The same paper said, “Iraq’s history of foreign occupation, first the Ottomans then the British, has left Iraqis with a deep dislike of occupiers. An indefinite military occupation with ultimate power in the hands of a non-Iraqi officer would be widely unacceptable. Iraqi military officers who oppose Saddam find the idea of a Western power conquering and governing Iraq anathema and a motivation to fight with Saddam where they otherwise would not.”
In another paper we cautioned that the demobilization process would be full of pitfalls and suggested that “Baghdad’s immediate post-war security needs may require that demobilization be delayed until Iraq [is] ready to begin building the armed forces.”
We warned that, “Regardless of US postwar policy for Iraq, Iraqis would become alienated if not persuaded that their national and religious sensitivities, particularly their desire for self governance were part of the foundation for reconstruction. Iraqis would likely resort to obstruction, resistance and armed opposition if they perceive attempts to keep them dependent on the US and the West.”
A National Intelligence Council paper in January 2003 titled “Can Iraq Ever Become a Democracy?” said that “Iraqi political culture is so imbued with norms alien to the democratic experience…that it may resist the most vigorous and prolonged democratic treatments.”
In March 2003 we warned that “Iraqi patience with an extended US presence after an overwhelming victory would be short,” and said that “humanitarian conditions in many parts of Iraq could rapidly deteriorate in a matter of days, and many Iraqis would probably not understand that the Coalition wartime logistic pipeline would require time to reorient its mission to humanitarian aid.”
Our prewar analysis of postwar Iraq was prescient. The challenge for CIA analysts was not so much in predicting what the Iraqis would do. Where we ran into trouble was in our inability to foresee some of the actions of our own government. If you don’t know the game plan, it is tough to do good analysis. As a result, did we exactly predict everything that would unfold? No.
Bremer would later write that three days after the White House announced his appointment, and shortly before going to Baghdad, he met with Doug Feith in the Pentagon. Feith, he says, urged him to issue an order as soon as possible upon arriving in Iraq that would prevent former Ba’ath Party members from having a role in the new government. Bremer did just that, on May 16, just four days after landing in Iraq. That morning’s New York Times carried a hint of what was to come: “Shortly I will issue an order on measures to extirpate Baathists and Baathism in Iraq forever,” Bremer was quoted as saying. “We have and will aggressively move to seek to identify these people and remove them from office.”
Just a few weeks before the war started, senior U.S. officials were saying publicly that the conflict might be avoided if Saddam and a few dozen of his top henchmen simply left. This concept was never embedded in our war goals. Now, the war having been waged, the United States apparently was saying that thousands of officials around the country would be aggressively removed.
Bremer writes in his memoir that the intelligence community estimated that this order would affect only about 1 percent of the Iraqi population. That could be taken to imply that we supported the move and thought it was a good idea, but that was definitely not the case. In fact, we knew nothing about it until de-Ba’athification was a fait accompli. Clearly, this was a critical policy decision, yet there was no NSC Principals meeting to debate the move. As for the 1 percent number Bremer cites, he didn’t ask for that estimate until the day after he issued the order, and once he got it he ignored the twofold context: first, that many of those Ba’athists were technocrats of exactly the sort Iraq would soon need if it were to again resume responsibility for its governance, and, second, that every Ba’athist “extirpated” from Iraq, to use Bremer’s word, had brothers and sisters and aunts, uncles, and cousins with whom to share his anger.
Privately, in fact, the senior CIA officer in Iraq and others strongly advised against this step when they were finally informed of it, and they continued to argue after the decision was made. A senior NSC staffer told me that when he briefed the president on de-Ba’athification, the staffer talked about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation program. Just as South Africans had done, Iraqis themselves should determine who had too much blood on his or her hands to be permitted to take part in a new government. Bremer’s plan put the process in the hands of an Iraqi all right. Ahmed Chalabi was named to head the de-Ba’athification Council, and as a result the implementation of the order was even more draconian.
We soon began hearing stories about how Iraqis could not send their kids to school because all the teachers had been dismissed for being members of the Ba’ath Party. In the context of a country armed to the teeth, this was not a good thing. If the kids and teachers were not in school, they were on the streets. I went to see Condi Rice and complained that the indiscriminate nature of the de-Ba’athification order had swept away not just Saddam’s thugs but also, for example, something like forty thousand schoolteachers, who had joined the Ba’ath Party simply to keep their jobs. This order wasn’t protecting Iraqis; it was destroying what little institutional foundations were left in the country. The net effect was to persuade many ex-Ba’athists to join the insurgency. Condi said she was very frustrated by the situation, but nothing ever happened. Several months later, with a full-blown insurgency under way, an interagency group headed by Deputy National Security Advisor Bob Blackwill desperately looked for ways to reach out to dissident Sunni Arabs. We again raised the subject of rolling back the de-Ba’athification order. Doug Feith retorted that doing so would “undermine the entire moral justification for the war.”
