PART XI
Baghdad, Iraq
APRIL 9, 2003
As cheering Iraqis in the heart of the capital brought down the over life-sized statue of Saddam Hussein, a scene decidedly less euphoric was occurring in a Sunni neighborhood just across the Euphrates. More than one hundred armed Iraqi soldiers, many wearing civilian clothing, entered the National Museum of Iraq. They took up sniper positions to contest the final advance of American soldiers and Marines into Baghdad and tried to turn the museum into a fortress.
A custodian of Iraq’s long and rich history, the Iraqi National Museum housed a peerless collection that illuminated the beginnings of civilization. The importance of this heritage was lost on no one, least of all the American military. CENTCOM planners had put the National Museum of Iraq high on the coalition’s “no-strike” list.*
Immediately after the regime collapsed in early April 2003, Iraqis across the country released pent-up grievances against the tyranny that had smothered them and impoverished their country for over thirty years by looting from government buildings. Looters ransacked and stripped Saddam’s palaces bare of furniture and decorations. Faucets and toilets in many public buildings disappeared, and wires were pulled from walls to salvage the copper. Stealing back property that was considered stolen from the Iraqi people struck them, evidently, as justified.
The looting made it appear that postwar Iraq was descending into chaos. A camera caught an Iraqi taking a vase out of a building in Baghdad—and that scene was replayed over and over across the world. This was accompanied by images of coalition troops standing by in tanks. The implication? America was fiddling while Baghdad burned.
A flood of disaster stories gushed forth. News organizations wildly asserted that nearly all of the museum’s collection had been looted.1 “[I]t took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed,” the New York Times reported, “with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters.”2 But the news stories tended not to blame the Iraqi fighters for breaking into the museum, turning it into a combat zone, and putting its collections at risk. “American troops were but a few hundred yards away as the country’s heritage was stripped bare,” National Public Radio claimed.3 Some even accused American servicemen of participating in the reported heists.4 “You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad of 1258, to find looting on this scale,” said one British archaeologist.5
Across the world, officials, especially those opposed to the war, made a great complaint. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan piled on, issuing a statement “deplor[ing] the catastrophic losses.”6 French President Jacques Chirac, a man of bottomless cynicism whose anti-Americanism had become reflexive, called the alleged museum looting “a veritable crime against humanity.”7 As if the ill-grounded comments of foreign officials were not enough, I then had the experience of turning on the television and seeing my colleague, Secretary of State Powell, in Washington issuing what was in essence a public apology on behalf of the U.S. government about the museum looting, with a promise to recover what was lost.8
Iraq and Afghanistan were the first wars of the twenty-first century—the first where operations were reported in real time on blogs, talk radio, and twenty-four-hour news channels. The public was hearing all kinds of allegations and one-sided, sensational reports. It took a while for the facts to catch up. Contrary to early reports, coalition forces had moved rapidly toward the museum to secure it. When American troops arrived, there were no visible looters. The advance on the building was halted, however, when our troops came under a barrage of sniper fire and rocket-propelled grenades from inside. The American commander on the ground faced a vexing choice. If his troops engaged further with the enemy forces in the museum, he risked destroying portions of the building, including whatever artifacts were within.9 Because the rest of Baghdad was rapidly falling under coalition control, the commander decided to hold back, expecting that enemy forces in the building soon would disperse.
