Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  What are those things that raise it? I asked.

  I'm not going to get into that, he said uncomfortably.

  Visiting the wounded at military hospitals is part of the job of secretary of defense, he said. I understand that historically. I understand it from my prior service here. I understand it today. So I do not go away and think, Gee, this is something that I ought to toss in the towel or something.

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  in december 23, 2005, the International Monetary Fund approved $685 million for Iraq. Almost as important as the money was the fact that the IMF had determined that the Iraqi exchange rate was stable, inflation was low, economic growth was estimated at 2.6 percent, and its overall medium-term outlook was favorable. It was great news, though the IMF required that Iraq reach certain benchmarks on revenue and other matters.

  Before long, though, in January 2006, Bush and the NSC faced a new crisis. Iraqi oil exports, the country's cash lifeline, were down about 20 percent from a year earlier. The drop meant that the Iraqi government was looking at a $2 billion to $3 billion revenue shortfall for the first quarter, even with rising oil prices. The shortfall would immediately jeopardize their IMF status, and potentially set off a chain reaction.

  At the NSC staff, Meghan O'Sullivan examined the numbers in detail. They were so bad that the very viability of the government would be called into question. Not only was Iraq losing the revenue from the oil it wasn't exporting, but it now had to import fuel to make up the gap. It was like importing sand to the desert. Oil was Iraq's cash crop, but the insurgent attacks and the infrastructure decay put the country on the edge of an incredibly negative economic cycle. Despite all the talk about earlier turning points, they were at a true tipping point. Everything could collapse.

  O'Sullivan and Jeffrey's Iraq steering group met, as did the deputies committee. Finally, Andy Card joined the discussion at a principals meeting. The causes of the drop in oil exports included spotty maintenance at the refineries, poor weather in the south, inadequate storage capacity, attacks by the insurgents and criminal networks within the Iraqi ministries.

  The Iraqis really have to take responsibility, Rumsfeld argued. If we do it for them, they will let us, once more expanding the mission. The plan was to give the Iraqis more responsibility. And how could the U.S. military protect thousands of miles of pipeline?

  Rice disagreed. A key part of our counterinsurgency strategy, she said, involves protecting Iraq's economic lifeline—the oil flow. That in turn affected electricity. Baghdad was now often down to two to three hours a day of electricity.

  There was also corruption. Oil was being stolen. The Iraqi Oil Ministry was paying many times what it should have paid for pumps and other oil equipment, and the difference was being pocketed. Add to this the targeted insurgent attacks on pipelines and other oil facilities, plus the decrepit condition of the infrastructure with its leaky pipes and broken pumps, and it was a mess. In at least one case it looked like Iraqis guarding a pipeline had attacked it themselves, or at least allowed it to be attacked, so they could get a bigger contract to protect it.

  Lieutenant General Gene Renuart, now the director of the plans and policy division at the JCS, said, If you want the electrical lines and the power plants, it's corruption. That's the problem. There's too much corruption!

  Rice stiffened. You know that country has seen corruption for thousands of years, she said. It'll probably see corruption for thousands of more years. I can't fix corruption, but you can fix some of this security.

  There was a deadly silence. So there it was on the table. Where was the security? What kind of country were they fixing?

  The military was aggressively raiding insurgent hideouts and strongholds, and had some 15,000 detainees. The principals discussed whether the raids were really accomplishing much. There was no conclusion after a long debate.

  Card was struck by the tension between Rice and Rumsfeld. It was not new but it had a sharper edge. He was inclined to agree with Rice. Yes, they should turn over as much to the Iraqis as possible, but they could not let the economic lifeline of the country be further jeopardized. The oil resource could not be squandered.

  As always, the debate turned to the perennially unanswered questions:

  What is the U.S. role here? How much do we leave it to the Iraqis? How much do we help the Iraqis? How much of it is our responsibility? The president had never made a decision, though the debate had raged for three years. What model applied to Iraq and the U.S. mission? Was it Hadley's abused child? Or was it Rumsfeld's Darwinian, American corporate model of allowing the Iraqis to fail? Should Rice's middle view prevail? Was there a strategy?

