Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  Okay, I said, but are they on the ropes?

  Wrong word, Pace said.

  You're going to sound like Cheney, I said. You want to retract that?

  I do, he said. I would like to retract that. Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate the courtesy.

  I asked about victory and how it might be achieved, and he said that would require more than security in Iraq. There would have to be self-government and the physical reconstruction of the country—all the lines of operation in Casey's war plan.

  Is this going to happen in your lifetime? I asked.

  Yes, it is. Well, I hope, yeah. I don't know, he said. I should retract that line. It can happen in my lifetime.

  Do you have any doubts this was the right decision to invade Iraq?

  I have no doubts at all, he said. None. Zero.

  Isn't the process, though, you always have to have doubt? I said. I live on doubt.

  I'm sorry for you, the Marine general said.

  Don't be sorry for me, I replied. It's a wonderful process.

  I do not have doubt about what we've done, he said. We did not do this. When we were sitting home minding our own business, we got attacked on 9/11.

  There it was: We did not do this. There is a deep feeling among some senior Bush administration officials that somehow we had not started the Iraq War. We had been attacked. Bin Laden, al Qaeda, the other terrorist and anti-American forces—whether groups or countries or philosophies—could be lumped together. It was one war, the long war, the two-generation war that Wolfowitz's Bletchley II group had described after 9/11.

  You sure it's the right war at the right time? I asked Chairman Pace.

  Yes.

  Right place?

  Yes, absolutely, Pace said. Fundamentally, yes. I said that before we started. And I'll say that today. It may not surprise you to understand that taking my country's battles to my country's enemies on their playing field is where I think we should be. To protect my country, to do my oath to my country, and to protect my kids and my grandkids and your kids and your grandkids, I have zero doubt that we have done the right thing.

  On May 26, two days after the SECRET intelligence assessment, the Pentagon released a public report to Congress entitled Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq. It was a quarterly report required by law. Though there was a chart buried in the middle of the 65-page document showing that average weekly attacks were up to over 600, the document put the most positive spin on stability and security.

  The four-page introduction was all happy talk. Anti Iraqi forces—extremists and terrorist—continue to fail in their campaign to derail the political process . . . and to foment civil war, the report said, omitting any mention of how the security picture was significantly worse.

  More than 80 percent of terrorist attacks were concentrated in just four of Iraq's 18 provinces, it said as if violence had gone down. Those four provinces, including Baghdad, had 37 percent of the population.

  The report defined Iraqi Rejectionists as former regime loyalists, Saddamists and terrorists, including al Qaeda. Rejectionist strength will likely remain steady throughout 2006, the report said, which was consistent with the SECRET intelligence assessment. But the Pentagon report went on to say that the Rejectionist appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007. The Pentagon report flatly contradicted its own secret assessment two days earlier that said the insurgents and terrorists retained the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year.

  John Negroponte had been director of national intelligence for over a year. He had access to everything, and saw the president almost daily. He was one of the few who knew the most about the U.S. involvement in Iraq. From the beginning of the insurgency in 2003, he believed, the administration had underestimated its size and miscalculated its motivation. Worse, they were still doing it.

  The sectarian violence, particularly Shiites killing Sunnis and Sunnis killing Shiites, was migrating down lower into the community to the local blocks and neighborhoods. This was a startling new phenomenon. In March, after the bombing of the Samarra mosque, there had been more than 450 violent sectarian incidents with 1,800 Iraqi casualties. The next month it had gone down to about 330 incidents with some 1,300 casualties—still incredibly high.

  The key was that Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug who had become the al Qaeda leader in Iraq, had been successful in getting people pissed off at each other. In some respects it was like throwing a fist at someone in a crowded bar that happened to be filled with permanent enemies. The indiscriminate attacks on Iraqis and long-nurtured sectarian hostility had fueled a chain reaction. Iraq was now much more fertile ground for sectarian violence. Zarqawi had created that fertile ground.

  Negroponte was not surprised that the Pentagon would put out optimistic reports. It was natural. He had seen it in Vietnam. The generals and civilians would sugarcoat things, praising their people and insisting that there was light at the end of the tunnel.

  But sugarcoating was not his job. Now there was so much sectarian violence in Iraq that the U.S. military or intelligence agencies might not even know about it or be able to measure it, Negroponte concluded. The real problem was how blind the coalition, the U.S. and the intelligence agencies were in Iraq.

  Who is the enemy? Negroponte asked, posing the same question that Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin addressed nearly three years earlier, when he concluded it was a mix of former Baathists, foreign fighters such as Zarqawi, Iraqi nationalists and tribalists offended by American aggressiveness. Negroponte came up with some of the same answers— Saddamists, troublemakers and Zarqawi, who obviously was more important. But overall he found it hard to get anywhere on this. The reason was that the human sources that the CIA had recruited reflected the polarization of Iraq. Everyone had taken sides, and it was hard to find unbiased Iraqi sources. When it was all sorted and analyzed, the mystery for him had deepened.

