Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  I'm uncertain, Zelikow concluded. That was the bottom line. But, he wrote, In the best case, on a good day, I could tell the president, 'We believe our effort in Iraq will probably succeed.' He had carefully used the word probably. Indeed, if pressed, the odds of success are as good as, say 70 percent. Again, that means at least a 30 percent risk of failure, and a significant risk of catastrophic failure.

  Zelikow noted that he had not found anyone who believed there was more than a 70 percent chance of success. Even in the upbeat assessment, he continued, we might optimistically judge that our efforts are probably just enough to succeed. Not much room to spare, but hopefully just enough.

  Of course, just enough really meant nowhere near enough. The president had declared that failure in Iraq was not an option. Zelikow agreed, and that meant the current risk of failure was unacceptably high. They needed a plan and strategy that was more than enough to succeed. They had to win going away, he wrote. His intended audience was Rice, the diehard NFL football fan, so he described the goal in those terms. We need to win by two or three touchdowns, Zelikow said.

  There was too much barely coping, just getting by, and making incremental improvements. They needed to make a major effort to prevail. Outside of a few components of the Defense Department and the military, few were going all out.

  We should try to then make 2006 a turning point year, setting the new government that will win or lose the war on a positive path.

  Under U.S. Force size and critical infrastructure protection, he said the forces were spread thin, but he did not advocate a massive infusion of U.S. troops. General Casey needed to accept that one of his core missions was infrastructure protection. The Iraqi infrastructure battalions were a bust, and the lack of security was getting lots of people killed. We need to treat key pipelines and electricity pathways with the same regard as we treat MNF's own main supply routes —the military term for highways— and devise a security plan accordingly with a mix of Iraqi and coalition forces.

  Again, he noted that the degree to which insurgents were using more lethal IEDs, which accounted for the majority of American military deaths, was especially troubling. There was strong evidence that starting in mid-2005, there had been a flow of advanced IED components coming into Iraq from Iran. The designs weren't revolutionary, but by shaping the charges and causing the explosives and projectiles to travel in a straight line, as opposed to a large, undirected explosion, the newer IEDs concentrated their force and could penetrate armor. They were very lethal—at least four times more lethal than what Iraqi insurgents were capable of producing themselves—and capable of killing everyone inside an armored Humvee.

  The Pentagon had a $3.3 billion plan to come up with effective defenses against IEDs. But this was really a multifaceted problem. It was no longer just the lethality of the weapons that was important, but the significance that the weapons were coming from Iran. Some evidence indicated that the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah was training insurgents to build and use the shaped IEDs, at the urging of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. That kind of action was arguably an act of war by Iran against the United States. If we start putting out everything we know about these things, Zelikow felt, the administration might well start a fire it couldn't put out.

  Rice recognized Zelikow's use of a standard academic model of risk assumptions, and she realized that he was questioning whether they were giving themselves enough margin for victory given the enormous stakes. But her considerations had to be practical. On the surface, Zelikow's calculation that there was a 70 percent chance of success might lead to a conclusion that overwhelming force was required because, in the tradition of the Powell Doctrine, they had to guarantee success. But a little deeper, it was not clear that overwhelming military force was how to beat an insurgency. An insurgency, Rice believed, would not be defeated principally by the military. It had to be defeated politically. So her focus had to be on the State Department's role. Did she need to change the structure of how she used her people? How could she get the very best people out to Iraq? What incentives could she offer to get the right people to go? How could she put her department on more of a war footing?

  She was all too aware that Rumsfeld had persistently argued to reduce Iraqi dependencies on U.S. assistance and insisted that it was time to get the American hands off the back of the bicycle seat.

  I think it is true that people will hold on to dependencies as long as they can, Rice said. But it's also true that if you take the hand off the bicycle and it goes over a ravine that's not a very good thing either. So it's a balance. How do you judge that they're really capable enough? I think you do it by doing it pretty gradually.

  On September 29, 2005, I went to the Senate to have breakfast with Senator Carl Levin, 71, of Michigan, a 26-year Senate veteran and the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. Often and accurately described as rumpled, Levin peered theatrically over his tiny glasses. In the Rumsfeld Pentagon they frequently referred to Levin as the prosecutor because he was always after them. Before the war, he had believed that Saddam had WMD but he didn't think that was a good enough reason to invade.

  Levin voted against the war and he had pounded hard on the CIA, convinced that they had not shared all the suspected WMD sites with the United Nations inspectors. That meant they hadn't all been inspected before Bush ordered the invasion. But this information from the WMD Master Site List was classified.

  I tried in 10 different ways to get that declassified, Levin said, because if we could have brought out in advance of the attack that we had not shared with the U.N. all of the sites that we were suspicious of, it would have put a chill on the decision to go to war.

  I remarked that the WMD Master Site List had been based on lots of five-year-old intelligence, and that the military intelligence people on the ground had had little confidence in it.

  Levin said the inspection process was incomplete, not thorough. It could have delayed war, he believed, but not stopped it. He complained about all of the shadings, exaggerations, and hype about WMD by Bush and Cheney and said it showed the most willful and purposeful intent to create a deception.

