Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  * Garner's to-do list of things to accomplish before July 1 included: (1) Bring all Iraqi government ministries back to a functioning level. (2) Pay the salaries of all the public servants across the country, including the army and the police. (3) Restore the police, the courts and the prisons. (4) Ensure basic services to Baghdad—water, electricity, sewage and so forth. This would have an added benefit, Garner reasoned, because most of the foreign reporters who covered Iraq were centered in Baghdad. They'd be happier—and might write better stories—if they had air-conditioning and hot showers. (5) End the Iraqi fuel crisis. (6) Purchase the Iraqi harvest—tons of barley and wheat. (7) Reestablish the food distribution system. (8) Restore interim local governance by arranging for the election of town councils in each of Iraq's 26 cities with 100,000 or more people. (9) Ensure the public health system was working, and continue to avoid epidemics.

  officer—at least a one-star general or admiral—in charge of each of Garner's 10 objectives, and Garner would assign a senior civilian from his group to each, creating a military-civil team. Junior flag officers got things done in part because they wanted to become senior flag officers. There was no more conspicuous bundle of energy than a one-star general with a mission.

  In Baghdad, Garner noticed that U.S. forces were deployed all about in tanks and armored personnel vehicles. He wanted them to reduce the visibility of the force. He called the tanks sidewalk crushers and at one point he suggested to one unit, Quit riding your goddamn tracks and tearing up the sidewalks and curbs. He even spoke with one of McKiernan's deputies and said they ought to do more dismounted patrols, get out of the body armor and Kevlar helmets. Garner refused to wear a flak jacket or travel in armored vehicles. It would send the wrong signal.

  But there was a tension in the city, and the U.S. forces were spring-loaded for action. They generally stayed in full armor and in combat mode.

  you have a call in from SecDef, Air Force Colonel Kim Olson, Garner's executive assistant, told him about 6 p.m. on April 24.

  Hey, you're really doing great, Rumsfeld said when he got on the phone. We're proud of what you're doing. He said he understood that Garner's team was arriving in full, and it really looked good from what Rumsfeld could tell.

  Yes, sir, Garner replied.

  By the way, Rumsfeld said, one of the reasons I'm calling is to let you know that the president has selected Jerry Bremer to be the presidential envoy. He didn't know when this would be announced, but he wanted to make sure Garner knew beforehand.

  Well, Garner said, taken by surprise, if he's already selected somebody then I'll come home.

  No, Rumsfeld objected. I don't want you to come home.

  It doesn't work that way, Garner said. You can't have the guy who used to be in charge and the guy who's now in charge there, because you divide the loyalties of the people. So the best thing for me is just to step out of here.

  Don't do anything until I come to Iraq. You and I will talk, Rumsfeld said. He was planning to arrive in a few days. Jay, this has always been the plan. You know that. This has always been our plan.

  Well, that's true. I have to give you that, Garner said. It was happening earlier than he'd thought.

  I want you to call Jerry Bremer, Rumsfeld said, and gave him the phone number.

  I'll do that.

  After hanging up, Garner recalled in an interview, he felt betrayed. I was thinking: Those sons of bitches. I busted my ass. I dropped everything I had. I walked away from everything I was doing. I thought I had done an incredibly good job at that time. In my head I thought I had. He said he felt cheated. I was naive enough to think that I could get all this started and there would be such a groundswell among the Iraqis ... I thought, 'I've got everything going.' And all they were going to have to do is wait and see it come to fruition and it's not going to take long for that to happen.

  What really got me, he said, is they never really announced what they were doing. Suddenly Bremer's coming and it looks like they fired me, which they may have.

  I think to the outside world I was seen as the envoy to Iraq, whatever you want to call it, the first governor and all that. Inside the administration, inside Defense, I was seen as a mechanic. 'We hired this guy.' I certainly never had the status I had to the outside world.

  a few hours after Rumsfeld called Garner, he made another call. The president had traveled to Lima, Ohio, that day for a campaign-style appearance at a factory that makes the M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank, where Bush had singled out Jay Garner for praise. We've followed up with a team of people, headed by this man Garner who's got one overriding goal, to leave a free nation in the hands of a free people, he said. He also praised the $4.3 million, 70-ton Abrams tank as the most safe vehicle for our fighting personnel, precise enough to protect innocent life. Nine hundred Ml tanks had crossed the borders the previous month in the Iraq invasion.

  Rumsfeld called Andy Card to complain that the Lima Abrams tank plant had been picked for a presidential visit. The Abrams tank was a thing of the past, not the light, quick, transformational weapon of the future. The president was sending the wrong message. They should speak with one voice: Transformation! This would not have happened when he had been chief of staff, he told Card.

  Unbelievable, Card thought. Rumsfeld was out of control. Not only was the secretary in the military chain of command by law, but he played it for all it was worth.

  Card found he could pretty much call the other cabinet secretaries— Powell, for example—and get them to play ball and carry out presidential orders and requests. But not Rumsfeld.

