Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  Afterward, the American U.N. ambassador, John D. Negroponte, came by. Lots of luck, he told Garner, and left. He looks a hell of a lot more rested than Greenstock, Garner thought. Negroponte did not have to spend time paying homage to the U.N.

  The next day, March 4, Doug Feith gave a secret briefing to the president and the NSC, including a PowerPoint presentation on U.S. and Coalition Objectives for an Iraq war. It was rosy, pie-in-the-sky political science—everything from visibly improving quality of life for Iraqis to moving toward democracy and obtaining international participation in the reconstruction. It was a wish list of high hopes with no how-to.

  Garner had not known anything about Feith's meeting with the president. A day later, March 5, he updated Rice in her West Wing office, a cozy, high-ceiling room decorated in blue with an impressively thick door. The office had been the national security adviser's for decades.

  Garner revealed that he had gone to the United Nations on Monday, had asked for a liaison officer and been turned down.

  Rice sat in silence.

  They're not seeking additional roles, Garner continued. They're willing to help but they need to understand our concept. And that's why they kept saying, 'We don't understand your concept. Why are you going it alone?'

  Rice continued to sit in silence.

  Proceeding with his written agenda, Garner said he needed the startup funding for such basics as food, law enforcement and energy.

  Okay, Rice said, turning to Hadley and Frank Miller. Let's work on this. Let's get this going. Let's have it by the time they need it.

  Hadley and Miller seemed to be taking notes, but Garner got the impression that Rice's directions were just sort of floating up in the ether. He didn't sense that there was a follow-up system in place.

  We need money to pay for public servants in Iraq, for the police and the military, Garner told Rice. I'm still planning on paying all these people just as soon as I can when I get there.

  There was about $1.6 billion in frozen Iraqi assets in the United States, Garner had learned. If they could tap into that money, their back-of-the-envelope calculation was that they could afford to bring back the civil servants—especially the police and about 200,000 Iraqi military— and keep them working for about 90 days.

  Rice seemed to agree.

  Ministries was the next agenda item. Who would be the designated American official to go in and run the Ministry of Agriculture in Iraq? Or Interior? He needed to fill out all the people who were going to be responsible, Garner said, and he hadn't finished that yet.

  Garner moved on to a crucial issue: They all knew they didn't have enough forces and that they needed more security.

  Well, where are we on that? Rice inquired.

  They both knew part of the answer was that Rumsfeld and Franks were still working out the final war plan. Garner believed that Franks's latest plan called for a force level dramatically below the 500,000 in the initial war plan for Iraq—perhaps as low as 160,000. But with another 100,000 U.S. forces that could flow in after combat began, plus some 200,000 to 300,000 from the Iraqi army who could be turned to work with the U.S. forces, it was possible to have some measure of security and stability.

  On the issue of contracts for economic development and reconstruction, Garner said it might be possible to require that all contractors have one or more Iraqi subcontractors—a kind of set-aside that would get money flowing to ordinary Iraqis.

  What about the numbers of police and other law enforcement officials? Garner wanted a lot, but Frank Miller wanted only $70 million devoted up front. Garner thought it would cost hundreds of millions, but he urged that they wait. Let's don't decide on a lower number now or a larger number, but let's leave this open so that if I'm right you can jump in and help me as fast as you can. And if he's right then we haven't lost anything. But I don't think he's right.

  The next item was funding. Who's got the money is in control, Garner said. Where is the money? I need the money.

  Rice seemed supportive, but Garner still didn't have any solid assurances about funding. He realized the president, Rice and the others were being told how easy the war was going to be—perhaps even a cake-walk, to use a term offered in a hawkish prewar Washington Post op-ed by Ken Adelman, the longtime friend to Cheney and Rumsfeld. The money issue, like most others, was left hanging.

  Governance was the final item. How would they put together a postwar government for Iraq? Garner asked. This was the overriding question of political power. Who would have it after the war? Someone would. But who?

  Rice never answered.

  On Friday, March 7, Garner and Ron Adams met with Wolfowitz. They were frustrated, and complained that they had no sense even of when they were expected to fly to Kuwait. They barely knew how they would move their people to the region, or where they would stay while they waited for war. Nobody would tell them when the war was planned to start.

  You should already be there, said Wolfowitz, who as the number two Pentagon official presumably had a good idea of the timing.

  Hunkered in the Kuwaiti desert, Spider Marks was outspoken, even strident with what he called his technical chain of command among intelligence officers, including Franks's senior intelligence officer, Brigadier General Jeff Kimmons. The intelligence they had on the WMDMSL just wasn't good enough.

  This is unsat, unsat, unsat, Marks told Kimmons, lopping off the last four syllables of unsatisfactory. Jeff, you need to move this forward, buddy. I'm not going to call Rumsfeld's office. I'm not going to call Cambone, who was now the Defense Department undersecretary for intelligence. He doesn't know me from Adam. But this is not working.

