. That, of course, was not true. A large majority of European countries were supportive. More troubling, the French and Germans were, intentionally or not, giving Saddam’s regime the impression that they could stop a military confrontation. By giving Saddam a false sense of security, and thereby reducing the incentive for him to comply with the UN’s demands, the French and Germans undoubtedly made a war more likely, not less.

Hours after the French and German declaration, I traveled to the Foreign Press Center for a scheduled briefing of foreign reporters. One questioner asserted that the attitudes of the French and Germans were representative of “the mood among European allies.”

“[Y]ou’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France,” I replied. “I don’t. I think that’s old Europe.” I pointed out that if the reporters looked at the entire composition of NATO today, the center of gravity had shifted east with its new members. Those countries, I asserted, were “not with France and Germany on this. They’re with the United States.”¹

I had no sense that anything I had said was anything other than blindingly obvious. But I soon learned that my “old Europe” comment had touched a raw nerve. It caused an uproar, especially from those who felt they were on the receiving end of my remark. The French Finance Minister called the comment “deeply irritating.”²

Ironically, my comment was unintentional. I had meant to say France and Germany represented “old NATO” not “old Europe.” As a former ambassador to NATO, I had been thinking of the alliance that existed when I served in Brussels. In the 1970s, when there were fifteen countries in the alliance, France and Germany played a large role. But after the Cold War’s end, NATO extended membership to a dozen Eastern European nations, changing its size and outlook. While serving as secretary of defense in the Bush administration, I took a particular interest in visiting Eastern Europe and its leaders. I was comfortable with those countries, since Chicago has a large representation of Eastern Europeans.^* This shift in the center of gravity of NATO eastward naturally reduced the role of France and Germany. Having been liberated from the Soviet Union only a short time earlier, the nations of Eastern Europe had a recent understanding of the nature of dictators, whether a Stalin, a Ceausescu, or a Saddam Hussein.^†

Shortly after my “old Europe” comment, and to counter France and Germany’s negative position on Iraq, ten Eastern European nations jointly declared their support for military action. “Our countries understand the dangers posed by tyranny and the special responsibility of democracies to defend our shared values,” their leaders declared jointly. “[W]e are prepared to contribute to an international coalition to enforce [UN Resolution 1441] and the disarmament of Iraq.”⁴

In any event, the phrase “old Europe” entered the vernacular. The segment of Americans that preferred calling french fries “freedom fries” loved it. The elites in Paris and Bonn who thought themselves the guardians of a sophisticated, new world order did not. All in all I was amused by the ruckus.

Nearly fifty nations would join the American and British–led coalition willing to change the regime in Iraq—with thirty members committed to concrete, visible support and the others preferring to provide assistance more discreetly. As far as everyone on the NSC was concerned, the more nations involved in the invasion and in the postwar period, the better. It would mean less burden would fall on the United States and, in particular, on our military. I agreed with Churchill’s formulation. “There is at least one thing worse than fighting with allies,” he observed, “and that is to fight without them.”

Yet even this impressive achievement did not prevent critics from accusing Bush of “acting alone.” It was harmful, to say the least, when Senator John Kerry publicly denigrated the forty-five nations that were supporting the coalition effort in Iraq. He acidly referred to them as members of the “coalition of the coerced and the bribed.”⁵ This was an especially peculiar charge for two reasons. The first was that Kerry, like most of the Democrats in the Senate, had supported the decision to go to war—at least, when things seemed to be going well. Second, he presented himself as an internationalist, yet he was insulting our friends and allies and purposefully harming our coalition, simply to score a domestic political point.

The deeper irony was that his charge was perfectly misdirected. It was true that some nations in the coalition provided only a little help, but in some cases that was all they could afford to offer. Others, particularly the British, Polish, Spanish, and Australians, extended substantial help, in the form of military and civilian personnel and materiel. Given all we now know about the deep corruption in the Oil-for-Food program, if any nations might have been charged with having been bribed or coerced to take a position on the war in Iraq, it should have been some of the nations that opposed military action, not those that supported it.

