Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  He promised to raise the issues on his own at the White House.

  On November 7, Bremer met with General Abizaid. It had been a bad day, with a second U.S. helicopter shot down in a week, and four American soldiers killed.

  I'm concerned that people in Washington might try to drive a wedge between us, Abizaid said. But as they talked it was clear that a wedge already existed. Abizaid said he needed to rehire experienced Sunni army officers from Saddam's old army. He was fed up with public pronouncements against doing so from Walt Slocombe, one of Bremer's senior deputies. Listen, Abizaid said, I've always told you that I opposed disbanding the army, but I've never gone to the press with my opinion.

  Bringing back Saddam's army, Bremer replied, would have set off a civil war here. If you think we've got problems now, imagine what they would have been.

  Bush gave a luncheon speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation on Veterans Day, November 11, 2003. The war in Iraq was much like the efforts of Presidents Truman and Reagan to thwart Communism, he told the audience. The will and resolve of America are being tested in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We are not only containing the terrorist threat, we are turning it back.

  The claim was contradicted by the facts on the ground in Iraq. Nothing was being turned back. The classified reports showed there had been about 750 enemy-initiated attacks in Iraq in September and the number climbed again to about 1,000 in October. That was still more than 30 attacks each day.

  About an hour after his speech, Bush was back at the White House, where he met with his National Security Council.

  Okay, Bush said. Let's see how it's going in Iraq.

  Rob Richer, who had been heading the CIA Near East Division for a year, started with the intelligence briefing.

  We are seeing the establishment of an insurgency in Iraq, he said.

  Rumsfeld cut off the CIA man. That's a strong word. What do you mean? How do you define insurgency?

  Sir, Richer replied, according to DOD's own publications there are three characteristics of an insurgency. He rattled them off: popular support, sustained armed attacks or sabotage, and the ability to act at will and move independently.

  I may disagree with you, said Rumsfeld, sitting back and letting it go. It was the Rumsfeldian hedge. He might. He might not.

  Richer understood why Rumsfeld would resist the use of the word insurgency. It meant plainly that those on the other side were a durable, organized and perhaps catastrophic force. But in Richer's view that was the reality, and it needed to be faced. Iraq was now a classic guerrilla warfare scenario in the CIA view, and the military was having to confront the question of not only protecting their own troops but of protecting the Iraqi population. Young men in Iraq were making practical decisions. Should they join the new Iraqi police force or the insurgency?

  Bush turned to Bremer.

  Is this how you see it? Bush asked.

  Bremer nodded.

  Richer, who had been to Iraq to visit the CIA's seven main bases two months earlier, had found that Bremer would agree in the field, but would not really engage in the debate back in Washington. He would never come clean in front of Rumsfeld.

  Richer made his pitch directly to the president for a new Iraqi intelligence service. The CIA's collection efforts are limited in Iraq because there's no Iraqi intelligence service to help get information. The CIA had about 200 case officers and people in Iraq, and Tenet was planning to expand the CIA presence.

  I need more data, Bush said. I don't want to read in The New York Times that we are facing an insurgency. I don't want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don't think we are there yet.

  General Myers mentioned various successes, painting a favorable picture.

  I'm not hearing that, Tenet interjected. He wanted his station chief brought in on the secure video link to state his views.

  I think the generals are best placed to tell us, Rumsfeld said.

  Okay, Tenet said, raising his hands in a signature signal of resignation. He seemed to be not only yielding but giving up.

  I want some clarity, Bush said, but the contradictions were not resolved for him, and he did not insist they be.

  Later, Rumsfeld said, he looked up insurgency and other related phrases in a military dictionary. I didn't have conviction that I was the one who ought to use, to set the phrase, as to what we would call it at any given time.

  Armitage had concluded that his friend Tenet had stayed too long as CIA director. He felt Tenet should have left in 2002 after the successful Afghanistan War, or more recently in the summer, when Saddam's brutal sons, Uday and Qusay, had been killed on July 22, 2003. He always said that leaving high-level government was not as traumatic as lots of people feared. When you leave government your IQ goes up 30 points, he said. And there was a tendency for people to believe incorrectly that they were indispensable. You got to remember when you remove your fist from a pail of water there's no hole, he said.

  But the giant problem now was the president's state of mind, Armitage thought. Bush was in denial about Iraq.

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  at another point in the nsc meeting, Rumsfeld argued that it was important to turn things over to the Iraqis to show them that they could run the country.

  We should accept the reality that we can't get a permanent constitution right away, the president said. He asked Bremer, Wouldn't caucuses allow for better security? I mean you wouldn't have the spectacle of lines at polls getting bombed or shot at.

  The president ended the meeting declaring, It's important for everyone to know that we're going to stay the course and that I'm determined to succeed. Meeting with Bremer later in the Oval Office, he asked, What's the real situation on the ground?

  The intelligence is just not good, Bremer answered. And I'm personally not persuaded that the military has a strategy to win.

  They chatted a little longer. At the end, Bush told his special envoy, You're doing a great job. Keep it up.