  Bush attended an NSC meeting on the Iraqi oil export issues. Rumsfeld argued once again that this was the Iraqis' job. They can do it, he said. Let's just tell them go do it. But there was no specific security training for pipeline and other oil infrastructure, so it would take months to get the Iraqis in a position to take control of infrastructure security.

  No, Rice said, there was no time to dilly-dally. Security was so vital to everything they were attempting in Iraq that it had to be made an explicit part of the American military's mission.

  Bush later expressed his frustration to Card that he was getting sucked into the details of this issue.

  Rumsfeld couldn't have agreed more. This isn't presidential, he told Card. You don't have to take a lot of his time on this thing. We can work it out.

  Still Rice pressed. She was down in the weeds on this thing, and she wanted the president with her. That was where he belonged. Besides, if Bush would not get involved it pretty much gave Rumsfeld carte blanche.

  The president attended another NSC meeting, a briefing on Iraqi oil infrastructure security that included General Casey and Khalilzad. At the end, the president addressed Khalilzad on the video screen. Look, we all have to agree that this is just unacceptable.

  That was the one part everyone did agree on.

  Zal, the president continued, I need you to come up with a plan to help the Iraqis fix this problem. I don't know what the right answers are but I need you to think differently. We need to fix this.

  Khalilzad and General Casey said they would assume responsibility for a new plan.

  Hadley and O'Sullivan took the president's directive to heart. They needed to think differently too. What they had been doing was not working. But it hadn't been working for nearly three years, and there had never been any prohibition on creative thinking. Instead, at this moment in February 2006 everyone went into crisis mode.

  A series of video conferences was set up so Hadley could talk at length with Baghdad—the embassy and General Casey's command. He got into so much detail, drilled down so far, and had to pull out so much information that the conferences were often not with Casey or Khalilzad but with their deputies. The national security adviser became, in effect, the mission manager for Iraqi oil production quotas.

  Card saw how awkward it was for Hadley to try to bridge Rice's and Rumsfeld's views. He was not sure Hadley could succeed. After weeks of work, Hadley came up with a plan that, at least on paper, looked integrated with the six main parts. The new part was a proposal to create rapid repair elements that could quickly fix almost any damage inflicted by the insurgents, an idea the government of Colombia had used in its battle against FARC insurgents.

  These repair units would be called Strategic Infrastructure Battalions and would be comprised largely of Iraqi tribal-based forces that lived near the pipelines. Since there was some evidence that these battalions had been complicit in the attacks, a whole new retraining and vetting effort would be undertaken. In addition, U.S. forces and regular Iraqi forces would be embedded or partnered with the tribal units to increase their effectiveness and monitor them.

  The other elements included: physically hardening the pipelines; building resilience and redundancy in the pipelines, including some secondary pipelines that would run alongside the primary; ferreting out corruption in the oil and electrical
ministries; and improving intelligence coordination. They would ask for $250 million in the supplemental budget to fund it all.

  Hadley asked that Rice and Rumsfeld be briefed separately. The plan was presented as what one official called a fully coordinated, fully integrated, fully vetted, multi-pronged strategy to help Iraqis address this problem.

  Rumsfeld seemed satisfied because the plan involved helping Iraqis get an Iraqi solution. We can't solve this for them, although we can help them solve it.

  Nearly three years after the invasion and two years after the transfer of sovereignty, the administration was addressing the same issues.

  General Chiarelli, who had been commander of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division in 2004-05 and who had impressed Rice's State Department counselor, Philip Zelikow, had become the biggest uniformed advocate for using less so-called kinetic or coercive warfare with military hardware or troops armed to the teeth.

  In a summer 2005 article in Military Review, a scholarly journal for the armed forces, Chiarelli said that for three decades in the Army he trained to maneuver large troop and armor units to find the point of penetration in the enemy lines. In Iraq now he said the point of penetration was to have his troops hook up a sewer line, build a school or oversee a democratic election in Iraq. He envisioned a kinder, gentler presence, shooting and arresting fewer Iraqis and kicking down fewer doors. It sometimes sounded like his soldiers were functioning as Peace Corps workers.