  Bremer had strongly supported the decision to invade Iraq. He believed it was the only moral course, that the alleged WMD were an incontestable, imminent threat. In April, he later wrote, he'd been contacted by both Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, asking if he'd be interested in taking over in postwar Iraq. Garner was never intended to be the permanent head of the reconstruction effort, they told him. They needed someone who knew diplomacy and politics.

  Bremer got his wife's blessing and was quickly brought in to talk with Rumsfeld, whom he'd known since they worked in the Ford administration. Soon after, he met with the president.

  Why would you want this impossible job? Bush asked him, according to Bremer's account.

  Because I believe America has done something great in liberating the Iraqis, sir. And because I think I can help.

  In Baghdad, Bremer's impending arrival was greeted with shock.

  What the hell are they doing that for? Abizaid said when Garner told him.

  John, I don't know.

  McKiernan was surprised. Tutwiler said she was stunned. Can you believe this? Robin Raphel exclaimed.

  Come on, you're kidding, DiRita said when Garner told him. He was concerned not so much by the decision to switch to a more experienced diplomat, but by the left-footed way it was being handled. That can't be right.

  Paul, this is not good, DiRita told Wolfowitz. The message being sent was that Garner had failed. I mean, it's a problem. Somebody needs to go out today and explain what the hell's going on.

  But the decision had already been made and no one was stepping up to explain.

  Garner ran into Khalilzad, the presidential envoy. Bremer's coming over here and I'm leaving, he said.

  Who?

  Jerry Bremer.

  What do you mean he's coming over here?

  He's coming over here to be the presidential envoy.

  Then I'm quitting.

  I don't think you can quit, Zal, Garner replied. You've got too much invested here. You're too important a guy. You can't quit.

  Khalilzad just walked off. He would return two years later as U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

  Garner called Rumsfeld to see if Bremer's arrival could be delayed for several months.

  I have a lot of things on the fire and I think I can get them all done by the first of July, Garner pleaded.

  I can't do that, Rumsfeld said. That's not my call.

  When Garner
went to his office the next morning to call Bremer, the phone was ringing.

  You're doing a great job over there, Bremer said, echoing Rumsfeld, but with the skill of a diplomat.

  The optics are pretty bad over here in the newspapers, Bremer said on a later call. The television and newspapers were filled with images of looting and chaos.

  Jerry, Garner replied, if you're going to try to run Iraq based on what's in The Washington Post, you're in for a long haul. He added that he didn't know what was in the newspaper. At that moment, he said, he didn't even have electricity.

  Yeah, but you've got to manage the optics, Bremer repeated. You've still got to be wary of what's being said about you.

  When you get here you can do that.

  Garner's team was trying to function in buildings that had been torn apart; 17 of the 23 ministry buildings were virtually destroyed. Doors, doorjambs, windows, windowsills, plumbing and electrical wiring had been ripped out. In some cases, looters had set the empty husks of buildings on fire. Soot, dirt, filth and human waste littered the floors. Ministry workers had fled. Some of Garner's people had gone out into Baghdad to look for them, asking almost at random, Do you know anybody that was in the Ministry of Transportation? or Do you know anybody in the Ministry of Health?

  • • •

  In late April, a Lebanese translator who had been working for the CIA approached Colonel Paul Hughes, one half of Garner's two-man Law Firm.

  Have you seen this? he asked.

  He showed Hughes a one-page document, an English translation of a directive that had been issued by the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam's intelligence service.

  The memo listed 11 things that the Mukhabarat would do in the event, God forbid, of the fall of our beloved leader. Each local Baath cell, each squad of Fedayeen, and each individual Mukhabarat agent would be responsible for assassinating collaborators, burning the ministry buildings, looting, burning public documents—doing things that would lead to chaos. It said nothing about sectarian violence, nothing about exploiting the divisions among Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis. It said that it would be up to all the independent agents of the Baath Party to figure out how to raise hell if Saddam's government fell.

  Hughes was stunned. He saw that the U.S. and coalition forces were up against a lot more than they had imagined.

  In his book, Bremer recalled being shown a similar document, but not for another three months, in late July or early August. Dated January 23, 2003, the Mukhabarat memo Bremer was shown was addressed To All Offices and Sections, and offered a contingency plan for what to do if the country were invaded. Burn this office, the memo began, and continued on to describe a strategy of sabotage and looting and ordering subordinates to scatter agents to every town. Destroy electric power stations and water conduits. Infiltrate the mosques, the Shiite holy places.

  I can't believe that son of a bitch, what he has done, General Myers said in the Tank at the Pentagon. Myers couldn't get General Franks to answer questions, couldn't even get him on the phone. Now, he heard, Franks wanted to leave the combat zone and come to Washington for the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 26. Leave a combat zone for a party? Myers was dumbfounded. Rumsfeld had to pass the word to Franks that he should not attend.

  Spider Marks was now living the challenge that he had outlined to the DIA smart guys at the Pentagon more than six months earlier. It no longer mattered whether failure to find WMD was an intelligence problem or an operational problem. The simple fact was that they weren't finding anything. In a moment of frustration, he put the blame squarely on the shoulders of General Franks's Central Command. If he couldn't share his personal hell with his boss, he had to express it somewhere.