In February 2003, to further rally international support and increase pressure on Saddam, President Bush decided that the United States would make a major presentation to the UN Security Council on the threat Iraq posed and its defiance of UN resolutions. The point person for that presentation was an obvious choice. Secretary of State Colin Powell was not only America’s senior foreign policy official, he also carried substantial credibility at home and abroad.

As he prepared to make his case for military action against Saddam, Powell worked closely with Tenet and other senior CIA officials, traveling to CIA headquarters, meeting with analysts over several days, and working late into the night. Powell went over his presentation extensively with Condoleezza Rice to be certain they had analyzed all of the facts and information, and had raised every conceivable question, to hone America’s case. Powell and his aides considered how to achieve an Adlai Stevenson moment—a reprise of the UN ambassador’s forceful 1962 presentation to the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which turned the tables on the Soviet Union.⁶

On February 3, two days before Powell was to go to New York, he sketched out his briefing to the President at an NSC meeting. “We have sources for everything,” Powell confidently told the President. If Powell felt duped or misled about any aspect of his presentation, as some would later claim, there was no sign of it two days before he delivered it.⁷

Powell would touch on Iraq’s links to terrorists and mention the small Kurdish town of Khurmal, which, the CIA had been reporting since early 2002 housed an underground facility for testing chemical weapons, including ricin and cyanide.⁸ The site was operated by Ansar al-Islam, a Sunni extremist group with ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian member of al-Qaida. A number of al-Qaida terrorists, including Zarqawi, were believed to be present at the Khurmal facility, having recently fled from combat in Afghanistan.⁹ Some in the intelligence community believed elements of Ansar al-Islam were funded by al-Qaida and could be colluding with Saddam’s regime. The reach of the Iraqi intelligence services was extensive in the country, with a vast network of informants, so it was not unreasonable to conclude that the Iraqi government knew of this fairly sizable terrorist operation.^*

Many months before the February NSC meeting, Chairman Myers, General Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Staff, and CENTCOM planners, in close coordination with the CIA, had developed a range of options to attack Khurmal. They included a ground assault using CIA operatives, U.S. special operations forces, and Kurdish militia fighters known as the peshmerga. Another way was to destroy the facilities using cruise missiles and air strikes. The ground option had the advantage of collecting better evidence on the WMD operation, but given how well defended the site was, it was almost certain to entail casualties.

We were aware that the intelligence about the facility, though extensive, could not be considered conclusive. But taking all the risks into account, Myers and I were convinced that the intelligence was sufficiently persuasive to warrant military action. The members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were also unanimous in their recommendation to strike.¹¹ We believed that hundreds of suspected terrorists, including Ansar al-Islam’s senior leadership, suspected al-Qaida members, and an active chemical weapons facility were in our sights. With a military strike, we thought we would gain more clarity on the CIA’s reporting on Iraqi WMD programs in short order. Myers, Tenet, and I went back to the President and the NSC several times in 2002 to urge an attack on the facility. Each time we were unpersuasive. Powell and Rice were concerned that a U.S. strike within Iraq’s borders could cause Saddam to take action against the Kurds and make America’s diplomatic initiatives in building a coalition and gaining support at the UN more challenging. Bush agreed with them.

In February 2003, as Powell briefed the National Security Council on his upcoming UN speech, I spoke up once again on Khurmal. If we were ever going to hit the facility and have a favorable result, we would have to do it at the same time, or preferably just before, Powell spoke, since he would be telling the world that we knew about the WMD facility. Once the terrorists learned from Powell’s speech that we were aware of their presence, they would flee.

Before the NSC meeting ended, I offered my recommendation for the last time: “We should hit Khurmal during the speech,” I said, “given that Colin will talk about it.”