  Chiarelli was given his third star and in January 2006 made commander of all U.S. ground forces in Iraq. He argued convincingly that Iraq had a culture of revenge and honor. The brazen killing and even capturing of suspected or real insurgents had alienated Iraqis, who then joined or supported the insurgency. As Thomas E. Ricks, a Post colleague who has studied the Army and counterinsurgency, said in his book Fiasco, The people are the prize. The American military was coming to realize that—at least on paper.

  On the morning of Wednesday, February 22, 2006, bombs leveled the golden dome of the Askariya Mosque in Samarra, about 65 miles north of Baghdad, leaving it in ruins. The attack on one of the holiest Shiite shrines had been carefully planned. Shiite militias, especially those aligned with Moqtada al-Sadr, poured into the streets, and in retaliation fired grenades and machine guns into at least two dozen Sunni mosques in Baghdad. Three Sunni imams were killed and a fourth was kidnapped. Tens of thousands rioted. A daytime curfew was imposed in Baghdad. Prime Minister Jafari condemned the violence but did not publicly criticize Moqtada, who had been one of his early supporters.

  Bush appealed for calm.

  Intelligence indicated Zarqawi was responsible. General Casey had an additional problem. Rumsfeld liked to have a list of things that could go wrong, and Casey, with the help of the embassy, had put together a list of possible catastrophic events. It included an invasion by Iran or by Syria, a cutoff of oil exports, and the assassination of Sistani. The list included religious shrines though the Askariya Mosque wasn't on it. That meant it hadn't been guarded. The bombing was almost the breaking point for the Shiites and their most prominent leader, Sistani. Rice thought it unlikely that Iraq could withstand another such attack.

  For Card, it raised the Rumsfeld question again. It was not clear to what extent Defense had planned to protect against sectarian violence and this was a classic case of sectarian violence. Iraq seemed on the brink of civil war.

  In March 2006, Rumsfeld invited six of the Pentagon's outside advisers to be briefed by General Richard A. Cody, the vice chief of staff of the Army, who had just returned from Iraq. After the briefing, the six would meet with Rumsfeld. Among the six were Ken Adelman, whose relationship with Rumsfeld was nearly over, and James Dobbins, of RAND.

  Adelman asked Cody, a husky 1972 West Point graduate and master aviator with 5,000 hours of flight time, what they were measuring to see how the war was going. What are the metrics coming back that you would say were needed to identify so we know if we're winning or losing?

  I'd say three, Cody replied. Number one is the number of Iraqi civilians that are killed by these insurgent attacks. Number two is the number of usable, important bits of information we get from the Iraqi people—the actionable intelligence. And number three is the number of competent Iraqi police and military. He stayed away from a body count and the number of enemy-initiated attacks.

  Shortly after, Rumsfeld entered. Let's take some questions, he said.

  Adelman asked him the same question he'd asked Cody. What metrics would you use for success in Iraq? You know, for winning the war?

  Oh, there are hundreds, Rumsfeld replied. It's just so complicated that there are hundreds.

  Dobbins pressed Rumsfeld on the number of Iraqi civilian casualties.

  Rumsfeld said he didn't think the numbers were relevant. The country's not in civil war, he said. If it was in civil war, there'd be a large number of refugees.

  Dobbins quoted the president's statement that 30,000 Iraqis had died in the last three years. It seemed about right based on the classified numbers they'd all seen. That was about 200 a week.

  Allowing for the fact that Iraq is 15 times smaller than the United States, Dobbins said, Iraqis for the first three years suffered the equivalent of a 9/11 attack every week. You can imagine the traumatic effect a 9/11 attack being repeated weekly would have on American society. Don't you think it's having a similar effect on Iraqi society?

  Rumsfeld dismissed the notion.