Bremer’s de-Ba’athification order became known as CPA Proclamation Number One. As bad as that was, CPA Proclamation Number Two was worse. Again, without any formal discussion or debate back in Washington—at least any that included me or my top deputies—Bremer, on May 23, ordered the dissolution of the Iraqi army.
To be sure, elements of the Iraqi army, especially the Special Republican Guards (SRG) and the Special Security Organization (SSO), did have much blood on their hands. However, we viewed many Iraqi military officers as professionals, driven by national Iraqi values rather than loyalty to Saddam, who could form the core of a new Iraqi military, but the order struck a broad blow at the Sunnis, who comprise 20 percent of the national population and who occupied virtually all of the top ranks in the army. Granted, they were never going to be completely satisfied, short of having Iraq handed back to their control, but along with the de-Ba’athification order, this second order had effectively alienated one fifth of the population and much of the center of the country.
NSC officials were expecting Proclamation Number Two to include some language about how Iraqi military members below the rank of lieutenant colonel could apply for reinstatement. After all, the majority of army members were conscripts just trying to feed their families. CPA Proclamation Number Two appeared to be punishing them—and even the Shia who made up the bottom rung of the military—equally with those who had ruled the roost. When the pronouncement was issued, however, that provision was not mentioned. So, as far as the rank-and-file members were concerned, Bremer had just announced that they were all unemployed.
Jay Garner, who was still in Iraq at the time, went to see Bremer along with our senior CIA officer in the country. They both told him that the demobilization order was madness. Garner had been counting on using some of the former Iraqi military for stabilization and security. Our officer told Bremer that the action would only “give oxygen to the rejectionists.”
The argument from some supporters of CPA Proclamation Two was that the army had essentially dissolved itself anyway, so what was the big deal? Our officer on the ground at the time, however, estimated that the majority of the army could have been recalled within a two-week period and put to useful work.
Bremer was unmoved. He reportedly told Garner that he could raise the issue wi
th the secretary of defense if he wanted to, but that this was a done deal and a decision made at a level “above Rumsfeld’s pay grade.”
Whoever had made the decision, the reaction from former Iraqi army members was swift. A New York Times report on a May 25 demonstration in Basra by dismissed Iraqi soldiers quoted one former Iraqi tank driver as saying, “The U.S. planes dropped the papers telling us to stay in our homes…They said our families would be fine,” he said. More ominously, a lieutenant colonel told the reporter, “We have guns at home. If they don’t pay us, if they make our children suffer, they’ll hear from us.”
Eventually some army members were paid and allowed to apply to rejoin the new Iraqi army, but all officers with ranks of lieutenant colonel and above were permanently banned—despite the fact that, like many non-Western armies, Iraq had a disproportionate number of army members with high ranks. A typical Iraqi lieutenant colonel did not have the same level of authority or influence wielded by his U.S. Army counterpart.
At meetings in the White House and in Baghdad after the two proclamations were issued, we argued that the orders were having unintended negative consequences. The actions had taken large numbers of common Iraqis and given them few prospects beyond being paupers, criminals, or insurgents. One of our senior officers tallied the numbers, including affected family members and the like, and came up with a pool of a hundred thousand Iraqis who had been driven toward the brink by the de-Ba’athification order alone. In the end, too many of them chose insurgency.
For some officials in the Pentagon, the accelerating violence simply proved the wisdom of excluding these Ba’athists and ex–army members from the future of Iraq. As late as the spring of 2004, at a meeting in the White House, one of our officers was asked for “out-of-the-box” ideas to stem the violence. He suggested rescinding CPA Proclamation Two and mounting an aggressive campaign to round up former army members and enlist them to help secure Iraq’s borders and maintain internal security. As later described to me, a U.S. Army colonel present, who had been DIA’s liaison to Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, said, “I agree. We should round them all up and shoot them.”
The moves the U.S. government was making were driving a wedge between the various factions in Iraq. Charles Duelfer was told by an Iraqi friend that, in the past, Iraqis were not accustomed to thinking of themselves primarily as Shia or Sunni. But the way we implemented democracy had led people to believe that they deserved a piece of the pie based on their membership in a certain group. So the whole dynamic was to pull away from the center. The decisions we made tended to fracture Iraq, not to bring it together.
On one of his trips to Iraq, Wolfowitz told our senior man there, “You don’t understand the policy of the U.S. government, and if you don’t understand the policy, you are hardly in a position to collect the intelligence to help that policy succeed.” It was an arrogant statement that masked a larger reality. In many cases we were not aware of what our own government was trying to do. The one thing we were certain of was that our warnings were falling on deaf ears.
In the midst of all this, we started pushing for the establishment of a new Iraqi intelligence service. Any government intent on protecting people needs an organization to acquire information regarding internal security and external threats. That much seems obvious, but we ran into strong and immediate resistance to our suggestions on building such a service.
