Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  Jeffrey also recognized that the idea of an Iraqi army was a farce. Wolfowitz came to Iraq for a full review of the training of the Iraqi army. The U.S. had bought equipment packages for dozens of Iraqi battalions—machine guns, trucks, body armor—but the contract had been challenged in a U.S. court and delayed for six months. There was no Iraqi army.

  Bremer and Sanchez were on the way out. After more than a year of talk, Rumsfeld had finally decided to put a four-star general in command inside Iraq and had selected General George Casey, the former director of the Joint Staff.

  By the spring of 2004, Wolfowitz was frustrated. As perhaps the chief neoconservative intellectual architect of the war, he had been on a yearlong crusade to get Rumsfeld to take the training of Iraqi security forces seriously. The secretary's resistance was maddening.

  Rumsfeld said in a later interview that in the Pentagon, too many people thought that only Special Forces could do the training. Every time I turned around, he said, the elite force was being dispatched for training missions. There's no reason Marines and Army people can't train people, he added. Then I said, 'Let's get contractors to do some of it.' He had insisted that they not try to make the Iraqis as good as the U.S. troops. It's not that they're going to end up winning the soldier of the year award at Fort Bragg. You've got too little time, too many people to deal with, too fast a turnover.

  Wolfowitz had estimated once privately to Rumsfeld that the invasion would take only seven days. But he had suspected that former Saddamists and Baathists would conduct a prolonged guerrilla war. The former regime was pure evil in his view, a form of Middle Eastern fascism.

  Wolfowitz made his first trip to Iraq in July 2003, and found security much worse than he had anticipated. The police were in need of a total overhaul. He met with General Sanchez, then the newly installed commander of the ground forces in Iraq. He listened as Sanchez rattled off a list of 10 problems. Number 10 was recruiting the new Iraqi army. Wolfowitz thought it was the most important. He was certain the training would take two to three years.

  But Wolfowitz found that he could not get Rumsfeld to focus. As violence escalated in the fall of 2003, he pushed Rumsfeld. Let's send a study mission out to look for the real requirements for Iraqi security forces, he suggested. Nothing happened. Wolfowitz thought the Iraqi police were as big a problem as the army, but he could get no movement from his boss. He spent about eight weeks trying to persuade Rumsfeld to send the study mission. When Rumsfeld finally agreed, Wolfowitz felt he practically had to hold Rumsfeld's hand when he signed the order sending Army Major General Karl W Eikenberry, who had helped set up the new army in Afghanistan, to Iraq. In an interview, Rumsfeld denied this. Oh, that's silly, he commented, adding that the only discussion was what level to train the Iraqis to. I remember during the Vietnam War, I turned around and we were training people to be doctors instead of medics. And what the Vietnamese people needed were medics. They didn't need U.S.-style hospital care over there at that stage.

  Eikenberry's emphatic conclusion was that a unified command had to be established for the Iraqi training mission. In April 2004, Army Major General David Petraeus was sent to Iraq and soon given his third star as head of training of the Iraqi forces. He had to start from scratch more than a year after the invasion.

  In May 2004, Negroponte met with Wolfowitz before heading to Iraq.

  I'm afraid we may have made the same mistake that we did in Vietnam, where we didn't start Vietnamization until it was too late, Negroponte said. The Vietnamization strategy had been designed to transfer responsibility for the fight and the internal security to the Vietnamese. It had been adopted only late in the war by President Nixon.

  Well, Wolfowitz replied, you've certainly put your finger on the right question. I don't think it's too late, but that's the issue.

  Wolfowitz felt increasingly marginalized by Rumsfeld, who canceled several of his deputy's trips to Iraq. The reasons were never clear. Rumsfeld would say there was too much work to do. Before one trip, Rumsfeld simply said, It's not necessary for you to go. His deputy felt he was more or less on his own. The Pentagon responded to the top guy, not the deputy, and that was what the top guy was demanding.