  Confronted with distressing reports from his lead man in Iraq, Bush seemed to want to use pure willpower to change the situation on the ground. His public comments around this time stressed similar passion and optimism.

  The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region, Bush said in a speech November 6. Iraqi democracy will succeed, and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran, that freedom can be the future of every nation.

  But if success were truly so important, where was the urgency to develop a strategy to win? And if there was no such strategy, as Bremer believed, what was the reason for optimism?

  Bremer worried that everyone was getting what he privately called bug-out fever. Though he kept insisting that early sovereignty—which would end his job at the CPA—was a lousy idea, it kept coming up.

  Bremer could read a calendar. The president was up for reelection in 2004 and reelection campaigns drove every White House. Nobody ever explicitly said anything to Bremer like You've got to get out of there before the presidential election. But winning would be the most important thing in Bush's life. He would be campaigning almost every day. Iraq was important, but reelection was the prize.

  Bremer spoke with Andy Card at the end of October 2003, and argued that they needed to do the right thing for history and for Iraq. It might make the president's life more difficult next year. It might even cost him the election.

  Card urged Bremer to talk to the president.

  Do what's right, Bush said. Even if we don't get this thing sorted out by the election.

  Bremer later said, This pressure, this early sovereignty pressure, I think part of it was political... although nobody spelled it out for me. I could figure it out.

  The military was soon arguing that ending the occupation would enhance the security situation because the Iraqis didn't like occupation. At one meeting, Bremer said, Look, ending the occupation is a good idea. But we are kidd
ing ourselves if we think that it's the silver bullet that's going to end the opposition. It won't, just because the average Iraqi's going to go outside his house and there's still going to be a Bradley tank sitting there, even if you're no longer the occupier.

  The president finally decided on November 12 that they should do early sovereignty.

  Bremer recalls in his book that he made the point that the decision they had just made to turn over sovereignty should be portrayed as something that the Iraqis had come up with, not the Americans.

  Bush laughed. I agree with that. And I suggest that maybe this can be the one meeting in history where everybody doesn't rush out to tell the press what we decided.

  It worked. The front-page headline in The Washington Post on November 15 read, Iraqis Say U.S. to Cede Power by Summer; Town Meetings to Set Process in Motion, and The New York Times headline was U.S. Is to Return Power to Iraqis as Early as June. Just as had been agreed in the White House, it was portrayed in the Times and elsewhere as a plan that had been put forward by Iraqi leaders, couriered to Washington by Bremer, and then broadly accepted by Bush.

  Two days after the announcement that sovereignty would be turned over the Iraqis, a group of 17 Iraqi women visited the White House. Dina Powell, Bush's special assistant for personnel, an Egyptian-born Arabic speaker, was taking the women around.

  Someone told Bush, and he agreed to see them. Many of the women had horror stories of the brutality of Saddam's regime. One had watched her son tortured to death. Others had been raped. Several of the women declined to go into the Oval Office to see Bush, but five of them went in for a private meeting.

  Muharrir, one of the women said in Arabic to the president upon entering the Oval Office.

  What does that mean? Bush asked Dina Powell.

  Liberator, she translated.

  The president broke down in tears.

  Dan Senor, the Republican political consultant who was Bremer's spokesman, thought the best assessments of Bremer's situation came from Hume Horan, who had served as U.S. ambassador in five countries—Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and the Ivory Coast. Fluent in Arabic and widely considered the most seasoned Middle East hand, Horan, 68, whose first foreign service assignment had been in Baghdad in the 1960s, was one of the first Arabists Bremer had recruited for the provisional authority. On one long road trip out of Baghdad, Horan told Senor they were doing full-blown nation building now, and estimated that their chance of building a democracy in Iraq was only about 30 percent.

  Those are the highest odds we have ever had or will ever have in trying to pull this off, Horan said, referring to the whole Middle East. But even at 30 percent, they were right to give it a try. It's worth doing, he said.

  In November, just before Horan left the CPA, Senor had dinner with him at Cafe Ranana, a restaurant in the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad. It was a pleasant evening, and Horan was in a reflective mood.

  When he had been ambassador to Saudi Arabia or had another important job, he said, he would have one decision land on his plate each year that was crucial and hard enough to keep him up at night. One a year that was sort of huge pressure, no mistakes, major intensity, high stress, he said. Bremer, on the other hand, was making anywhere from 10 to 100 decisions of that magnitude every day. No diplomat can fully appreciate what Bremer is up against, Horan said.

  One of David Kay's interrogators in Baghdad went to visit the former head of the Iraqi military procurement commission. Now that he had cooperated with the Americans, the Iraqi was asked, what hopes did he hold for his future?

  As long as you're here, I want to stay right in confinement, the Iraqi man replied. It's safe.

  Kay thought it was disturbing evidence of what Iraqis thought about the security situation in their country.

  Just before Thanksgiving, General Abizaid sent word he wanted to meet with Kay. Alone, came the word from Abizaid's staff, meaning Kay should not bring General Dayton with him.

