Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad on September 4. He wanted to see if they could reduce the number of U.S. troops. The initial plan had been for the United States to have only 25,000 or 30,000 troops, maybe 60,000 at most, in Iraq by this time. That reduction had been impossible because of the violence, and there were still about 130,000 in Iraq. Though no one was advertising it, there had been nearly 500 attacks against U.S. and coalition forces in July and more than 500 in August. At a small dinner with Bremer and his senior staff that night, Rumsfeld said, I wonder if all of you working here have a sufficient sense of urgency. Bremer, who was working day and night, was stunned and outraged. He insisted to Rumsfeld that the problem was security.
David Kay had about 30 minutes with the secretary of defense. If there was any doubt that Rumsfeld felt he had successfully shifted responsibility for finding WMD from the military to the CIA, he cleared matters up nicely by telling reporters he had not asked Kay for an update on the WMD search. I have so many things to do at the Department of Defense, he said. I made a conscious decision that I didn't need to stay current every 15 minutes on the issue. I literally did not ask.... I'm assuming he'll tell me if he'd gotten something we should know.
Bremer was making it clear that as far as he was concerned, the U.S. would likely be in Iraq for years. On September 8, four days after his dinner with Rumsfeld, he published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, Iraq's Path to Sovereignty. He again used the word occupation, apparently not understanding that for Iraqis, the word occupation— IHTILAL in Arabic—invoked humiliation at the hands of foreigners. Also, in the Middle East, the occupation was the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Certainly most Iraqis weren't thinking of the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II, with massive infusions of American money and the rebuilding of societies as democracies and economic powerhouses, which the U.S continually pointed to as evidence of its past successes as an occupying power.
Bremer outlined seven steps that needed to take place before sovereignty would be transferred to the Iraqis, including the drafting of a constitution, its ratification and then elections.
Rice had had no idea Bremer was going to publish such a sweeping declaration. I am not going to lose connectivity with you, she told him afterward. But she already had. Bremer kept a tight hold on the reins. He's a control freak, Bush began saying in private. Rice agreed that Bremer was a micromanager. But no one did anything about it. Six months earlier, the NSC had agreed that the goal was to get Iraqi faces in the government as fast as possible. Now the face was Bremer, who was using the MacArthur-in-Japan model of occupation. It was a massive redefinition that did not involve the NSC. It was policy drift.
Bremer was telling the Iraqis in no uncertain terms that the coalition held sovereignty over Iraq for now. He reports in his book that he told a group of new Iraqi ministers on September 16, Like it or not—and it's not pleasant being occupied, or being the occupier, I might add—the Coalition is still the sovereign power here. He did not try to hide his disdain for the Iraqis. Those people couldn't organize a parade, let alone run the country, he told Wolfowitz.
On September 24, Bremer was back in Washington, where he and his wife, Francie, had a private dinner with the president and first lady. He reports that he told the president that he was optimistic about Iraq but was concerned about the growing and sophisticated insurgency. Bush did not respond, he wrote.
Bremer complained about the Congress, the number of U.S. troops, the quality of the intelligence, the new Iraqi army trainees and what he called bureaucratic spiderwebs. He wrote that he told Bush that it was misleading that all the Iraqis in uniform were being counted as if they were equivalent to U.S. troops. At dinner they prayed for one of Bremer's favorite Iraqis who had died, but there was no discussion of Iraqi sovereignty.
One matter Bremer left out of his book about his time with the president was Bush's reaction to Bremer's organization chart that showed about 20 people reporting directly to him.
Look, the president said, I know you went to business school, but I went to business school. You've got too many direct reports.
I know, Bremer replied. It's crazy, and I'm going to start the process of reorganizing.
He later did some, but nearly everything flowed through him.
Bremer also did not mention one of his conclusions, reached from working in eight presidencies. He felt that presidents really didn't have much power. Other than starting a war, Bremer thought, presidents can only set a vision and choose the right people. In Iraq, he, the Coalition Provisional Authority, had the power.
Steve Herbits, still Rumsfeld's unofficial eyes and ears at the Pentagon, was regularly in and out of Washington. He was a hawk on the war, a firm believer that invading had been the right thing to do. But Bremer, he believed, was not working out. Herbits didn't think he could effectively go to Rumsfeld about the situation because he knew the secretary was set on a course. But he might listen if Herbits could build pressure from within the Pentagon and from conservative circles in Washington. Distressed at the situation, he reached out to two of the most influential conservatives he knew: Paul Wolfowitz and Newt Gingrich. He had been close to both men for years, but Wolfowitz and Gingrich didn't know each other very well. The three of us have to get together and talk over dinner, Herbits said.
Herbits made a reservation for a private room at Les Halles, a pricey French restaurant four blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, for Tuesday, September 30, 2003. Wolfowitz and Gingrich were almost on time.
The three chit-chatted briefly, and then Herbits stepped in.
This is the premise of the meeting. The president is losing the peace. He is not going to get reelected unless we get this thing straightened out. There are two things which he has to do, and he has to do now, or it's going to fail. This is the premise, and you guys discuss it, Herbits said. Item number one is we have to set a date that we are turning over the government to the Iraqis, and we have to set it now. And I pick June 30, 2004.