I thought the looting being reported was tragic, but I did not fault our troops. Iraq is the size of the state of California. Unfortunately, it would have been impossible to gather a force large enough to stop it all. In addition, General Franks had a long list of priorities for his troops that were as important, if not more so. They had to defeat remaining enemy units. They had to search the suspected WMD sites identified by the CIA. They had to secure large caches of weapons that had been placed all over the country. They had to locate, seize, and secure government documents that Iraqi officials were no doubt busily shredding. They had to find Saddam Hussein and other senior Iraqi officials, to bring an earlier end to the war. They had to act as local police, since the Iraqi army and police force had unexpectedly disappeared.*
It had been only days since coalition forces had ended Saddam Hussein’s regime in a military campaign prosecuted faster and more successfully than most had predicted. Meanwhile, critics of the administration had made error after error—calling the campaign in Afghanistan a quagmire just days before the overthrow of the Taliban government, calling the advance on Baghdad a quagmire just days before American forces overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime—yet they never seemed to lose credibility. Now critics were once again selling the public and the world a bill of goods about the alleged looting of the national museum and the alleged indifference of American forces to this supposed rape of Iraq’s cultural heritage, which also proved not to be the case. The irresponsible reporting was harmful to our troops just as they were trying to build relationships with Iraqi citizens.
At the same time these unsettling allegations were being made, my family was undergoing a personal crisis. In the first week of April, Joyce became extremely ill. It was increasingly clear something was terribly wrong. It turned out that she was suffering from a ruptured appendix. The problem had gone undiagnosed for some days. Our daughter Valerie flew in to be with Joyce at the hospital. At the time, I was spending more than fifteen hours a day at the Pentagon. I would visit Joyce in the hospital in the early morning and then again in the late evening hours. At one point she looked so pale and weak that she reminded me of how her wonderful mother, Marion, looked just before she died at age ninety.
Though Joyce would eventually and thankfully make a full recovery, all of this weighed heavily on my mind when I was preparing for a Pentagon press briefing on April 11, 2003 as the looting furor continued. I intended to remind the press and the American people about the success our forces had just achieved. I wanted to put events in context and defend our troops. I thought I could tamp down the controversy. Unintentionally, I wound up fueling it. A reporter asked me if I thought the words “anarchy” and “lawlessness” were ill chosen to describe the situation in Iraq. “Absolutely,” I responded. I expressed my frustration that reporters insisted on highlighting the negative aspects of Saddam’s ouster, which was a positive, albeit complex event.
“Given how predictable the lack of law and order was, as you said, from past conflicts,” another queried, “was there part of General Franks’ plan to deal with it?”
In fact, military planners had expected a difficult transition period. CENTCOM had prepared plans to institute martial law if the commanders thought it necessary.11 CENTCOM’s public order plan hinged on a key intelligence assumption that proved to be inaccurate: The existing Iraqi police could be helpful in keeping order.* The military had experienced what Generals Myers and Franks and I ironically called “catastrophic success.” Because Saddam’s forces had crumbled so rapidly, our troops were able to liberate Baghdad even faster than anticipated. “Freedom’s untidy,” I said. “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that’s what’s going to happen here.”13 Then I vented some annoyance by uttering a few ill-chosen words: “Think what’s happened in our cities when we’ve had riots, and problems, and looting. Stuff happens!” I was thinking back to the riots in American cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., when whole blocks of Washington, D.C. were set aflame.
I had uttered more than a thousand words at that press conference before I said “stuff happens,” but they were the only two words that seemed to matter. My point was that in all wars, bad things happen. During World War II, cities across Germany suffered from looting and chaos soon after Allied troops entered. The northern city of Bremen was, as one shocked onlooker described it, “probably among the most debauched places on the face of God’s earth” as liberated Germans looted stores, museums, and government buildings.14 Liberated Iraqis were doing the same thing, filling the temporary vacuum that existed between the old order and the new. What I said was characterized as callous and indifferent. Once I saw how my comments were being interpreted in the media, I realized I had made a mistake.