Powell objected. “That would wipe out my briefing,” he said, adding, “We’re going to get Khurmal in a few weeks anyway.”¹²

In his dramatic address before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, Powell presented recordings, satellite photographs, and documents that he argued proved that Iraq was engaged in WMD activities in defiance of the UN. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” Powell told the Security Council. “These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”¹³

On the subject of nuclear weapons, Powell left no room for doubt about his convictions about Saddam’s intentions. “[W]e have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons,” Powell said, with the authority of his years of military and diplomatic service. “Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb.” He echoed the Agency’s estimates about linkages between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaida. “[W]hat I want to bring to your attention today,” he said, “is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder.”¹⁴ Powell went on to finger Khurmal. “[T]he Zarqawi network,” he said, “helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp ... and this camp is located in northeastern Iraq.”¹⁵

As expected, shortly after Powell’s speech was delivered, many of the terrorists fled Khurmal. When our troops and intelligence operatives eventually arrived there in March 2003, days after the war in Iraq began, they engaged in a firefight with the terrorists remaining.¹⁶ By then, much of the facility had been destroyed by cruise missile strikes and fighting on the ground, but clear signs of chemical weapons production were found, including chemical hazard suits, manuals to make chemical weapons in Arabic, and traces of the deadly toxins cyanide, ricin, and potassium chloride.¹⁷ For whatever reason, the administration never made public these facts about an active WMD production facility run by terrorists in Iraq. Members of Ansar al-Islam would later become part of the insurgency. Ironically, had Powell not objected to the DoD and CIA proposal to attack the Khurmal site before he gave his presentation to the UN, we might have been able to gather the conclusive evidence of an active WMD facility, that he said existed in his UN speech.

As we now know, portions of Powell’s presentation about Iraq’s WMD programs proved not to be accurate, but something interesting happened over the years that followed. Here was a briefing, personally developed by the Secretary of State, with the close assistance of the National Security Adviser, the CIA Director and the intelligence community. It was consistent with strong statements of congressional support for military action, including those from many prominent Democrats, as well as with the assessments of several foreign intelligence agencies. And yet, over time, a narrative developed that Powell was somehow innocently misled into making a false declaration to the Security Council and the world. Powell himself later contended, in defense of his participation, “There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn’t be relied upon, and they didn’t speak up. That devastated me.”¹⁸ When asked why these people did not speak up, he replied, “I can’t answer that.”¹⁹

Powell had spent decades in uniform and had become the most senior military officer in our country, and at every level he had spent long hours dealing with intelligence. As President Reagan’s national security adviser, he routinely had been exposed to reporting and analysis from the intelligence community. As secretary of state, his department’s own intelligence agency reported to him. There was no one else in the administration who had even a fraction of his experience in intelligence matters, including CIA Director Tenet. Powell was not duped or misled by anybody, nor did he lie about Saddam’s suspected WMD stockpiles. The President did not lie. The Vice President did not lie. Tenet did not lie. Rice did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong.

Whatever those in old Europe may have thought, Iraq’s neighbors took a different view of the prospect of military action. In meeting after meeting in Washington and in the region, Arab leaders confided to us that Saddam was a danger in their part of the world. Some believed he was irrational, citing reports that he had taken to writing out the verses of the Koran in his own blood. They made clear that they would be better off if Saddam were gone, though some were uneasy about publicly supporting the idea of a U.S. military invasion. They noted that the last time they had supported military action against Iraq, Saddam remained in power—angry, dangerous, and still threatening. I suspect that that must have made subsequent gatherings of the Arab League somewhat awkward.

In my visits with leaders from other countries in the Gulf and North Africa, I received another oft-repeated message: If you go after Saddam, do it quickly. The leaders were worried about the “Arab street” erupting in anger at the West’s invasion of a Muslim country. I was skeptical of the idea that a monolithic Arab street existed. My experiences suggested that each Arab country was different, but I did understand that popular discontent could cause them difficulties.

During my time in the Bush administration, I went to Vice President Cheney’s office only occasionally. Our positions were such that we were not working together daily, as we had thirty years earlier in the Nixon and Ford administrations. So it was somewhat unusual when Cheney asked me to come over to the White House for a confidential meeting on January 11, 2003.