  I've never thought that Bush was dumb at all, Levin said, lightly rapping on the table for emphasis. But I think he's intellectually lazy and I think he wants people around him who will not challenge him but will give him the ammunition which he needs or wants in order to achieve some more general goal.

  I said I thought Powell was in anguish about what had happened in Iraq, with 130,000 American troops still stuck there, facing an evergrowing insurgency.

  I don't want to hear about his anguish, Levin said, nearly exploding in anger. I don't have the stomach to hear his anguish. He is so smart and his instincts are so decent and good that I can't just accept his anguish. I want more than anguish. I expected more than anguish.

  What did you want? I asked. An apology?

  Honesty. I wanted honesty. I don't want to read a year later or two years later saying that this is the worst moment of his life or something. He had problems with this along the way. I had hoped for a George Marshall type. In World War II, General George Marshall had kept his distance from President Roosevelt, telling him at one point, Mr. President, don't call me George.

  Powell had the potential to change the course here, Levin continued. He's the only one who had potential to.

  How could he have done that? I asked.

  If he told the president that this is the wrong course, Levin said. I don't think he ever realized what power lay in his hands, and that's an abdication. I think Powell has tremendous power. He said Powell had a number of things he could have done to slow down if not possibly stop the war. He could have threatened to resign or insisted that the U.N. weapons inspectors be allowed to continue, Levin said. When Bush asked Powell in January 2003 if he would be with him in the war, Levin said, Powell was at the peak of his influence.

  Can you imagine what would have happened if he'd said, 'I've got to give that
a little thought? Can you imagine the power of that one person to change the course? He had it.

  Bush held so-called Big Five meetings with the top leaders in Congress—the majority and minority leaders in the Senate and the House of Representatives, plus the speaker of the House. The meetings generally started promptly at 8 a.m., and Bush would deliver a 45-minute monologue, mostly on foreign policy. There would be 10 or 15 minutes for questions or comments, and the meetings always ended at 9 a.m. There was never anything important enough to go longer.

  Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, a 65-year-old former boxer who had been chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, found Bush nice, even friendly, at these meetings. But the partisan divide was so great that Reid told his staff, I just can't stand him. He found it unbearable to watch most of the president's nationally televised speeches. Instead, members of his staff would watch and then brief him on what Bush had said.

  On Iraq, there was little common ground between the two parties. Real communication had virtually broken down.

  The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, once a powerhouse in national foreign policy debates, had been clamoring for nearly a year for Rice to testify about Iraq. Her ducking was humiliating for the senators, many of whom thought she was just trying to avoid being tarred with the prolonged war. She finally agreed to testify in the fall.

  Rice conferred with Zelikow and others on her staff, hoping to come up with a definition of success for her testimony. She went back to Zelikow's September memo, where he had said success would include breaking and neutralizing the insurgency, keeping Iraq from becoming a significant base for terrorism, demonstrating some democratic process, and turning the corner fiscally and economically. She decided to incorporate his benchmarks almost verbatim. But her planned testimony lacked a cohesive, understandable, headline-grabbing summary.

  Zelikow had been reading A Better War, a 1999 book by Lewis Sorley about a clear and hold strategy that Sorley claimed had led to some success in the Vietnam War after the search and destroy strategy had been discarded.

  In Zelikow's view, clear and hold was not enough. It needed another pillar that was positive, more declarative. Holding was too passive. He came up with the notion of clear, hold and ... build.

  Rice made it the centerpiece of her testimony before the Senate committee on Wednesday, October 19. It was the first time any senior administration official had come to the committee in more than a year and a half specifically to talk about Iraq. She told the senators, Our political-military strategy has to be to clear, hold and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely and to build durable Iraqi institutions.

  Much of this was a military mission, and Rumsfeld was furious. As far as he was concerned, it did not convey what they were really trying or should be trying to do: get the Iraqis to shoulder more of the burden. It was wrong to say that the United States' political-military strategy was all about what the U.S. would do and not what the Iraqis would do. They had to get their hands off the back of the bicycle seat, had to lose the training wheels.

  According to Rumsfeld, Rice felt that a bumper sticker was needed to explain what the State Department was doing in Iraq.

  I didn't need one, he told me later in an interview. We've got our job to do. We're doing it. And they had to fashion something like that. And they're right. If you're going to communicate with multiple audiences, including ours—our Congress, our public—the Iraqi people, then they want to know, 'Well what are you doing? Do you have a strategy? Do you have a plan?' The answer is we do have a plan.

  But the question was, clear is one thing, and my problem was I wanted—if that is our strategy for the United States, then I worried about it because in fact I wanted—we've got what, 263,000 Iraqi security forces? I wanted them clearing. And then holding. And I didn't want the idea to be that it was just us. And so that was my concern, because that is grabbing ahold of the bicycle seat and holding on for dear life.

  On Friday, October 28, 2005, Scooter Libby was indicted in the CIA leak case on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to the FBI. He resigned that day. White House security officials came to his office, took away his passes and told him he had to leave immediately. Libby had broken a bone in his foot and did not have a car. He was literally put out on the street, hobbling away on his crutches. Later, when he saw a copy of the indictment, United States of America versus I. Lewis Scooter Libby, he broke into tears. He later told friends he was reading Kafka.

