The second alternative for coordinating the war’s aftermath would be to follow the model of the postwar effort in Afghanistan. There we had used an “adopt a ministry” plan, with allied governments taking responsibility for various functions: the Germans had the police, the Italians had the Justice Ministry, we had the army, and so on. That was already breeding conflict and incoherence, and no one wanted to repeat that approach.
Moreover, with large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground, the President wanted one authority with full responsibility; that would be the Defense Department. No one challenged this assumption, most especially not the State Department. Colin had said that there was a reason that Douglas MacArthur hadn’t been a Foreign Service officer. The department was too small and was ill suited to oversee a complex operation in the middle of a war zone. Colin, for his part, wanted to make sure that State had an appropriate but supporting role. The President signaled in mid-October that the Defense Department would be the lead agency responsible for postwar planning in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, should one be necessary. This would be formalized in a National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) that officially established an office in the Pentagon to coordinate these efforts.
On December 18, having watched the inspectors play cat and mouse with the Iraqi government, the President told Don to jump-start the civil administration office that would help manage postwar Iraq. When I mentioned to the President the need to ensure coordination from Washington, he agreed but said I needed to use a “light touch.” He believed that once the Pentagon was given the authority on the ground, it had to be free to act.
But he didn’t mean that it should do so in the high-handed, dismissive way that emerged. Almost immediately the under secretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, made clear that the Pentagon neither needed nor welcomed the opinions of others. He treated Franks’s Executive Steering Group as a nuisance and the NSC Deputies Committee with only slightly more respect. At one point, Steve Hadley asked Doug if he realized that the President had given Don the Iraq ball and with it the future of his presidency. “Not only does he know it,” Doug intoned, “he welcomes it.”
Defense produced a lot of preparatory work, going so far as to issue a document called “Parade of Horribles,” which presented twenty-nine catastrophes that the war in Iraq might unleash. We asked the intelligence agencies to examine the likelihood of potential disasters. Most of the points on the list were self-evident, such as possible sectarian violence and Iranian support for our enemies in Iraq, though I suspected that the Defense Department’s motive was really to issue a documented warning just in case the whole endeavor failed. In any case, there were no implementation plans to address the conclusions.
On January 20, the President signed NSPD-24 that formally created the postwar planning machinery for postwar Iraq, including the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). The NSPD outlined nine tasks for ORHA to address, including humanitarian relief assistance, the reestablishment of key civilian services, the restructuring of the Iraqi military, and a variety of other political and economic issues. Retired General Jay Garner was put in charge of ORHA. He seemed the perfect choice, since he had overseen the successful implementation of Operation Provide Comfort in support of humanitarian relief for the Kurds after Saddam’s attack on them in 1991. Jay Garner briefed the NSC after a “rock drill” (an exercise to simulate various contingencies) his office conducted with representatives of the military and civilian agencies that were to be involved in the administration of Iraq. The drill uncovered a number of problems, which were then sent back to the agencies for review and resolution.
All those plans were reviewed at the Principals Committee meetings on March 1 and March 7. At a full National Security Council meeting on March 10, Doug Feith briefed the President on a political plan to transfer governance to an Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA) composed of Iraqi exiles and Kurdish leaders. The interim authority, which would be charged with developing a constitution for the country and organizing the country’s permanent elections, was designed to be representative of Iraq’s Shia and Sunni sects. There were differing views about how long the transfer of authority and governance to the Iraqis would take. Defense, which was more willing to rely on exiles, believed that the United States would not have to bear responsibility for managing the country very long. State was less optimistic about the ability of the Iraqis to govern the country and concerned about too heavy a reliance on people who had not lived in Iraq for decades.
President Bush resolved the differences among his advisors by making clear that he wanted some government ministries placed under Iraqi control as soon as possible. But he also worried that placing Iraqi expatriates at the highest levels of government might stir resentment among locals who had suffered under Saddam’s rule. The power dynamics of the country had likely shifted since those exiles had fled, he reasoned, preventing them from having any natural domestic constituencies that would align behind them and potentially denying the interim administration the legitimacy it needed. The President nevertheless agreed to the Iraqi Interim Authority framework on the condition that internals were “fully represented.” The IIA was meant to cooperate with the U.S.-led military coalition in carrying out political and military tasks. Iraqis would take as much responsibility as they could demonstrate the ability to take.
Another challenge confronting us was how to restructure the institutions of a multiethnic Iraq to enfranchise and protect populations that had been suppressed under Saddam’s regime without alienating those who had previously benefited from his rule. Frank Miller briefed the President on our plan for de-Baathification, a process designed to purge the government of Saddam’s loyalists without crippling basic services necessary to keep the state running. Although Saddam’s Baath Party had approximately 1.5 million associated members and supporters, Miller estimated that only 1 to 2 percent—or about 25,000—were “active and full” members who constituted the party elite. He argued that those full members should be removed from government posts and all positions of power and influence. The country had 2 million government employees, including military and police, and the de-Baathification process, as we conceived it, would eliminate only approximately 1 percent of them; as Frank put it, it “will not leave the public institutions without leadership.”