As it happened, most of what the media had reported about the museum looting—that monstrous “crime against humanity”—turned out to be false. After reports about the looting of the Iraq National Museum first surfaced, CENTCOM’s director of operations, Major General Gene Renuart, dispatched Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos to Baghdad to investigate. Though press reports commonly reported 170,000 items stolen, Bogdanos discovered that only a tiny fraction of that was actually looted.15 Somewhere between 3,000 and 15,000 items were later proved missing from the museum collections.16 Those numbers included the state-sanctioned looting, theft, and forgery that Saddam Hussein’s regime had used as a source of revenue for some years.17 The press claims that had become an international sensation, Bogdanos concluded, were “intentionally false, a fiction perpetuated first by some museum staff, and then repeated by the press.”18
I also received firsthand information about the museum from an unusual source. Our informant was a spy who had been in Baghdad prior to the invasion. Days before coalition bombs began falling on regime targets in the capital, he had visited the already closed national museum. He peered through the museum’s windows and found none of the museum’s antiquities on display. Well before the war started, it appeared, the museum curators had put tens of thousands of pieces in safe vaults or taken them out of Baghdad.*This same plan had been used in the Iran-Iraq War and during the first Gulf War. The museum staff also left doors unlocked, which suggested that the director, a Baathist and Saddam ally, intended for the fighters and looters to move about freely in the compound.
A few media outlets belatedly issued some corrections, but not with anything approaching the prominence of their original false reports of extensive looting.† “Officials at the National Museum of Iraq have blamed shoddy reporting amid the ‘fog of war’ for creating the impression that the majority of the institution’s 170,000 items were looted in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad,” noted the Daily Telegraph one month later.20 One museum official tried to explain the confusion: “I said there were 170,000 pieces in the entire museum collection ... not 170,000 pieces stolen... . No, no, no. That would be every single object we have!”21
Those in the press who created and spread the grossly false and harmful stories about the museum looting took no responsibility for the negative pall that quickly engulfed the coalition’s efforts. It was as if the news media had shrugged its collective shoulders and said “stuff happens.”
CHAPTER 34
Before the war, officials in the Department of Defense spent many months analyzing contingencies and risks—both the risks of war and the risks of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. We knew the United States could defeat Iraq’s forces in a reasonable period of time, but the more difficult challenge came after the end of major combat operations. Our military was well organized, trained, and equipped to win wars. Winning the peace after an enemy regime has been removed is quite another matter. There were many difficulties still ahead when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down in Firdos Square on April 9, 2003, but it was not the absence of postwar contingency planning that caused them.
Some who might have been in a position to know better suggested that the Iraq war would be a “cakewalk” and that the risks were few.1 That was not the view of those who would be ordering the men and women of our military into combat—not President Bush, not me, and not any of those I worked closely with at the Pentagon. In fact, the members of our Defense Department team were thinking long and hard about potential problems in post-Saddam Iraq.
No war has ever gone according to plan, but that did not absolve any of the President’s advisers of their duty to prepare carefully and consider the possible perils that our forces might face. Because of the public controversy and divided opinions over the impending war, I believed it was important to give the President a full set of things to consider, especially those arguing against military conflict.
In the autumn of 2002, during a National Security Council meeting on Iraq, I departed from the agenda to read a handwritten list of possible problems, later referred to as the “Parade of Horribles,” that I believed could result from an invasion. Sitting at the table in the Situation Room, with Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Tenet, and the others in attendance, I went through the items one by one. The list was meant to generate serious, early thinking about the potential risks and what might be done to assess and reduce them. I also hoped to encourage others on the NSC to raise their concerns. That discussion was brief.
Because I considered the topic so important, when I returned to the Pentagon I used my notes to draft a memo, which I sent to a few of the Department’s senior civilian and military advisers for comment. The DoD policy shop and dozens of military planners at CENTCOM and on the Joint Staff had been working long hours on contingencies in the event of war. Taking their suggestions into account, I expanded my original list and submitted it as a memo to the President and the members of the NSC. “It is offered simply as a checklist,” I noted, “so that they are part of the deliberations.”2
With regard to the risks of an invasion, my memo listed a number of problems that were worth thinking about in case they materialized, though they ultimately did not:
· While the US is engaged in Iraq, another rogue state could take advantage of US preoccupation—North Korea, Iran, PRC in the Taiwan Straits, other?
· There could be higher than expected US and coalition deaths from Iraq’s use of weapons of mass destruction against coalition forces in Iraq, Kuwait and/or Israel.
