No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  13

  CONFRONTING THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY WITH A CHOICE

  AS WE PREPARED the President’s speech to the United Nations, we were mindful of two requirements. The first was that the President wanted to remind his audience of the dangers of Saddam’s regime and of its long history of defying international opinion. The language of the speech was thus appropriately uncompromising and tough but broke no new ground.

  The second purpose of the speech was to put the world on notice that the United States would act—alone if necessary—to deal with the threat. “We will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions,” the President said before the General Assembly. “But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced—the just demands of peace and security will be met—or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.”

  We had to be aware of the need to address various audiences. This is an enduring problem for policy makers; a message meant to rally and reassure allies that you will be firm but prudent has to simultaneously strike fear into your adversary. The same words need to be heard differently by different listeners. It isn’t an easy balance to find.

  Sitting in the UN chamber, Colin and I realized about halfway through the President’s speech that there had been an editing error. The President was supposed to call for a new resolution; that had been the whole debate inside the administration. Somehow it had been left out. How could we get word to him on the podium? Fortunately, we didn’t have to. The President had been deeply involved in the debate about the resolution. He immediately noticed the omission and ad-libbed a line that put the fate of Saddam into the hands of the UN Security Council.

  A week before the UN speech, the President sought authorization from Congress for military action against Saddam. There had been a spirited debate inside the White House as to whether it was wise to go to the United Nations first or to Congress. The President decided that our hand would be strengthened with the international community and with Saddam if Congress had already approved the use of military force. That was very much in line with his belief that Saddam would finally comply with his obligations only if he believed that this time he had no choice.

  Coercive diplomacy requires the simultaneous conduct of military preparations and diplomatic engagement, and the success of the latter is dependent on the intensity of the former. But the required choreography is complex and rife with contradictions. The mobilization of the military has a certain rhythm and inexorable movement forward, and it cannot be sustained indefinitely. On the other hand, the pace of diplomacy is uncertain and erratic, and it is rarely clear whether or not the desired breakthrough is going to be achieved.

  Colin launched the negotiations for a new United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) almost immediately after the address to the General Assembly. Within days Resolution 1441 was predictably bogged down in haggling over its exact wording. There were arguments over who would carry out the inspections, what the inspectors would be allowed to challenge, how often there would be reports to the Security Council, and so on. Not surprisingly, the biggest bone of contention was what was meant when Saddam was threatened with “serious consequences,” a phrase that is often understood to mean the use of force if necessary if he failed to comply. The United States and Great Britain wanted to make the resolution the only necessary step before action could be taken. The French and the Russians insisted on language that left open the need for a second resolution.

  It took more than six weeks to resolve those issues, but when the resolution finally passed it did so unanimously. That was a triumph for U.S. diplomacy, for John Negroponte, our ambassador to the United Nations, and for Colin Powell. I felt good about it too because I’d run interference for State in the process, taking up practically every controversy directly with the President rather than allowing continued haggling among the various agencies. I know that caused some unhappiness in Defense and within the Office of the Vice President, but the process was taking long enough at the United Nations; we didn’t need to slow it down with divisions within our own ranks.

  Once the resolution was passed, events moved rather quickly—at least by UN standards. Iraq was given one month, until December 7, 2002, to make a full and accurate declaration of the state of its weapons programs and to receive international weapons inspectors to begin the process of verifying the declaration’s claims.

  The truth is, though, the clock was ticking. We were trying to do three things simultaneously: assess the progress of the weapons inspectors; refine military plans and begin the mobilization of our forces to pressure Saddam; and plan for a postwar, post-Saddam Iraq should diplomacy fail.

  The job of monitoring the progress of the inspections fell largely to me. I established a relationship with both Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat who oversaw the effort, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who had responsibility for the nuclear component of the inspections regime. The Pentagon and the White House regarded both men with deep suspicion. I therefore took responsibility for reassuring the President that Saddam was not being allowed to cut corners.

  I was pleasantly surprised to find Blix to be honest and pretty tough. He would later, like many others, become a critic of the war and claim that we hadn’t given him enough time to complete his inspections. But in our two key conversations, at the United Nations in January and in Washington in February, he was extremely skeptical of Saddam’s veracity. His report to the UNSC on January 27 was telling: “Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.” The second report, on February 14, was more ambiguous. I know that he’d received significant criticism from the Europeans, who believed that his first presentation had given the United States a pretext for war.

  ElBaradei and I established a reasonably good relationship as well. He told me that he did not believe that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear program. I reported this to the President, but the fact that the IAEA had been wrong in 1991 made it difficult to accept the assessment at face value.