Rounding out the meeting, Treasury Secretary John Snow outlined a plan for a new currency in Iraq to replace the two official ones that were now in place, a Swiss dinar in the north and a Saddam dinar in the south. John advocated the temporary use of the U.S. dollar as a stable replacement in the interim, and President Bush approved the plan. (By mid-October 2003, new Iraqi dinar banknotes were available and the U.S. dollar was phased out.)
Two days later, on March 12, Feith briefed the President on ORHA’s postwar plans for the Iraqi military and intelligence services. It was clear that, like the existing government institutions, the country’s security apparatus needed to be purged of its politicized elements and Saddam loyalists who had committed atrocities on behalf of his regime. The Defense Department planned to completely dismantle Iraq’s paramilitary forces, including the Baath Party Militia, the Jaysh al-Tahrir al-Quds (“Jerusalem Liberation Army”), and Fedayeen Saddam (“Saddam’s Martyrs”). He said that Iraq’s entire intelligence service needed to be demobilized and consolidated and that Iraq’s Republican Guard would be completely disarmed, detained, and dismantled, with some of its members prosecuted for war crimes, given its heinous record of abuse.
Regarding the regular standing Iraqi army, the plan presented to the President on March 12 did not call for its full dismantling but actually the retention and reintegration of some of its elements into Iraqi society. To be sure, Iraqi society needed to be demilitarized, with the armed forces subordinated to civilian control. The army was plagued by sectarian prejudices between Sunni senior officers and Shia conscripts. But the advantages of preserving some elements of the Iraqi military were its assets: a fo
rmal chain of command, trained personnel, and sophisticated infrastructure. Furthermore, it was clear that we would not be able to immediately demobilize 250,000 to 300,000 military personnel. No one wanted desperate, once armed, now-unemployed young men out in the streets.
The plan put before the President therefore called for the preservation of three to five army divisions that would form the “nucleus” of a new Iraqi army. Elements of the Iraqi army would be permitted to retain their current status in assembly areas and permanent garrisons. Those troops would be used as a national reconstruction force that would have the dual benefit of training and identifying new military leadership and rebuilding the country that they would work to protect.
Finally, together with Tom Ridge, the NSC developed a plan for security here at home just in case terrorist groups believed that there was a window of vulnerability during the war. That would likely never have been a consideration before 9/11, but the world had changed.
In short, we needed to get ready because the President was increasingly convinced that Saddam had blown his last chance. Now it was a matter of explaining to the American people and the rest of the world that “serious consequences” had to have meaning.
The Case for Action
THE PRESENTATION of the case against Saddam had three elements. First, we would review his transgressions against the international community and against his own people. Saddam had signed a ceasefire agreement in 1991 and was systematically violating every aspect of it. Second, we would inform the world of what we knew about his continuing pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, his support for terrorism, and his oppression of his own people. Finally, we would paint a picture of the dangers inherent in failing to address the decade-old threat of Saddam Hussein.
The President had begun this effort at the UN, but there was much more to say. The entire NSC team spoke to the issue in television appearances and print interviews. The “Sunday shows”—Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday, Face the Nation, ABC This Week, and CNN Late Edition—were particularly important venues. The audiences of those shows are not huge (Meet the Press is the largest, with only a few million viewers), but they’re influential among policy elites and often drive the Monday headlines.
When I became national security advisor, I had planned to follow Brent Scowcroft’s example and keep a low profile, deferring to the cabinet secretaries for public appearances. After September 11, though, I was pressed into action in large part because I could be a reliable surrogate for the President. In the run-up to the Iraq war, that became even more the case. Between September and March, I appeared on twelve Sunday shows.
I didn’t mind doing the press interviews, though the appearances tended to ruin any remaining semblance of a weekend. Because of their importance, I devoted late Saturday afternoons to preparing for them after working in the morning and early afternoon. If more than one official was appearing, we participated in a long conference call to coordinate our responses. And then Sunday morning had to begin unusually early, with a full review of the news and updates from the press staff about overnight events. The President and I talked every Sunday morning anyway, and he sometimes passed along his thoughts about what I should try to achieve.
