The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  As the domestic legitimacy debate wound on inconclusively, there were some tactical successes on the international legitimacy front. But they didn’t come without considerable grumbling from hardliners in the administration, who saw the whole UN effort at best as a waste of time and at worst as a sign of weakness. Vice President Cheney squabbled with Powell in several principals meetings in August and September, and gave two speeches late in the summer pressing the case for regime change and downplaying any need for wider international backing. One Saturday that September, I was sent to represent State at a last-minute principals meeting on Iraq. Sitting across from the vice president, with Condi Rice chairing the meeting, I dutifully made the case for working through the UN to build international legitimacy and to enhance the leverage of coercive diplomacy. After listening politely but impatiently, the vice president replied, “The only legitimacy we really need comes on the back of an M1A1 tank.”

  Pressed also by the British, the president stuck with his commitment to Powell and joined in a high-level push for a new Security Council resolution. In October, a new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate made the sweeping assertion that Iraq “is reconstituting its nuclear program” and “has now established large-scale, redundant and concealed biological weapons agent production capabilities.” That same month, by substantial majorities in both the Senate and House, Congress gave the president authorization to use force against Iraq. The margins for the congressional vote authorizing the use of force more than a decade before were far narrower, despite the more compelling reality of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. It was yet another reminder of how much 9/11 had changed the political atmosphere. In early November, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441. It declared Saddam in “material breach” of his obligations, gave Iraq a “final opportunity” to comply, and warned of “serious consequences” if it did not.

  At the end of November, with his attention focused by the new resolution and the congressional vote, Saddam suddenly took steps to comply, providing a first tranche of documents and allowing UN inspectors to return to Iraq for the first time in nearly four years. In December and again in January 2003, suspicious UN inspectors reported that Saddam remained in violation of his obligations and had not yet provided complete information or access. A number of us in the department made the case to Powell that we should give the inspectors more time and let 1441 play out a little longer, in the slim hope that Saddam would come clean. By that point, however, the secretary had run out the string with the White House.

  On February 5, Powell made his famous presentation to the UN Security Council about Saddam’s noncompliance and continuing WMD activities. He said that the evidence of Iraq’s breach of its obligations was “irrefutable and undeniable,” and that Saddam was “determined to keep his WMD and determined to make more.” The secretary had worked hard to peel away unsubstantiated material pressed on him by the vice president’s staff and others, but most of what remained was eventually discredited. In the moment, it felt like the most persuasive—and honest—case that the administration could muster, from its most credible spokesperson. Over time, the damage done became more obvious, to both Powell’s reputation and our country’s. Powell would later call his speech “painful” and a permanent “blot” on his record. It was a hard lesson for all of us in the complexities of duty.

  Late on the evening of March 19, the president announced in a nationally televised speech that we were at war again with Saddam. A dozen years before, I had sat with Lisa and watched the president’s father make a similar, equally sobering speech. I had much deeper trepidation this time. This was not a war that we needed to fight.

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  THE MILITARY OPERATION proceeded with predictable efficiency. Iraqi forces crumbled, Baghdad fell in early April, and Saddam fled into hiding. The mood in much of the administration was triumphant, and the president declared “mission accomplished” in early May. It didn’t take long, however, for many of the troubles we had foreseen to surface. After a visit to Baghdad at the beginning of July, I reported bluntly to Powell that “we’re in a pretty deep hole in Iraq.”

  Looting and lawlessness had already taken a huge toll. Rumsfeld’s determination to display the new lean, mobile, technologically innovative American way of war had made short work of conventional Iraqi military resistance, but was inadequate to the task of ensuring postwar order. Less than one-third the size of the Desert Storm coalition force, the U.S. military was badly overstretched on the ground in Iraq, especially as the Iraqi army and police melted away and insecurity mushroomed. The problem was compounded by two tragically misguided American decisions in May, first to ban Baath Party members from public-sector roles, and second to disband the Iraqi army. In that same July message to Powell, I relayed an anecdote from a friend in the CIA who had recently returned from Baghdad. Interrogated after an RPG attack on U.S. troops, an ex–Iraqi army captain admitted that he had taken fifty dollars from insurgent leaders to conduct the operation. “They took away my job and my honor,” he explained. “I can’t feed my family. There are many more like me.”16

  In the aftermath of the toppling of Saddam, the decision-making process in Washington was even worse than the prewar experience. In NEA, we continued to push for internationalizing the civilian administration of Iraq, with an immediate emphasis on security and order, preserving the Iraqi army and police, and engaging both Sunni and Shia leaders. We also continued to make the argument for careful cultivation of a new Iraqi governance structure, whose legitimacy would come largely from people inside the country, with exiled oppositionists playing a significant but supporting role.

