Known and Unknown

by Donald Rumsfeld

  The execution was greeted by dancing in the streets and guns fired into the air in most of Iraq. Along with euphoria and celebration, there was relief. Saddam had lingered in a cell far longer than suited many Iraqis. Some feared American forces might have been keeping Saddam alive as a bargaining chip with the Sunni insurgents, or that he might even be released if major groups agreed to lay down their arms. Many had bitter memories of an earlier Bush administration that had encouraged Iraqis to rise up against the Baathist regime in 1991 but then stood by as Saddam regained his power and massacred those who rose up. Now the man who had dominated and darkened their lives for decades, whose portrait had been in schools and restaurants, on television screens and buildings, was truly, finally gone. Though not all of Iraq’s demons were exorcised, Saddam’s death offered his oppressed people a psychological release that is impossible for outsiders to fully gauge.

  The U.S. military involvement in Iraq has come at a high price. Combat took the lives of thousands of American servicemen and-women and left many more wounded. The U.S. Treasury spent hundreds of billions of dollars. The prolonged war also poisoned our politics at home. Political campaigns used the war as a bludgeon against President Bush, his administration, and his party.

  Since Saddam Hussein’s statue was brought down in Firdos Square in March 2003, the United States’ goals—replacing Saddam’s government with one that did not attack its neighbors, or develop WMDs, and was respectful of the country’s diverse ethnic and religious minorities—had migrated into a more ambitious effort. Bush administration officials increasingly spoke about the imperative of creating a democracy, particularly after it was discovered that Saddam Hussein didn’t have the ready stockpiles of WMD our intelligence community believed we would uncover. This shift in emphasis suggested that Iraq’s intentions and capability for building WMD had somehow not been threatening. Many Americans and others around the world accordingly came to believe that the war had been unnecessary.

  The Bush administration should have pointed out that, while Saddam Hussein did not have WMD stockpiles, he did in fact maintain dual-use facilities that could produce chemical and biological weapons. Given Saddam’s record of using chemical weapons against his own people, those facilities were effectively as dangerous as stockpiles. The Duelfer Report, the product of the Iraq Survey Group that examined Saddam’s WMD programs after the war, carefully documents the scope of his ambitions. Saddam wanted to “[preserve] the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted.”1 He remained intent on reconstituting his WMD programs and kept many of them “on the shelf,” which would allow him to begin producing biological and chemical weapons within several weeks’ time.2 Instead of pointing out these facts, the White House decided not to dispute the matter to avoid “relitigating” the past and changed the subject to democracy promotion. Some assumed that the justification for the war and the need to remove Saddam were self-evident. “[O]ne of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years,” senior Bush adviser Karl Rove later acknowledged, was not “engaging” with administration critics, which “let more of the public come to believe dangerous falsehoods about the war: that Bush lied, that Saddam Hussein never had and never wanted WMD, that we claimed Iraq had been behind 9/11.”3 The damage from this error in judgment was substantial. It allowed critics to whitewash Saddam’s record and political opponents to build a deceitful narrative about the rationale for going to war.

  In the weeks leading up to Saddam’s death in December 2006, Democrats who had gained control of Congress were poised to finally succeed in their efforts to cut offwar funding, which would bring U.S. involvement in Iraq to a forced end. President Bush knew that if they prevailed, it would ensure the defeat of the U.S.-led coalition and victory for the jihadists, insurgents, and other enemies of a potentially peaceful and responsible Iraq. He believed that the outcome would be not only a military calamity, but would also force the United States to endure the humiliation of a precipitous withdrawal while plunging Iraq into a further humanitarian disaster.

  Bush realized that a political strategy with the new Congress was now as important as a military strategy. The President was frustrated that progress was too slow, but he believed that with some additional time and patience, the situation could improve. His challenge was to convince the opposition party, led by incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, that the administration had developed a promising new approach and deserved additional time. The President undoubtedly hoped that the sweeping personnel changes underway—new commanders at CENTCOM and in Iraq and a new secretary of defense—offered a concrete demonstration to the public that the commander in chief was pursuing a different course. Accordingly, President Bush took one of the boldest political and strategic maneuvers in recent American history: the 2007 surge.

  Talk of executing a surge of additional U.S. troops began in November 2006 with a White House review of Iraq strategy led by J. D. Crouch and Bill Luti, both of whom had come to the NSC from the Defense Department. At the same time, officials in the Pentagon were undertaking our own review. Assistant Defense Secretary Peter Rodman and I sought to develop a DoD position that recognized the approach we had taken over the last year was not working “well enough or fast enough.”4 Though I had largely removed myself from policy making after the announcement of my resignation, I continued to oversee this review in the hope that the administration’s new course would have the support of the country’s top military officials.

  We drew up a working paper in early December summarizing the options that the Pentagon’s civilian and military leaders were considering. “[F]ailure in Iraq will place the American people in even greater danger,” my cover memo for the paper began.5 We suggested further accelerating the buildup of the Iraqi Security Forces and renewed efforts at befriending the Sunnis, now that the Awakening movement in Anbar province was blossoming.6 We also suggested new efforts to curb Iran’s hostile involvement, particularly its training of sectarian Shia militia death squads and its clandestine attacks on U.S. troops.

