Rice dispatched Zelikow and a small team to Iraq. She needed ground truth, a full detailed report from someone she trusted. Zelikow had a license to go anywhere and ask any question.
On February 10, Rice's 14th day as secretary, Zelikow presented her with a 15-page, single-spaced MEMORANDUM TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE. The report was classified SECRET/NODIS, meaning no distribution to anyone else.
The January elections that had so buoyed the White House had been a landmark success, Rice read, but we are still at a tipping point.
At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change, Rice read. This was a shocking notion— a failed state, after two years, thousands of lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars. Failed state was about as low as it got in geopolitics, and Rice later wanted to remember it differently, as if Zelikow had said it was only in danger of becoming a failed state. But he had said it was already there.
It was ugly. The insurgency was being contained militarily, but it was quite active, leaving Iraqi civilians feeling very insecure, Zelikow said.
Conditions for U.S. officials seemed to resemble those of the Bremer era, locked down in the Green Zone. Mobility of coalition officials is extremely limited, and productive government activity is constrained.
Because the Shiites and Kurds had dominated the election, there was a danger of a backlash from the disaffected Sunnis, she read.
The evidence of this backlash was available daily. Two days earlier, for example, a man had walked into a crowd of Iraqi army recruits in Baghdad and blown himself up, killing 21 of the recruits and wounding 27 others. Insurgents had killed 168 Iraqis in the ten days since the January 30 election. The astonishing fact was that there had been 3,000 attacks in January—about two thirds on coalition forces and about one third on Iraqi security forces and civilians—but that information was kept classified.
Zelikow criticized the Baghdad-centered effort, noting the war can certainly be lost in Baghdad, but the war can only be won in the cities and provinces outside Baghdad. He urged that the coalition empower provincial and local authorities to improve security and intelligence, and proposed the creation of Regional Security Teams of military and coalition civilians. This would replace the current patchwork of people from military headquarters, regional embassy offices and State Department teams.
She read that Zelikow had met and been impressed by Major General Peter Chiarelli, the commander of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, who was a proponent of what the military called full-spectrum operations, meaning that his soldiers didn't just do typical infantry tasks like killing insurgents, but they also did civil projects that helped the local population. Chiarelli had his infantry soldiers out hooking up houses to the local sewer lines. Zelikow said it was one of the best briefings he had ever heard from a general.
Everyone stressed to us that movement on this civil dimension of government performance is now key to solving their military problem. We recommended that the US take the lead to set strong targets for much greater distribution of electricity and fuel across the country within the next six months. In the last six months, the availability of electricity and fuel had decreased.
The memo also noted that it would be hard to get more reconstruction money, critical police training was lagging, Kirkuk, the Kurdish city that sits astride major oil fields some 200 miles north of Baghdad, was a powder keg, the banking system was a mess, the agriculture system was a Soviet relic, and a real Iraqi justice system was needed, so high-value detainees could get fair trials.
Overall, Rice read, the United States effort suffered because it lacked an articulated, comprehensive, unified policy.
Zelikow's memo was depressing, but Rice was not one to be discouraged.
I've been working on this for years, Rice said. She felt a strong sense of responsibility, not just because of her current government position. She'd been at the White House when Bush decided to invade, and was one of only two people whose opinions he'd asked beforehand. I own Iraq, she said. I have to operate that way. I was part of the team that made the decision. Clearly the State Department effort was inadequate. Not enough attention was being paid to the political side of the counterinsurgency fight. They had to make a concerted effort to win hearts and minds at the local level in Iraq.
Rice had visited Iraq only once, very briefly, going along with Bush on his surprise Thanksgiving Day 2003 trip. It was only a photo opportunity. She was eager for a real visit.
Not the right time, Jim Jeffrey told her, but she insisted and arranged a trip for March 1. Her senior assistant, Jim Wilkinson, told the State Department reporters about the planned trip in confidence. You can't report it. It's for planning purposes only, he said. Wilkinson, 35, had been director of strategic communications for Rice at the White House NSC and then for General Tommy Franks during the buildup and the invasion of Iraq. In his memoirs, Franks wrote that the youthful public relations man looked a little like Tom Sawyer, without the fishing pole.
Despite Wilkinson's admonitions, e-mails started flying. Rice was the rock star of the Bush administration, the face of a new active diplomacy. Condoleezza Rice's Commanding Clothes was the headline of a Washington Post Style section story in late February, focusing on her sexy knee-high boots. Soon news of her pending trip to Iraq was reported in the press.
Rice received multiple death threats every week from extremists along the entire political spectrum, from right-wing white racists to left-wingers accusing her of selling out African Americans. Wilkinson and Rice's head of security realized that knocking off Rice would be a sensational coup for Iraqi insurgents. A quick, surprise visit was the best security. Now that was impossible. It was too dangerous. They told her she couldn't go, and she was furious. How did this happen?
Frankly, Wilkinson told the State Department press corps, the next time she goes you're not going to know about it. You're just going to wake up and Condi Rice is going to be in Baghdad. Sorry.
