No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  I was attending a dedication of a library in Kansas for former Senator Robert Dole when Steve called the press together and methodically walked them through what happened. It was a searing experience for him—he the most honest of public servants.

  Steve’s “admission” did not, of course, stem the tide. The press wanted an admission from me. Anna had been right that I had created a perception of dodging responsibility. I called the late Tim Russert of NBC News, whose counsel I valued. “What do I need to do?” I asked him off the record. “The American people can always forgive,” he said, “but they want to know that you feel remorse for what happened.”

  On July 30 I appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer with Gwen Ifill. I knew that Gwen would be tough but fair and, most important, credible. I stated clearly that I felt personally responsible for the whole flap. Earlier that day in a press conference the President had been asked whether he wanted me to resign. He gave me his strongest possible endorsement, but it really cut to hear the President have to give one of those “I have full confidence in …” statements that only demonstrate the depths of an official’s troubles. I remember that evening receiving a phone call from a member of Congress who purported to be my friend. We were supposed to have dinner in a few days. “It wouldn’t be good for us to be seen together,” this person said. “I have to maintain my objectivity.” Washington is a lonely place when the wolves turn on you.

  Eventually my personal trials would abate, but the problems for the administration were just beginning. The weapons hunt continued, but no stockpiles were found. David Kay, the chief inspector, came to the White House and met with the President on July 27. Kay told the President that it was likely that Saddam had a latent capability that he could have mobilized when the pressure from the international community lessened. There was still an infrastructure: scientists, laboratories, and front companies. Too, the air assault on Iraq’s WMD in 1998 had been more successful than we had known, and serious damage had been done to Saddam’s capabilities at the time.

  After closed-door briefings to select Senate committees four days later, Kay publicly cautioned that the hunt for WMD was “going to take time” but that his team was making “solid progress” and that every day he was “surprised by new advances.” To the critics on Capitol Hill who were anxious to find weapons, he said, “The Iraqis had over two decades to develop these weapons. And hiding them was an essential part of their program. So it’s not an easy task, and we’re not close to a final conclusion yet.” But by the beginning of the next year, Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “We were almost all wrong.” In saying so he would become one of the administration’s harshest critics.

  I’ve replayed all of this over and over through the years. What could we have done differently? Where did I fail? Clearly, we had allowed the argument concerning WMD to get disconnected from the broader strategic case against Saddam. I should never have sanctioned the use of bits of intelligence, particularly by the President. The intelligence agencies were indeed wrong about the extent of the WMD threat from Saddam but not in saying that there was evidence of a threat. There were competing views in the intelligence community, but the Agency thought that he’d reconstituted his biological and chemical weapons capability and all but the State Department thought that he was doing so on the nuclear side. That assessment was shared by several foreign intelligence agencies too. I bristled as I listened to congressional critics accuse us of inflating the threat while forgetting their own prior statements of the impending doom posed by Saddam’s WMD.

  Ultimately the fallout took a toll on all of us. Colin has described the presentation at the United Nations on February 5 as a stain on his career. I am sorry that he feels that way, and it pains me to know that that is the moment that is often called up in reviewing the long and stellar record of service of this American hero and my friend. But Colin didn’t seek to deceive anyone. None of us did. In retrospect, I wish I’d said over and over again that intelligence always carries uncertainties; that is the nature of the beast.

  After 9/11, Saddam in possession of WMD in the world’s most volatile region was a terrifying prospect; the Middle East would be a less frightening place without him. I still believe that the latter is true. I have many regrets about the run-up to the war, but I’m not sorry that we overthrew Saddam. And I’m grateful that today’s concern is not an impending nuclear arms race between Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

  “The UN Headquarters Has Been Bombed!”

  THE INTELLIGENCE FAILURE was unfolding simultaneously with the worsening security situation on the ground. Throughout the spring and early summer, the insurgency seemed to be gaining steam, and harrowing incidents were becoming commonplace. Tommy Franks stepped down in May 2003. I thought the world of Franks, but Don told several of us that the general was tired and wanted to retire. General John Abizaid was nominated to replace Franks on June 18 and assumed command July 7. I cannot be sure that the turnover in leadership mattered in the final analysis, but I remember thinking at the time that it was bizarre to change command in the middle of a war. Ricardo Sanchez, then a two-star general, was quickly promoted to lieutenant general to serve as the top commander in Iraq. Nonetheless, his staff lacked sufficient and experienced personnel to carry out the increasingly complex mission in Iraq during the early months of his command. John Abizaid would prove to be an exceptionally able commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM), but the continuous shifting of military leadership in the field still strikes me as having been the wrong approach.

  The CPA was also experiencing difficulty. Insurgents had begun to attack its incipient reconstruction projects, and Jerry Bremer was clearly struggling to reconcile the existing power structures and institutions with the political demands of the new Iraq. One of the first steps he’d taken was to issue CPA orders that removed full members of the Baath Party from government posts and, more consequentially, dissolved the Iraq army, air force, navy, and other regular military services.