Joining us were Myers, and Cheney’s guest: Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. No voice in the region tended to be as crucial when it came to U.S. interests as Saudi Arabia. At ease in American culture—Bandar smoked, rooted for the Dallas Cowboys, and cited the Founding Fathers—he still retained the ear of the Saudi elite. Bandar’s diplomatic credibility was burnished by a colorful background that included service as a Saudi Air Force pilot.

“The President has made the decision to go after Saddam Hussein,” Cheney told the Prince. Of course Bush would not irrevocably decide on war until he signed the execute order for Operation Iraqi Freedom—that would come only hours before the first military actions commenced—but this was the first time I had heard a senior administration official speak with such certainty about imminent military action. The President had apparently asked Cheney to alert the Saudis that the United States was serious and would request their cooperation. The United States needed several military facilities in Saudi Arabia to accommodate coalition forces that would be taking part in the invasion.

Though Bandar did not seem surprised, the Ambassador was leery. “Let’s not repeat the mistake of the President’s father,” he said, referring to the decision in 1991 to stop short of taking Baghdad and removing Saddam Hussein. The unfortunate impression that the United States might retreat after sustaining some casualties was apparently not shared only by Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Bandar thought Saudi support was “doable,” but with caveats. The Saudi people would not support a long period of combat operations in a neighboring Arab country. He emphasized the importance of having a small American footprint in the kingdom and in Iraq once our troops toppled Saddam.²⁰

The Saudis’ position, echoed by other Arab states, was that the U.S.-led invasion should be quick and decisive, and that the U.S. troop presence in Iraq should be small and reduced rapidly. General Franks had consulted with many leaders in the region and had received similar messages.

U.S. diplomatic efforts with another key ally in the region were foundering. Despite optimistic assurances from our diplomatic corps, the United States was having trouble persuading Turkey to permit transit across their country, from the north into Iraq. In the months leading up to the critical vote of Turkey’s parliament, the administration had confidence that they would grant us the approval we sought. No one had anticipated that the vote might fail. I remembered thinking in the early months of Bush’s presidency that it was important for us to work closely with the Turks, because we might need their cooperation.²¹ That day had come. But the Turkish parliament did not approve the U.S. transit request, by a razor-thin margin.^*

The lack of support by a key NATO ally in the region was a serious operational setback, as well as a political embarrassment—and very likely an avoidable one. Powell might have aided our efforts by traveling to Ankara to make our case personally. I also might have visited Turkey in those crucial weeks, or encouraged President Bush or Vice President Cheney to make a personal appeal to the Turkish leadership.

Without a threat to Saddam’s forces in the north and west from U.S.troops advancing from Turkish soil, enemy fighters would have an opportunity to escape to the north and operate in the Sunni-dominated provinces where there would be no coalition presence early on. Our inability to invade Iraq from Turkey may well have been a key factor in the rise of a Sunni-backed insurgency after major combat operations ended. Turkey’s decision made it essential that Franks find other ways to get coalition forces to Baghdad and the north of Iraq as quickly as possible, to close off the Iraqi military’s escape routes.

As harmful as all of this was, there was a modest upside. In the summer of 2002, I received word that a New York Times reporter had detailed information about a version of CENTCOM’s classified war plan for Iraq, and that his paper was going to run a story on it. I asked General Pace to call the Times to urge the paper to not run the story. We did not want Saddam’s forces to be better prepared against us and put more American lives at risk. Pace made the call, but the Times published the story anyway, though with some modifications.²² At the time I dictated a note to myself. “It would be wonderful if everyone who likes to leak memos and everyone who likes to publish classified material had a daughter or son in the advanced party of every military operation,” I said. “I suspect it would get their attention.”²³

The newspaper reported that CENTCOM’s plan was to send American forces into Iraq from the north and west through Turkey, and to use another invasion force that would enter Iraq from the south, thereby creating a vise around Baghdad that might trigger a quick Iraqi surrender. Even though on the eve of military action, the Iraqis knew, like everyone else, that Turkey had voted against helping our military effort, the New York Times had said otherwise. Because of that article, Saddam’s generals prepared to repel an attack from the north anyway. Apparently they had not yet learned that you can’t believe everything you read in the press.