  Once after Rumsfeld had canceled a trip, Wolfowitz arranged a virtual Iraq tour, with each of the major division commanders and their staffs giving him two-hour briefings on secure video conference. He came in on a Saturday about 6:30 a.m. and spent the day listening and questioning. The predominant theme was that the commanders were disappointed in the performance of the Iraqi security forces. The new army, police and even the border patrol needed better equipment, improved training and much more money.

  In largely overlooked public testimony, Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee that training Iraqis had been the central issue even before the war. In the struggle with the insurgency, he added, The key to defeating them all along has been getting Iraqis trained and equipped and capable of fighting them as quickly as possible.

  Nobody on the committee asked why it had taken over a year to get this focus. Wolfowitz told close associates it was not just neglect but that Rumsfeld had blocked efforts to get the training up and running earlier.

  I can't understand it, Wolfowitz told one associate.

  The staff of Judge Silberman's WMD intelligence commission conducted hundreds of interviews in the intelligence community, and also relied heavily on the interviews of David Kay's Iraq Survey Group. Silberman and Robb agreed that only they would be allowed to see some very secret intelligence. They would not share it with others on the commission. In an interview in 2005, I asked Silberman if Rumsfeld was among those the commission interviewed.

  We had trouble getting Don to come over to be interviewed by the full commission, Silberman said. He had threatened to subpoena him, believing that Rumsfeld would not know the commission had no such power, and Rumsfeld gave in. Rumsfeld was particularly sensitive about the fact that DIA had not exactly covered themselves with glory, he said.

  I said that some of the generals had doubts about WMD, and realized before the war they couldn't prove there was any WMD at any one site.

  Silberman wondered who.

  I mentioned Generals Abizaid, McKiernan and Marks.

  Interesting, Silberman said. I'm sorry we didn't talk to them.

  Tenet was willingly interviewed three or four times, Silberman said. He concluded that Tenet had relied too heavily on a few pieces of intelligence from foreign services. Poor George, Silberman said. I mean, it took him a long time in this process to try and figure out what the hell went wrong, why they were so wrong, and how incredibly stupid some of their decisions were.

  John McLaughlin, the CIA deputy director, insisted that the failure of the intelligence community on WMD was the result of a perfect storm, that everything went wrong at once but it couldn't have been anticipated. We thought that was garbage, Silberman said. There were some fundamental flaws. The very worst thing was the chemical stuff. Analysts had looked at satellite photos of large tanker trucks in Iraq and decided they contained chemical weapons. It was a guess, a deduction. It wasn't hard evidence but you could say that it was logical, Silberman said. But then the analysts concluded they were accelerating the process because we saw so many more trucks. Nobody bothered to tell the analysts that they saw many more trucks because we were running the satellite more over them. That was almost like Saturday Night Live.

  As Bremer prepared to turn over sovereignty to the Iraqis, Powell and Rumsfeld got into another fight. The question was yet again: Who would be in charge? Powell and Negroponte would be standing up the first U.S. embassy in Baghdad since the 1991 Gulf War. Powell wanted State in charge.

  Rumsfeld argued that with 130,000 troops in Iraq, this was not a normal situation. Back and forth it went. One contentious issue was the $18.4 billion that Congress had provided in the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund the year before. This was the money for the key economic and infrastructure rebuilding. Rice and Hadley got involve
d in acrimonious negotiations between Powell and Rumsfeld.

  Rice insisted it must be spelled out clearly. For the last eight months of Bremer's time in Iraq she had been his nominal reporting channel, though on paper Rumsfeld and Defense were supposed to be in charge. No more. She was not going to have the question of who was in charge subject to Rumsfeld's whim.

  After direct intervention of the president, a three-page order was finalized. On May 11, 2004, Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD-36. The three-page directive, classified SECRET, formally shifted responsibility for Iraq from the Pentagon to the State Department after the termination of the Coalition Provisional Authority and transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis.