Bush was trying to find a director of national intelligence. He wanted someone who would bring the perspective of a president to the job, someone who had been a consumer of intelligence, knew the importance of producing intelligence for policy-makers to make decisions. He wanted someone who would ask what would be the best way to take the intelligence to the president. And he needed someone who would not be captured by one of the bureaucracies—State, Defense or one of the intelligence agencies. Most important, they had to find someone who would ensure, at any and all costs, that there would be no more WMD-style intelligence fiascoes.
Card called Negroponte in Iraq. Negroponte said he was interested, and that he would come to the White House to talk about it. On the plane from Baghdad, he read the new 262-page law.
What does the job mean? he asked Card when they met. The DNI would have some authority over the Pentagon intelligence agencies but really couldn't manage them and have full control over the personnel. There was lots of so-called dual hatting, with the head of the National Security Agency reporting to both Rumsfeld and the new DNI, for example. The FBI would remain part of the Justice Department. It was out of the DNI's control but was nevertheless a key counterterrorism intelligence agency.
It's new, Card said. These are all good questions. He didn't have the answers. You get to invent it, create it, he said. Isn't it better? How you mold it is likely how the director 20 years from now or 15 years from now is going to be doing the job. How many chances do you have in the U.S. government to build an institution?
Negroponte met with the president. This will be the capstone assignment for your career, Bush said.
There weren't a lot of people lined up for the job, and Negroponte wanted to leave Baghdad. Bush needed somebody who was hard-nosed, and instead of a killer angel, he would be getting one of the smoothest, least confrontational old-school diplomats around.
Bush announced Negroponte's appointment on February 17, 2005. The problem now was what to do about replacing him. The o
nly real choice was Khalilzad, and both Rice and Hadley were eager to get him to Baghdad, although first they had to rap his knuckles about contradicting the president on the date of the Iraqi elections. They couldn't name him right away as a result. More than two months passed after Negroponte returned before Khalilzad took over in Iraq.
It was an uneasy time for Vice President Cheney. He had been the most active and influential vice president in history. But the center of gravity on Iraq had shifted out of the White House—first to Defense and now to State.
He felt like he was being pushed aside on the Iraq decision making. Who do they think they are? Cheney said to Prince Bandar on February 28. I was reelected too.
Rice was determined to be actively engaged in managing Iraq on a daily basis. The sort of senior officials hands off; let Baghdad handle it approach was over. NSPD-36 put State in charge.
The leading candidate to become interim prime minister after the January 30 elections was Ibrahim al-Jafari, a Shiite who had been part of both the Bremer-era Iraqi Governing Council and the temporary government after the transfer of sovereignty. Negroponte found him incredibly difficult, the only person he had ever met who could talk for an hour and make only one point. In one such hour-long talk, Jafari said that Talabani, a Kurd, should not hold the largely ceremonial post of president. He was trying to reach out to the Sunnis and it would be awful to have a Kurd. Then, in the last two minutes, Jafari said, well, if it was necessary he could accept Talabani.
After Negroponte left Baghdad for Washington to begin his confirmation hearings as the first director of national intelligence, Jeffrey became the head of the embassy as charge d'affaires. Rice began bombarding him with calls saying that she was coming to Iraq.
No, he advised again. Not the right time.
Okay, Rice said. After the January 30 elections, the formation of the new government was going too slowly. Who do we call?
Jeffrey dreaded her request. First, he figured he could handle the Iraqis himself. Second, Rice—and Bush, Cheney and Hadley for that matter—had only the most general understanding of the situation on the ground and the personalities involved. The officials in Washington couldn't compete with the wily Iraqis.
Talabani was sworn in as president of Iraq on April 7. Minutes later Jafari was named prime minister. The next task was to pick other officials to fill out the government.
Rice wanted to participate in applying the pressure to get the government set up. She insisted on calling Talabani, who had been engaged in these survival negotiations for decades.
How's it going, Mr. President? Rice asked Talabani in an April 22 phone call.
Everything was great, he said, even when she asked about the need to include Sunnis in the new government. Oh, I'm telling your man Jeffrey that every day. I'm cooperating and consulting fully with him and we believe we're moving forward.
Jeffrey realized Rice didn't want any call to go badly. Talabani was saying good things, not arguing, and Rice didn't want to interfere with the good vibrations. Jeffrey feared that Talabani would slip in some idea or solution that had been rejected days earlier, and Rice would say it sounded encouraging or say she would order Jeffrey to go along with it. Jeffrey was relieved that no damage was done in the call. He saw Rice was all over the problems. She was not going to go away, so he changed course and encouraged her to come to Iraq for serious discussions. That way he could sit next to her when she met with the leading Iraqis and whisper in her ear, That's Plan C, which you zilched at an NSC meeting three weeks ago.
Jeffrey attended the NSC meetings via secure video, and a pattern was very clear. Hadley said that Iraq was like an abused child, and the U.S. would have to continue to act as its caretaker. Rumsfeld said strongly and repeatedly, the Iraqis need to be given the chance to fail and fall on their faces, and only then would they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and come up with solutions. He used the analogy of a parent trying to teach a child to ride a bike. They had to take off the training wheels and remove their hand from the back of the seat or they'd wind up with a 40-year-old who could not ride a bicycle. Rice was between Hadley and Rumsfeld, once remarking, Let's let them try to pedal on their own, but we better be there to catch them.