A major story line about the invasion of Iraq has been the debate about troop levels—whether the U.S. invasion force or stabilization force should have been larger.²⁴ In reality, there was full debate and discussion, but there was no disagreement among those of us responsible for the planning. The officer in charge of preparing the Iraq war plan was General Franks. The chief military adviser to the President and the NSC was General Myers. Among Myers, Franks, and me, there was no conflict whatsoever regarding force levels. If anyone suggested to Franks or Myers that the war plan lacked sufficient troops, they never informed me. Moreover, if anyone did do so, they were unsuccessful, since they did not dissuade Franks from his view, nor Myers from his, nor, to my knowledge, any of the chiefs from theirs.

In December 2002, the Washington Post made headlines with a story that two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were opposed to the war in Iraq and to the war plan they had participated in developing, and had approved. “[A]spects of the plan, which appear riskier than usual U.S. military practice, worry the chief of the Army, Gen. Eric Shinseki, and the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James L. Jones, defense officials said” the paper declared.²⁵

I was astounded by the report, which, if true, deserved the headline it generated. It would be most unusual, to say the least, for sitting members of the Joint Chiefs to publicly oppose the Commander in Chief, the Secretary of Defense, the responsible combatant commander, as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the eve of a potential war. Both Jones and Shinseki had been invited to, and for the most part attended, the many deliberations on the Iraq war plan in “the Tank”—the Joint Chiefs’ conference room—with Franks. They had each taken part in a number of meetings with the President, with Myers, and with me.²⁶ Neither Jones nor Shinseki raised concerns, either about the wisdom of President Bush’s intention to go to war if diplomacy failed or of Franks’ war plan on how to fight it.²⁷

The day the story appeared I called each of them on the phone, reaching Jones first. “General Jones,” I said, after referencing the Post article, “you have had every opportunity to talk and you haven’t.”

“You’re right,” Jones responded.²⁸ A seasoned insider known for his skill in navigating the Washington political scene, Jones knew well the effect of appearing in the press criticizing a war plan, particularly when he hadn’t raised a single criticism of it on the inside. He said it wouldn’t happen again. He told me explicitly that he wanted me to know he was “on board with the plan.” To my knowledge, Jones never corrected the record with the Washington Post.

Though Jones seemed to take responsibility for the remarks attributed to him, Shinseki was a different matter. When I raised the article with him, he indicated that the story was not true, and that he had not expressed doubts to anyone.

“Who do you believe?” Shinseki asked. “The Washington Post or me?”²⁹

When he put it that way, I was not inclined to believe a press report over what a four-star general said to me personally. Even though Shinseki was adamant that the Post had the story wrong, no correction from Shinseki found its way into the paper either.

The incident reveals much about how Washington works. Neither general was directly quoted in the story saying he was skeptical, yet on the front page of the Washington Post they were so portrayed. Each denied the central element of the story. Still, the story ran, was never corrected or retracted, and as a result, Shinseki and Jones gained reputations as war skeptics and heroes to war critics. I respect both Shinseki and Jones for their service to our country, but I cannot explain their failure to correct the public record.^*

Six weeks after the article appeared, President Bush invited the senior military officials to the White House to give them still another opportunity to review and offer their comments on the war plan. I accompanied the combatant commanders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the cabinet room on January 30, 2003. Once we were gathered, the President went around the long table. Looking each of them squarely in the eye, Bush asked the four-star officers in uniform, one at a time, to offer their views and to raise any questions or issues they might have. This was one more chance for the most senior officers of the United States military to express any reservations they might have directly to the President, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Franks—the responsible combatant commander—and me. No one in the room—not General Shinseki, not General Jones, nor anyone else—raised an objection. These were all decorated, experienced senior officers, not wilting wallflowers. I assumed and expected that they would speak up if they had reservations—indeed, it was their duty to do so. They did not.