· Fortress Baghdad could prove to be long and unpleasant for all.3
My memo to the NSC also directed attention to some serious risks that did in fact materialize, in whole or in part:
· US could fail to find WMD on the ground in Iraq and be unpersuasive to the world.
· US could fail to manage post–Saddam Hussein Iraq successfully, with the result that it could fracture into two or three pieces, to the detriment of the Middle East and the benefit of Iran.
· Rather than having the post-Saddam effort require 2 to 4 years, it could take 8 to 10 years, thereby absorbing US leadership, military and financial resources.
· Iraq could experience ethnic strife among Sunni, Shia and Kurds.
· World reaction against “pre-emption” or “anticipatory self-defense” could inhibit US ability to engage [with other countries in order to deal with problems of common concern] in the future.4
To take just one for example, I understood that if WMD were not found, the administration’s credibility would be undermined. That was why I felt we needed to make sure everyone understood that WMD was only one of the many reasons underlying the decision to remove Saddam. If we had had a full discussion of this possibility then, it might have made an important difference in the administration’s communications strategy. It also might have tempered the WMD-focused briefing Powell would make to the UN Security Council several months later in February 2003.
My memo did not argue for or against military action in Iraq. That was not the intent. Indeed, at the end, I noted that “it is possible of course to prepare a similar illustrative list of all the potential problems that need to be considered if there is no regime change in Iraq.”5 I wrote the memo because I was uneasy that, as a government, we had not yet fully examined a broad enough spectrum of possibilities. Unfortunately, though the Department of Defense prepared for these contingencies in our areas of responsibility, there was never a systematic review of my list to the NSC.
To analyze what an American presence in postwar Iraq might look like, we needed to know with precision what the desired objective was—what were America’s goals. In March 2001, six months before 9/11, I had written a short paper titled “Guidelines When Considering Committing U.S. Forces” that summarized what I believed the commander in chief should consider before ordering combat operations.6 The memo was intended to help the administration establish a framework for when and how military force should be applied, and under what circumstances. I had seen over the years that there often was pressure on presidents to use military force without clearly achievable military objectives.
When it came to the administration’s goals in Iraq, my views were straightforward. They were to help the Iraqis put in place a government that did not threaten Iraq’s neighbors, did not support terrorism, was respectful to the diverse elements of Iraqi society, and did not proliferate weapons of mass destruction. Period. The aim was not to bestow on it an American-style democracy, a capitalist economy, or a world-class military force. If Iraqis wanted to adapt their government to reflect the liberal democratic traditions espoused by Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith, we could start them on their way and then wish them well.
As soon as we had set in motion a process, I thought it important that we reduce the American military role in reconstruction and increase assistance from the United Nations and other willing coalition countries. Any U.S. troops remaining in Iraq would focus on capturing and killing terrorists and left over supporters of the old regime that were still fighting.
I questioned the way earlier administrations had used the military in post-conflict activities. When we took office in 2001, more than twelve thousand forces remained in the Balkans performing tasks that might have been turned over to local security forces earlier.7 Throughout my tenure, I focused on reducing the American military presence in Bosnia and Kosovo and assigning security responsibilities to local security forces or international peacekeepers from countries more directly affected by potential instability in the area.*
I recognized the Yankee can-do attitude by which American forces took on tasks that locals would be better off doing themselves. I did not think resolving other countries’ internal political disputes, paving roads, erecting power lines, policing streets, building stock markets, and organizing democratic governmental bodies were missions for our men and women in uniform. Equally worrisome, locals could grow accustomed to the unnatural presence of foreign forces acting as their de facto government and making decisions for them. The risk was that these nations could become wards of the United States.
My experience in Lebanon during the Reagan administration also demonstrated the problem of dependency on U.S. forces in countries facing internal strife and violence. By late 1983, the Marine presence in Beirut was just about the only thing keeping the country from either descending into a civil war or falling under Syrian domination. When President Reagan, spurred by the Congress, withdrew the Marines, Lebanon quickly succumbed to Syria.