When Card heard this, he thought to himself that the bicycle seemed to be moving forward, upright and momentarily stable. But he knew there were no pedals.
36
in early May, Jeffrey broke out the champagne and whiskey in Baghdad. He had been pressuring the Shiites nonstop to let more Sunnis into the new government process. These are the guys doing the insurgency, he had argued. Include them. The Shiite leaders finally agreed, adding nine Sunnis to the government process.
Then, 36 hours before Rice was to arrive in Iraq for her long-anticipated but secret visit, it all fell apart.
Jeffrey realized he hadn't convinced the Shiites of anything. They didn't get the larger points, about reconciliation, outreach and inclusiveness. They were initially compliant because he had been in their faces saying, You must do this.
They were right back where they had been two months earlier when Negroponte had left. Rice would be arriving on May 15. Jeffrey was furious.
Rice traveled in General Abizaid's airplane, with a private cabin in the back. From a security standpoint it was probably the best aircraft to use to avoid attracting attention, because it was going into and out of Iraq all the time. She first flew into Irbil, 200 miles north of Baghdad in Kurdish territory, to meet with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. It was kind of an insult to interim Prime Minister Jafari to see somebody other than the head of government on the first stop, but the Kurds were key to reconciliation.
Rice told Barzani how important it was to President Bush that everyone make compromises. The Sunnis had to be included. She voiced concern about the meddling of both the Syrians and especially the Iranians in Iraq.
They're both enemies, Barzani said. There's the stupid enemy, Syria, and then there is the smart enemy, Iran, which is the long-term problem.
Rice agreed.
The flight to Baghdad was 45 minutes. In her next meeting, with Jafari, she toughened her stance.
You don't get it, Rice told the prime minister. This is about inclusiveness. True, she acknowledged, the Sunnis had not participated in the January 30 election. Either they were intimidated or had boycotted it. Now we're asking you to put that aside and effectively grandfather them into the political process. It might be the most difficult thing to do, she added. But you need to do it, because if they're not part of the political process, they can destroy your ability to govern.
Everyone else in Rice's group was nodding off after the 20 hours of travel. She really amazed some of the people traveling with her, as she sat there, not a hair out of place, catching every word, a real machine.
Jafari was his own machine—a fog machine. It was very depressing, but Rice put the best public face on it later and gave seven-minute interviews to four U.S. and two Arab media outlets. Her message was persistence. If you think about it, this government has been in power a very, very short time, Rice told a reporter from NBC. In fact, it's been less than a year since they actually transferred sovereignty to the Iraqi people. And so there are going to be ups and downs. Things are not going to happen overnight.
Afterward Rice went for an unpublicized visit to the military's Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. Some of the soldiers had their digital cameras and asked for pictures with Rice.
After speaking with the doctors and nurses, she visited a 19-year-old Iraqi woman who had been part of Jafari's security detail. She had thrown herself on a bomb as a human shield. The bomb partially exploded, and the teenaged Iraqi had lost her leg.
You're a very brave young woman, Rice told her. You're one of the people who's already sacrificed for your new democracy.
The Iraqi woman quietly said thank you. It was one of the first times Rice had encountered a personal sense of the sacrifices Iraqis were making.
Trying to keep her
visit low-key and as unobtrusive as possible, Rice walked down a hallway, and wound up in a room with a single patient inside. He was an American soldier, in terrible shape, his face bandaged, on life support, barely alive.
Rice was staring firsthand at the human toll—the real and personal costs of war, a war she had advised the president to wage.
Rice later told several of her staff, I have to be able to look at those young soldiers and ask myself honestly if I think what they're going through was worth it, and are we making it worth it. And so these are not toy soldiers that somebody sent in, you know, little toy soldiers. These are real, living human beings.
If there were some way to win wars and secure countries without sending young people to either circumstances where they may be killed or where they might be maimed, we'd all do it.
But wars have costs. And nothing makes me angrier than when I hear people say, 'Well, George Bush wanted to go to war. He was looking for a reason to go to war.' You know, you can't know this president, or any president, and what they see and what they feel when they know the implications of their actions, that they're just anxious to go to war. I think it's a completely outrageous statement.
Jeffrey went to work on the Sunnis. They wanted 30 representatives on the Constitutional Committee, which was the next milestone on the road to democracy. Why 30? he asked. The argument was that the Sunnis were at least 30 percent of the population, probably 40 percent.
Well, no, you're not, Jeffrey replied, you're 20 percent of the population.
Back and forth it went. The Sunnis had won only two of the 55 committee seats. Some 10 days after Rice's visit, the Shiites agreed to expand the Constitutional Committee to include more Sunnis, and after several weeks of negotiations settled on 15 full Sunni members and 10 Sunni advisers.
Bob Woodward Page 46