At this point there is a certain logic to [the] transfer. We all understand and agreed that at some point the stabilization responsibilities would move out of DoD.
Next, increasingly, Jerry Bremer has been reporting directly to Colin, Condi and you, as well as to DoD, so the effect of the change should not be major.
Third, the responsibilities that Jerry is currently wrestling with are increasingly non-DoD type activities—they are increasingly political and economic.
Finally, Condi, in effect has ... announced that that is the case. To not make the transfer now will cause confusion as to where the responsibility resides.12
I further noted that I had told Bremer months earlier that I would prefer to have him report to the President, Rice, or Powell. “[H]e is fully aware of my willingness to have this reporting relationship adjusted now that the circumstances there have matured,” I wrote.13 No one took up my offer. In fact, Rice shortly thereafter reversed herself, apparently at the President’s insistence, and informed the press that, contrary to her previous announcement, nothing about the administration’s Iraq policy had changed.
One week later, after a principals meeting on October 14, 2003, Rice asked to see me privately. She apologized for the flap over Iraq and said that she was doing everything to correct it.
I interjected, “You’re failing. You could have said something in the NSC meeting in front of the President and the principals.”
“Don, you’ve made mistakes in your long career,” she replied.
“Yes, but I’ve tried to clean them up.”14
Over the first four years of the administration, I had repeated discussions with Rice and Card suggesting a series of reforms to the NSC process. Mindful of my own admonitions that complaints without tangible recommendations for solutions were generally unhelpful, I had sent a number of memos to Rice and Card proposing that they institute changes to improve the President’s most important national security body. But there had been little or no improvement.15 It was not pleasant to see these problems up close, knowing how they undermined our nation’s policies.
On December 6, 2003, I went to Iraq to assess the situation on the ground and made another attempt to clarify Bremer’s chain of authority. Meeting him at the Baghdad airport, we moved into the lounge, where I took him aside. “Jerry,” I began, “it is clear to me now that you are reporting to the President and to Condi.” My view was that he should report to Powell at the State Department, not to Rice at the NSC, and that State should take on the responsibility for the civilian aspects of reconstruction in Iraq.
“I will keep my hand in on security,” I said, “and I will try to be as helpful to you as I can, but I don’t want four hands on the steering wheel.”
I also said I didn’t think the NSC was doing its job well, and that Rice’s taking on an operational role in Iraq was a grievous mistake. When the NSC staff engaged in operations abroad in the Reagan administration, I noted, they wound up overseeing a trade of arms for hostages in Iran and brought the Iran-Contra scandal down on the President’s head.
Bremer told me that he shared my concerns about the NSC, and that he didn’t disagree with or object to anything I said. I wished him well. At that meeting, as far as I was concerned, any lingering pretense that I oversaw his activities came to an end.16
By the time I arrived in Baghdad that December, military officials told me they were beginning to believe they might finally have Saddam—officially dubbed High Value Target Number One—in their sights. But reports of Saddam sightings were as frequent as they were unreliable. Even as a deposed dictator, he remained skillfully elusive. He had a number of hideouts and body doubles. He reportedly slept in a different place every night.
I put a high priority on Saddam’s capture and considered it a critical step in giving Iraqis confidence that the old tyranny was gone and would never come back. Even after Saddam’s overthrow, many Iraqis feared that the war was not over—and that the Baathists might be heard from again. They had lived in terror of the midnight knock on the door from regime agents for so long that they had difficulty moving past the worry that conceivably one day Saddam Hussein might return to power. Saddam had worked for decades to build his cult of personality. Suddenly turning himself into an amateur genealogist, he even declared he was a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammed. His picture was in all public buildings, on billboards, in homes, and in restaurants, reinforcing the idea in Iraqis’ minds that he was everywhere and everything. Saddam had survived several wars, an earlier U.S. invasion, coups, and uprisings. Iraqis asked themselves, with justification, whether he might pull off such a feat again.