It was not long before Shinseki, I believe unintentionally, would again be catapulted into the public spotlight. That February, after having been called to testify to Congress about the impending war, the soft-spoken general became one of the most famous members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in recent history—a poster child, even a martyr, for opponents of the war.

The popular version of the General’s now famous February 2003 testimony is that Shinseki testified to members of Congress that far more troops would be needed in Iraq than were provided for in the war plan. Because he had supposedly spoken truth to power, the New York Times claimed he was later “vilified, then marginalized” by members of the Bush administration, including me.³⁰ Both assertions were false.

It is undoubtedly too late to correct the literally hundreds of misstatements that were repeated in what Jamie McIntyre, the Pentagon reporter for CNN, described as a media-generated myth elevated to “the level of Scripture.”³¹

General Shinseki appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 25, 2003, before the war started. During his testimony, he was asked a question by Senator Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

LEVIN: General Shinseki, could you give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army’s force requirement for an occupation of Iraq following a successful completion of the war?

SHINSEKI: In specific numbers, I would have to rely on combatant commanders’ exact requirements. But I think ...

LEVIN: How about a range?

SHINSEKI: I would say that what’s been mobilized to this point—something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We’re talking about posthostilities control over a piece of geography that’s fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence ...³²

It remains a mystery why Levin would decide it was in our country’s interest to publicize in an open hearing Franks’ planned number of troops four weeks before the war began, but it was not Levin’s unusual question that received attention. Shinseki’s response began a media firestorm that sought to pit what some journalists and war critics characterized as his lone, courageous voice against an administration bent on war.

Reflecting on his actual comments, what Shinseki said was unremarkable. He noted that the forces mobilized in the region to that point were probably enough. He also said he deferred to the combatant commander, General Franks, for the exact requirements. When asked by journalists about Shinseki’s comment, I should have known better than to respond to a quote that I had not heard myself, but I took the bait. So did Paul Wolfowitz, who characterized Shinseki’s answer as “wildly off the mark.” We were focused on avoiding any signals to the enemy about how many troops Franks had in mind. Bush’s political opponents inflated Shinseki’s comments into a grand confrontation with the administration he served, though, in fact, there was no clash at all.

It was later claimed that, in retaliation for Shinseki’s comment, I authorized a leak of the name of his supposed replacement, Army Vice Chief of Staff General Jack Keane, a year before Shinseki was slated to retire. I did not talk to the press about Shinseki’s successor, nor did I ask anyone else to do so. Neither the President nor I had decided on Shinseki’s replacement. Furthermore, when the dust settled it was not Keane at all but General Pete Schoomaker, and only after Shinseki had completed every day of his full four-year term as chief of staff and retired with full honors.

Shinseki was not dismissed early or otherwise rushed out the door. Yet literally hundreds of news reports in the press and on television falsely declared that General Shinseki was fired for insubordination and “shunted aside.”³³ Critics of the administration explained Shinseki’s silence during the war—he declined to respond to press requests or correct the record—as the result of the alleged shunning he supposedly had suffered at the hands of senior Department officials. This hardened into a myth that he was punished for telling the truth about the war. Its promoters cite as evidence that I did not attend Shinseki’s retirement ceremony. The truth is that Shinseki did not invite me, despite the fact that several senior officers urged him to do so.

As Shinseki was departing in June 2003, he addressed the controversy that journalists had inflated into a major crisis in civilian-military relations in a private end-of-tour memorandum. “During the February testimony, I didn’t believe there was a ‘right’ answer on the number of forces required to stabilize Iraq,” he wrote. Shinseki said that his testimony was “misinterpreted.”³⁴ He saw that his testimony had been distorted for political purposes. Perhaps someday he will publicly correct the gross and repeated mischaracterizations in the media.

The Shinseki myth did harm to civilian-military relations. It became widely believed among the military’s active and retired communities, which came to resent the bad treatment I supposedly inflicted on a general officer. The myth also bolstered the allegation that I was intolerant of views that challenged my own and that I punished those who put them forward.