  Wait a minute, Adelman insisted. A former boss of mine always said identify three or four things, then always ask about, get measurements and you'll get progress or else you'll never get any progress. The former boss was Rumsfeld himself, who had driven the point home to Adelman 35 years before, when he worked for Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity. What are they? Adelman insisted.

  Rumsfeld said it was so complicated that he could not give a list.

  Adelman believed that meant there was a total lack of accountability. If Rumsfeld didn't agree to any criteria, he couldn't be said to have failed on any criteria.

  Hundreds, Rumsfeld insisted.

  Then you don't have anything, Adelman said. He left as disturbed as ever. No accountability. When he had been Rumsfeld's civilian assistant in the Ford administration, all Rumsfeld had to do to be a great secretary of defense was to bitch about Kissinger. It became his main occupation, along with bashing the Soviet Union and stopping SALT II, the treaty for strategic arms limitations.

  Now, Adelman thought, Rumsfeld's task was of greater strategic and historical meaning. The Pentagon, Rumsfeld and Bush—to say nothing of the very age in which they lived—would be remembered for either winning or losing the Iraq War.

  The president monitored Khalilzad's efforts to put together a new government. It was slow and tedious. Bush repeatedly reminded his ambassador of the immense frustration in the U.S. People want to see progress in Iraq, he told Khalilzad, and it's hard to portray progress when there's so much political wrangling around this new government.

  The Iranians started saying openly and emphatically that Jafari was their candidate. For Washington, Iranian support for Jafari was reason enough to dump him. Besides, nobody at the NSC could think of a time when Jafari had taken a decisive stand on anything.

  In addition, Jafari's crutch was Moqtada al-Sadr, who had supported him early in the process.

  Bush's frustration boiled. He repeated his mantra to Card: Where's the leader? Where's George Washington? Where's Thomas Jefferson? Where's John Adams, for crying out loud? He didn't even have much of a personality.

  In retrospect, Card wished they had expanded their search to the leaders of the provinces or even the tribes to see if a Thomas Jefferson was hanging around. It was now apparent that most of the Iraqi leadership who had embraced the invasion weren't Iraqis so much as longtime Iraqi exiles living in Europe or the United States. Where were the grassroots political success stories? Card wondered.

  In late March, President Bush secretly sent a personal lette
r to Ayatollah Sistani—his first directly to the Shiite leader. Without personally referring to Jafari, Bush said the United States wanted to work with someone who had the support of all Iraqis. The current situation did not meet that test. Bush said the United States wanted to work with Sistani, who was doing a great job being a calming influence. Normally presidential letters went out only in English, leaving it to the recipient to translate, but the White House translated it and sent the original in Arabic to avoid ambiguity and to show respect. Word came back that Sistani appreciated the letter and its sentiments.

  Given Sistani's reaction, Hadley and Rice concluded that Iran had overplayed its hand by supporting Jafari.

  On Wednesday, March 8, before 7 a.m., Andy Card walked the 35 or so paces from his corner West Wing office to the Oval Office for what promised to be one of the most difficult conversations of his life. He planned to talk himself out of his job.

  The condition of the Bush presidency was not good. Iraq was a mess. The president's political standing was plummeting, with his overall approval rating below 40 percent and still sinking. Seventeen months earlier, the weekend after Bush's reelection, Card had unsuccessfully pushed for more staff and cabinet changes, including his own offer to resign. Since then he had focused on getting the president to replace Rumsfeld—another failed mission.

  The second term was full of setbacks. A plan for Social Security reform had not even gotten out of the box. Hurricane Katrina had destroyed New Orleans and the president's handling of the crisis had become a metaphor for cluelessness. The nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court had to be pulled when conservatives revolted. Scooter Libby had been indicted for perjury in the CIA leak investigation.

  The previous month Cheney had been in the spotlight after he accidentally shot a friend in the face during a hunting foray in Texas, an escapade that landed the shotgun-toting vice president on the covers of Time and Newsweek. The White House had also fumbled the explanation and policy portfolios on a controversial deal to have a Dubai firm manage several U.S. ports. The only real positive for Bush was that two of his conservative nominees to the Supreme Court had been confirmed and taken their seats—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.