Abizaid didn't disagree. I hear you, I hear you, he said. He asked Garner to stay on in Iraq.
I can't stay, Garner said.
On Friday, May 16, Bremer and John Sawers, Britain's ambassador to Egypt, who had been sent to Iraq as the top U.K. representative to Bremer's organization, officially called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), hosted a dinner meeting with the Iraqi leadership group that Garner had put together. Bremer had resisted meeting with the leadership group earlier in the week, he later recalled, in part because he wanted to show everybody that I, not Jay, was now in charge.
Bremer explained he was dedicated to fighting terrorism. Brimming with self-confidence, he conveyed a sense that the Iraqis were almost superfluous. He then said it explicitly: One thing you need to realize is you're not the government. We are. And we're in charge.
At least it was candid, no cat-and-mouse pretense. But Garner realized that the imperial takeover that he had been warned about and worried about at his rock drill three months earlier had come to pass.
The next day Garner's interim group went home. The face of Iraqi leadership was now an empty room.*
Hadley first learned of the orders on de-Baathification and disbanding the military as Bremer announced them to Iraq and the world. They hadn't been touched by the formal interagency process and as far as Hadley knew there was no imprimatur from the White House. Rice also had not been consulted. It hadn't come back to Washington or the NSC for a decision. But Rice didn't find the order surprising. After all, the Iraqi army had kind of frittered away.
One NSC lawyer had been shown drafts of the policies to de-Baathify Iraq and disband the military—but that was only to give a legal opinion. The policy-makers never saw the drafts, never had a chance to say whether they thought they were good ideas or even to point out that
* Over the months, Bremer would set up his own interim governing council and it would be made up mostly of the same people Garner had in his group. The first two interim Iraqi prime ministers, Allawi and Jafari, would come from Garner's initial attempt at putting an Iraqi face on the government, as President Bush had approved two days into the war.
they were radical departures from what had earlier been planned and briefed to the president.
Instead, from April 2003 on, the constant drumbeat that Hadley heard coming out of the Pentagon had been This is Don Rumsfeld's thing, and we're going to do the interagency in Baghdad. Let Jerry run it.
General Myers, the principal military adviser to Bush, Rumsfeld and the NSC, wasn't even consulted on the disbanding of the Iraqi military. It was presented as a fait accompli.
We're not going to just sit here and second-guess everything he does, Rumsfeld told Myers at one point, referring to Bremer's decisions.
I didn't get a vote on it, Myers told a colleague, but I can see where Ambassador Bremer might have thought this is reasonable.
Rumsfeld later said he would be surprised if Wolfowitz and Feith gave Bremer the de-Baathification and army orders. He said he did not recall an NSC meeting on the subject. Of Bremer, Rumsfeld said, I talked to him only rarely. And he had an approach that was different from Jay Garner's. No question.
Bremer was swamped. De-Baathification and disbanding the military were only part of his first five days, according to his notes. Within hours after he landed in Baghdad, someone wanted to know if they should let Baghdad University hold its elections for university officers. Bremer said to go ahead. He rescinded one of Saddam's laws that prohibited professors from foreign travel. He set up a television station and newspaper. They were trying to arrange cell phone service. Bremer visited the Baghdad children's hospital, and ordered emergency generators for all of the city's hospitals. He made arrangements for emergency deliveries of gasoline and propane to Baghdad. None of the Iraqi civil servants had been paid since before the war, now going on three months. It'll take us three months to design a coherent pay grade system, one of his advisers said.
You've got three days, Bremer replied. They put together a radically simplified wage structure with four levels of pay. It amounted to $200 million every month.
It was a staggering to-do list, and decisions had to be made on the tightest deadlines. There was no time to set up a system, to farm decisions back to the U.S. or to delegate. Besides, Bremer thought, no one in their right minds who had any experience with the U.S. government bureaucracy would refer crucial decisions back to Washington.