  It vividly illustrated the breakdown. The general whose job was to find and exploit Saddam's WMD had looked at the fruits of more than a decade of intelligence work and found it wanting. Bush and others in the administration had been escalating the rhetoric. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on December 5, 2002: The president of the United States and the secretary of defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it. Fleischer announced again on January 9, 2003: We know for a fact that there are weapons there. In his weekly radio address February 8, Bush said, We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons—the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.

  Marks understood Kimmons's predicament. It resembled his own. They were just junior generals looking at the same unfulfilling jumble of data. Kimmons was dealing with his own personal hell. He wouldn't want to go to Franks for fear of triggering one of General Franks's notorious and profane explosions, Marks thought. Kimmons could end up with a hole in his chest and, more important, be no closer to a solution.

  But the intelligence wasn't getting any better. If Cambone and Rumsfeld didn't know Marks from Adam, maybe that was a problem. Marks had told McKiernan, Abizaid and Kimmons about his concerns, but was there anything else he could have done from the Kuwaiti desert to raise hell up the chain of command until he was heard? For that matter, shouldn't Rumsfeld or Franks—or even Bush—have reached down the chain a link or two, found the general handling WMD intelligence for the invading forces and asked him what he thought? There was too much riding on the answer.

  Still some confusion, Marks wrote in his journal on March 3. Do we secure as we progress thru zone, or treat like an obstacle and mark, cover, bypass? He was still waiting for a complete answer to another of the questions he'd hammered on at the DIA smart guys meeting back on October 4: How do we prioritize the 946 suspected WMD sites in Iraq?

  War was clearly imminent, but Garner was still at the Pentagon. He believed the nagging question of governance still had to be addressed, and he wanted to stand up the Iraqi ministries immediately. But again the question had not been answered: Who was going to be in charge? At one point Rumsfeld had asked him a key question in a Rumsfeldian way. By
the way, what are you going to do about de-Baathification? Do you have a de-Baathification process? Garner was going to have to get rid of the members of Saddam's Baath Party, much like the de-Nazification in Germany after World War II.

  You can't do de-Baathification of the ministries, Garner answered. There won't be anybody left. Most of the jobs were filled by party members. So what we'll do is take out the top guy. We'll take out the personnel guy. Maybe a few others. We'll let everybody else return and over time the people in the ministry will begin to point out the bad guys.

  Well, that sounds reasonable to me, Rumsfeld replied.

  Garner walked down to see Wolfowitz again.

  You know, probably the most important function we have, we don't have covered, Garner said.

  What's that?

  It's governance. We have to have a team that's putting together the government. They needed an Iraqi face. What I'm asking you to do, he continued, is let's go out and get the smartest minds in America, and go to Harvard or go to wherever you want to go, and put together a world-class governance team that we can bring over there that begins immediately putting together a government for us.

  Let me think about that, Wolfowitz replied to Garner.

  Later that afternoon, Wolfowitz called Garner back.

  I thought about what you said, he began. What do you think about Liz Cheney?

  I don't know who Liz Cheney is, Garner replied.

  The vice president's daughter.

  Cheney, a 36-year-old lawyer and mother of three, had held several posts in the State Department and was now serving as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs. Steeped in conservative politics since childhood, she had worked on the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign.

  I don't care, as long as I know it's somebody who knows what they're doing and knows how to do this.

  Well, she'll be over here in the morning, so you can come in and explain to her what you want, Wolfowitz said.

  The next day, Garner came to Wolfowitz's office and met with Liz Cheney.

  What we need is a face of Iraqi leadership for the Iraqi people, Garner told her. I think we need to put together a group that is capable of governance. And we also need to immediately start writing a constitution.

  We have to start having elections. We need to start having elections in the provinces. And so we need to start all this immediately and let them be involved in what happens.

  Leaders, a constitution, elections—it was a tall order.

  Let me work on this, Liz Cheney said. Neither she nor Wolfowitz added much or offered any objections. Later that afternoon, she came back over to the Pentagon with a few people from State. One was Scott Carpenter, a balding but boyish-looking deputy assistant secretary of state who had worked on the Future of Iraq study.

  Garner outlined his broad, ambitious plan for governing. Carpenter took some notes and said, Okay, I'll start to put this together. When will we go over there?

  Garner still didn't know when he was leaving. The best thing for you to do is to stay over here and put the team together and then join me when I go to Baghdad.

  Okay, I'll do that.

  After Liz Cheney and Carpenter left, Garner had a private discussion with Wolfowitz.

  You know, he seems like a good guy, Garner said, meaning Carpenter. He's a little young. I don't know how experienced he is. She would have been okay.

  Yeah, but we can't send her over there because she's too high-risk being the vice president's daughter.

  That makes sense, Garner responded.

  In Room 666 in the prestigious E-ring of the Pentagon on the third floor, just several outer corridors from Rumsfeld's office, General John M. Keane, the vice chief of staff of the Army, got wind of Garner's new role. Bizarre, thought Keane.

  An old bear of a man with 37 years in the Army, Keane had been stunned by the lack of trust Rumsfeld had shown the uniformed military leaders in the first years. The secretary was abrasive, curt and dismissive of other people's thoughts and ideas. But Keane found that Rumsfeld was right most of the time about the need for change in the military, especially the Army.