  By the beginning of 2003 I was convinced that we would have to use military force. Saddam seemed to be playing games with the inspectors, refusing interviews with his scientists or sending “minders” along with them for their meetings with the inspectors. That was what passed for cooperation, and it seemed to be producing minimal information. Nonetheless, UN inspectors did, despite the limitations, gather evidence that Iraqi officials were moving various items and hiding them at suspect sites prior to inspection visits. The Iraqi dictator seemed to be up to his old tricks.

  I frankly couldn’t understand it. Maybe he just didn’t believe us. In 1990 he had underestimated the world’s reaction and invaded Kuwait. I was in the White House when Operation Desert Storm was launched in 1991 and helped manage the run-up to the invasion. It had been remarkable to watch Saddam, with U.S. and coalition forces sitting on his doorstep, refuse to withdraw from Kuwait despite the warnings from his friends, including the Russians, who told him that his days were numbered. In 1991 he had been either stubborn or delusional, and it seemed to me that he had not changed.

  Still, the question of how to get Saddam out short of war was constantly on my mind and the President’s. We reached out to Arab leaders, asking them to tell him that we would indeed overthrow him if he didn’t comply. The Egyptians claimed at one point that Saddam’s son had sent a message: Saddam would leave in exchange for one billion dollars. The President sent word that we would gladly pay. Nothing came of it. Frankly, I’m not sure it would have been a good idea to pay the dictator to leave. What kind of precedent would that have set? But sometimes you face unpalatable choices. That was not the first time the international community had faced the tension between bringing a murderous tyrant t
o justice and offering him exile to avoid violence and war. In this case, the President was prepared to opt for the latter.

  A few weeks before the President’s UN speech, I was visited by Charles Boyd, a retired air force general who had previously been in the employment of the Council on Foreign Relations. He had a novel idea: perhaps the United Nations could authorize armed inspections of Iraq, giving them more credibility with Saddam’s henchmen. The very sight of the humiliation of the Iraqi dictator might also lead someone, maybe even the army, to overthrow him. The President was attracted to the idea, and so was I. But we could never figure out how to make it work. What would armed inspectors do, shoot their way into restricted sites? What if Saddam’s guards fired back? Moreover, it is hard to imagine the Russians and French agreeing to what they would have undoubtedly seen as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. The idea didn’t get to first base with the NSC Principals either. When I raised it at a Camp David meeting a few weeks before the war, Colin, Don, and the Vice President were united in their disdain for the concept.

  The fact is, we invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options. The sanctions were not working, the inspections were unsatisfactory, and we could not get Saddam to leave by other means. The President did not want to go to war. We had come to the conclusion that it was time to deal with Saddam and believed that the world would be better off with the dictator out of power. We thought that there was a small chance that Saddam without his WMD, disarmed before the world, might not last long. He ruled through fear and cunning. Stripped of that he couldn’t survive, and if UN action could achieve that result, all the better. His ouster would give us time, having dealt with the WMD threat, to advocate for further steps such as a transition to elections.

  Moreover, we did not go to Iraq to bring democracy any more than Roosevelt went to war against Hitler to democratize Germany, though that became American policy once the Nazis were defeated. We went to war because we saw a threat to our national security and that of our allies. But if we did have to overthrow Saddam, the United States had to have a view of what would come next. When the NSC had that discussion, some members, including Don, argued that we had no such obligation. If a strongman emerged, so be it. But the President believed that the use of U.S. military power had to be followed by an affirmation of the United States’ principles. If war occurred, we would try to build a democratic Iraq. And democracy in the Arab heartland would in turn help democratize the Middle East and address the freedom gap that was the source of hopelessness and terrorism.

  Preparing for War

  AS THE INSPECTIONS dragged on, the military component of the strategy was gaining momentum. To carry out Tommy Franks’s plan, Don was putting the lead elements of an invasion into place—moving equipment and supplies to forward bases, for example. Military forces also had to be mobilized and troops called up. That is usually done in neat packages, with the troops and their equipment moving together. But Don, sensitive to the President’s concern that the military preparations not outstrip the pace of diplomacy, deliberately delinked those elements and tried to slow everything down. That was frustrating to the uniformed military but was one of the requirements of coercive diplomacy.

  The NSC Principals reviewed the military plan at least once a week during the run-up to the war. Several questions arose in the discussions. We were worried about Saddam’s potential use of WMD against our troops or, again, against his own people. That led the coalition to take extraordinary measures, including the deployment of specialized chemical warfare teams from the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The Warsaw Pact had been better prepared against battlefield WMD than had NATO, a fact about which I had written as a young East Europeanist. There were always debates about the reason for that, some suggesting that it was because the Soviet military intended to initiate the use of their vastly larger store of the nasty weapons. Whatever the explanation, we had inherited the superior capabilities to protect against WMD when the former Warsaw Pact states had joined NATO. Now those assets would be very useful.