In fact, the opposite was the case. I welcomed and made a point of encouraging different views, dissent, and challenges. It was a constant refrain of mine at meetings that all proposals and plans are based on assumptions, that those assumptions should be spelled out clearly, examined skeptically, and reexamined routinely—and that applied also, indeed especially, to my own. Everyone makes errors in judgment, and the higher the official, the worse the consequences can be. So it was a principle with me that subordinates should speak up.

In 2002, for example, I sent a snowflake to a representative of the CIA who sat in on some of my Pentagon meetings:

When I told you I want you to speak up, I meant it. You know a whale of a lot about this subject, and every once in a while I see you in the back of the room looking reticent. That doesn’t help me at all! I need you to step up and say, “Have you thought about this?” or “What about that?” or “I think differently.” I am very comfortable with that. You may not want to do it to some of the other principals, but I am delighted to have you do it to me.³⁵

As I believe in being challenged, I also made a practice of challenging my challengers. I wanted to make sure people disagreeing knew what they were talking about. When a challenger failed to support his views, I did not pretend to be impressed. But, in my view, no professional, let alone a three-or four-star military officer, should be intimidated into silence by a boss who asks questions and expects sensible answers, even honest answers as simple as an “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you.”

While the President and I had many discussions about the war preparations, I do not recall his ever asking me if I thought going to war with Iraq was the right decision. The President was the one charged with the tough choice to commit U.S. forces. I did not speculate on the thought process that brought him to his ultimate, necessarily lonely decision. We were all hearing the same things in briefing after briefing, and one NSC meeting after another, mulling over what we knew of the Iraqi regime and what the intelligence community believed about its capabilities and intentions. Though there were differences among us, they were not differences at the substantive or strategic levels of whether or not to allow Saddam Hussein’s regime to remain in power. Not one person in NSC meetings at which I was present stated or hinted that they were opposed to, or even hesitant, about the President’s decision. I took it that Bush assumed, as I did, that each of us had reached the same conclusion.

The process toward war had been incremental. Up until the very minute the President authorized the first strike, there was no moment when I felt with razor-sharp certainty that Bush had fully decided. Like the rest of us in the chain of command, Bush was reluctant to use force and invite the serious challenges it entailed. This came through in his dogged attempts to bring the UN onboard to enforce their own sanctions and his ongoing diplomatic initiatives to stave off armed conflict. It seemed to me Bush was balancing a growing imperative to take military action and a natural reluctance to commit American troops and our nation to such a struggle.

Wars, it has been correctly said, are failures of diplomacy. And in the run-up to the war with Iraq, institutions, nations, and individuals failed. The United Nations failed to live up to its charter by not enforcing its resolutions. France, Germany, and Russia contributed to the failure by allowing Saddam to believe they would forestall action and he did not need to comply with the UN resolutions. For our part, we as an administration and as individuals failed to persuade Saddam or his top generals that we were prepared to take down his regime if necessary.

I wondered if we worked hard enough through intermediaries to encourage him to find another way out.^* I thought, or at least hoped, to the very end that he might decide at the last minute that he would prefer a comfortable exile to the risk of capture and death. Other dictators, such as Haiti’s Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and Uganda’s Idi Amin, had made similar choices to save their lives. Why not Saddam Hussein? If Saddam actually believed we were serious, I thought that his instinct for survival might work to our advantage. It would not be easy to stomach Saddam sipping Campari on the coast of southern France, but if his comfortable exile meant sparing the world—and thousands of American men and women in uniform—a war, I was all for it.

On March 17, 2003, President Bush made yet another effort to avert war by offering Iraq’s ruling family one last chance to avoid an invasion. It was an overture I urged and supported fully. “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours,” Bush said in a primetime address from the White House. “Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.”³⁷

Unmoved, the Iraqi leader was shown on Iraq’s state television in full military uniform chairing a meeting of his ruling Baath Party and his top generals. Saddam’s eldest son, Uday Hussein, even issued an ultimatum of his own, urging President Bush to “give up power in America with his family.”³⁸ Saddam Hussein was defiant—for the last time.