Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  Okay, that's it, Garner replied. The teleconference was over. Garner then sent a longhand note by fax to Rumsfeld insisting they had the same goals. I am a team player, he wrote. He was deeply offended. It was the worst kind of bullying tactic—if you don't agree with me you are disloyal.

  No WMD had been used or found in the first days of the invasion. The intense pace of Marks's intelligence team only got more frantic. The quality of the intelligence on the hundreds of remaining sites on the WMD site list was still unsatisfactory, and the unanticipated Iraqi opposition was jarring. It had been part of the intelligence shop's job to figure these things out, and they hadn't done it.

  Marks had to give himself a pep talk at one point. One of the CIA station chiefs he was dealing with, he wrote on March 29, had been watching this region for his entire professional life and he did not understand the depth of the people's fear. Don't beat yourself up Marks. Everybody was worn out. This is the most fulfilling but most difficult and frustrating job I have ever endeavored to do, Marks continued in his diary. The scope of responsibilities, the compressed timelines for execution, little time for anything other than execution, no time to think. Substance does matter, but the process is what is killing me. Just keeping the engine room stoked is monumental.

  Rotkoff put it succinctly, baring his exhaustion, frustration and doubt:

  Mental bone tired

  Hard to stay not wanted

  Can't rest—men will die

  Thousands are just taking off their uniforms and going home, Bush told British Prime Minister Blair on the phone.

  Yes, they are just melting away, Blair added.

  Just melting away, Bush echoed.

  Bush didn't really have a lot to do once the fighting started. Notes of his conversations and meetings show he spoke repeatedly about victory, but they also reveal a president concerned that the U.S. could win the ground conflict but still lose the propaganda battle.

  We need to remind people why we are here, Bush said in a Pentagon meeting on March 25. He told Rumsfeld: You will remind the world of who we are fighting.

  The Air Force had three giant, four-engine Commando Solo transport planes in the air—flying TV and radio stations—broadcasting over Iraq.

  How does this look to the average Iraqi? Bush asked at an NSC meeting on March 28. The answer was that the broadcasts were reaching Baghdad for five hours a day, from 6 to 11 p.m. They weren't broadcasting video, just still photographs.

  Not enough, was Bush's reply. You have to calibrate it. You have to market programs. People don't turn on television if there's nothing to watch.

  Three days later, he had General Franks on a secure video teleconference.

  Are you pleased with our information ops? he asked. Can you broadcast our message into Baghdad?

  Franks said he wasn't pleased that Iraqi TV was still on the air, and he needed more translators to turn up the quality and volume of Arab language broadcasts.

  Bush said, If you need help from the States, we'll give it to you.

  On April 4, toward the end of another NSC meeting, somebody mentioned that the electricity was off in Iraq's capital city, which U.S. forces had not yet reached.

  Who turned out the lights in Baghdad? Bush asked.

  Most probably the regime to reposition its forces, Franks said on the video screen. But we don't know for sure.

  Well, then, if it's the regime, put the word out that we didn't do it, Bush said.

  Still, the president appeared confident. Only one thing matters: winning, he said at one NSC meeting, as he dismissed second-guessing regarding the post-Saddam world. In a private moment, Hadley asked him how he was doing.

  I made the decision, Bush said. I sleep well at night.

  16

  I don't know how long it's going to last, and I don't know how much it's going to cost, Rumsfeld told his staff often. On April 2, he sent a one-page memo to the service secretaries, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Feith, Franks and other key people in the Pentagon. He directed them to support Garner as required, and said Garner's mission was to help create the conditions for transition to Iraqi self-rule and the withdrawal of coalition forces upon completion of their military objectives. In Kuwait, Colonel Tom Baltazar on Garner's staff got a copy. The memo had been written because Garner's group just couldn't get cooperation from the military commands. Amazing, he thought. The president's signature on the National Security Presidential Directive of January 20, saying, in effect, support them, isn't good enough for these guys. We've got to get Rumsfeld's signature as well.