  Negroponte went around telling an old joke about an admiral who asks a scientist how to deal with the threat posed by submarines. Figure out how to boil the ocean, the scientist says. That will solve the submarine problem. I'll leave the implementation to you.

  Overall, he concluded, it had all been downhill in the first six months of 2006. Clearly now, in early June, he could see the U.S. Iraq policy was in trouble. It was time to face facts. The Shiites were already the winners. They would prevail. The only question was how the United States could help shape things—which was different from determining them. It was time to take American hands off.

  If we had 10 years, then we could do it another way, Negroponte said privately. I'm with Rumsfeld on the training wheels now. We're just going to have to take them off.

  Rice believed they had to be careful about reducing forces. At the same time she wanted to be flexible with a political solution that would bring in the insurgency and get them involved with the government. But that could not include compromises or any kind of outreach to those with American blood on their hands. As the insurgency grew stronger and the attacks increased, that became more and more difficult. It was almost impossible.

  Rice had always been the superachiever, undeterred by impossible odds. Our obligation is to get this right, she said. The word obligation loomed large for her. The obligation is to work our way through the thicket of problems that are there.

  She was regularly challenged about the administration's claims of progress. What I found hardest to say, she said, what I honestly believe, was that side by side you had progress and chaos, all right? And that was hard for people to accept. They would think you were spinning. But it was truly a mixture of progress and chaos, she felt. That was the paradox.

  In Rice's analysis, the Iraq invasion had challenged the old authoritarian structure and foundation of the Middle East. Now the old Middle East was destroyed, and they had to put a new order in place. She reminded people that not so long ago, it was sort of taken as a given
that France and Germany would always be fighting with each other. Nobody now believed that France and Germany would ever fight again. The two world wars had changed the fundamental pillars. That too could happen in the Middle East, but it would take time. The president and his war cabinet would have to show how the new foundation was going to be built.

  Part of her seemed to long for the day when it might be over, when she would be out of government.

  I'm sure that in seven or eight years I'll come visit you in Crawford, she told the president. And we'll think, 'We should have done this or we should have done that.' Or maybe we'll all look really good in retrospect, the way things do when you're getting older.

  45

  classified reports bore out exactly what the Joint Staff's intelligence report in May had grimly predicted—still higher levels of insurgent attacks in Iraq. During one week in May 2006, enemy-initiated attacks soared to 900, a new record. In June, attacks went down to about 825 one week but then spiked up again.*

  It was even worse considering that the level of violence existed after two years spent training, equipping and funding 263,000 Iraqi soldiers and police. The cost had been $ 10 billion, and American teams had been embedded with most of the Iraqi units for over a year. At an equivalent time in 1971, after several years of Vietnamization, the trend lines of insurgent violence had been down, not up. The simple conclusion was that the Iraq strategy was not working, and the insurgency was strong and sustainable.

  * The classified report on weekly security incidents for the week of June 16 to June 22, 2006, divided the approximately 825 attacks that week into five categories:

  A) Undetonated, discovered or disabled improvised explosive devices—nearly 200.

  B) Exploded mines, IEDs, other modified ordnance and vehicle-borne IEDs (car

  bombs)—more than 200.

  C) Close engagements—small-arms fire, ambushes, drive-by shootings, snipers, rocket-

  propelled grenades and standard grenades—about 175.

  D) Standoff attacks—mortar, artillery and multiple rocket launcher barrages, surface-to-

  surface missiles, surface-to-air missiles—about 100.

  E) Attacks on Iraqi authorities—about 150.

  A note on a graph showing the escalation of violent attacks said the incidents did not include insurgent reactions to Coalition-initiated actions such as sweeps, safehouse raids, weapons seizures or high-value target captures.

  Steve Herbits went to have a sandwich with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon on Wednesday, June 14.

  The most important op-ed piece of the year, Herbits told him, was probably the one in The New York Times the previous month by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Les Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

  Rumsfeld began taking notes.

  Biden and Gelb had proposed an option between staying the course indefinitely and bringing the U.S. troops home on some kind of timetable, Herbits noted. This would be done by establishing three largely autonomous regions, one each for the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, who would make their own domestic laws and be responsible for security in their regions. The central government in Baghdad would control border security, foreign affairs and oil revenues. Iraq was already heading toward partition and this loose federalism of three ethnic states was developing on its own.

  Herbits said that the current concept of an integrated national police was not working at all, and the sectarian militias were increasingly powerful and violent. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were migrating on their own to their ethnic regions already, he said, and the voting by foot was more important than any of the highly touted elections. Events were already taking Iraq in this direction and it might be impossible to stop. U.S. policy could effectively embrace it. This, he noted, was the conclusion in a forthcoming book by Peter W. Galbraith, an expert with two decades of experience with Iraq, called The End of Iraq.

