Seeing the images, I rushed down to the Oval Office. The Vice President and Kanan Makiya, one of the Iraqi exiles with whom we had worked, were there. Everyone was hugging. But the President was just sitting at his desk. “You did this,” I said to him. He didn’t really respond. Again I walked away because he was very much inside his own thoughts.
I later learned that a few nights later the Vice President had invited Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and several other people to his house to celebrate the liberation of Iraq. I am not sure whether Don was invited, but Colin and I weren’t included. For a brief time there was a kind of hubris among those who had been the most persistent and long-standing advocates for the overthrow of Saddam. It was summed up by the Vice President who, when challenged on the need for interagency coordination in the postwar period, said, “The Pentagon just liberated Iraq. What has the State Department done?” I knew that I had my work cut out for me. We all did.
“Where Are the Oil Workers?”
THE JOY of the liberation was short-lived. There was widespread looting, perhaps to be expected immediately after the overthrow of a hated dictator. But it went beyond that to systematic attacks on important buildings, including the museum containing Iraq’s significant antiquities. Unidentified people were raiding weapons depots. At least there was no attempt as in 1991 to set the oil fields on fire, but the pictures from Iraq were very ugly.
I’ve always believed that those Baath party members loyal to Saadam, not ordinary Iraqis, created much of the chaos to embarrass us and sow the seeds of a comeback. Within a few days we began to get reports of armed thugs calling themselves “Fedayeen Saddam.” “Who is Fedayeen Saddam?” I asked George, temporarily forgetting the somewhat cursory mention of the group in the prewar briefings.
In the midst of the increasing turmoil, we began carrying out the plans we’d made for the postinvasion period. It was immediately obvious that some of our assumptions had been faulty. No one could locate most of the civil servants who had been expected to keep the country running. I remember well standing at my desk a week after U.S. forces entered Baghdad and yelling, “Where are the oil workers?” Along with members of the army and police, they seemed to have vanished into thin air.
The problem was exacerbated by the fact that we could not get Jay Garner and his team into Iraq due to the security situation. That was hard to explain, given that we had just deployed almost 200,000 troops to Iraq, but the Pentagon insisted that it was too dangerous to send Garner in. Finally, almost three weeks after the invasion, he arrived and was almost immediately overwhelmed.
I called Margaret Tutwiler, our ambassador in Morocco. Margaret had been Jim Baker’s closest confidante during his State Department years. She was a lot like Karen Hughes, a great communicator but also a savvy political advisor. “Go help Jay Garner,” I implored her. “He can’t seem to get a handle on what to do or what to say.” She made clear that she didn’t want the mission. But she is a patriot, and she agreed to go.
The Garner operation was to have worked hand in hand with an Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA) composed of exiled Sunni and Shia leaders and the Kurds. The President had been briefed on the concept before the war broke out. Doug Feith presented a more elaborate version on March 31, complete with principles for the authority and pledges by its members to uphold them. The Defense Department was given full authority to implement the plan, again with a caution from the President to make certain that indigenous, not just exiled, leaders were included.
In addition to planning for the new administration to have an Iraqi “face,” Doug Feith’s office had hired outside civilian experts to help run the government. Defense contracts had been awarded for various functions. Some of them made sense, and others did not. I learned later, for instance, that Science Applications International Corporation had been engaged to set up and run the Iraqi state television station. SAIC was a fine technical company, but it was hardly versed in media content, let alone Arab media content.
The State Department was prepared to deploy employees, many of whom were Arabists. Some were sent without incident, but Feith vetoed several State recommendations on what could only be called ideological grounds. When I learned of this, I went to the President and told him that it was an affront to Colin to act that way and we needed the expertise. But it was the Defense Department’s show, and the President was reluctant to intervene. Steve dutifully worked to get as many State employees in as possible.
Unfortunately, the Pentagon had minimal ability to implement the elaborate IIA plans given the chaos on the ground. They managed to get some of the exiles into Iraq with the assistance of American military personnel. But the Garner mission collapsed almost on arrival and could barely manage itself, let alone the country and the Iraqi Interim Authority. The nightmare that we had tried to get Defense to avoid through planning for “rear-area security” was unfolding. There was a serious manpower shortage in Baghdad, and, though pressed by the President about the number of troops on the ground, Don continued to insist that there were enough.
Colin Powell had once said that military force has to be overwhelming in its application. That was known as the Powell Doctrine and certainly described the strategy in Gulf War I, when 500,000 forces had been used. He would later tell me that he had personally expressed concern to Tommy Franks about the troop levels. But the Pentagon had decided upon a different approach, using a so-called light footprint. It worked well for the defeat of Saddam’s army and his overthrow, but we had too few troops to stabilize the postwar environment. As I watched the chaos unfold, I kept harkening back to all those briefings when the President had been told that the plan was “adequately resourced,” meaning there were enough troops. If there were any objections in the ranks of the senior generals to the assessment, they were not made known to the President.