  Besides being the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi was the head of a group of exiled Iraqis who had received some American-sponsored military training. But everything about the military group had been a bust. Besides training only a tiny fraction of the number who were supposed to be armed and ready, there had even been a fight over what the group should be called. Chalabi's band was eventually given the alliterative but redundant name Free Iraqi Freedom Fighters.

  By early April, Chalabi was clamoring to get into Iraq. Despite the support of his patrons at the Pentagon and in Washington, the American generals in the Middle East had little use for him. The last thing they wanted to do was drop Chalabi with his small army in the middle of the war zone, but there was pressure to do just that.

  Abizaid finally relented. Okay, let's put the son of a bitch in there and see if he can do what all of them think he can do, he told Garner. And I'll tell you he can't.

  The U.S. flew Chalabi, the Free Iraqi Freedom Fighters and other Chalabi associates into Nasiriyah aboard one of its durable, take-off-and-land-anywhere C-130 Hercules transport planes. Spider Marks was there when Chalabi landed. He thought the INC leader was trying to emulate MacArthur's return to the Philippines. Chalabi was wearing a black sport shirt with a bush hat, leading a group of his people. So these are the Free Iraqi Freedom Fighters, Marks thought. Check your wallets. Boy, that's a nasty crowd.

  Reports started to come in that the Free Iraqi Freedom Fighters were carrying out reprisals, stealing and looting.

  Marks and another intelligence officer, Colonel Jon Jake Jones, were riding in an open-air Humvee one night with their weapons pointed outward, wondering whether they might get into a firefight with some unknown enemy.

  Slow down, Jones said, spotting four or five bearded Iraqis gathered around a fire at the side of the road. They were cooking some kind of animal on a spit—a sheep or a dog maybe—and dancing around. It looked as if they were smoking dope, the officers thought. It was almost a scene out of Lord of the Flies.

  Jones and Marks looked at each other and reached the same conclusion, in stereo. Free Iraqi Freedom Fighters, they both said, before hitting the gas.

  Christopher Ryan Henry had gone to work in February as principal undersecretary of defense for policy, making him Doug Feith's top deputy. A retired Navy captain and a former top official at the defense contractor SAIC, Henry had a unique connection to the secretary of defense. His wife, Delonnie Henry, was Rumsfeld's confidential assistant and chief secretary, the woman who typed his snowflakes and kept his files. Rumsfeld was still pressing on control of the Iraqi ministries, and on April 6, Henry called Garner with Defense's new list of people. Ryan, that's great, Garner said. When are they going to get here? Well, we don't know. We haven't even notified some of them yet.

  Ryan, let's be reasonable on this. You'll never get them here on time. Major combat would soon be over. U.S. troops were nearing Baghdad.

  No, Henry said, we're going to work this hard.

  Garner and Bates knew the problem was soon going to be in Baghdad. As they'd been saying for months, the question was going to be who was going to be in charge. Garner had an idea. Here's what you have to do to be successful, he told Rumsfeld. You bring John Abizaid in the country and you promote him. As Franks's deputy, Abizaid was too much out of the real action. Make him a sub-unified commander, because you need a four-star. And put me in charge of all the recons
truction, civil administration. Put McKiernan in charge of all the security and military operations.

  Rumsfeld balked, but he wouldn't say why he didn't think it was a good idea. Garner persisted. He felt it was the solution, ensuring unity of command in the theater, with both McKiernan and him reporting to Abizaid.

  I'm not talking about this anymore, Rumsfeld said in another phone call.

  About the third or fourth time Garner raised the suggestion, Rumsfeld said, Look, Jay. We've discussed this before and you know my position. He slammed down the phone. Bush and Rice had made it clear that no military man was going to get the job. Imagine, Rice thought: President John Abizaid.

  Rice thought Garner was sitting in Kuwait too long. All the important things—running the government, getting the ministries up and running in Iraq—were not getting done. She understood that Iraq had a pretty good civil service, and she assumed it would still be there. But several days into the war, she received reports that the government workers, including oil workers, could not be found.