One of the guidelines in my memo on putting American forces at risk was that a proposed action needed to be “achievable—at acceptable risk.” “We need to understand our limitations,” I wrote. “The record is clear [that] there are some things the U.S. simply cannot accomplish.”9 Thus, at the Department of Defense, postwar planning for Iraq had begun with the generally accepted recognition that recent efforts to rebuild nations had been flawed. We had tried to avoid those mistakes in Afghanistan by emphasizing the importance of building up indigenous security forces, both army and police, and promptly establishing a new, independent government under the leadership the Afghans selected. But unfortunately the U.S. military seemed to be doing most of the postcombat stabilization and reconstruction work on its own. Despite tireless efforts by the Defense Department’s comptroller, Dov Zakheim, to solicit funds and assistance from friends and allies for reconstruction, their contributions were minimal.10 At the Bonn conference in 2001, the United Nations had treated Afghanistan’s reconstruction like Solomon’s baby, but without Solomon’s wisdom. Reconstruction activities had been divided among different coalition nations—training the police and border guards (Germany), rebuilding a judiciary (Italy), counternarcotics (Britain), disarming militias (Japan)—without any realistic assessment of their ability to deliver. Afghanistan’s reconstruction proved largely to be a series of unfulfilled pledges by well-intentioned but poorly equipped coalition partners. So too the contributions of the civilian departments and agencies of our government were modest.
I understood that there were times when the United States would not be able to escape some nation-building responsibilities, particularly in countries where we had been engaged militarily. It would take many years to rebuild societies shattered by war and tyranny. Though we would do what we could to assist, we ultimately couldn’t do it for them. My view was that the Iraqis and Afghans would have to govern themselves in ways that worked for them. I believed that political institutions should grow naturally out of local soil; not every successful principle or mechanism from one country could be transplanted in another.
As early as the summer of 2002, well before the Iraq war, the Pentagon policy team, led by Doug Feith, was developing an approach that would allow Iraqi opposition elements—including the Kurds of semiautonomous northern Iraq and the sizable exile community—to participate in an interim governing body. A key member of our policy team, Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman, sketched out some of the imperatives we needed to consider.*
The post–World War II German and Japanese models of reconstruction, Rodman contended, were the wrong analogies. Rather, he suggested we look to postwar France, where Roosevelt and Churchill planned an Allied military occupation because they did not think Charles de Gaulle commanded the respect of the French people. When De Gaulle returned to France after D-Day and millions came to greet him, however, Allied military planners, led by Eisenhower, reconsidered. Rodman observed that if the Allies had gone ahead with the plan for occupation, the Communists, who were then the backbone of the French anti-Nazi resistance, “would have taken over the countryside while the allies sat in Paris imagining that they were running the country.”11
Rodman’s point was that we didn’t want Americans holed up in Baghdad deluding themselves that they were actually controlling the country. There were “bad guys all over Iraq—radical Shia, Communists, Wahhabis, al-Qaeda—who will strive to fill the political vacuum,” Rodman presciently warned. To prevent a vacuum, the U.S. government should begin preparing moderate Iraqis to take over their country. I agreed with Rodman’s analysis.
Feith and Rodman alerted me that in the interagency discussions at the deputies committee level and below, the State Department had different ideas.† Officials at State favored what they called a Transitional Civil Authority, led by the United States, that would govern post-Saddam Iraq for a multi-year period. State’s idea, as Rodman wrote, “is that (1) the Iraqi opposition is too divided to fill the vacuum on its own, and (2) the U.S. will want to control what happens with Iraqi WMD, oil, etc.”12
On July 1, 2002, I forwarded Rodman’s assessment to Cheney, Powell, Tenet, and Rice, in the hope that they might be similarly persuaded that an American occupation would be a mistake:
Organizing the Iraqi opposition to assist with regime change is needed for two reasons: to ensure legitimacy, particularly in the eyes of other regional players, and to make sure the wrong people don’t fill the vacuum created by the end of the Saddam regime. Regional leaders have argued that it is important for Iraqis to be seen participating in the liberation of their country... . An attempt to run Iraqi affairs by ourselves without a pre-cooked umbrella group of Iraqi Opposition leaders could backfire seriously... . In Iraq, there are many undesirable opposition elements—a Communist faction, Sunni fundamentalists and radical Sh’ia—all with presumably some support around the country and in some institutions. Organizing the democratic opposition groups that we favor into a real political-military force is essential to preempt these groups, avoid a political vacuum, and avoid a chaotic post-Saddam free–for-all.13
A chaotic post-Saddam free-for-all was the last thing we wanted if President Bush decided to go into Iraq. I was reasonably certain that the memo was read, but it did not lead to any resolution on a postwar strategy by the NSC.
At CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, General Franks and his staff prepared the Iraq war plan in its four required parts: Phase I, preparations for a possible invasion; Phase II, shaping the battle space with the start of air operations; Phase III, decisive offensive and major combat operations; and Phase IV, posthostilities stabilization and reconstruction. In the summer and fall of 2002, Franks and his team had a lot on their plates. In addition to Iraq war planning, they were still engaged in counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and maritime interdiction operations off the Horn of Africa.
Recognizing the burdens on CENTCOM, Myers expressed concern that it might not be paying sufficient attention to Phase IV.14 Franks admittedly had little enthusiasm for setting up a postcombat government or dealing with the related tangle of bureaucratic and interagency issues. As the general noted in his memoir, “I’m a war fighter, not a manager.”15 Myers advised me that he had decided to establish a new group to help CENTCOM plan for postcombat operations. He asked Franks to stand up Combined Joint Task Force 4, which would work in Franks’ Tampa operation on Phase IV.
Outside of the Pentagon, teams at the United States Agency for International Development, the NSC, and the State Department also were working on plans for the postwar period. Among these initiatives was the Future of Iraq project at State, which consisted of a series of documents addressing aspects of postwar Iraq.16 Later, the State Department effort was dubbed in the press as “the earliest and most comprehensive planning undertaken by the U.S. government for a post-Saddam Iraq.”17 Some of the participants in the project later mischaracterized that work as a State Department plan that Pentagon officials ignored. “Many senior State Department officials are still bitter about what they see as the Pentagon’s failure to take seriously their planning efforts, particularly in the ‘Future of Iraq’ project,” the Washington Post wrote some years later.18
In fact, senior DoD officials did review and consult those papers, finding some of them to be helpful. But the Future of Iraq project—outlining broad concepts—did not constitute postwar planning in any sense of the word. There were no operational steps outlined in them nor any detailed suggestions about how to handle various problems. One State Department official, Ryan Crocker, a future ambassador to Iraq, was heavily involved in the project and he later acknowledged, “It was never intended as a post-war plan.”19 If it had been, it could at least have given us a blueprint to discuss and consider.
The Future of Iraq papers were likely circulated at lower levels within the government, as is often the case with concepts and proposals. But I was not aware of an effort by any senior official at State to present these papers for interagency review or evaluation, as would certainly have been needed had they been intended as a plan. The notion that a few in the State Department may have alerted people to potential problems in postwar Iraq—even if quite helpfully—was not on its face a seminal achievement. I had listed problems that might arise in postwar Iraq in my “Parade of Horribles” memo. That does not mean my memo was a plan or a solution.
Further complicating matters prior to the war was an undercurrent of concern about the wisdom of even conducting large-scale planning. This could signal that America considered war inevitable and derail President Bush’s diplomatic efforts, which continued almost until the day the war began.
In discussions of postwar Iraq, the toughest challenge was the tension between two different strategic approaches. The debate between them was legitimate, but it remained just that—a debate. It was never hashed out at the NSC and never finally resolved. Right up until the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis in 2004, the basic difference was between speed—how quickly we could turn over authority—and what was called legitimacy—exactly what political and constitutional processes needed to be in place prior to turning the reins over. The Pentagon leaned to the former, the State Department to the latter.