  There has been a good deal of retrospective examination of whether the order to disband the Iraqi army was adequately reviewed by and coordinated with Washington. A postmortem conducted by the late Peter Rodman, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, shows that the Pentagon was aware of Jerry’s intentions to issue an order dissolving Iraqi security organizations, including the army, as a part of the de-Baathification effort. Don received a memorandum to this effect on May 19, but he did not bring it to my attention or that of the President. Jerry has said that he raised the issue at the NSC on May 22. Several participants remember that it was brought up only in general terms during a discussion of de-Baathification. It was certainly not a request for permission to issue the order.

  By that point the army had largely melted away, and there was little left of a formal structure. But surely the decision to dissolve it explicitly ran counter to the earlier plans to retain as many as three to five divisions to form the nucleus of a new Iraqi army. We all knew that it was one of the pillars of Iraqi society and a source of pride. There were concerns, which I shared, that it was rife with Baathists and needed to be reformed. But I was surprised when I read in the newspaper on May 24 that the Iraqi military had been dissolved by order of the U.S. envoy.

  I resolved at that moment to get a better handle on what was going on in Baghdad. The President had made clear that he wanted Jerry to have flexibility in dealing with conditions on the ground. But something was wrong when a decision of that magnitude could be made without Washington’s full and considered deliberation.

  Moreover, by June there were almost daily protests outside the CPA headquarters calling for elections to form a national government. The strong U.S. hand was already wearing on the population’s nationalistic pride, and in response Jerry approved the formation of a twenty-five-member Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). Making clear that the Council was advisory, we hoped that it would begin to give the Iraqis more of
a say in the development of their country. But it was a delicate balancing act because the IGC was a raucously divided group reflecting the political fissures of the country. The leaders decided to rotate the presidency of the IGC every month, adding to the chaos. More than a few times, Jerry had trouble even getting the Council to meet since some of its members greatly enjoyed traveling the world’s capitals on behalf of the new Iraq.

  Then, on August 20, the situation on the ground took a stunning turn for the worse. We’d long overcome our aversion to a UN role in Iraq. The President had come to the conclusion that Colin was right: we needed a substantial UN presence to help legitimize the steps we were taking toward the establishment of postwar order in Iraq.

  I cannot say enough about the help that we received from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in this regard. Though he was clearly opposed to the war, he moved more quickly than I could have imagined to forge a good relationship between the United Nations and the United States concerning Iraq. He sought and received the UN Security Council’s authorization for the appointment of a special representative of the secretary-general to carry out the difficult mission in Iraq. He chose a remarkable man, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian with long experience in conflict resolution. When Vieira de Mello at first refused the assignment, Kofi asked me to meet with him. We met in my office on March 5, and then I walked with him down the hall to the Oval Office to see the President. He returned to New York and agreed to take the job. That afternoon, Colin and I talked about the big leap forward that we had just achieved. Vieira de Mello would be a steady hand and bring international legitimacy as we pushed forward the transition to a new Iraqi government.

  I’D DECIDED to take a short vacation in August at the Greenbrier in West Virginia. The lovely resort had become my quiet getaway every summer because it was a short drive home if I was needed in Washington. Colin and I once joked that a vacation spot is where you go to pay a lot of money, look out at the beautiful scenery, and take phone calls from the White House. But despite that, I still felt refreshed whenever I returned home from White Sulphur Springs.

  On my last vacation day, I was playing tennis with a pro, Terry Deremer, and Missy Weiss, a woman who also vacationed at the Greenbrier every year. Missy had played number one for Ohio State and had been on tour. I was no match for her on the court but loved to rally with her. Once in a while I even won a point or two.

  Literally midserve, one of my security agents sprinted onto the court. The Situation Room was on the phone. I yelled apologies while running toward the waiting cell phone and soon learned that the UN headquarters in Baghdad had been bombed. Initial reports indicated that there were many casualties, and the fate of Vieira de Mello was unknown. I rushed back to my room and packed, telling my aunt, cousin, and friends who were accompanying me that we were heading back to Washington immediately. A few minutes later I got a reassuring update concerning Vieira de Mello, who’d reportedly spoken with Kofi on the phone after the bombing. But by the time we drove away and onto Interstate 81, I got word that Vieira de Mello had perished along with twenty-one other people, including UN workers. I was devastated and felt personally responsible for having talked him into taking the job.

  My friends and family were talking in the back of the van. “I can’t hear,” I said somewhat rudely as I listened to an update from the Situation Room. The chatter ceased. We drove home in silence, interrupted only by reports from the White House and a call from the President, whom I assured that I was headed home.

  THE SITUATION would spiral downward after that terrible August attack. Coalition forces couldn’t get a handle on the insurgency, which was gaining strength almost daily. The political situation wasn’t stabilizing either, as Iraqis were becoming more insistent about retaking control of their country. We started to hear the word “occupiers” with greater frequency. I did not expect, as the Vice President and others naively suggested, that the Iraqis would joyfully greet us as liberators. I reckoned that the only place where soldiers had flowers thrown at their feet was in old movies about World War II. The Iraqi people are gritty and tough and have a reputation for being fiercely independent. “I know you want to bring democracy to the Middle East,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had told Steve Hadley. “But why did you start with the Iraqis? They are the worst.”