Even the death that July of Saddam’s vicious sons, Uday and Qusay, had not been enough to overcome the fear that a Hussein regime could return in some form. Active participants in the regime’s crimes, Saddam’s sons long had been his heirs apparent and were rumored to be even more sadistic than their father. If Saddam died, Iraq under their leadership was likely to be even more oppressive and hostile to Western interests than it had been under Saddam. After the invasion, Uday and Qusay had gone into hiding. When coalition authorities tracked them to a building in Mosul, they became engaged in a fierce firefight, seemingly determined not to be taken alive. Their wish was granted.17
After his sons were killed, there was an intelligence report that Saddam Hussein was paying $60 million for his agents to target the President’s two daughters and my two daughters for reprisal attacks. That threat report was brought up at an NSC meeting in October 2003. I acknowledged it, but went on with our discussion.
“You need to take this seriously,” Bush said. He had received word that pictures of his daughters had been found in Uday Hussein’s palace.
Tenet broke in, reinforcing the President’s concern. “You took out Saddam’s sons. They might well go after your daughters.” Needless to say, I was concerned about my family, but there was little I could do about it other than encourage them to take precautions.
On December 6, 2003, I visited Kirkuk in northern Iraq, where I met with Major General Ray Odierno. At a hulking six foot five inches, Odierno looked like a superhero in a movie. As commander of the Fourth Infantry Division in the Sunni areas to the north and west of Baghdad, he was leading the hunt for Saddam Hussein. I asked a number of questions about how close we were getting to him and what intelligence methods Odierno was using—human intelligence, signals intelligence—and how many suspects he was rounding up. Odierno made no promises but indicated that the trail was getting warmer.
Exactly one week later, in the late afternoon of Saturday, December 13, I had just left the Pentagon and arrived at General Myers’ house for a brief stop at a holiday party he was hosting when I was summoned for an urgent call from CENTCOM. The many reporters present were curious when I had to quickly end my conversation and go upstairs to Myers’ private office. Abizaid told me over the secure line that our military had finally captured Saddam Hussein. Through an operation code-named Red Dawn, U.S. military personnel had rounded up a host of people judged likely to be hiding Saddam, or at least knowledgeable of his whereabouts, including former bodyguards, palace officials, and tribal leaders. One of these informants directed our forces to a farmhouse near Tikrit, Saddam’s ancestral home. There they found a trap-door concealed by dirt and rubble. As one soldier prepared to lob a grenade into the hole, another noticed that there was a man inside.
As he was hauled up into the light, the man looked disoriented. He was carrying a pistol but made no effort to use it.
“My name is Saddam Hussein,” he announced. “I am the President of Iraq and I want to negotiate.” The Butcher of Baghdad was pulled from the small, dirty “spider hole” at 8:30 p.m. Baghdad time.18
I immediately telephoned the President, who was at Camp David. In light of a number of prior false alarms, I didn’t want to say anything too definitive.
“Mr. President,” I began as soon as he picked up my phone call, “first reports are not always accur
ate, but—”
“This sounds like it’s going to be good news,” Bush interrupted.
I told him I had been advised by Abizaid that our troops believed they had captured Saddam Hussein. Bush too expressed caution. He asked why we thought it was him. My answer was that U.S. military officials had identified a bullet hole in his left leg and distinctive tattoos on his body; I added, however, that I wasn’t necessarily persuaded by that. Saddam’s body doubles could easily have been given similar identifying marks. I told him I was more impressed that our troops had found a sizable amount of money with him. I did not think it likely that a body double would be carrying some $750,000 in U.S. currency.
I assumed that our military would announce Saddam’s capture. Sanchez and Odierno were the ones who had been hunting him and had successfully tracked and captured him. Their dogged work had led to a major achievement. I thought it also would have been logical for them to have some senior Iraqi official participate in the announcement, to give it added credence. Instead, Bremer strode to the microphones at his Green Zone headquarters in Baghdad the following morning. “We got him,” he announced. Bremer was beaming. I was not.