  Under the guidance of the Secretary of State, Bush's directive set out, the U.S. would be represented in Iraq by a Chief of Mission —an ambassador—who would be responsible for the direction, coordination and supervision of all United States government employees, policies and activities in country except those under the command of an area military commander.

  Though it was pretty standard language, it was a clear, defined shift to State in the midst of the war zone. If the model were to work, the new ambassador, Negroponte, and the military commander, Casey, would have to cooperate. To underscore this and make sure there was some foundation for their relationship, Bush threw a small dinner party for both men and their wives at the White House.

  The Iraqi interim government was about to be set up. Bremer and Blackwill were on the hunt for a leading Shiite to head it. The criteria included someone who was strong, could get along with the Sunnis and would be approved by Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Blackwill liked Ayad Allawi, 58, a physician, the son of one of the leading Shiite families whose grandfather had helped negotiate Iraq's independence from the United Kingdom in 1932. He had been exiled in Britain since 1971, and had survived an assassination attempt in England in his early 30s that was reportedly directed by Saddam Hussein. He had extensive ties to the CIA.

  Blackwill-Godzilla became Allawi's campaign manager.

  The first prime minister of this new Iraq is going to have been a CIA agent for a dozen years? Brahami asked Blackwill incredulously.

  Yes, Blackwill replied. You would rather have an Iranian intelligence agent?

  Wolfowitz didn't like Allawi, as he was Chalabi's main rival, but Bremer supported him and persisted. He's the right guy for Iraq, Bremer told Jeffrey, but watch it. This guy is not a democrat. The secular Allawi was basically a reformed Baathist and didn't like what he called the turbans —the religious leaders. So the new leader of Iraq was to be a CIA man who was skeptical of democracy and had little influence with Sistani and the clerics, who held most of the power.

  Transfer of sovereignty was scheduled for June 30, and insurgents were thought to be planning a wave of violence to mark the occasion. Bremer was especially worried about information that the attacks would include major sabotage of Iraq's oil pipelines and refineries. On June 1, Scott Carpenter, one of a handful of Coalition Provisional Authority staffers who had stayed with Bremer in Iraq the entire 14 months, proposed a novel idea: How much were they really going to accomplish in the next few weeks that was worth risking all the expected terror and violence on June 30? Why not just transfer sovereignty immediately, and catch the insurgents off guard?

  Bremer liked the suggestion, but there were legal problems, the CPA and Pentagon lawyers said. An occupying power couldn't just pack up and leave under international law. Besides, there were all sorts of official events planned for June 30.

  On June 17, Rice called Bremer to say the president wanted to go ahead with an early handover. But violence was running at about 60 attacks a day, and they were never quite sure it would be possible. By June 27, Bremer was pushing hard for the handover to take place the following day—two days early, enough to catch the insurgents by surprise. He called the president, who was in Istanbul with Blair and Powell for a NATO summit.

  Sounds good to me. Let's ask Tony, Bush told Bremer, and then turned to Blair. Tony, what do you think? Bush came back quickly. Yeah, sounds good. Okay.

  Bremer and Prime Minister Allawi made the official transfer just after 10 a.m. on June 28 in a simple ceremony in Allawi's office. By noon, Bremer had flown out of the country in a camouflaged, four-propeller Air National Guard C-130. The secret had been kept. Most of the CPA staff—many of whom were staying behind to work in the new U.S. embassy—knew nothing about the early transfer before it happened.

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  negroponte arrived in Baghdad the same day. His working assumption was that the task of bringing democracy was doable and that they had a better than 50 percent chance of defeating the Sunni insurgency. Jeffrey asked the military to make a slide with a map of Baghdad locating precisely one week's worth of insurgent attacks—red dots for rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attacks, yellow dots for indirect fire, green dots for ground attacks. There were well over 100 dots on the map—just in Baghdad.

  John, this is your embassy compound, Jeffrey told Negroponte, handing him the slide when he arrived. The main issue was security. We don't have it.