  We were also concerned that Saddam and his forces might just withdraw to Baghdad (we called this the “Fortress Baghdad scenario”), leaving us to launch a bloody assault on a heavily civilian area. Don raised and we discussed the possibility of retribution killings and ethnic violence as the Shia turned on the Sunnis, who despite their minority status had held the power and most of the wealth of the country. That was one reason we hoped to bring along a multiethnic interim authority as quickly as possible.

  But I was most concerned about what seemed to be the Pentagon’s insufficient attention to two issues: first, plans for the North and the volatile Turkish/Kurdish mix, and second, the requirements of what we called “rear-area security.” Who would be responsible for maintaining order as coalition forces pushed through against Saddam’s military forces?

  I was able to get the first of these issues addressed by going to the President with my concerns. We were having all kinds of problems with the Turks, who had initially agreed to let our forces transit through their territory but eventually refused to do so. That meant we had no northern entry into the country. After one of the briefings in the Situation Room, I followed the President into the Oval. I sat on the sofa to the right of the wing chair in which the President sat. The Vice President was on the other side. George Tenet was present too. “Mr. President,” I said, “you don’t have a northern strategy, and the Pentagon owes you one.” The Vice President immediately objected, letting it be known that the President should trust Don and the generals to do the military planning. I held my ground, though, and the President raised the issue with Don in his next meeting.

  The plan wasn’t perfect by any means. Franks concluded that he could send the 4th Infantry Division through Kuwait if necessary but would, at the outset of the war, leave them on their transit ships in the north. That would give us a contingency force if there was trouble on the Turkish-Kurdish border or if Saddam’s forces tried to turn north. Because the Turkish government ultimately denied us permission to pass the 4th Infantry Division through its territory, around one thousand paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade dropped into the North.

  On the issue of rear-area security, though, I failed to get a workable plan for the President. That turned out to be a big problem in the days immediately following Saddam’s overthrow. As our forces pushed through, chaos ensued behind them. Neither we nor the British had enough troops to keep order.

  My several attempts to get the Pentagon to address the rear-area security issue seriously always led to uninformative slides and a rather dismissive handling of the question. When I finally arranged a briefing on the issue before the President in early February, he started the meeting in a way that completely destroyed any chance of getting an answer. “This is something Condi has wanted to talk about,” he said. I could immediately see that the generals no longer thought it to be a serious question. That is the weakness of the national security advisor’s position: Authority comes from the President. If he wasn’t interested in this issue, why should they care?

  Steve Hadley followed me to my office after the disastrous meeting. “I would have resigned after that comment by the President,” he said.

  “No,” I replied. “I’ll talk to the President, but we’ll just have to keep hammering away at the issue.” We did, knowing that the President would eventually share our concern and want the matter dealt with. He started to ask the question about rear-area security himself. The Pentagon briefed him several more times, but it always resulted in the same answer: “We’ve got this covered.” Maybe Defense thought it did. But this was an early indication that the military’s Phase IV (postinvasion) plans were lacking. As the importance of the issue was revealed in the days after the war, I wondered if Steve had been right.

  After Saddam

  ON THE OTHER HAND, I felt confident about our postwar planning on the civilian side. There were several contingencies that we just didn’t anticipate
. But the idea that we did not take the postwar situation seriously is patently false. We examined war termination procedures, humanitarian issues, and reconstruction and political arrangements, producing hundreds of documents and almost as many meetings to review them.

  Elliott Abrams of the NSC staff was charged with developing a plan for humanitarian relief with a careful ministry-by-ministry assessment of Iraq’s capabilities to deliver goods to the population. The group was concerned that there could be up to two million displaced Iraqis, and plans were made to engage UN agencies to handle the load.

  In August I asked Frank Miller, the senior director for defense programs, to coordinate postwar planning efforts across the government. Frank was an experienced and respected civilian who had served in the Pentagon for twenty-two years. I had first gotten to know him in 1986, when he was working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and I was serving on the Joint Staff. Careful and earnest, he was a stickler for details and had a network of contacts and sources within the Pentagon.

  That was crucial because responsibility for the execution of Phase IV would come to rest within the Defense Department. The decision to give unambiguous authority to the Defense Department would turn out to be one of the most consequential that the President and his advisors took—and it was not particularly controversial within the administration at the time.

  The President wanted the United States to take the lead in the aftermath of the war. We considered two other options. The first was to let the United Nations and its various agencies lead the effort. But the President had been to Kosovo in 2001 and been appalled by the lethargic UN presence more than two years after the war had ended. The head of the mission, who frankly couldn’t have looked more disinterested in the discussion, had told us that the economy was starting to perform but unemployment was still rampant at more than 55 percent. On the flight back the President had opined that Kosovo seemed to be where European governments sent their washed-up diplomats rather than their best and brightest. I couldn’t disagree.