It was an arbitrary date, Herbits acknowledged, but they needed a date before the presidential election. June 30, 2004, seemed about right, being nine months away, and four months before the November election.
The reason we have to do that, he said, is because no one will work towards that date unless the date exists. Herbits was a process person, and there was no process here. He knew how bureaucracies worked, and why they didn't. People don't move unless they have a deadline. A long, indefinite occupation would be a disaster. The American people won't tolerate it. Mostly the Iraqis will throw us out before then if we don't have a date.
The second thing I'm arguing is that we have got to put Iraqis in uniform. Bremer and the Pentagon had announced that month that they envisioned a 40,000-soldier Iraqi army by 2005 or later, with another 146,000 people in the police, the border guards and other security forces. So far, there were only 1,000 would-be soldiers training for the new Iraqi army.
My idea is 300,000 by June of 2004, Herbits said, pausing theatrically. Gentlemen, discuss.
You're completely wrong, Gingrich said. The election was going to be about the American economy.
No, Herbits said. The economy would be fine. And even if it wasn't there wasn't much Bush could do about it. But Iraq was important and it was also something that could be influenced. I'm looking at the process, he said. It's failing.
Wolfowitz agreed that occupation was the wrong approach and started to make a point to Herbits.
This isn't about me, Herbits insisted. This is about you two discussing it.
Wolfowitz, a longtime advocate for dissolving the Iraqi army as a critical element of ridding Iraq of the Saddam legacy, reminded them that the army had just disappeared and melted away.
The army dissolving was not our choice, Herbits agreed. But allowing it to stay dissolved was indeed the doing of the United States and Bremer. And that was the mistake that had to be rectified. Iraq had to have an Iraqi army.
Herb
its's final argument was political necessity. Listen, this president is going to get creamed if you don't change this.
For more than two hours, Wolfowitz and Gingrich went at it, quoting poetry, studies, historians, Greeks, the moderns. But in the end they agreed with Herbits's two main points—deadlines had their virtue and something had to be done about an Iraqi army.
At the end of the dinner, both said they would act. Wolfowitz would talk to Rumsfeld and Hadley. Gingrich was a member of the Defense Policy Board, an outside group that periodically advised Rumsfeld, but his real connection was to Cheney. The two men had first been elected to Congress together in 1978, and had been friends for nearly 25 years. Gingrich said he would go to Cheney and Scooter Libby.
Gingrich later recalled the dinner vividly.
It was the first captive moment, he said. We sat down and compared notes about how bad it was, and the degree to which Bremer was totally outside of the chain of command. According to Gingrich, Washington was being systematically misinformed.
On the economic front, Gingrich said, Bremer's model was totally wrong. Totally. His model was you could use peacetime contracting, hire big multinationals. They could do all the planning in Denver, and in two or three years, things would start to happen. The infighting in the National Security Council, he said, was still intense. The big guys were so tired of fighting each other that they all said, ‘I sure hope Bremer solves it.' And when you come in and say this ain't going well, they'd say, 'Well, let's give Bremer time.'
But Gingrich thought there was no way Bremer was going to solve the problems. Bremer is the largest single disaster in American foreign policy in modern times, the former speaker said later.
The most dangerous thing in the world is a confident, smart person with the wrong model because they have enormous enthusiasm in pursuing the wrong model. Bremer arrives thinking he was MacArthur in Japan and that we should have an American-centric system.
He said that if you ask great American businessmen or entrepreneurs, What's the biggest mistake of your career? their answer is Not firing people fast enough.
Okay, Gingrich said, Bremer, no later than September, should have been relieved.
But Gingrich added that he and Wolfowitz realized Bremer couldn't be fired. He had been appointed by Bush, and Jay Garner had effectively been fired. Two in one year just wouldn't be possible.
You have to find specific things to fight over that are measurable, he said. So more than the turnover date or the rebuilding of the Iraqi army, Gingrich said he was upset that the military could not get the emergency money they needed for small projects.
The White House said the money was released, but officers that Gingrich had known for years were telling him it was not. Finally, he said, he called Cheney.
You and Condi are being lied to, Gingrich said he told the vice president.
I'll get into it, Cheney said.
It still took 60 days of direct orders to get the money.
Gingrich said he went in to see Rove and Hadley and handed them a memo that said, Bremer may cost you the election. He said he then told them, I'm here to tell you it is that bad. Gingrich said that he felt he had to engage Rice and Cheney. They are going to make a thousand decisions. So it's not just getting a decision made, it's getting them to think differently about what's at stake.
The bottom line, Gingrich said: Losing a war is bad.
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the CIA's top leadership met with Condoleezza Rice in September 2003 to argue that the U.S. needed to develop a new Iraqi national intelligence service. Tenet and McLaughlin filed into Rice's White House office, along with Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R. Kappes, Near East Division Chief Rob Richer, and the counterterrorism chief, who was still undercover.