John McLaughlin tried to get authorization through the Deputies Committee to help set up such a capability, only to be thwarted. In all the years that I have known John, I don’t think I have ever seen him more exasperated. “The only country in the world where the U.S. intelligence community doesn’t have a counterpart is Iraq,” he remembers saying at one of the deputies meetings. “The best way to get a handle on who is causing the violence in Iraq is to have Iraqis figure it out.” That message, too, never seemed to get heard.
On another occasion, Steve Kappes, the then second-ranking operations officer at CIA, was pushing the same theme at a meeting where Condi Rice was present. “How do I know you guys aren’t going to create another KGB?” Condi asked. “We didn’t create the first one,” Steve reminded her. Condi’s comment was emblematic of the mind-set we were up against. Policy makers didn’t seem to want us dealing with anyone who wasn’t “politically acceptable” to them on some firm but unannounced scale. Our point was that Americans were dying, jihadists were running all over the country, and it was time to figure out how to vet Iraqis who had the capabilities to do something about it.
We’d been through this before. When the Soviet Union fell and the West inherited Eastern Europe, we set about building intelligence services there out of what was already on hand to work with. Was there a high probability that Soviet agents still peopled those services? Sure. Is there a high probability that over the course of time, they’ll be weeded out? Sure, again. The point was, you have to take some risk if you want to make the government work.
After many months lost, months during which insurgents and dissidents gained a valuable foothold, we began the process of setting up an Iraqi intelligence service.
Gen. Mohammed Shawani, the hero of the Iran-Iraq war, was finally selected to head it up and build a service drawn from across the country’s ethnic, religious, and tribal groupings. He spoke frankly to the Bush administration in the months after the liberation of Iraq, highlighting his concerns to the president and vice president about the developing insurgency. He was the first senior Iraqi official to identify and speak of Iran’s hand in destabilizing his country. (He continued to serve as the director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service as of early 2007, although Iran and elements of the Iraqi Shia groupings were working to have him removed because of his anti-Iranian stance.) It may be fair to say that our analysis before the war never precisely predicted the dire circumstances that would unfold on the ground in Iraq after the initiation of hostilities. What is absolutely clear, however, is that the intelligence generated by our officers on the ground after the war told the story, and the reasons for a deteriorating situation, with great clarity.
How does an insurgency grow in a place like Iraq? It happens when you are late securing your lines. Or when you create a vacuum to be filled by opportunists like al-Qa’ida. It occurs, in essence, when you disenfranchise many of those most able to help you. Also when you refuse to avail yourself of indigenous resources that could provide you with intelligence on insurgent activity. And, finally, when you blind yourself to the evidence that is steadily mounting in front of your eyes.
As the situation turned for the worse, the senior CIA officer on the scene would send in field appraisals. These cables are known internally as “Aardwolves.” (The Agency has called such assessments this for many years—although the origin of the name is obscure. One theory is that in the early days of CIA, someone opened his dictionary to page one, looking for an apt code word, and “Aardwolf” just leapt out.) The common thread running through all the Aardwolves during this period was the threat of the rising insurgency.
On July 8, 2003, a report from CIA’s senior officer in Baghdad noted that while normalcy seemed to be gradually returning for “average Iraqis,” security for Coalition forces was crumbling. “Among the factors contributing to hostility toward allied forces is a general sense of disappointment at the slow progress in rebuilding Iraq and producing tangible evidence that life will be better…than it was under the former regime.” The report went on to mention the demoralizing effect of widespread looting in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall, the rise of opportunistic terrorist groups, and the lack of an “effective internal security service.”
The report also stated, “In the current environment of confusion, uncertainty and dissatisfaction, the risk exists for violence to quickly become acceptable and justified in the minds of broader sectors of the population.”
Six weeks later, on August 20, another Aardwolf noted that “the insurgency is the most pressing security issue the CPA faces in Ir
aq today…. Success against the insurgents and terrorists requires an immediate and enhanced effort on the part of the coalition. The liberation of Iraq has sparked a revolution among the Shia community. This revolution…will only begin to gather momentum. We will face violence and instability in the Shia heartland as soon as this sorts itself out.”
To this assessment, Bremer added his own comment that read in part: “It is not clear to me that at its current level, or even if it picks up, this low intensity conflict could erase our gains. The insurgency could certainly challenge parts of the reconstruction program, and it has. But on balance, reconstruction has gone forward…even in the face of this low level conflict.” Some journalists have written that we hesitated to pass our negative reports up the line for fear they would spark an unpleasant reaction. This is absolute nonsense. They all went straight to the top policy makers. We held nothing back. Reports from the field during my tenure were remarkably prescient, and some were leaked to the media at warp speed by various recipients.
The fact that these often gloomy assessments found their way to the press led some in the administration to believe that CIA was trying to undermine the administration’s efforts in Iraq. That was not the case. Although Aardwolves were originally very closely held documents, in recent years they have gotten a much wider dissemination. Typically, they are now read at senior levels in the departments of Defense and State, and at the NSC. I have no idea where the leaks came from, but I have no reason to believe that they originated within CIA.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 45