Everywhere, Miller found that the Iraqi units suffered from a desperate shortage of vehicles and communications equipment. And the Civil Defense Corps—whose first mission was to guard valuable infrastructure like banks and other buildings, thus freeing up better-trained forces for more difficult duties—was a creature of the individual U.S. military divisions that parented them. One division had a one-week training program, another a two-week program, and a third had extended it to three weeks. It was ridiculous. Earlier that year, Miller learned, a two-star general had sent a report to Defense practically begging for national standards for the new Iraqi corps, but it hadn't happened.
Miller recorded in his notes the comment of one division commander: What's wrong with Baghdad? the commander said, meaning Bremer's CPA. Why won't they give us money to do this, and to do the reconstruction projects that need to be done? Building Iraqi units, both police and military, and rebuilding the country's infrastructure were prerequisites to an exit strategy for the U.S. But there was too little money, too little coordination to do the job right.
Iraq looked and felt like a war zone. Attacks had climbed again, to about 1,000 a month. Every soldier Miller saw carried a weapon. A mess hall Miller was eating in was attacked with mortars. When he flew in helicopters, the door gunners kept their weapons pointed down at potential targets. Miller wore a flak jacket, and he and his two aides traveled under the watchful eye of an earnest young lieutenant of field artillery from Kansas who was assigned as his escort officer. When they moved on the ground, it was in convoys with Humvees and big sport utility vehicles, a machine gunner on top of the Humvees and the escort officer with his M-16 pointed out the window. It was good on the one hand—Miller felt pretty safe—but then he thought, We ain't winning any hearts and minds this way.
From Tikrit, Miller flew on to Kirkuk, where he linked up with a brigade from the Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division. He checked out an Iraqi police station where the U.S. Army was trying to train Iraqis to become real police. Fairly impressive, Miller thought, but he also heard more about the thousands of Iraqi teachers who had been fired under the de-Baathification order. It was a real catch-22, because in Saddam's Iraq, all teachers had been required to join the Baath Party.
Miller headed down to the city of Basra, at the southeastern tip of Iraq, which was under U.K. control. A British two-star and a lieutenant colonel gave him what he considered a happy-face briefing about their great success teaching the local Iraqi police how to patrol. The local cops couldn't read the English-language maps they got from the British, they said, so they memorized their patrol routes: Come out of the station and turn right, walk 10 blocks to the marketplace, turn right, go 15 blocks to the mosque, turn right, that sort of thing.
The British officers took Miller over to the Iraqi police station for another briefing by a British captain.
Tell me, Miller asked an overweight, elderly Iraqi police brigadier. What do your men do when they come to work in the morning?
The Iraqi said, Well, they come in and they have a coffee and they sit here until I tell them to go out and arrest somebody.
Miller shot a glance at the British two-star and lieutenant colonel. Hey, guys, this is what Saddam did, he said. You give me all this bullshit about how you've reformed the police. You haven't done a goddamn thing.
Miller moved on to meet with the Polish commander of the Multinational Division, made up of troops from 23 nations. This was the shakiest part of the coalition—but an important fig leaf to suggest that the war was a broad international effort.
The Polish division commander told Miller, I've got 23 separate national units. They have 23 separate rules of engagement. I pick up the phone, I tell the colonel in charge of the Spanish Brigade what to do. He picks up his phone, calls Madrid, and says, 'I've been told to do this. Is it okay?'
Miller understood that this meant the Multinational Division had little or no fighting capability.
In the Green Zone on his way out of the country, Miller tried to locate the CPA bottlenecks. One basic problem was that Bremer and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the ground commander who had replaced General McKiernan, were not really speaking. Bremer was trying to deal with the internal Iraqi politics and the reconstruction effort, while Sanchez was supposed to deal with security and the violence. Bremer kept saying that the central problem was the lack of security— Sanchez's job.
Sanchez asked to see Miller for dinner.
There's a big problem in communication, Miller told Sanchez. I've spent a week with your division commanders, and they don't all have the same understanding of what their authority is. One thought he could fire bad cops. Another thought he had the authority to run his own psychological operations. A third thought he had to clear everything with Baghdad. With all these new divisions coming in, Miller suggested, It might be useful to you if you promulgate your standing orders again for the benefit of the new guys.
Sanchez said they were having trouble getting the money that Congress had authorized for reconstruction projects in Iraq—billions of dollars. He turned to Colonel Jeff Jones, who was accompanying Miller, and said all the talk from Washington had too little follow-through. Prove to me that Iraq is the number one priority, because I don't see it from here, Sanchez said.
In a week in Iraq Miller figured he'd seen more of the country and had a better sense of what was going on than most of the CPA people who'd been there for months.
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miller reported to Rice and Hadley. There's a lot of urgency outside the Green Zone, but I did not find a sense of urgency inside the Green Zone. It was slow, it was unresponsive, it was ineffective. He read from his notes: Bremer didn't delegate and he doesn't have time to do everything. One general summed things up nicely, Miller said: Bureaucracy kills.
He quoted a commander talking about the Commander's Emergency Response Program. If I don't do it with CERP it doesn't get done, adding that it was vital to keep the CERP program going after the handover of sovereignty.