I caught up with Don outside the Situation Room after an NSC meeting as all of this was unfolding and asked him if he realized that the Garner mission was not working. “We can’t even get Garner into the country,” I told him. He said that he did see the problem and was considering a different model. On April 11, Don recommended that the President appoint a new presidential envoy, who would replace ORHA (Garner had finally arrived in the country the same day). Don and his staff put together a diverse and wide-ranging list of more than a hundred candidates, including Paul Wolfowitz, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former California Governor Pete Wilson, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer.
Bremer was well known to most of us and was working for Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm. He seemed a reasonable choice and immediately impressed the President with his presence and can-do attitude. We did not, frankly, go through a long vetting process because the situation on the ground demanded an immediate response. On May 6 Jerry was appointed to lead the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). After a session with each of the NSC Principals and then alone with the President, Jerry Bremer was dispatched to Iraq. Don’s instructions to Bremer empowered him with all executive, legislative, and judicial functions in Iraq. Jerry immediately did what Garner had not: he took control and brought a semblance of order.
That is how the Coalition Provisional Authority came into being. Some people in the Defense Department continued to argue that we needed to hand over more power to the Iraqi Interim Authority, but that contradicted the instructions Don had given Jerry. Did Don want Jerry to have all executive, legislative, and judicial functions or not? The issue wasn’t between State and Defense. If there was a coordination problem, it was that Defense wouldn’t or couldn’t reconcile Doug Feith’s Iraqi Interim Authority and Jerry’s CPA within its own building.
In order to give maximum flexibility to the CPA, Steve Hadley “shut down” the Deputies process and Frank Miller’s interagency Executive Steering Group. The coordination would be done in Baghdad under the direction and guidance of the Pentagon in Washington.
Upon his arrival Jerry made clear that the Un
ited States, at least for a while, needed to show a strong hand. It wasn’t a matter of a binary choice: turn the country over to the IIA or not. It was a matter of how quickly the Iraqis could assume authority, particularly given the security situation on the ground and the fact that most of them hadn’t been in the country for years, giving them no indigenous base. The President had confidence in Jerry and believed that he had to give his “man on the ground” flexibility to organize in the way he saw fit.
The Bremer mission could have been helped, nonetheless, by continuing to use Zalmay Khalilzad as a political envoy. Zal had been the very successful ambassador to Afghanistan and had long experience with exiles from all parts of Iraq. He was already working effectively with tribal and provincial leaders who had survived in Saddam’s Iraq, calling them together for a conference in Salah ad-Din province. Together with the exiles, those leaders might have given the Baghdad-based interim authority greater legitimacy.
I’m not given to cultural arguments, but there was something about Zal’s effectiveness that seemed attributable to his comfort level with the ways of the region and the region’s comfort level with him. I asked the President to keep Zal on to help Jerry with the very difficult Iraqi personalities. The President said that it would be Jerry’s call. Jerry demurred, saying that he would have to do the work himself. That was a mistake.
Yet Jerry would eventually become effective in dealing with the Iraqis. The criticism that the CPA became overblown and grandiose has some merit; at its height there were more than 1,200 people working for it. The CPA would make mistakes, including the decision to disband the army. But through the ups and downs of the next year, Jerry did heroic work under the most difficult of circumstances, including deteriorating security. The President appreciated that, and so did I.
“Punish France, Forgive Russia, and Ignore Germany”
IN THE immediate aftermath of the war, we began to consider how to restore at least a semblance of normalcy to our relations with the French, Germans, and Russians. The President was particularly concerned about the Russians, whom he saw as at least having been straightforward about their opposition to the war. I felt the same way but uttered what I thought was a clever quip in what I thought was a private moment with the President and a couple of aides standing in the Oval Office: “Punish France, forgive Russia, and ignore Germany,” I said. We all laughed, but I was horrified to see that someone had passed the tidbit on to the press. I was reminded of a Benjamin Franklin saying that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. He must have been talking about Washington.
The President called Vladimir Putin and told him that he wanted to send me to Moscow. Putin appreciated the gesture and said that he would gladly receive me.
I arrived in Moscow on April 6 and went to my room in Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence. The house is a beautiful neoclassical estate, which has been inhabited by the U.S. envoy since the establishment of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1933. I turned on the television to a Russian news station. My Russian was once very good, but it is a difficult language to retain because of the peculiarities of its grammatical structure. I always found it helpful to get my Russian “ear” as soon as possible.
As I unpacked, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: a convoy of Russian diplomats and journalists had been wounded when their motorcade became trapped in a firefight while leaving Baghdad. This is going to be a great trip, I thought. I called the President, who said that we didn’t have the facts but of course I should give Putin his deepest regrets.
Despite some back-and-forth about the responsibility for the accident, my meetings in Moscow went smoothly. I met with the secretary of the Russian Security Council and others and then made my way across the cobblestoned square to Putin’s ornate Kremlin office. I had last been there on my own during a mission to smooth the diplomatic path before our withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in the summer of 2001.