  The Defense Department’s summary paper was developed from a memo I had written the previous month to provide Bush with some “illustrative new courses of action.” One proposed course was to “[i]ncrease Brigade Combat Teams and U.S. forces in Iraq substantially.”7 Since a surge of military forces still lacked support among military leaders, that suggestion was placed in my memo “below the line”—in other words, as a less favored option.8

  Generals Abizaid and Casey were still uneasy with the idea of deploying more troops without a clear and agreed military mission for them. The Joint Chiefs also had questions about surging more troops into Iraq without a parallel surge by the State Department and other civilian agencies. Army Chief of Staff Pete Schoomaker and Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee were concerned about the toll more combat tours would take on their ground forces. Surging more U.S. troops would mean that some units’ tours would need to be extended to fifteen months—a step that could not be taken lightly. The senior military leadership had the proper concern that military power alone could not solve Iraq’s problems. I agreed with them that any surge of U.S. forces would have to be accompanied by more effective diplomatic and economic surges from other departments and agencies, and, of critical importance, by considerably greater political progress by Iraq’s elected leaders.

  The President understood his surge proposal already ran against the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, his State Department, and congressional Democrats as well as some Republicans in Congress. Without support from senior military leaders, it would be fatally wounded before it was ever proposed.9

  Gradually, opinions were changing at the Pentagon. Pace had assembled a council of colonels to conduct a military review for the Joint Chiefs. The colonels, many of whom had spent more than one deployment in Iraq, were open to the idea of sending several additional brigades if they had a clear mission. Pace and I worked to all
ay any concerns Casey, Abizaid, and the Joint Chiefs might have. For instance, to address the Army’s and Marine Corps’ concerns about stress on their forces from continued deployments, the President endorsed an increase in the size of both services.

  The skepticism of senior military leaders, however, was mild in comparison with the opposition within the State Department. Rice argued that surging more U.S. troops would further antagonize American allies and erode domestic political support. State Department officials recommended reducing U.S. troop levels and redeploying what forces were left on the ground into large bases away from the fighting.10

  On December 13, 2006, President Bush came to the Pentagon for a meeting on Iraq. Present were the incoming secretary of defense, Bob Gates, and the senior military and civilian Defense Department leadership. The President urged everyone at the table to propose anything that could “show noticeable change in the situation in Baghdad.”11

  “What I want to hear from you,” Bush said firmly, “is how we’re going to win, not how we’re going to leave.”12

  The President knew that if he were to avoid a congressionally mandated defeat in Iraq, he needed a political and military game changer that would give the progress underway a chance to develop fully. Though I was a latecomer in supporting the surge, by the time I left the Pentagon I felt that there were solid arguments for its two main military features: a somewhat heavier U.S. footprint and a new operational approach that centered on securing the population.

  The new commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, had distilled the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare after a year of research at Fort Leavenworth, where he had been assigned after his second tour in Iraq. He believed it was time to emphasize protecting the population now that the Sunni tribal leaders had decided to break with al-Qaida and needed the U.S. military to shield them from the jihadists’ retribution. In 2005 and 2006, local commanders had tried some of the classic counterinsurgency techniques, such as living in small outposts and cordoning off neighborhoods with cement barriers to protect the population, but not in Baghdad, where violence was escalating. Petraeus proposed to take back the capital city from al-Qaida, radical Shia militias, and death squads by securing the local population block by block.

  To ensure that these gains would last, Petraeus requested and received an additional twenty thousand troops that began deploying in January 2007. More troops, however, were not the sole reason for the success of the surge. In 2005 we had twice increased U.S. troops by twenty thousand. Yet the 2005 surges did not lead to the impressive progress that was achieved in 2007. The 2007 surge coincided with seismic shifts in the Iraqi political landscape. The Sunni Awakening, which had begun in the late summer of 2006 in Anbar province, was by then a full-fledged antiterrorist movement.

  Sunni Iraqis were reclaiming their towns from al-Qaida one by one. Sunni leaders in Anbar, like Sheikh Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi, were willing to risk violent death—al-Qaida murdered Rishawi in 2007—to finally disavow the extremists that had taken sanctuary in their towns and villages. Muqtada al-Sadr declared a cease-fire against the coalition and the government, effectively ending a latent Shia rebellion. An elected government, seated in mid-2006, had finally formed, and its leaders were gaining enough confidence to take on the extremists, even within their own religious sect. Shia leaders like Nouri al-Maliki were prepared to win back Basra by defeating Iran-funded Shia militias. Perhaps most important, the surge also coincided with the time when the Iraqi security forces had finally reached a critical mass in number and capability. By December 2006, some 320,000 Iraqis had been trained, equipped, and deployed, producing the forces needed to help hold difficult neighborhoods; they joined in patrols with the surge troops, putting an Iraqi face on the new strategy.