  Powell and Rice had instructed Negroponte to take a light touch with the Iraqis. They had sovereignty. Don't play Jerry Bremer's proconsul role. Negroponte agreed and approached his job as a traditional foreign mission—diplomatic relations with a sovereign country. But he quickly found that even though Iraq had the trappings of a modern government and modern society, most things just didn't work. Transportation was a mess. All the basics were corroded. It was a Potemkin village. Agriculture was totally collapsed and the food-rationing system that depended on imports was chaotic. The U.S. embassy had to track letters of credit and soybean accounts through Lebanese and Turkish banks or people wouldn't get fed.

  One of Negroponte's first actions was to shift about $3.3 billion of his funds from long-term electricity and water projects to more immediate needs. He gave General Casey $2 billion for security and some $200 million in CERP funds, which had an immediate impact because the American officers could hire Iraqis on the spot.

  The shift was a shot in the arm for Casey and Petraeus. The ready money also helped cement the relationship between Negroponte and Casey. Casey decided to have two offices—one at Camp Victory at the airport and the second at the embassy, almost across the hall from Negroponte. Both were determined to avoid the conflict of what the old hands called the Jerry and Rick Show, Bremer and Sanchez.

  The availability of electricity was one of the most visible indicators of progress in Iraq, so during that summer of the American presidential campaign, the shaky electrical system was run hard. Availability steadily increased by some measures. Rice found herself quickly becoming an expert on Iraqi electricity. Preferably, clean natural gas would have been used in the generators. But what natural gas pipelines existed had been hit by the insurgents. Diesel was the fallback fuel and it was in short supply because the refineries were underproducing. So new generators were run on fuel oil, but that required that they be taken offline every few weeks for maintenance. By fall the system would virtually collapse, and one day it lost half its capacity.

  On July 15, 2004, Steve Herbits, Rumsfeld's one-man think tank, sat down at his computer and wrote a scathing seven-page report entitled Summary of Post-Iraq Planning and Execution Problems. Though he discussed the postwar planning and policies, and Bremer, his real target was his friend of 37 years, Don Rumsfeld. The memo listed a series of tough questions:

  • Why didn't Rumsfeld supervise him [Bremer] the way he did

  Franks?

  • Who made the decision and why didn't we reconstitute the

  Iraqi Army?

  • Did no one realize we were going to need Iraqi security forces?

  • Did no one anticipate the importance of stabilization and how

  best to achieve it?

  • Why was the de-Baathification so wide and deep?

  Rumsfeld's style of operation, Herbits wrote, was the Haldeman model, arr
ogant, referring to Nixon's White House chief of staff, H. R. Bob Haldeman.

  Indecisive, contrary to popular image, Herbits wrote of Rumsfeld. Would not accept that some people in some areas were smarter than he. . . . Trusts very few people. Very, very cautious. Rubber glove syndrome —a tendency not to leave his fingerprints on decisions.

  Rumsfeld was often abusive in meetings. He diminished important people in front of others.

  He had a prosecutor's interrogation style. While he was trying to improve product—and his questioning almost always did—his style became counterproductive. . . . Summary: Did Rumsfeld err with the fundamental political calculation of this administration: not getting the post-Iraq rebuilding process right within 18 months?

  Tenet went to see Bush alone in early June. He had to get out. His doctor had told him he was jeopardizing his health. He'd had a heart attack years ago when he'd been on the Clinton NSC staff.

  Bush said he didn't want any member of his war cabinet leaving now, in the election year.

  Tenet knew he and the CIA were targets. The Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating Iraq WMD, Silberman and Robb were investigating. The 9/11 Commission report was coming out soon. He insisted that he was out.

  The president had no choice.

  The June 4 Washington Post front-page headline read, Tenet Resigns as CIA Director; Intelligence Chief Praised by Bush, but Critics Cite Lapses on Iraq War. Tenet had given a tearful speech at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the day before, saying he was leaving because he wanted to spend more time with his wife and teenage son, who would be leaving for college the following year. He had been director for seven years, under two presidents, and had seen the agency for better or worse through both 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. On July 11, he officially left office.