Robin Raphel, who was a Bremer contemporary in the State Department and had known him for years, said they needed to raise $150 million to buy Iraqi farmers' wheat and barley. We've got to do something right away, because the crop is already being harvested, she said. She and Bremer went to the U.N. lead officials in Baghdad, who could release money from the U.N. Oil-for-Food program—commonly known as OFF—to buy the national grain crop.
Mr. Ambassador, the U.N. official told him, the OFF money belongs to the Iraqi government, and I can't release it without the approval of their government.
I am the Iraqi government for now, Bremer said. And on behalf of that government, I am asking the United Nations to release these funds immediately. He eventually got the money.
Everywhere there were problems. My God, he said to himself, this place needs fixing. Let's get on with it.
Electricity flickered on and off. Go fix the electricity, Bremer told Clay McManaway, one of his most trusted deputies. Go find out why we can't get it back up.
McManaway, 70, was one of the first people Bremer had coaxed into joining him. He'd brought him along for just this kind of mission. McManaway had spent 30 years in the foreign service, along with time in the Defense Department and the CIA. He'd been all over the world, including five years in Vietnam. He knew how to function in dysfunctional places.
Things were even worse with the Baghdad sewer system, another portfolio Bremer gave McManaway. Raw sewage was backing up all over the place. They could see it and smell it everywhere. Literally going down into the system, McManaway found things were a total mess. There were two or three separate sewage systems under the streets of Baghdad. They weren't connected, and none of them was working. They had only one American trying to fix the problem, a sanitation engineer from Pennsylvania.
Aw, shit, McManaway said.
Garner awakened on Saturday, May 17, thinking about Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general and military strategic thinker. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu cautioned that you don't want to go to bed at night with more enemies than you started with in the morning. By Garner's calculation the U.S. now had at least 350,000 more enemies than it had the day before—the 50,000 Baathists, the 300,000 officially unemployed soldiers from the army, and a handful from the now defunct Iraqi leadership group.
Later that day he hosted a major meeting with Abizaid, McKiernan and the flag officer-civilian teams dealing with his top 10 issues. It was hot and the room was full, with lots of people crowded around a large table. One entrance led directly outside to a courtyard; across the courtyard were Bremer's offices.
The first of the staff generals was beginning his report when McManaway came through the doorway from the courtyard.
Bremer wants to see you, McManaway said, indicating Abizaid.
As soon as we finish this meeting, Abizaid said.
McManaway indicated, Now.
Abizaid looked at Garner as if to say, What do I do?
Go on in there, Garner said. Look, he called for you.
Several minutes later McManaway came in and said Bremer wanted to see McKiernan.
Do you want me to go? McKiernan asked Garner.
Yeah.
Well, another general inquired, do you think we ought to go on with this meeting or is it over?
Let's go ahead and finish it because everybody's put a lot of work in it, Garner said. After all, he realized, the issues on the table were only the ministries, back pay, police, water, electricity, sewage, fuel, food, governance, health and security. Just the essence of Iraq's future. Who co
uld possibly give a shit?
I was disgusted, recalled Ron Adams. We were being marginalized.
When the meeting was over, Garner marched into Bremer's office. He shut the door behind him with a gentleness and control he did not feel.
Don't you ever do that to me again.
What do you mean? Bremer asked.
If you ever have me in a meeting and you start pulling people out of it— Garner began. He cut himself off, and added, You give me more respect than that. I'll tell you what. I'll make it easy on you, Jerry. I'm going home.
Bremer jumped up. You can't go home.
I can't work with you, and I'm leaving. What you just did in there— I've never had anybody do something like that to me before, and I'll never let you do something like that again.
I didn't know what was going on, he said.
That's bullshit. You knew exactly what was going on.
They went back and forth for a minute or two.
Look, Jay, Bremer said, stopping them both. You and I may not agree on anything, but we both have the same objective.
I don't think so, Garner interrupted.
Yes, we do. Our objective is to make our nation successful in this endeavor.