  Rumsfeld continued to take notes, expressing neither agreement nor disagreement.

  Set up an A Team and a B Team on the possibility, Herbits proposed. Have each give you a 30-minute argument so you become familiar with the language and issues on each side because it was likely to become the focus of debate.

  It is an exit strategy, Herbits told the secretary, and the administration frankly did not have a viable one. It would be something this administration could adopt in the name of freedom and self-determination. And they could call it victory.

  The U.S. was still keeping score and releasing body counts. Inside Iraq, evidence of the Great American Killing Machine and the trumpeting of its latest body counts became recruiting tools for the insurgents. The ground reality was that since the insurgents didn't wear uniforms and lived and blended into the population, some of those killed, possibly a significant number, were innocent civilians. Body counts also reminded Iraqis that they were living in an occupation. Counterinsurgency experts say that body counts offer a false measure of winning, and cite the Vietnam War when the North Vietnamese, the winning side, lost about a million, compared to the United States, which had 58,000 killed but lost the war.

  But President Bush loved to keep scorecards. Notes of the NSC meetings in the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks show Bush repeatedly asking for a scorecard as a way to measure the war on terror. On October 10, 2001, Bush went to the FBI headquarters and personally unveiled a list of the 22 Most Wanted Terrorists, which included Osama bin Laden. He took a classified version of the list with photos, brief biographies and personality sketches of the 22 and slipped it into a drawer in the Oval Office. When one on the list was killed or captured, he personally drew a big X through the photo. With pride, Bush displayed his terrorist scorecard during an Oval Office interview December 20, 2001. During an interview at his Crawford ranch on August 20, 2002, he said, The scorecard is important because I want people to know there is progress.

  So during the Iraq War it was difficult for the president to restrain himself. Rumsfeld, Rice and Card had cautioned him on body counts, but he wanted to know, wanted the tally sheet for what he saw as a series of separate battles. They killed three of ours. How many did we kill of them?

  It bled into his public statements. In an October 1, 2005, radio address, for example, he noted that one sign of success was that hundreds of insurgents and terrorists have been killed.

  Rumsfeld too did not resist, ignoring his own advice. On July 11, 2006, in a press conference with Afghanistan President Karzai, the secretary of defense said, If you look at the number of terrorists and Taliban and al Qaeda that are being killed every month, it would be hard for them to say that the Coalition forces and Afghan security forces were losing.

  Nine days later I went to interview General Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He confirmed that body counts were a red line for him. But despite his strong, absolute feelings that body counts are a false measure of success, President Bush still asks for them. The president has asked on occasion to get a flavor for the give-and-take about enemy killed, Pace said, adding that on the secure videos, Generals Abizaid or Casey have given him a number for that battle.

  The president wants to know, are we damaging the other guy. That's really how it comes up. But it's not frequently.... It's not inappropriate for the leadership to know on occasion that we are giving a whole lot better than we're getting. He said that Abizaid agrees with him that body counts should not be used. John and I totally agree, Pace said. He's a good soldier and he understands exactly the same thing.

  But well into the summer of 2006, the president was still asking. I am satisfied that the president knows exactly where I am on body counts, Pace said.

  Three days after I interviewed Pace, for example, Casey's headquarters put out a report, Coalition, Iraqi Troops Kill 15 Terrorists. Pace's caution about body counts was just another example of advice that was rejected. It was another argument the number one military man in the United States had lost even though
it raised the ghosts and anguish of Vietnam. Meeting the president's emotional and political needs was apparently more important.

  In July 2006, I interviewed Rumsfeld on two successive afternoons. Asked about the battle with the Iraq insurgency, he said, It could take eight to 10 years. Insurgencies have a tendency to do that. Overall, he said, Our exit strategy is to have the Iraqis' government and security forces capable of managing a lower-level insurgency and ultimately achieving victory over it and repressing it over time. But it would be a period after we may very well not have large numbers of people there.

  I said I understood that General Casey had reported that the insurgency had not been neutralized—a key goal of his campaign plan—but only contained. After some typical verbal jousting, I was able to ask directly, Do you agree it has not been neutralized?

  Oh, clearly not, Rumsfeld answered.

  Only contained?

  Yeah, he said. Thus far.

  I then read from the May 2006 assessment that said the Sunni Arab insurgency is gaining strength and increasing capacity. I asked him, Does that sound right to you?

  Here was one of the central questions in any war. Was the other side gaining strength and increasing capacity ? Casey, the Joint Chiefs' intelligence staff, and the CIA had all categorically said the insurgency was gaining. Certainly Rumsfeld knew that. I had also quoted from the assessment on a list of 29 sample questions I had submitted in advance, and I know he had spent at least one hour the day before preparing for the interview.