Postwar planning for Iraq lacked effective interagency coordination, clear lines of responsibility, and the deadlines and accountability associated with a rigorous process. I suspect that the failure to fashion a deliberate, systematic approach by which the President could establish U.S. policy on the political transition in post-Saddam Iraq was among the more consequential of the administration. Trying to achieve a bridge or compromise between the two different approaches was not a solution.
The postwar planning for Iraq exposed a gap in the way the United States government is organized. No template exists for the kind of postwar planning that proved necessary in Afghanistan, Iraq, and, for that matter, in Kosovo, Bosnia, and elsewhere. There was no single office that could take charge of the military and civilian elements of postwar reconstruction.* That left the Department of Defense, with its expertise in war-oriented planning—but not in postwar reconstruction—as the only practical option.
In the fall of 2002, President Bush and I considered the advantages of unity of command and effort in postwar reconstruction. Dividing responsibilities between security and reconstruction, as had been the case in Bosnia and Afghanistan, was not an encouraging model.20 The President agreed. When the President issued National Security Presidential Directive 24 (NSPD 24) on January 20, 2003, directing the Defense Department to coordinate postwar planning and assume the lead for postwar reconstruction, some critics grumbled about a Defense power grab.21 I don’t know of anyone at the Pentagon, myself included, who was looking for more assignments. The Department of Defense was engaged enough in the military aspects of the global effort against terrorists, including in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and Asia.
With the President’s decision, in January 2003 the Department of Defense created the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). The office’s mission was to help CENTCOM manage the transition to the post-war phase in Iraq.22 To run the organization, I recruited Jay Garner, a barrel-chested retired lieutenant general who had spent nearly four decades in the U.S. Army. I had met him when we served together on the Space Commission in 2000. General Garner knew Secretary Powell and had fought in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In what was called Operation Provide Comfort, Garner had led twenty thousand troops to assist Iraqi Kurds battered by Saddam’s regime. He helped to secure an autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. When U.S. troops withdrew from Kurdistan and the American flag was lowered in July 1991, Garner was the last American to cross into Turkey. Thousands of Kurds delayed his departure by lifting him on their shoulders in celebration of his work.23
I saw Garner’s military background as a valuable asset. I knew the civilian reconstruction effort in Iraq would have to be done in close cooperation with CENTCOM’s military personnel—the unity of effort envisioned in the President’s directive. Once on the ground in the Gulf region, Garner’s office would become an element of CENTCOM, reporting to Franks, and thereby assuring unity of command. I believed a retired general, one who knew many CENTCOM officers and understood military culture, would have the best chance of avoiding friction with the military personnel. I also thought that Garner’s prior association with Colin Powell would foster good relations between the reconstruction office and the State Department.
Garner believed, as I did, in empowering local populations to do things for themselves. “We’re notorious for telling people what to do,” he said. Garner thought American heavy-handedness had been a mistake in Vietnam, one he didn’t want to repeat in Iraq.24Once the military had toppled Saddam’s regime, I thought it was strategically important to put the United States in a supporting role to the Iraqis as soon as possible. This was the Pentagon’s and—at least as I understood it—the President’s vision.
Months before the war began in Iraq, we encountered strong resistance from State and the CIA to the idea of working with Iraqi expatriates. I couldn’t quite understand why the idea was controversial. One of the first things we did in Afghanistan, after all, was develop relationships with the Northern Alliance and Afghan exiles. Hamid Karzai, in fact, had lived for years abroad. I thought it made sense to do something similar in Iraq: reach out to the anti-Saddam elements (largely confined to the autonomous areas of Kurdistan) and to the Iraqi exiles who had been advocating the liberation of their country for many years.* These Iraqi “externals,” many living in the United States or London, included some highly educated and skilled professionals. Some clearly had ambition. While by no means monolithic in their politics or their views, they shared an interest in Iraq’s freedom and success. I thought the diversity of views among them was not only natural, but healthy. Why, I wondered, wouldn’t we want them involved in a post-Saddam Iraq early, rather than late or never?