Most of the time, the goal of these interviews was to state current U.S. policy and take the slings and arrows of the very capable and experienced journalists who anchored the shows. But we adopted a practice that in retrospect I believe to have been a mistake. In support of the public case, the intelligence community began declassifying pieces of information in order to describe the emerging threat fully. That was the source of some of the claims that turned out to be controversial and in many cases wrong: the high-quality aluminum tubes that were thought to be components for uranium enrichment; mobile laboratories for biological weapons development; the acquisition of mapping software for the territory of the United States that could be used in conjunction with pilotless drones. In one now infamous case, we used the CIA’s assessment that the aluminum tubes were for centrifuges—a key element in a nuclear weapons program. I misspoke during one of the interviews, saying that the tubes could only be for nuclear use. In fact, I had meant to say that they were most likely for nuclear use and corrected the language in subsequent statements. But the misstatement was taken as evidence that we were inflating the evidence. It was a lesson in the dangers of using individual intelligence points. As a result of this practice, these intelligence “nuggets” became too much the focus of the arguments about the dangers of Saddam. The entire case came to rest on those isolated intelligence statements about his programs.
The argument was really more straightforward: Saddam Hussein was a cancer in the Middle East who had attacked his neighbors, throwing the region into chaos. He had drawn the United States into conflict twice, once to expel him from Kuwait and a second time to deliver air strikes against suspected WMD sites because he would not allow arms inspectors to do their jobs. Saddam was routinely shooting at our aircraft patrolling under UN authority. The sanctions put into place to contain him had crumbled under the weight of international corruption and his considerable guile. He had tried to assassinate a former President of the United States and supported terrorists, harboring some of the most notorious of them in his country. There had been no arms inspections in Iraq for more than four years. And it was the unanimous view of the U.S. intelligence community that he had reconstituted his chemical and biological weapons programs. All but one agency believed that he was reconstituting his nuclear weapons capability as well and could have a crude nuclear device in one year if he got foreign help, by the end of the decade if he had to go it alone. Similar views were shared by many foreign intelligence organizations, including the British. The world had given Saddam one last chance to come clean about his weapons programs or face serious consequences. This time the word of the international community had to mean something.
In 2001 we had failed to connect the dots. We could not do so again. When I said, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” that is what I meant. Intelligence information is rarely certain. Waiting until a threat explodes was not an option after the experience of 9/11.
It is hard for many people now, knowing what subsequently occurred, to appreciate how compelling the overall intelligence case against Saddam appeared to be. I was a veteran of the Cold War, Gulf War I, and 9/11. I had served on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon and spent years trying to determine the direction of Soviet military programs. I had never seen a stronger case, and we knew Saddam had used weapons of mass destruction before. We reviewed the intelligence on numerous occasions. The NSC Principals, all experienced people, read the NIE cover to cover, and George Tenet repeatedly assured us of his own judgment that the intelligence was sound.
But what really should have anchored the argument was the problem of WMD in the hands of Saddam, not just the problem of WMD per se. In fact, Senator Robert Bennett of Utah reminded me that I had told a group of legislators exactly that. Russia had many times the number of WMD that Saddam was thought to possess, but there wasn’t much worry about Moscow using it or passing it on to a terrorist. Saddam was a unique threat on both counts. Intelligence was an input but not a substitute for our strategic judgment about what he was doing and, more important, what he might do. One cannot reliably judge the intentions of an adversary, but Saddam had shown a willingness to act recklessly before. We didn’t believe that we had the luxury of inaction.
Our public reliance on isolated intelligence nuggets was especially foolish when it turned the President of the United States into a “fact witness.” No one is to blame for this but me. We worked closely with the White House communicators, and they, not surprisingly, pushed the President to be specific in describing the threat. They loved the sporadic declassified nuggets, which had the added attraction of giving the American people a sense of being “let behind the spy’s curtain,” as one person put it. But knowing the uncertainties that always attend intelligence and how it is especiall
y true in intelligence that the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts, I should have resisted.
The practice came to a head in the State of the Union address on January 28, 2003. The President knew that we were likely headed to war and wanted to give as detailed an assessment to the American people as possible. The speech included a long litany of what we knew about Saddam’s WMD. One of the nuggets referenced a British report that Saddam was trying to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger.
Three months earlier, George Tenet had suggested in a memo clearing another presidential speech that this reference be removed. At the time of the elaborate process for vetting the State of the Union, however, the Agency did not make the same request for the reference. In fact, the reference appeared in the 2002 NIE. Steve Hadley and I had a firm policy: if the intelligence agencies couldn’t support something the President was about to say, he wouldn’t say it. This time the red flag was not raised, and the line would embolden our critics in the months to come.
Late in February, Steve Hadley and I realized belatedly that the President had not made the broader argument. Somehow all that Saddam had done and what he meant to stability in the Middle East was getting lost in the discussion. The President agreed to deliver one last speech on Iraq and did so at the American Enterprise Institute. But the die had been cast. This was a war that had been justified by an intelligence judgment, not a strategic one. The rationale would rise or fall accordingly.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 24