  I need your help, Abizaid told Kay. He was trying desperately to get better intelligence to help his forces battle the insurgency. Kay's Iraq Survey Group was perhaps the biggest and best intelligence network in Iraq right then. I need these resources. You've got translators. You've got analysts.

  Kay objected. I have analysts who are experts on WMD. They're not going to help anyone on counterinsurgency. They don't know it. I have exactly two operational officers who are fluent in Arabic. Take them away from me and I might as well close up shop and go home. He would be unable to interview any Iraqi who wasn't in custody.

  Abizaid bargained. He'd be willing to take only a dozen of Kay's 60 or so analysts. Then it got down to six or seven.

  No, I can't do it because I got assigned this mission. I have absolutely no problem if you go back to Washington and Washington decides at this point in time counterinsurgency is more important than WMD, Kay said. Look. I live out here. I travel the BIAP highway four times a day. I've had teams attacked. If you say that and Washington says that's important, I understand. But it's not my decision.

  No. I don't want to go back to Washington. I don't want to ask. I just want us to agree to it, Abizaid replied.

  Kay wouldn't budge, and Abizaid called his intelligence staff into the room. He repeated the request, leaving Kay to conclude that Abizaid thought that he wouldn't be willing to stand up to him in front of the staff, or maybe that the general just wanted to demonstrate that he'd made the effort. It grew uncomfortable for the staff, Kay thought, because he was doing something none of them could ever dream of doing: He was telling a four-star general No.

  In December, Tenet called Kay to tell him that he had lost his tug-of-war with the military. Kay's Iraq Survey Group would have to take on other missions besides WMD. Kay flew back to Washington to remind Tenet that part of the deal for him to take the job was that his group would focus solely on the WMD hunt.

  It's just time to go, Kay said.

  Tenet didn't stand in Kay's way, though he was concerned about what Kay would say after he left. He didn't want him to go out and trash the CIA.

  No, that's not my intention, Kay said.

  Was he planning on writing a book?

  I don't do that. I've never done that. I didn't do it after the first Gulf War. If anything, perhaps a book on his successful search for WMD after the Gulf War would have been more marketable than a book on his 2003 WMD hunt, which was coming up zeroes.

  Tenet proposed to Kay that he stay on the CIA's rolls as a consultant. Kay agreed, although he recognized that if he stayed and kept his security clearances, Tenet might think that would restrain him from talking. He had come to see Tenet as a relationship guy, someone who thought he could manage anything or anybody.

  Not long afterward, Kay met with Charles Allen, the assistant director of central intelligence for collection, who told Kay about a highly covert operation to gather intelligence about WMD about eight months before the war, so secret that it wasn't even in the files. It was similar to the so-called Dead Souls Program launched after the collapse of the Soviet Union to track down and pay Soviet weapons scientists who were out of the country to find out what had been going on inside.

  For Iraq, the CIA had run a two-part clandestine program to try to develop reliable human-source intelligence on WMD. During the United Nations inspection days in the 1990s, the CIA had acquired a very good roster of the Iraqi scientists involved in WMD research and production. The first part of the operation entailed contacting Iraqi scientists who were outside Iraq and paying them to see if they knew anything about WMD programs. The second part, which was more dangerous, involved paying Iraqis in Europe or Asia to go back into Iraq and talk with their relatives who had been involved in WMD programs in the past.

  It hadn't turned up any evidence of WMD, but the CIA was so convinced that Iraq had the weapons that absence of evidence was taken as proof that the Dead Souls-style program wasn't working. After some 120 contacts had been made without developments, the program was terminated.<
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  Upon learning of it, Kay was offended that the contrary pieces of evidence hadn't been reported or included in the wide dossier of intelligence he was shown before he'd begun his mission that summer. I don't think the president was told, Kay later said. I don't think Powell was told. I don't think Condi ever asked or was told. *

  On December 6, 2003, Rumsfeld was on one of his dashes through the Middle East. He stopped in Baghdad, where he pulled Bremer aside at the airport.

  Look, Rumsfeld said, it's clear to me that your reporting channel is now direct to the president and not through me. Condi has taken over political matters. I think that's a mistake. The last time the NSC got into operational issues, we had Iran-contra. But she seems to have jumped into this with both feet.

  It was an extraordinary accusation. Iran-contra was the Reagan administration scandal involving the secret sale of arms to Iran and the illegal diversion of millions of dollars in profits to the anti-Communist contras in Nicaragua. The various Iran-contra investigations concluded unanimously that the National Security Council should be involved only

  * McLaughlin didn't think the program was very large and certainly not at all conclusive. In his opinion, it was ridiculous to think anything had been suppressed.

  in policy and coordination—not operations—and criticized the covert work.

  According to Bremer, Rumsfeld added with a tight smile, I'm bowing out of the political process. Let Condi and the NSC handle things. It might make your life a little easier.

  Around this time coming out of the Situation Room one day, Rice asked Rumsfeld to call Bremer to handle some routine matters.

  No, Rumsfeld said, He doesn't work for me.

  Well, who does he work for? Rice asked.

  He works for you, Rumsfeld said.