  Our colleagues in the Pentagon had a different view, far more suspicious of ceding oversight to international partners or the United Nations, and still far more attached to central roles for Chalabi and returning exiles. Setting them atop a provisional government would be a much quicker and less complicated way to establish new Iraqi leadership. Just three days after the launch of the war, on March 22, I stressed to Powell that it was already clear we were “being pushed in a dangerous direction on some critical postwar planning issues….OSD and OVP have been working steadily to…[hand over] postwar Iraq to ‘our’ Iraqis (Chalabi and company), while keeping at bay other Iraqis, the rest of the U.S. Administration, and the UN and other potential international partners.”17

  Events in Iraq and incoherence in Washington soon overwhelmed the fledgling steps we managed to take toward a more inclusive political process. Jay Garner, the retired Army general leading the early transition effort, was well-intentioned but badly miscast. The atmosphere within his group was tangled, to put it mildly. One British colleague described Garner’s team as “a bag of ferrets.”18

  Garner was quickly replaced by a retired diplomat, Jerry Bremer. Smart, disciplined, and supremely self-confident, Bremer seemed like a solid choice. He reported to the Pentagon, but had enormous room to maneuver. Rumsfeld was already experiencing periodic bouts of amnesia about his hard prewar press to manage the aftermath, and the White House was all too willing at the outset to defer to a strong-willed proconsul on the ground. Described to Secretary Powell by Henry Kissinger as a “control freak,” Bremer was intent upon swiftly establishing his leadership and convincing Iraqis that there would be no return to the old political order.

  Just before Bremer left for Baghdad, I joined Powell and Armitage for a quiet conversation with him at Powell’s home in Virginia. The secretary made clear that he wanted to do all he could to help, and that Bremer could count on State to provide whatever support we could. Powell was candid about his frustrations with the interagency process and emphasized the importance of building an international structure in Baghdad to shepherd the transition and to keep focused on a legitimate, inclusive Iraqi political process. Bremer seemed appreciative.

  He didn’t mention anything in that discussion about his intention to issue sweeping order
s shortly after his arrival in Iraq on de-Baathification and formal dissolution of the Iraqi army. Ahmed Chalabi was put in charge of implementing the broad injunction against Baath Party members, which he applied to its illogical extreme, tossing aside not only senior officials with blood on their hands, but schoolteachers and lower-level technocrats for whom party membership was an essential basis for employment. In different hands, implementation of the de-Baathification decision might have been far less catastrophic, but Chalabi ensured that it would have ruinous effect.

  The disbanding of the regular military was similarly shortsighted, casting thousands of Sunnis with lethal training and an equally lethal sense of grievance into the hands of the insurgency. It was true that most of the Iraqi armed forces had not been physically defeated in battle; when the Turks blocked the movement of U.S. ground forces into northern Iraq, and the Americans quickly took Baghdad, most of the Iraqi military beyond the capital simply melted away. It would have been hard to reassemble them, and any such effort would likely have alienated the Shia majority. The cardinal sin, however, was to cut them off entirely, and not immediately ensure some form of payment or support to disbanded soldiers. In August, UN special envoy Sérgio Vieira de Mello was killed in an insurgent truck bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad, and prospects for international administration of the Iraqi transition as well as for a provisional government that could bridge sectarian differences rapidly receded.

  The Bremer-led Coalition Provisional Authority was a curious amalgam of American hubris, ingenuity, courage, and wishful thinking. It didn’t take long for the CPA to mirror the wider dysfunction of the society Bremer was seeking to mold. Its reporting to Washington was constrained by Bremer’s disinclination to be second-guessed and the fact that what little reporting there was had to come through the Pentagon. I told Powell at one point that “we learn more from The Washington Post than we do from CPA.”

  Partly for that reason, but mostly because of the sheer significance of our unfolding predicament, I visited Iraq a half dozen times during the CPA’s yearlong existence. Each trip had an element of the surreal. After one of my visits to the Green Zone, I described CPA headquarters in Saddam’s old Republican Palace to Secretary Powell as “reminiscent of the bar scene in Star Wars.” In the faded and still creepy grandeur of Saddam’s corridors, American and other coalition personnel swarmed busily at all hours of the day and night—military and civilian, armed and unarmed, veterans of post-conflict situations and young Republican neophytes, the hardworking and committed and the certifiably clueless. Ambitious young ideologues talked earnestly about remaking ministries and educational systems, or building a securities and exchange system whether the Iraqis knew they needed one or not. On one trip, I stopped in to see Bernie Kerik, the former New York Police Department commissioner who had come to advise the Ministry of Interior. He seemed perplexed by Iraq, and perked up only when an aide informed him of another urban explosion. He rushed out, eager to get to the scene and give a television interview, reassuring Iraqi viewers in Arabic translation that order was being restored and the perpetrators would be caught, much as he might have done in the more familiar boroughs of New York City.

  I traveled widely outside Baghdad that year, from Erbil and the Kurdish north to Basra and the Shia-dominated south. The two principal Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani, circled each other warily but made a united front in defending the autonomy that they had spent much of the previous decade building. In my visits to Mosul, Tikrit, and Baquba in late 2003, evidence of a mounting Sunni Arab insurgency was all too obvious. By the end of the year, Shia militia groups had begun to spring up too, with Muqtada al-Sadr emerging as a particularly difficult and incendiary voice. Iran and its Revolutionary Guards deepened their meddling, feeding off the sectarian strife. Turkey kept a careful eye on the north, and opened up channels of communication to the Iraqi Kurds. Across much of the country, security was fragile and infrastructure painfully inadequate. By the spring of 2004, the early self-assurance that had fueled the CPA was fading fast.