  What do you mean you can't find the oil workers? she asked.

  There was a brittleness in the country, she concluded. As a Soviet expert she had studied what happens to totalitarian systems when they collapse. She recalled reading about the 1953 death of Joseph Stalin. For five weeks the Soviet Union ceased to function. Nobody could do anything because everybody counted on direction from the very top. Iraq seemed to have cratered in the same way or worse. But history predicted it would be temporary. In the end, she was confident, order would reassert itself, as had happened in the old USSR.

  The XTF—the artillery brigade turned WMD-hunting unit—had to scale back. The plan had been to send five teams to travel with the combat forces and catalogue or quickly deal with whatever WMD they came across, and to field three more teams with greater expertise to systematically visit the sites on the WMD master list. With too few people and vehicles, they pulled back to four teams with the invading units, and two teams of between 12 and 25 people—called MET units, for mobile exploitation team —to do the most intensive inspections.

  On April 8, Colonel Richard McPhee, the XTF commander, rolled into Iraq with one of the two MET units, on their way to its first inspection in a small town south of Baghdad, where the WMD intelligence suggested they would find a form of chemical weapons agent. There was nothing. Buried where they thought they were supposed to look, they found only 55-gallon drums of gasoline.

  Part of the team hurried on to another suspected site at Karbala, about 60 miles southwest of Baghdad, where they heard a rumor about an Iraqi man who had passed a note to U.S. forces saying he was a scientist who had worked on WMD, had information for the coalition, and wanted to turn himself in. After a 24-hour chase through the Iraqi desert, the unit tracked down the soldiers who had the note, and then found the Iraqi scientist.

  Colonel McPhee left the team and flew quickly back to Kuwait by helicopter to meet with Marks. Tension was growing over whether the teams should keep going down the list of WMD suspect sites, or if the better idea was to follow new leads, such as the site the scientist suggested.

  I've got to tell you, this is as important as it gets, McPhee told Marks, and described the Iraqi scientist, who didn't ask for anything from the Americans. McPhee wanted clearance to dedicate a significant effort to focus on this one assignment.

  Rich, you don't have to do that, man, Marks replied, meaning McPhee didn't have to fly back to Kuwait and ask for permission to do his job. Absolutely. Got to go for it.

  Marks wrote briefly about the meeting in his daily diary. WMD testing—keep expectations low. Even with his chagrin at the quality of the intelligence, Marks had been thinking: 946 sites! They couldn't be wrong about all of them, could they? Even if they were right on only 30 percent of the sites, that would still be a heck of a lot of WMD. Batting .300 was enough to get a ballplayer into the Hall of Fame. We're all going to Cooperstown, Marks thought. But news of the Iraqi scientist was still a welcome relief.

  McPhee went back to Iraq, and the MET unit spent about a day and a half with the scientist, first searching exactly where he'd thought the WMD materials had been buried, and then spreading an arc around the area and continuing the search.

  McPhee contacted Marks by secure radio and classified e-mail. No joy, he reported.

  It was a watershed moment for Marks. No joy said it all.

  General Franks was on a secure video line on April 9, piped into the National Security Council meeting at the White House. The war was going well, he said. In the south all the enemy formations are destroyed. There are small groups operating with no threat. The Marines and the Brits are squeezing the Iraqi divisions.

  In the Baghdad region, they'd destroyed 90 percent of the Iraqi forces' equipment, Franks reported.

  Are we picking up the bad guys? Bush asked.

  We've distributed pictures of the top 55. There aren't a lot of refugees yet. Some bad guys will slip through but we're doing everything we can to cut the main routes.

  The humanitarian crisis, the burning oil fields, and the WMD attacks hadn't happened, Franks said. Nine hundred of the 1,000 southern oil wells were under control, and the last 100 would be under control within 48 hours. The population of Umm Qasr —Iraq's largest deep-water port, just over the border from Kuwait— in a week has gone from 15,000 to 40,000. Water is better than prewar, electricity is restored, food's available, Franks said. There were some problems in other cities, but they were mostly under control.