Tenet sat down in the back of the room, chewing on one of his half cigars. The meeting was important, but he would let the others do the talking. His alienation from Rice was nearing a high-water mark.
Both State and Defense were opposed to the idea. Saddam's intelligence service had been a symbol of his brutal despotism. Dissolving it in May had been an important step. They feared any effort to form a new spy service would be received with such trepidation and loathing by the Iraqi people that it would outweigh any benefits.
Kappes outlined the problem. Iraq was the only country in the world where the U.S. was fighting terrorism without a native intelligence service to assist. It was a crippling disadvantage. They needed an internal partner that could provide the CIA with information.
Iraq now has the largest CIA station, Kappes said. That's where we're facing the largest terrorist threat.
In addition, the idea that stepping up a new spy service would send the wrong signal and imply a return to old Saddam-style secret police tactics was simply wrong. The new service could be carefully recruited and monitored. McLaughlin said it had been his experience that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism, the intelligence services in Eastern Europe swiveled on a dime and were willing to work with the CIA. In 1990, he had gone to Hungary, where the intelligence people said in effect, Okay, we used to work for the Soviets, now we're going to work with you guys. Intelligence officials abroad could be bought.
We need better ground intelligence, they argued. A local service could be subsidized and co-opted. We created the Jordanian intelligence service and now we own it, Tenet said.
How do you know we will not create another KGB? Rice asked, referring to the old Soviet intelligence service.
The original KGB wasn't a creation of the CIA, Kappes said.
Tenet shook his head, saying nothing more, barely disguising his disgust. The CIA got some of its best intelligence from foreign intelligence services. It was preposterous that anyone would want them blinded in Iraq.
McLaughlin thought Hadley and Wolfowitz were naive and he spent the next months pushing the deputies committee for approval for an Iraqi service. At one meeting, he told the group, including Wolfowitz and Armitage, I've been on the deputies committee for four years and never been in such violent disagreement with my colleagues.
For his part, Wolfowitz just didn't trust the whole concept. The CIA would back the wrong people, he thought. So far, the CIA had been sending people in for 90-day Iraq assignments who didn't even speak Arabic. The military was doing a much better intelligence job.
After nine months of arguing and pestering by Tenet and McLaughlin, the CIA finally won authorization for an initial 1,000 Iraqi intelligence officers in July 2004.
One of Blackwill's assignments was to be the NSC's coordinator for strategic planning, and Rice asked him to do some interagency planning on Pakistan. After Blackwill had some meetings of middle-level officials, Powell called Rice.
I'm not going to participate in some make-work project on Pakistan, he said. Our Iraq policy is in more trouble every day. Put Blackwill in charge of Iraq policy. You should assign him full-time to Iraq. Iraq policy is a terrible problem.
Without consulting Blackwill, Rice assigned him to Iraq. It was obvious that Powell wanted Godzilla to come in and step on automobiles that belonged to the Pentagon.
Blackwill went to work, read the files and Pentagon reports, made the rounds and wrote a long memo to Rice in late September. The bottom line: We need more troops in Iraq on the ground, about two more divisions or 40,000 men.
Rice didn't say no or yes.
Since Blackwill had been a friend of Bremer's for decades and they had both served as foreign service officers, Rice sent Blackwill to Baghdad to assist Bremer. They became more and more convinced they needed to make a dramatic pitch to Rice. They asked for a secure video conference with Rice and Hadley with no one else present. To emphasize the importance they asked that all communications and technical people involved in the secure video leave the rooms in both Washington and Baghdad.
When Bremer and Blackwill came up on their end they could see only Rice and Hadley. They went through a methodical presentation about the geography of Iraq, th
e level of violence, and how the military commanders dealt with the attacks in one area or where suspected insurgents were concentrated and then moved on. After a while the insurgents just moved back into the old areas. From two of Kissinger's protégés, it was what could be called a full Kissinger. In their minds it was irrefutable proof that at least two more divisions were needed. Hadley took notes furiously.
With the time lag on the security video it looked like neither Rice nor Hadley had a reaction.
Well, Jerry, Bob, Rice finally began, thank you so much for these ideas. Let us think about them.
Then the screen went black.
Bremer turned to Blackwill and said, Swing and a miss.
Deep space shot, Blackwill replied, forecasting that their proposal was now heading out to Mars and then beyond the outer galaxies and star systems for all of time.
In two interviews in July 2006, I asked Rumsfeld about troop levels— a key issue and point of contention. The record showed that the plan for invading Iraq had a top number of 275,000 ground combat forces, including about 90,000 who were scheduled to flow into Iraq in the weeks and months after March 19, 2003, when the war began. Rumsfeld said it is one of the great canards that he had decided or unduly influenced the decision to not bring in the 90,000. It was all on General Franks's recommendation. He made a judgment that he had what he needed, or would have as this played out and that he would not need the additional ones that were in the queue.... And he made that recommendation and I made the recommendation to the president, and we agreed with it. So the 90,000 additional ground troops were not sent for the war or stabilization.
Bob Woodward Page 30