  They are completely asleep at the switch. No one anticipated or executed on the req. to get details of WMD, Marks wrote in his war journal on April 28, abbreviating requirements as req. How idiotic are these guys! Incredible.

  That same day, Marks learned that DIA would be taking over the WMD hunt. The Iraq Survey Group, as the effort was going to be called, would be commanded by a two-star general named Keith Dayton, the head of DIA's human intelligence section.

  Marks got in touch with Dayton. You're going to have a massive coordination program, Marks said, but maybe if you have the authority of the secretary of defense's office, you'll be able to move things around and find some WMD. When you come, he said, make shit happen.

  Dayton said he was delaying his arrival in Iraq to attend his son's college graduation. It meant that Marks and Dayton would barely overlap.

  Rumsfeld flew to Iraq on April 30. All the ambiguity on the ground was there for him to see. It was over but it was not over. He addressed 1,000 troops of the 3rd Infantry Division in a large aircraft hangar at the airport.

  You've rescued a nation, he told them. You've liberated a people. You've deposed a cruel dictator and you have ended this threat to free nations. You've braved death squads and dust storms, racing across hundreds of miles to reach Baghdad in less than a month. He could not resist a dig at those who had written or said that the war had moved slower than the administration had predicted. Some people called that a quagmire.

  Traditionally in war, taking the enemy's capital meant the end. So Rumsfeld and the others—even Garner—were feeling very muscular. Garner made some remarks to reporters that were totally unrealistic. There's not much infrastructure problems here, he said, other than connecting some stuff back together.

  Rumsfeld videotaped an optimistic message to be broadcast to the Iraqis from the military's Commando Solo psychological operations aircraft: Let me be clear: Iraq belongs to you. We do not want to own or run it, Rumsfeld said, perhaps trying to refute Powell's warning that the U.S. would own Iraq. He added, We will stay as long as necessary to help you do that—and not a day longer.

  In an interview later, Rumsfeld said he realized that the Iraqi infrastructure had been neglected for decades. I went over and looked at an electric power plant, I can remember. It was being held together with chewing gum, bobby pins and baling wire. And I looked at [it] myself and said, My Lord, this took 30 years to get there. Saddam had ruled for over 30 years. It's going to take 30 years to get out of here, to get that— not us out—for them to get back to looking like Kuwait or Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Turkey or their neighbors. And I said, My goodness, that's going to be their job over a long period of time, because it just takes that long. You can't—and they have wealth. They've got water. They've got oil. They've got industrious people. They clearly are going to be the ones that are going to have to do that.

  Rumsfeld also met privately with Garner to talk about Bremer's impending arrival.

  I want you to stay here, keep working, he said. You're doing a great job and I want you to transition Jerry in and all that.

  I'll stay for a short time, Garner promised, but it won't be a long time.

  Bush and his staff were borderline giddy. The president's speechwriters, including Michael Gerson, drafted an address that echoed the formal surrender of Japan on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri at the end of World War II. The draft borrowed General MacArthur's memorable remarks— the guns are silent —and according to Rumsfeld included the line Mission Accomplished.

  The Missouri was not available—it was now a memorial at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii—but the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was at sea off the coast of San Diego.

  I took 'Mission Accomplished' out, Rumsfeld recalled. I was in Baghdad and I was given a draft of that thing and I just died. And I said, it's too inclusive. And I fixed it and sent it back. They fixed the speech but not the sign.

  On May 1, Bush, the former Texas National Guard pilot, landed dramatically on the Lincoln, riding in the second seat of a Navy antisubmarine warplane. Later, after trading his military flight suit for a suit and tie, he addressed the nation and the world, standing before 5,000 of the crew under a huge banner reading Mission Accomplished. The Lincoln's crew had been told over the ship's public address system that
after the president officially came aboard, you'll be allowed to cheer as loudly as possible, and you'll be encouraged to show your affection. The White House later claimed the Mission Accomplished sign had been the Navy's idea. Rumsfeld is the first to say Mission Accomplished was in the White House speech draft.

  Giving the revised, Rumsfeld-approved version of the speech, Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq have ended. He stopped just short of formally declaring victory in Iraq, not only because of Rumsfeld's objection, but also in part because of the implications that declaration would have under international law. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed, he said. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

  The president signaled that a new phase of work was beginning. We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We are pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We have begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We are helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools for the people. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

  In Baghdad, one of Garner's team's computer printers was humming, churning out copies of a new Ministry Teams Newsletter dated May 2. It was an internal update on the ministries.

  A major project was to requisition and provide plastic sheeting and tape for use in covering over broken windows and holes in buildings. The Interior Ministry—the organization in charge of intelligence, security and police forces—was completely out of control. HQ building occupied by 'family' or tribe, the newsletter said. Need to remove occupiers and return to police control. The Agriculture Ministry was devoid of any security and could not be opened until someone could post guards. Islamist faction in bldg that needs to be evicted; workers will not return without the eviction and guard. Even the National Library was occupied by religious group; ministry officials request removal of group and posting of security.