You're right, Garner agreed. You're right about that.
Well, if you believe in that strongly enough, as I do, then you need to stay for a while. You've got to help me do that.
I'll tell you what I'll do, Jerry. I'll work on a day-to-day contract with you. The next time you piss me off, I'm gone. There's a couple of things that I'd like to finish, and I don't think it'll take me long. And once I finish with those things then I'll come shake your hand and leave.
Okay, let's try to work that way, Bremer agreed.
You've got to make the staff available to me, Garner said.
Bremer thought for a moment, and finally said, I don't think I can do that.
Why?
He and Garner would give conflicting guidance, Bremer said, but he said he would think about it.
I don't think I can get anything accomplished if I don't have a staff, Garner said.
Let me think about that.
I'll tell you what I'm going to do. The one thing that has to happen immediately is we've got to get the public servants and the police paid. It's a very complicated and difficult process. I'm going to stay here until I'm sure that process is in place. And when I'm sure of that then I'll either make a decision to stay a little longer or to leave.
Okay, Bremer said. And I'll get back to you on staff.
Later, Bremer said that while he recognized he needed a smooth transition from Garner's group to his own, he was already growing angry at people—he assumed they were Garner's people—who had leaked details of his plans and meetings to the media. One such leak had sparked a news story about Bremer's suggestion that the military start shooting looters. I wanted Jay's expertise in logistics, Bremer wrote, but I wouldn't be sorry to see the leakers go.
Within hours after the confrontation, Garner and his executive assistant, Colonel Olson, got the heck out of Baghdad and headed south to the city of Hillah. Olson thought that if Bremer just stroked Garner some or gave him some assignments, especially away from Baghdad, Garner would stay and help. But, she felt, Bremer was making a classic leadership mistake: not figuring out how to use the talent that was sitting there at his disposal.
Robin Raphel wanted Garner to stay. She thought he had a better sense than Bremer about what needed to be done. Garner and his core group had worked hard to get a foothold in Iraq, but politically they were in way over their heads. In one of her few criticisms of him, she agreed with the White House about Garner's habit of not wearing a jacket and tie. He didn't seem to understand that Iraqis liked formality.
Bremer was wired. He dressed every day in a suit with a white shirt and a tie. The tan Timberland boots he wore with his dark suit were already a trademark. He surrounded himself with an entourage of energetic 20-somethings. Some of them ridiculed Garner because he didn't have an official daily schedule. Garner's group had nicknamed themselves the Space Cowboys, after a Clint Eastwood movie in which retired astronauts get together for one final mission. Bremer's young staff was referred to as the Neocon Children's Brigade, or even more derisively by some military officers, in a play on the CPA's initials, as Children Playing Adults.
Bremer recognized that the challenges were immense. I'd settle for MacArthur's problems, he later recalled saying. Conditions weren't this complicated for him. But still, he just seemed so confident that he would succeed. Was it his nature, Raphel wondered, or did it stem from the religious faith he shared with the president?
In late May, the day before Larry DiRita left to return to Washington, a report came that an explosion had gone off on the road to the Baghdad airport—called the BIAP highway—as a Humvee passed by. No one was killed, but DiRita thought to himself, Wow, that's kind of interesting. I wonder what that was all about. It seemed out of the ordinary, since the airport road was almost like an American superhighway, where everyone traveled without security, armor or escorts.
It was his last day in Baghdad, and that night, around 11 p.m., he and several of Bremer's staff piled into a car and drove halfway across Baghdad to have dinner at a packed restaurant. Everyone else there seemed to be Iraqi, and DiRita's group ate dinner and had a few beers. A couple of U.S. soldiers came walking down the street, and people in the restaurant ran out to greet them and thank them. It was a memorable evening, very pleasant, almost a scene from liberated Paris after World War II.
When DiRita returned to the Pentagon he reported to Rumsfeld on the way Iraqis felt and described his last-night-in-Baghdad restaurant outing.