Though Bremer tried to control things, on so many issues, Miller said, the staff at CPA was playing to run out the clock. They kept deferring to the Iraqi Governing Council, which was slow or stagnant in making decisions—communications, regulatory policy, police code of conduct, hiring former officers, firing the Kirkuk teachers. It was always the same story. People in the CPA are tired, bitter and defeatist. There are few problem-solvers there, and the Iraqi ministries aren't much help.
We need to pick our top 10 issues, he advised, things that needed to be accomplished before the handover of sovereignty was scheduled to take place.
He made five additional points. First, they shouldn't underestimate how many Iraqis were watching Al Jazeera on satellite TV. Electricity is a problem, he added, not just because they didn't have enough of it, but because to Iraqis it was seen as something that should be free.
Second, Sanchez and Bremer aren't talking. And Sanchez and his division commanders aren't communicating effectively enough.
Third, CPA never leaves the Green Zone. Their regional offices in all 18 provinces outside Baghdad are worth their weight in gold, but the folks in the Green Zone were not doing anything.
Fourth, de-Baathification is a mess. There are some good people with only tenuous Baathist connections who are not being allowed in, Miller said. He wasn't sure whether it was the CPA or the de-Baathification group run by the nephew of Ahmed Chalabi who was responsible, but Chalabi was hoarding files from the old Iraqi intelligence service—a prime source of information on who had been a true-believer Baathist under Saddam—making it almost impossible to determine levels of involvement.
Fifth, they needed to put contracts on a wartime footing. CPA was sending out requests for proposals with 90-day timelines. That was pointless, bureaucratic busywork. In 90 days, CPA would be nearly extinct.
Miller repeated his briefing to most of the deputies on the NSC, including Armitage and Pace. He talked with Scooter Libby, hoping his most salient points
would make their way to the vice president.
At the Pentagon briefing for Wolfowitz, it was standing room only, with lots of straphangers from Feith's policy shop and the CPA-Washington liaison. There's not a single person in this room who will do a thing about what I have to say, Miller thought, even if they believe it. The problem as always was implementation.
He started putting these items on the deputies committee agendas. How do we cut contracting time? How do we get more CERP funds for military commanders? Can't we standardize the training for the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps? How do we weed out the bad apples so we have a better, saner, quicker de-Baathification process?
I will fix it, Rice told Miller. She called Bremer. You will give the division commanders more money. The division commanders got another billion dollars in CERP funds.
Rice saw they had to get the United Nations reengaged in Iraq. Earlier, she had resisted Jay Garner's push to internationalize the postwar phase, but now she saw it was necessary. The U.N. had pretty much withdrawn from Iraq after the terrorist attack on their headquarters that had killed 22, including their top envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Bob Blackwill was handed the U.N. task. Not surprisingly he found that Cheney and Rumsfeld were not enthusiastic at all. We'll get the U.N. in, Rumsfeld warned Blackwill, and we'll lose control.
Yeah, but I think we can manage it, Blackwill insisted, and he went on a recruiting drive. He zeroed in on Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister who had headed the U.N. mission in Afghanistan for two years. In Blackwill's view, Brahimi, a 70-year-old secular Sunni, was a world-class diplomat, the kind of person who could really help with everything from funding, to stability to elections.
Absolutely not, Brahimi said, when Blackwill solicited his help. Brahimi detested the American approach and did not want to become an enabler of or spokesman for U.S. Iraq policy.
Still, Blackwill kept up the diplomatic courtship. In January, Brahimi became top adviser to Secretary General Kofi Annan on peace and security. Though he resisted focusing primarily on Iraq in his new job, Blackwill and Rice invited him to the White House to press him to help with Iraq. Powell dropped by during the visit, and Bush made time to talk with Brahimi too.
The wooing worked, and Brahimi and Blackwill went to Iraq. The two men virtually lived together there for three months. As sovereignty was about to be transferred, Brahimi warned Blackwill that something would have to be done for the Sunnis, who had run things under Saddam. They were used to their privileges—the first group of positions in the military academy, the medical schools and just about everything else. If you got all these exiles, Brahimi said, referring to the Shiites likely to rule, none of whom have any real political roots in this country, this thing is going to turn into a terrible mess.
Blackwill tried to reach out to the Sunnis, who were really only a fifth of the population, and keep them involved. In one meeting with a key Sunni leader, he said, I want to reassure you that it's our intent that the Sunnis in this new Iraq have in every dimension a status and privileges consistent with their role and number in Iraqi society.
Mr. Ambassador, the Sunni said, formally addressing the former envoy to India, you don't understand. We want to run Iraq.
It was a frightening moment for Blackwill, who sensed that it would take a generation or two to get the Sunnis adjusted to majority Shiite rule.
On Wednesday, March 31, 2004, insurgents in the Iraqi city of Fallujah attacked a small convoy of sport utility vehicles, killing four Blackwater USA security guards working as independent U.S. contractors. The grotesquely disfigured and blackened bodies of two of the dead Americans were strung up from the steel girders of the main bridge across the Euphrates, nicknamed the Brooklyn Bridge by American troops. The widely broadcast images, with Iraqi crowds jubilantly celebrating in the background, became one of the ugliest symbols of the war, its horrors and the American impotence.