  Bush told him to make sure that somebody was compiling statistics on what prewar Iraqi life was like under Saddam.

  We cannot have people coming into one of these cities and say, the conditions here are appalling, and measure it against an American city. You have to measure it against the city prewar, the way it was, Bush said. This guy's spent 20 to 30 years ruining this country. It's going to take a while to rebuild it.

  We're moving McKiernan's headquarters up to Baghdad, Franks said. Eventually Garner's team would follow. Sensitive site exploitation will continue. So far there had been no WMD stockpiles found.

  In a few days, Franks said, there would be a conference of Iraqi representatives in Tallil, outside Nasiriyah, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad. It'll be an organizational meeting without commitment, meaning it was preliminary.

  Very wise, Bush replied. It'll be a focal point for the world to see that we're not parachuting our own choice in. You know, 'Do we believe in democracy? Yes.' We're bringing these guys together.

  We've got to win the story in the peacetime era, Bush told British Prime Minister Blair. We've won the war. We cannot have people define the peacetime era for us.

  Rumsfeld dispatched Larry DiRita, his special assistant, to Iraq. DiRita was in Qatar that same day, April 9, waiting to catch a plane to Kuwait, where he would link up with Garner.

  In the airport, DiRita watched on television as an amazing scene unfolded in downtown Baghdad, broadcast live throughout the world. A team of U.S. Marines who had swept into the city were helping a group of Iraqis topple a 20-foot statue of Saddam, using an armored vehicle with a chain. It marked the symbolic end of Saddam's regime.

  That night, after DiRita landed in Kuwait, Garner's people gave him a series of briefings in a small dining room in one of the villas at the Kuwait City Hilton. One discussion turned to the benefits that the Iraqis would enjoy as a result of American reconstruction plans.

  As Colonel Paul Hughes remembers, DiRita slammed his fist on a heavy oak table, and said, We don't owe the Iraqis anything! We're giving them their freedom. That's all we should give them. We don't owe them any other benefit.

  DiRita does not recall the remarks, but says his point was that the U.S. had to help the Iraqis do it for themselves. If the United States came in with large amounts of cash flowing out of everyone's pockets, it would tell the Iraqis to stand back. Rumsfeld wanted them to stand up.

  A few days later, DiRita met with Garner's senior staffers at the Kuwait Cit
y Hilton.

  We went into the Balkans and Bosnia and Kosovo and we're still in them, Hughes recalls DiRita saying. We're probably going to wind up in Afghanistan for a long time because the Department of State can't do its job right. Because they keep screwing things up, the Department of Defense winds up being stuck at these places. We're not going to let this happen in Iraq.

  The reaction was generally, Whoa! Does this guy even realize that half the people in the room are from the State Department?

  DiRita went on, as Hughes recalled: By the end of August we're going to have 25,000 to 30,000 troops left in Iraq.

  DiRita had heard Rumsfeld talk privately many times about foreign occupations. It's like a broken bone, Rumsfeld said. If you don't set it right at first, it is always somewhat broken. Rumsfeld said later, I think I used the characterization of a broken arm. If you don't set it, everything grows around the break and you end up with that abnormality there. Too many occupations like Kosovo and Bosnia had been approached as if they would be permanent; and sure enough, that was what they became.

  Others in the room that day don't recall DiRita's words being quite so stark, but most of the State Department people there instinctively knew there was no way they could run Iraq the way Defense envisioned. Invading and quickly departing didn't seem just physically impossible, it was morally dubious. Robin Raphel's eyeballs were on the ceiling, as she thought to herself: What is Larry DiRita smoking? The poor baby. He just doesn't get it.

  The next day, April 10, Ryan Henry called Garner again.

  Hey, we've got a real problem in the ministries, Henry said.

  What's that?

  Well, Henry explained, the White House had learned about the Defense Department list of people for the Iraqi ministries. And they want to know why they're not appointing people and why are we doing it. So we've got to send the list to the White House, and we think they're going to redo it, so it will be a little while longer.