  Violence in Anbar Province, where Sunnis were an aggrieved and well-armed majority, boiled over. The towns I had driven through on my misbegotten trip from Amman to Baghdad twenty years earlier filled American television screens with awful images. First were the scenes of the burned corpses of four Blackwater security contractors being dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge in Fallujah, then it was images of detained insurgents being brutalized and humiliated by their American captors at Abu Ghraib. That was only more tinder for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian extremist who was already fanning the flames in Iraq and organizing the particularly vicious group that would later be known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. It was an ugly spring, with reverberations that would stretch across the next few bloody years.

  Meanwhile, the White House finally agreed to replace the proconsular CPA with a more normal embassy structure, as the Iraqis moved toward national elections and establishment of a new government. Jerry Bremer left Baghdad in late spring, and John Negroponte took over as ambassador. We set up a sizable mini-bureau inside NEA in Washington to provide support for Embassy Baghdad, which remained a huge and exceptionally complicated diplomatic mission. Much as Powell had predicted to President Bush in August 2002, war in Iraq sucked the oxygen out of the administration’s foreign policy agenda, and left lasting scars on America’s influence and an already complicated region.

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  AS IRAQ BECAME the main event, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became a painful and distracting sideshow. It was hardly the most promising diplomatic possibility that the administration had inherited. The White House thought the Clinton administration had wasted political capital on a problem neither central to American interests nor ripe for solution. Like so much else in foreign policy, that attitude hardened after the September 11 attacks, with Palestinian violence looking increasingly like a part of the wider terrorist problem, Yasser Arafat its enabler, and Ariel Sharon a partner whose hard, uncompromising reputation fit the mood in Washington. Nevertheless, the grinding violence of the Second Intifada was impossible to ignore, and America’s Arab friends were agitated about the impact on their own populations, if not so much about the plight or aspirations of Palestinians themselves.

  The net result was a policy of relative detachment, with the administration trying to do just enough to placate the Arabs without leaning too hard on Sharon or diverting from the emerging post–9/11 goals of regime change in Iraq and regional transformation. Middle East policy in the first term of the administration was a world of two parallel bureaucratic and conceptual universes. In one corner stood the vice president and his activist staff, the civilian leadership of the Defense Department, and most NSC staffers. Their view, shared increasingly by the president after 9/11, was not only that the road to a better future for the region lay through toppling Saddam, but also that the road to Israeli-Palestinian peace lay through toppling Arafat and thorough democratic reform of the Palestinian Authority. Too much talk about what such a future might hold for Palestinians, or about the corrosive impact of Israeli settlement activity in the meantime, was seen as a reward for bad Palestinian behavior and a distraction from the main challenge. They sought to park the peace process—and decades of bipartisan diplomatic convention—until the broader regional goal was accomplished.

  In the other corner stood Powell and his team at the State Department, often supported analytically by CIA. Deeply skeptical about the rush to take on Iraq and its likely consequences in the region, we argued for more focus on the immediate fires that were burning, to create better long-term conditions for considering what to do about Saddam. We largely shared the view that Arafat had become an obstacle to progress. We also realized that the Clinton administration had underplayed the importance of Palestinian reform in its zeal for a political settlement, and that we had to put a higher priority on better Palestinian governance.


  The inconvenient reality, however, was that the more Arafat posed as the victim, the more popular he became among Palestinians. There was considerable frustration with the Palestinian Authority’s corruption in the West Bank and Gaza, but far more anger about Israeli use of force, the ritual humiliations of life under occupation, and the absence of hope for a two-state solution. In a note to Secretary Powell, I argued that the more we focused on those issues, the more pressure we could bring to bear on Arafat. “If we are prepared to lay out for all our partners some plain truths about what a two state solution will look like, and a clear roadmap for getting there…a great deal is possible. If we’re not prepared, however, to speak those plain truths, we will get nowhere on Palestinian reform, achieve no real security for Israel, and our Arab friends will head in other directions.” I continued, “This will require us to piss everybody off to some extent, and address our message to the peoples involved, not just to the stubborn old men who lead them.”19

  Against the backdrop of continuing Israeli-Palestinian violence, American policy moved fitfully and ineffectually down its two parallel tracks. Powell’s Louisville speech in November 2001 launched an effort by Tony Zinni, the former CENTCOM commander, to achieve a cease-fire and the resumption of security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. There couldn’t have been a better person to lead such an effort, or a worse set of circumstances in which to try. Zinni was supported by Aaron Miller, my longtime friend and colleague at State, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the peace process and passion for promoting it. They were an unlikely but capable duo—the brawny and cerebral former Marine general, an Italian Catholic from Philadelphia, and the lanky Jewish peace process lifer from the suburbs of Cleveland—but their mission was nearly impossible. Then came the Israeli seizure of an Iranian-origin ship loaded with arms for Palestinian fighters. The failed voyage of the Karine-A was a damning indictment of Arafat, and effectively buried the chances that Zinni and Miller would get anywhere.