Shortly after his capture, Iraqi officials displayed Saddam on television. The Iraqi people needed to see him for themselves, so they could be convinced that their resilient and elusive former leader was really in hand. As I saw this bedraggled figure, my mind flashed back to my meeting with him, the grand potentate. Twenty years later, Saddam Hussein was under arrest. The capture led to jubilation throughout much of Baghdad. There was a noticeable uptick in Iraqis’ interest in cooperating with coalition authorities, and, it seemed, an increasing optimism.
It was tempting for me to meet with Saddam in jail, as Bremer and members of the Iraqi leadership had done. However, I was actually more interested in seeing Tariq Aziz, who had been captured months before. I knew that nice guys didn’t last long in criminal regimes, but he lacked the obvious hard edges that many of his fellow Baathist bigwigs displayed. He had a manner that could obscure the underlying evil of the regime he represented—a paradox I had always found interesting whenever I sat across from him and engaged in the friendly conversations we had. I would have been interested in hearing Tariq Aziz’s version of events—how things had gone so wrong for him since our visits together in Iraq and in Washington in the 1980s. I wanted to know why Saddam had refused to comply with seventeen UN resolutions, and why they didn’t leave the country when President Bush had given them a chance in the days before the war. I wanted to understand the tortured logic behind the regime’s serial deception on its WMD programs and why their warped bluff had invited the very thing they hoped to deter. Ultimately, I decided there was no way to talk with my old acquaintance without creating a spectacle.
It was a mistake not to make the separation between the Department of Defense and Bremer official and publicly visible. Had I successfully done so, the Department might have been spared some of the criticism for another of the CPA’s decisions, relating to a violent event in the city of Fallujah.
Known as the “City of Mosques,” Fallujah by the spring of 2004 had become a haven for militants operating against the coalition. Baathists, al-Qaida terrorists, marginalized Sunnis, and criminals looking to make easy money planting roadside bombs had turned the city into a nest of killers. Car bomb factories and terrorist safe houses were scattered throughout the area. Many of the city’s two hundred mosques had become nodes of the disparate resistance movements.
On March 31, 2004, Iraqi insurgents ambushed four Blackwater contractors. They were pulled from their convoy and dragged through the city streets. Their murdered bodies were hanged over a Euphrates River bridge. Photographs and videos of the carnage promptly flashed around the world.
These crimes were monstrous—everyone understood that. But what many also did not seem to realize was that this act had a sinister and calculated purpose. The insurgents knew that they couldn’t hold off an American assault with arms alone. Instead, they had a sophisticated propaganda effort designed to intimidate and make Americans question whether their effort was worth the cost. The shocking images of bloodied and charred American corpses dangling from a bridge was a public relations victory for them. Increasingly, people questioned why Iraq seemed to be chaotic, violent, and out of control after its liberation.
All of us on the National Security Council recognized that we could not allow an Iraqi city to become a sanctuary for murderers and terrorists. My impulse was not only to find the enemies who had committed the atrocity, but also to send a message across the country that anyone who engaged in acts of terror would face the might of the U.S. military.
With the situation appearing to worsen that spring, General Myers and I approved Abizaid’s request to extend the tours of twenty thousand of our forces. Abizaid had earlier hoped that we might be able to gradually begin reducing troop levels. But that now seemed less likely.
On April 6, 2004, the Marines began an offensive to secure Fallujah, the largest combat mission in the eleven months since the end of major combat operations. Through no fault of the Marines, Operation Vigilant Resolve proved to be neither vigilant nor resolute. After three days of intense fighting, the Marines commanded a quarter of the city. But the gains came amid controversy, as the enemy’s savage tactics, combined with their successful propaganda effort, had their desired effect.