Key officials at State and in the CIA, including at senior levels, viewed the externals in general as untrustworthy, however. Particular animus was directed against Ahmed Chalabi, a secular Shiite from a wealthy Baghdad family who lived abroad. Chalabi had worked with the CIA in the 1990s to promote resistance to the Iraqi regime. The relationship soured after the CIA and Chalabi quarreled over responsibility for a failed operation in northern Iraq that led to the murder and exile of many hundreds of anti-Saddam Iraqis. Despite his differences with State and the CIA, Chalabi retained bipartisan support among elements of the U.S. Congress, having been a strong proponent for the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act.
Some concocted a myth that the Pentagon was engaged, as CIA Director Tenet put it in his book, in “thinly veiled efforts to put Chalabi in charge of post-invasion Iraq.”25 Chalabi knew a number of administration officials, including but not exclusively some at the Pentagon. I had met him once or twice at meetings set up for the Iraqi exiles. He struck me as one of a number of bright Iraqis looking to do what they could for their country. However, no one in the Department of Defense urged that Chalabi be “anointed” as the ruler of post-Saddam Iraq, although some officials admired his skills. Robert Blackwill, who served as Rice’s director for Iraq and was previously U.S. ambassador to India, once remarked that Chalabi was the “Michael Jordan of Iraq.” I assumed Chalabi would participate in an interim government, but I had no idea who would emerge as its head. That was for the Iraqis to decide.
The State Department’s and CIA’s desire to ensure that Chalabi not have a leadership role in postwar Iraq may have led both organizations to oppose the exiles generally. For example, CIA officials opposed our efforts to constitute a force of Iraqi exiles to fight and act as interpreters and translators alongside our troops in the invasion. Tenet was cool to the idea. When “Agency officers suggested to DoD that they scrap the idea of a fighting force of Iraqi exiles ... [w]e were scoffed at once again,” he wrote.26 While not large in size, I believed the Free Iraqi Forces, as they were called, could be a useful corrective to the perception that the United States was invading Iraq to occupy the country rather than liberate it.27 At least in part because of a lack of cooperation from the State Department and the CIA, we were unable to recruit and train enough Free Iraqi Forces to show that Iraqis were involved in the military campaign to rid their country of Saddam.28
State Department and CIA officials instead argued that the United States should assist Iraqis from inside the country to emerge as the new leaders. I had no problem with that approach—in theory. But in reality it would take a long time to assemble a team of acceptable and capable candidates within Iraq after Saddam’s ouster. His Iraq was hardly a training ground for aspiring leaders. Visible political opponents tended not to have long lives. Regrettably, because of State Department wariness of the Iraqi externals, the United States did little to include them in planning for the postwar period until after Saddam’s regime had fallen.*
Instead of putting an Iraqi face on postwar Iraq as soon as possible, the State Department proposed an American-led civil authority for an indefinite period.29 On March 1, 2003, Powell sent a memo from the State Department historian labeled “informative.” The paper argued that any occupation would take “time.” That apparently was Colin Powell’s position on the matter.30
At a principals meeting in the White House on March 7, 2003, two weeks before war would begin, we discussed whether to put Iraqis in charge of the post-Saddam government sooner rather than later. In Powell’s absence—he was in New York at the United Nations—Richard Armitage represented the State Department.
In late 2002, I had proposed that after Saddam’s regime was toppled, we should promptly announce a provisional council, the Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA). This Interim Authority, designed as an Iraqi variation on the one in Afghanistan, was intended to bring Iraqis from all parts of the country, plus externals, and all political factions into a temporary national governing coalition. Its immediate but limited responsibilities would include supervising the drafting of a constitution, playing a significant role in the conduct of Iraq’s foreign policy, and administering selected departments of the government. Membership would include representatives from Iraq’s Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite populations. For several months, the deputies and the interagency coordinating committees discussed, debated, and refined the concept. The State Department had been uncomfortable with the proposal.
“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.