  One night that fall, Brent Scowcroft sat next to Senator John McCain at a dinner. McCain, who had campaigned hard the previous year with Bush for the president's reelection, said that he had grown to like Bush.

  Does he ever ask your opinion? Scowcroft asked.

  I don't believe in giving my opinion when I'm with him campaigning, McCain answered. These guys come up. They get two minutes with the president and they try to tell him how to run the country. I don't.

  That's not what I asked, Scowcroft said. Has he ever said, 'John, what do you think about...?'

  No, no, he hasn't, McCain said. As a matter of fact he's not intellectually curious. But one of the things he did say one time is he said, 'I don't want to be like my father. I want to be like Ronald Reagan.'

  That burned Scowcroft, who was feeling increasingly hopeless. He concluded that the administration was doing the unthinkable, repeating the mistakes of Vietnam. Few people knew more about Vietnam than Scowcroft, who had worked on Vietnam for Presidents Nixon and Ford. He felt there was even less of a chance of building an Iraqi army that would fight than there had been three decades earlier when they were trying to build up the South Vietnamese army, which had existed as a powerful, even almost autonomous force in Vietnam its own right. In Iraq, the armies were all connected one way or another to the Shiites, the Sunnis or the Kurds. It was a political catastrophe.

  Scowcroft was increasingly disappointed in the performances of those he had worked with and mentored. He considered Hadley, who had been on his NSC staff in the early 1970s, a dear friend. But Hadley would not stand up to anyone—not to Cheney or Rice, and certainly not to Rumsfeld. He wouldn't even stand up for his own opinions.

  Even the president's father had confided that he was unhappy with Rice. Condi is a disappointment, isn't she? the former president had offered, adding, She's not up to the job.

  From his military contacts, as far as Scowcroft could tell, General Myers, the outgoing chairman of the JCS, was a broken man, a puppy dog. General Pace was worse. Pace had watched Myers with Rumsfeld for four years, knew exactly what he was getting into, and accepted it anyway.

  Cheney was the worst, Scowcroft felt. What's happened to Dick Cheney? all the old hands were saying to him, the people who'd known him for years. It's a chorus. 'We don't know this Dick Cheney.'

  Rumsfeld was behaving as he always had, going back to the Ford administration— enigmatic, obstructionist, devious, never know what his game is. To Scowcroft, Rumsfeld was a wholly negative force.

  Most tragic, Scowcroft felt, was that the administration had believed Saddam was running a modern, efficient state, and thought that when he was toppled there would be an operating society left behind. They hadn't seen that everything would collapse, and that they would have to start from zero. They hadn't seen the need for security, or that probably 90 percent of the Iraqi army could have been saved and used. So Iraqis now felt overwhelmingly insecure. Without security there was little opportunity to give people a stake in their society, little reason for them to have a positive attitude. It seemed to Scowcroft that the Iraqis were in despair.

  But the administration wouldn't reexamine or reevaluate its policy. As he often said, I just don't know how you operate unless you continually challenge your own assumptions. Most distressing to Scowcroft was to see his good friend and former leader Bush senior, 41, as Scowcroft called him, in agony, anguished and tormented by the war and what had happened aft
erward. It was terrible. The father still wanted his son to succeed. But what a tangled relationship! In his younger years, Scowcroft thought, George W. couldn't decide whether he was going to rebel against his father or try to beat him at his own game. Now, he had tried at the game, and it was a disaster. Scowcroft was sure that 41 would never have behaved this way— not in a million years.

  39

  u.s. intelligence agencies were conducting polls in Iraq measuring the favorable/unfavorable ratings of some of Iraq's leaders and figures.

  From November 11 to 18, 2005, the person with the highest standing in Iraq was Sistani, with 61 percent favorable, 39 unfavorable.

  Former Prime Minister Allawi was close behind, with 59.7 percent favorable, 40.3 percent unfavorable.*

  Those were the kinds of approval ratings Bush could only dream about in the United States. A poll by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal on November 10 had him at 38 percent favorable, 57 percent unfavorable.

  Rice wanted to establish some concrete State Department presence in Iraq outside the Green Zone. She took seriously Zelikow's criticism that the civilian agencies were not deployed enough beyond Baghdad, and she wanted to develop Provincial Reconstruction Teams involving political and economic experts, aid workers and engineers who would go into the 18 provinces, set up outposts, and help in the rebuilding. Khalilzad had established similar PRTs in Afghanistan when he was ambassador there. Rice and Rumsfeld got into another dispute because he

  * Others in the Iraq polls had high negatives. Chalabi was at 34 percent positive, 66 unfavorable. Saddam Hussein was at 22 percent favorable, 78 percent unfavorable. The lowest ratings were for Izzat al-Duri, Saddam's former vice president, who had never been caught by the U.S., who had a 20 percent favorable rating, and 80 percent unfavorable.

  wanted the State Department to hire private contractors to provide security for the teams, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Rice, of course, wanted the military to provide the security. Back and forth it went.