Insurgents took over public buildings, notably mosques and hospitals, and used them as bases from which to attack the advancing Marines. When an American air strike destroyed a mosque, it led to a public outcry fueled by false news stories on Al-Jazeera that trumpeted civilian casualties and carnage.* It was asymmetric war in its purest form. The insurgents of course were violating the laws of war: using civilians as human shields; firing on Marines from houses in Iraqi neighborhoods, daring the Marines to fire back; and storing their weapon caches in mosques, schools, and hospitals. The enemy sought to convince the world that America’s use of force was indiscriminate, disproportionate, and reckless.
Sunni members of the Iraqi Governing Council, who were anxious to assume control of their government as the June deadline for Iraq sovereignty approached, expressed outrage at the U.S. attack on Fallujah and pressed Bremer for a cease-fire.
On April 9, Bremer, Abizaid, and Sanchez participated in an NSC meeting via secure video from Baghdad. I joined the President, Powell, and Rice in the Situation Room. “We have a real threat with the top Sunni members of the Iraqi Governing Council,” Bremer told the President. He said they were threatening resignation and the dissolution of the council. “I’ve agreed to a twenty-four-hour cessation of operations,” Bremer said, adding, “This is not a cease-fire.”
It sounded exactly like a cease-fire—even a capitulation—to me. The Iraqi Governing Council wanted time to negotiate, but I doubted any real concessions would be extracted from an army of fanatics who had vowed to attack the new Iraqi government. I wanted to continue the operation.
“What do we do when the Iraqi Council asks for an extension?” I asked.19
“I recommend we don’t grant it,” Abizaid answered quickly.
“I tend to agree,” Bremer interjected, “but we can’t rule it out, and we shouldn’t answer hypothetically.” His reluctance indicated to me an extension of the twenty-four-hour so-called cessation of hostilities was all but certain.
I knew Bush’s instinct was to take the enemy out, but he also had to consider the diplomatic aspects. “How long do the Marines need to conclude their operations in Fallujah?” he asked.
“Three to four days,” Abizaid replied.
“Well, tell ’em we’ll quit in four days,” Bush said.
As the Iraqi Governing Council engaged in discussions, our Marines, still taking fire from the enemy, held their positions but halted their advance. As the twenty-four-hour cessation of hostilities expired, just as I had anticipated, Bremer was reluctant to continue the offensive. He said he feared uprisings in Iraq and a “collapse o
f the entire political process” if the Marines continued.20 It was not an unreasonable concern, but for me an even greater worry was the insurgent attacks that were continuing against our troops. I felt our military was being tested, and we needed to push back against the challenge.
Bush seemed to share that view. At the NSC meeting the next day, on April 10, the President worried that there would be consequences if people thought, as he put it, that “we’ve been whipped.”21 But the President did not issue an order for the Marines to continue.
The President decided that extending or canceling the cease-fire was an operational decision—one that belonged to the senior officials on the ground. Directly countermanding the recommendations of the two most senior commanders responsible, Abizaid and Sanchez, in addition to Bremer, was not in the cards. The Commander in Chief made the call to let them proceed as they saw fit.
There was logic in deferring to Bremer and Abizaid in that they had made some real progress elsewhere in Iraq. The military’s efforts and arrests of senior members of the regime gave the Iraqi people an opportunity to close the book on their recent past and bring the criminals to account. By October 2003 the country’s electricity generation was higher than prewar levels, though in the years that followed it would ebb and flow with the pace of attacks.* With help from Undersecretary of the Treasury John Taylor, they rapidly created and distributed new Iraqi currency and curbed inflation. Real Iraqi GDP growth during the CPA period was 46.5 percent.22 The stock market opened, as did schools and hospitals across the country. In March 2004, Bremer and CPA officials drafted an interim constitution known as the Transitional Administrative Law that protected human rights, asserted the freedom of religion, and established the basic structure of a representative Iraqi government.23 It left a lasting imprint on Iraqi society. These were important signs of progress that received relatively little recognition.
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