  The surge recognized these major political and military changes in the environment and adopted a new approach to take advantage of them. But ultimately, the true genius of the surge was the political effect it had in the United States, where the conflict’s true center of gravity had migrated. The surge began first and foremost with a major shift in the administration’s political strategy at home, by tempering the defeatist mood on Capitol Hill.* Petraeus’ embedding of U.S. forces with Iraqi troops in violent neighborhoods also gave Iraqis a renewed confidence that the United States stood with them. It improved intelligence collection, with more tips and cooperation coming from Iraqi citizens. As more neighborhoods became calm, citizens started moving back, reopening their businesses, and once again taking their children to neighborhood parks. The terror that had aided the insurgents’ cause began to subside.

  While Petraeus brought a new operational approach to Iraq, ultimately he continued the existing strategy: building up Iraqi capabilities while containing the violent threats to the new political order so Iraqis would soon be able to take charge of their own problems. This was the same sensible and modest strategy we had set out before the war. It was the same strategy that—though altered with the establishment of a longer-term Coalition Provisional Authority—we reaffirmed in our October 2003 strategic review, when I intervened to bring an early end to the CPA. It is the strategy that President Barack Obama continued to pursue in the first years of his presidency.

  As I had repeatedly argued in the Defense Department and in interagency meetings, success should not be defined as our solving all of Iraq’s problems. Our strategy was not to create (for the first time in its history) a noncorrupt, prosperous democracy, with all the protections afforded by due process. Such goals were desirable, but not within the limits of American capabilities or patience. Because Iraq would be plagued for years by some level of violence, ethnic tensions, and a poor economic infrastructure, I thought our strategy should be to try to contain those problems and build up the abilities of Iraqis to deal with them so that they could manage their own affairs and not be a security problem for the region, the United States, or our allies.

  I have been asked on occasion if I believed the war was worth the costs, particularly since WMD stockpiles were not found. It is a fair question. Any calculation of the costs and benefits of the Iraq war has to take into account what Iraq and the world might look like if Saddam and his sons were still in power. While the road not traveled always looks smoother, the cold reality of a Hussein regime in Baghdad most likely would mean a Middle East far more perilous than it is today: Iran and Iraq locked in a struggle to field nuclear weapons, which could give rise to a regional arms race among Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria; continued support for terrorists from an Iraqi regime enriched by rising oil prices; wars of aggression launched against neighboring countries in the Gulf; the torture and death of thousands more Iraqis suspected of opposing the regime; and a United Nations even more discredited than it is today, as its sanctions crumbled. Our failure to confront Iraq would have sent a message to other nations that neither America nor any other nation was willing to stand in the way of their support for terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

  President Bush made the decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein knowing there would be consequences that neither he nor anyone else could foresee. We had discussed many of the potential risks, but there are no methodologies or formulas that can substitute for judgment and intuition in dealing with the challenges of statecraft. There are always factors that turn out to be important, but were unanticipated. I have no doubt that given the facts that were available to President Bush in 2003, I would have made the same decision. Further, knowing what we later learned and recognizing the costs, there is not a persuasive argument to be made that the United States would be in a stronger strategic position or that Iraq and the Middle East would be better offif Saddam were still in power. In short, ridding the region of Saddam’s brutal regime has created a more stable and secure world.

  In 2010, Iraq had the twelfth fastest growing economy in the world.14 Though al-Qaida still has the ability to pull off spectacular attacks, it no longer finds sanctuary in any corner of that country. Over the c
oming years, with a moderate, representative government, Iraq has the potential to become a positive influence in the Middle East, a region that is sorely in need of good influences. It could become a valued long-term partner of the United States and a bulwark against Iran, a role that will prove critical if Tehran continues on its belligerent path toward a nuclear arsenal.

  Any optimistic prognosis for Iraq is quite a change from how things looked in 2006. But making policy and formulating strategy are not exact sciences in which outcomes are certain and measurable. Though it makes officials in both the executive and legislative branches of government uncomfortable, strategic thinking requires acknowledgment of the inevitability of considerable uncertainty.

  Postulating a world in which Saddam Hussein remained in power is of course a theoretical exercise. It involves numerous known unknowns and undoubtedly some unknown unknowns. The only known certainty is that those who made the decisions with imperfect knowledge will be judged in hindsight by those with considerably more information at their disposal and time for reflection. Indeed, my own analysis—and criticisms—in this book benefit from both.

  It is of note that during Bob McNamara’s confirmation hearing to become secretary of defense in 1961, not a single U.S. senator asked him a question about Vietnam. In Dick Cheney’s confirmation hearing in 1989, not a single U.S. senator asked him about Iraq. In my confirmation hearing in 2001, not a single U.S. senator asked me about Afghanistan. Yet in each case, the questions not asked dominated our tenures. The lesson is that we should learn to expect to be surprised. The limits of intelligence—of both human intellect and the products of our government’s intelligence agencies—are a reality that should make us all humble. We need to be confident but also intellectually flexible to alter course as required. Being prepared for the unknown and agile enough to respond to the unforeseen is the essence of strategy.