Putin knew that I had been a student of Russia, a fact that he seemed to find reassuring—at least in the early days. Our personal chemistry was good, and though I always spoke to him in English (I wanted to be precise in delivering messages), I always listened to him in Russian. Putin spoke in a rough, unvarnished manner, and I wanted to hear him in his own language, not through translation. In any case, I told him that the President wanted to get relations back on track. He said that he wanted to do the same and then made clear that President Bush needed to be aware of Russian economic interests in the rebuilding of Iraq. Those included both the large debt that Saddam Hussein owed to Moscow and pending oil contracts. At least he was straight with me.
The first encounters with the French and Germans since the invasion would be on the margins of the G8 meeting in Evian, France, that June. The President began his trip in Poland and then went on to St. Petersburg for the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city. Millions of dollars had been spent to restore Peterhof, the spectacular palace of Peter the Great. Everywhere you looked there was gold: gold-leaf–covered cathedral domes, gold fountains, and gold people. Yes, gold people. What appeared at first to be statues were indeed human beings spray-painted gold. The grand performance following dinner featured those beings whirling around as classical ballet dancers performed Swan Lake. Not surprisingly, the finale was Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with cannons blasting across the river. The whole thing was a bit like the Bolshoi meets Caesar’s Palace, but the Russians and Putin were bursting with pride. As we left, I noticed that the back of one of the cathedrals had not been painted. The phrase “Potemkin Village” came to mind: in days gone by, local officials would paint the fronts of houses whenever the tsar was passing through a village. They didn’t bother with the part he couldn’t see. Some things don’t change.
During the event, President Bush approached German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and shook his hand. It was about as warm a moment as the two could ever manage, but they maintained cordial relations for the rest of Schroeder’s term.
Prior to Evian, I had given an interview that was, in retrospect, a little brusque. Saying that our disappointment in our allies would not go away easily, I added that there were times it appeared that U.S. power was seen to be more dangerous than, perhaps, Saddam Hussein. I went to the President and said that I had been a little rough on the allies. He wasn’t concerned, saying that it left him room to be the nice guy.
In fact, the G8 went very smoothly, everyone trying to demonstrate, as Colin said, that we were “starting to talk about the future and not just grind our teeth over the disappointments of the past.” And people were starting to move on. The UN Security Council had been reunited with a resolution giving the United States and Great Britain a mandate to use Iraq’s oil revenues to rebuild Iraq.
There had been a silly debate inside the administration about how much authority to give the United Nations. The Defense Department and the Vice President’s office had scoured every word of the resolution to make sure that the United States had free rein to rebuild Iraq without the nettlesome advice of the international community. When I called Colin with yet one more “suggestion” from the White House, he said, “One day we’re going to be trying to give this tar baby to the UN.” He was, of course, right; our problem wouldn’t be too much UN involvement but too little. I closed down the vetting process by the agencies and gave Colin the go-ahead to finalize the resolution.
The hubris didn’t end there, however. As we were looking to the first proposals for the rebuilding of Iraq, we made what turned out to be a terrible and ultimately unenforceable decision. The Pentagon wanted the contracts to go to the countries that had supported the war. In theory that, of course, made some sense. But in practice it made the United States look petty. Eventually we would want help from everyone—a lot of help—to rebuild Iraq.
Again a Chance for Middle East Peace
THERE HAD LONG BEEN a belief that action in Iraq could be made more palatable for the region if accompan
ied by efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Though the connection is not obvious, the fact is that the perception had become the reality. After the Gulf War in 1991, then Secretary of State James Baker convened the Madrid Conference, which garnered international support for the peace process. What followed was the Oslo Accords between Arafat and the Israelis, which established the Palestinian Authority and a modicum of self-governance for the Palestinian people. Arafat would famously renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist. The accords were not directly related to the conference (in fact, they were conducted in secret and without U.S. participation). Nonetheless, the two events did establish a new foundation for the “peace process.”
The overthrow of Saddam Hussein seemed to offer a similar opportunity. Since the end of the Israeli operations in the West Bank in the summer of 2002, there had been enormous pressure on Arafat to reform the Palestinian Authority. The adoption of a new Basic Law and the appointment of the moderate leader Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister were hailed worldwide as a real step forward.
The President decided to build on those developments, hoping that the “new” Palestinian leadership for which he had called in his Rose Garden speech was emerging. He would leave the G8 in Evian and go to the Middle East. To be sure, there was a kind of perverse pleasure in leaving Chirac’s soirée a little early to go make Middle East peace.
We sought and gained agreement from the regional parties to hold two meetings: one would be held in Sharm el-Sheikh, where the key Arab leaders, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah of Jordan, King Hamad of Bahrain, and President Mubarak of Egypt, would meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas to signal support for him and for a new effort with the Israelis. Abbas would then go on to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Sharon in Aqaba, Jordan.
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