We still face thugs and terrorists in Iraq who would rather go on killing the innocent than accept the advance of liberty, Bush said in a speech at a Bush-Cheney fund-raiser at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington at 6:30 that night, adding, This collection of killers is trying to shake our will. America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins. We are aggressively striking the terrorists in Iraq.
Bremer promised, Their deaths will not go unpunished. Fallujah, a city of about 250,000 on the Euphrates River some 50 miles west of Baghdad, was the heartland of bandit country, a place so rough even Saddam had not bothered to tame it. The city was now the epicenter of the Sunni insurgency. If the U.S. forces could take the city, they would hand the insurgency a major setback. Bush told General Abizaid, Get ready to go, and said, If this isn't resolved in 48 hours, you go.
Abizaid in turn passed the order to General Sanchez, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq. The U.S. Marine units around Fallujah were to begin a full assault on the city.
For Bremer, it was unclear what was happening. He did not see the American military's operational messages. Worse, there was personal distance and a real communication breakdown between him and Sanchez. The two were from different worlds. Sanchez grew up poor in the small Texas town of Rio Grande City, on the border with Mexico. He and his five brothers and sisters lived in a one-bedroom house with no indoor plumbing at the end of a dirt road. Many days the only food had been beans and rice. But Sanchez pulled himself up, earning a math degree at Texas A I and excelling in the Army.
Bremer, raised in tony New Canaan, Connecticut, and a graduate of Yale and Harvard Business School, was from the other side of the tracks. Intentional or not, Jerry's patronizing elitism, as one person close to him called it, was palpable in his dealings with Sanchez.
Sanchez was the junior three-star general in the Army. He had been given America's most important ground command and had a small and inexperienced staff. In 2006, Rumsfeld acknowledged in an interview that he had not been involved in or even aware that such a junior three-star was being given the critical Iraq ground command. I've asked people to think about it so that we don't repeat the mistake, Rumsfeld said. For about six months after the completion of major combat on May 1, 2003, Rumsfeld said, there were decisions being made—including the Sanchez appointment—that weren't visible to him. I felt badly a year or so later when I started looking at all that stuff that had happened so rapidly without my awareness, and I honestly felt badly for General Sanchez. I think he ended up in a position that was difficult.
As the military prepared a full-scale assault on Fallujah, Brahimi issued dire warnings to Blackwill, threatening to pull out the U.N. mission if the Sunni Arab city was attacked. Brahimi was trying to help put together a sovereign government that could take over. An attack on Fallujah, he said, would crush any possibility of that because both the United Nations and the interim Iraqi Governing Council were against it. Losing the U.N. and the Governing Council could mean losing the country.
Rice understood the implications. If there were no government it would mean they could lose the war. The security problem and the political problems had finally converged. Bremer also voiced uncertainty. He couldn't judge whether an attack would blow up the political process, but the Sunni leadership made it clear they would walk, and if that happened they would be transferring sovereignty just to the Shiites. It was a nasty dilemma.
Bremer and Blackwill watched General Abizaid, who was Sanchez's boss, on the secure video conferences seesaw back and forth about whether to continue with a full attack.
We've got to go do this now in a big way, Abizaid said at one point, and get this over with because my guys, they're sitting ducks out there. They would lose the war if they did not clean out Fallujah, he said. Forget the politics. We got to go do this. We're taking casualties. Then at the next secure video conference he shifted, saying If we clean out Fallujah we're going to have an Arab revolt far beyond Iraq.
Blackwill was struck by how erratic and emotional the combatant commander was, totally schizophrenic.
Also at the NSC, Frank Miller found that Abizaid suddenly was not sounding like the commander in the field. Maybe I shouldn't get ready, Abizaid told Miller. Maybe we shouldn't assault the place.
Miller was so worried that Abizaid was losing his nerve that he called on his old friendship with Colin Powell.
You've got to talk to John Abizaid, Miller said to Powell on the secure phone. You've got to buck him up. Remind him that he is a soldier and fighting a war, Miller recommended, and that it would be a terrible mistake to pull back on Fallujah. It is not clear if Powell ever made the call to Abizaid.
In Baghdad, Bremer's interim Governing Council started to come apart. We're leaving the Government Council for good, Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni leader, told Blackwill. Brahimi again told Blackwill that he would go home and pull the U.N. mission out.
Bremer and Blackwill got on the secure video with Washington and warned the president. We've got to stop, Blackwill said. They couldn't hold the Governing Council together. It would shatter. Sovereignty was supposed to be transferred to the council. Without it there could be no transfer.
Bush began to backtrack. An attack might be dicey, he said. He began reeling off questions, unusual for the typically confident Bush. Why move now? Why not let the political situation develop? What about a larger backlash against the U.S. elsewhere in Iraq? Bush never said, Don't do Fallujah now, but those in the room could read the president's body language and his newfound caution. A president can kill an operation with questions, Bremer felt, and Bush's were in effect an order not to attack.
Bob Woodward Page 35