  Setting aside emotions and personality, Keane had become a Rumsfeld favorite and for practical purposes was running the Army, because Rumsfeld had battled with Keane's boss, General Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff. In late 2000 and early 2001, there had been a big imbroglio over Shinseki's decision to issue a black beret to every soldier in the Army. Black berets had long been the trademark of the elite Army Rangers. Rangers, ex-Rangers and some members of Congress were offended. A couple of former Rangers even marched from Fort Benning, Georgia, to Washington to protest the change. But Shinseki dug in his heels. Bush talked to Rumsfeld twice about the controversy, which dragged on for months. So Rumsfeld, who came back to the Pentagon wanting to focus on big priorities, had to quell a big fight over the kind and color of hat the Army would wear.

  In April 2002, Rumsfeld had asked Keane to become the next Army chief. Keane had agreed but more recently had reconsidered, saying he was leaving the Army because his wife was seriously ill. He told Rumsfeld that his married life had been about him for 37 years and now it had to be about his wife. Of all the top people in the Pentagon, Keane had found Rumsfeld to be by far the most understanding and instinctively compassionate.

  Keane asked Garner to come give him a briefing. He thought Garner was smart and he had lots of wonderful ideas. Garner was painting on the broadest of canvases—everything from water, food and electricity, to a new government, a constitution and elections—trying to do quickly what American entrepreneurs and the Founding Fathers had needed decades to accomplish.

  Who are you working for? Keane asked.

  I'm working for the secretary of defense, Garner replied.

  Jay, that's the wrong answer. I mean, God Almighty, you've got to be working for General Franks, and de facto for General McKiernan. You can't be working for the secretary. There will be a separate channel. I mean, your staff will immediately become dysfunctional from the military command. I mean, you can see it coming. They're not going to want to deal with you. You're not going to—

  No, Garner protested. We'll make it work somehow.

  Keane reminded Garner of the principle of unity of command. One person had to be in charge in each theater or operation. Franks should be in charge of Phase IV and held accountable for stability. Early on, everything would be military anyway. Jay, if we've learned one thing in the last fifteen years, it's this. Come on. Every time we've screwed up we've had problems with this. We don't have to relearn this lesson.

  I will make it work, Garner said, reminding Keane he was a military man and very sensitive to the problem. In addition, he added, decisions had already been made.

  Keane was aware of that. Perhaps worse were the decisions that had not been made. Soon, he heard Abizaid too pressing Rumsfeld on the governance questions.

  Mr. Secretary, Abizaid said, I'm concerned about who is going to be in charge when we take the regime down. What is the political apparatus going to be? Abizaid had four or five variations of the same question. Who is going to be in charge of the country? he asked another time.

  Once Rumsfeld said, Well Doug is working on that. That meant Feith, who Keane believed to be a very weak link in Rumsfeld's team and completely underqualified for his post. Feith had lots of paper and documents outlining elaborate plans. Garner, for example, was technically supposed to be under General Franks. But Garner was already reporting directly to Rumsfeld, who not only liked it that way, but insisted on it.

  Several days before deploying, Garner and Bates went to the State Department to see Powell and Armitage. Powell and Bates gave each other a hug. It wasn't only the long Army affiliation; in September 1994 Bates and Powell had been part of the small team President Clinton dispatched to avert a hostile U.S. invasion of Haiti. Former President Carter, Powell and former Senator Sam Nunn, who had been chairman of the Armed Services Committee from 1987 to 1995, had been the trio
in charge of the mission. Bates had been the military representative from the Joint Staff.

  You know, sir, Bates said to Powell, we could solve this if you and I just take another trip over there with President Carter and Sam Nunn.

  Powell laughed and made some remarks about the eternal and escalating warfare between State and Defense. It was extraordinarily dysfunctional, the four former military men agreed.

  You know, Powell said, the problem with these guys is they've never been in a bar fight. He was referring to Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and others in the administration who had never served in the military or never seen actual combat. Among the four in Powell's office, including Armitage's six years in the Navy, they had over 100 years of military experience. There was a feeling among them that they were the old hands who knew the ropes.

  Whatever you need that I can give to you, I'll give to you, Powell told them. You know that.

  It really pissed me off when Don had you get rid of Warrick and O'Sullivan, Powell said.

  You know, I don't think he did that. I think he was just following orders, Garner replied.

  Well, let me tell you something. I picked up the phone and said, 'Hey, look. I can take prisoners too.' I started to pull everybody in the State Department off your team, but after taking a brief moment thinking about that, I thought, well, that won't do anybody any good. That just damages what you're doing. It'll ruin what you're doing. It'll ruin what the nation's trying to do. Somebody has to be the big guy about this, and I've tried to be it.

  As they were getting up to leave, Armitage stopped Garner.

  Hey, Jay. Let me tell you one thing. You've got a bunch of goddamn spies on that team of yours. They're talking about you. They're reporting on you, so you better watch your back.

  Well, yes, sir, Garner replied, I'll do that. But you've got some spies over here too.