  But I didn’t expect the United States to be thought of as an occupier, either. We’d gone to great lengths to avoid having a heavy military footprint in the country. A larger force would have given us much-needed manpower to deal with multiple contingencies—but there was also a downside to a big foreign presence.

  At the time Tommy Franks sent a draft of his initial address to the Iraqi people to us for review, I remember turning to Anna Perez. “This sounds like a Roman emperor,” I told her. We modified the address to make it sound friendlier. The British had no such qualms. They knew that for all intents and purposes we were occupying the country and constantly said so. It turned out that the Iraqis, even those who supported us, thought so too.

  Obviously, we had to help the Iraqis find a path to sovereignty. Jerry understood this very well and proposed a road map that he published in the Washington Post on September 8, 2003. The problem was that he did so without fully consulting Washington. The seven-point plan he presented in the paper’s op-ed pages touched off a firestorm in Iraq and consternation in the White House and State Department. Jerry had suggested that a new constitution be written through a process organized by the Iraqi Governing Council, with elections to follow. That drew a rebuke from perhaps the most powerful man in Iraq, the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who objected to the sequence Jerry had outlined. Sistani believed that Iraq’s new constitution had to be written by representatives elected by the Iraqi people, not through a process devised by an organization that emanated from the CPA.

  The seventy-something Sistani was among the most revered clerics in the Shia faith. He’d been kept under house arrest during Saddam’s reign but was now free to speak to his following. Sistani turned out to be a remarkable man. Insisting on “quietism” for clerics, he believed that religious men should eschew formal roles in politics. That, of course, stood in stark contrast to the ruling ayatollahs in Iran. When Sistani, sitting in Najaf, the holiest of Shia cities, was prohibited from speaking publicly, the Iranian mullahs in Qom had become the voice of the Shia people. But among the Arabs of Iraq, the Persian Iranians had long been viewed with suspicion, even hatred. And Najaf, not Qom, was the religious heart of the Shia sect, a kind of Vatican for that part of the Islamic faith.

  So when Sistani spoke, it mattered. Ironically, he would not meet with nonmembers of the faith, particularly foreigners, so we had no direct contact with him. His son acted as a conduit for his views, which we came to regard as crucial to progress in Iraq. Yet this mysterious man always seemed to be on the right side of the issues; he was a voice for democracy and for the separation of religion from matters of the state. In private we called him Iraq’s Benjamin Franklin—a wise man who never held or wished to hold elected office.

  Within days it was clear that the road map that Jerry had outlined was untenable. The NSC met to consider the next steps, and there was a lot of talk around the table about whether Sistani was right about the sequence. The President cut through the debate. “How did I get on the wrong side of a demand for elections?” he asked. That shut everyone up, and we resolved to find a new path that would give the Iraqis a chance to elect the leaders who would draft their constitution.

  INCIDENTS LIKE THOSE convinced me that we had to have better connectivity between Jerry and Washington. Colin and I had talked to Don about the problem of pronouncements popping out of Baghdad without due consideration in the NSC. I learned through Frank Miller that Jerry felt disconnected too, having only intermittent contact with Don. Jerry recruited Reuben Jeffery, a highly capable man who’d been a managing partner of Goldman Sachs, to run a Washington office for him and facilitate better contact with the Pentagon. But we just kept gettin
g surprised by decisions—some small but some very large indeed.

  I went to the President in late September and told him that I wanted to form a new steering group to bridge the divide between the CPA and Washington. He agreed. I drafted a memo, which I shared with Colin and Don, establishing the Iraq Stabilization Group (ISG). Robert Blackwill, with whom I had previously served in government, would lead the effort. Bob had just returned from a stint as ambassador to India, but it was his black belt in bureaucratic politics that made him the right person for the job. He was like a bull in a china shop, and I knew that there would be tensions with others. I could tolerate the turbulence, though, because Bob would make sure that the NSC had a voice.

  A few days after the memo to Don and Colin, Anna called to say that David Sanger of the New York Times had caught wind of the formation of the group. She thought that we should give him the story so that it would be accurate. I know, too, that Anna thought it would make me look good—in control of what was a deteriorating situation in Iraq.

  The story that emerged caused a sensation. My effort to explain that the Pentagon retained direct supervision and responsibility for the CPA was swept away by the perception that I’d shoved Don aside and taken operational control of the civilian effort in Iraq. The problem was exacerbated by the Defense Department, which conveyed the impression that Don had been caught off guard by the group’s creation. This happened despite the fact that Larry Di Rita, Don’s spokesman, had agreed to talk to Sanger so that it would be clear that we were all on the same page. I had talked to Larry personally about this issue.