This thing, Rumsfeld said, is on the right track.
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early in May 2003, terror attacks rocked Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, targeting a U.S.-linked business and three housing compounds used mainly by Westerners. Eight Americans were among the 34 killed. Hundreds were wounded. It was one of the worst terror attacks since September 11, 2001. Bush sent Tenet to warn the Crown Prince.
Al Qaeda is here in the Kingdom, Tenet told Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia. They will kill you. They are using your country as a launching ground for attacks on the United States. If that happens, it is all over with U.S.-Saudi relations, he warned.
Abdullah agreed to massive joint intelligence and police security operations within the Kingdom. Soon, the CIA was giving the Saudis access to more and more sensitive U.S. intelligence, including transcripts of NSA intercepts inside Saudi Arabia and the region.
Saudi intelligence said that was not good enough. The Saudis did not trust the American translations. The Arabic spoken in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, wherever, was all different. Eventually, the NSA started giving the Saudis actual audio voice cuts of some of the intercepts so that more accurate translations could be made, and some of the voices might be traced or recognized by Saudi security forces, informants or detainees.
Garner mostly stayed out of Baghdad and away from Bremer after their row. He encountered a British lieutenant colonel in southern Iraq who said he had about $ 1 million in discretionary funds to spend in his sector. Garner couldn't move a dime on his own. He went to Babylon, the ancient city once known for its wealth and extravagance, about eight miles from Hillah on the lower Euphrates River.
We're just never going to get this right, he said, according to Kim Olson's notes.
Bremer wrote a memo to President Bush, sending it through Rumsfeld a week after he'd arrived in the country. Reflecting his new tough line, Bremer said, We must make it clear to everyone that we mean business: that Saddam and the Baathists are finished. He claimed, The dissolution of his chosen instrument of political domination, the Baath Party, has been very well received. This accompanied an even more robust measure dissolving Saddam's military and intelligence structures to emphasize we mean business.
On the other hand, Bremer wrote, we must show the average Iraqi that his life wil
l be better. We face a series of urgent issues involving the resolution of basic services. We have made great progress under Jay Garner's leadership. There has been an almost universal expression of thanks to the U.S. and to you in particular for freeing Iraq from Saddam's tyranny. In the northern town of Mosul yesterday, an old man, under the impression that I was President Bush (he apparently has poor TV reception) rushed up and planted two very wet and hairy kisses on my cheeks.
Why would we want to pay an army we just got through defeating? Walt Slocombe asked Jerry Bates, Garner's chief of staff.
Because we don't want them to suddenly show up on the other side, Bates answered. We need to get control of them.
Slocombe and Bates had worked in the Pentagon together during the Clinton years. Bates liked Slocombe and thought he was smart. But on this issue they vehemently disagreed, and Bremer was clearly of the same mind as Slocombe. The army had melted away, Bremer said. They don't exist, so we're not paying them.
On May 19, 2003, Bremer sent Rumsfeld a two-page memo informing him that he was going to issue the order disbanding the Iraqi military. He was not really recommending it or asking permission. In the coming days I propose to issue the attached order.
In the days after the order disbanding the military, vehicles traveling the road between Baghdad and the airport started coming under attack more regularly. Crowds began to gather to protest the order, although reports differed greatly as to how many people turned out each time. On May 19, about 500 people demonstrated outside the Coalition Provisional Authority's gates. A week later, on May 26, a larger crowd gathered to demonstrate. Some Arab media reports that were later translated and given to Bremer's team said there were as many as 5,000 protesters. We demand the formation of a government as soon as possible, the restoration of security, rehabilitation of public institutions, and disbursement of the salaries of all military personnel, said one of the leaders of the protest, an Iraqi major general named Sahib al-Musawi. His speech was carried over the Arabic-language television network Al Jazeera, and later translated for the CPA. If our demands are not met, next Monday will mark the start of estrangement between the Iraqi army and people on the one hand and the occupiers on the other.
Bob Woodward Page 24