In fact, the opposite was the case. I welcomed and made a point of encouraging different views, dissent, and challenges. It was a constant refrain of mine at meetings that all proposals and plans are based on assumptions, that those assumptions should be spelled out clearly, examined skeptically, and reexamined routinely—and that applied also, indeed especially, to my own. Everyone makes errors in judgment, and the higher the official, the worse the consequences can be. So it was a principle with me that subordinates should speak up.
In 2002, for example, I sent a snowflake to a representative of the CIA who sat in on some of my Pentagon meetings:
When I told you I want you to speak up, I meant it. You know a whale of a lot about this subject, and every once in a while I see you in the back of the room looking reticent. That doesn’t help me at all! I need you to step up and say, “Have you thought about this?” or “What about that?” or “I think differently.” I am very comfortable with that. You may not want to do it to some of the other principals, but I am delighted to have you do it to me.35
As I believe in being challenged, I also made a practice of challenging my challengers. I wanted to make sure people disagreeing knew what they were talking about. When a challenger failed to support his views, I did not pretend to be impressed. But, in my view, no professional, let alone a three-or four-star military officer, should be intimidated into silence by a boss who asks questions and expects sensible answers, even honest answers as simple as an “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you.”
While the President and I had many discussions about the war preparations, I do not recall his ever asking me if I thought going to war with Iraq was the right decision. The President was the one charged with the tough choice to commit U.S. forces. I did not speculate on the thought process that brought him to his ultimate, necessarily lonely decision. We were all hearing the same things in briefing after briefing, and one NSC meeting after another, mulling over what we knew of the Iraqi regime and what the intelligence community believed about its capabilities and intentions. Though there were differences among us, they were not differences at the substantive or strategic levels of whether or not to allow Saddam Hussein’s regime to remain in power. Not one person in NSC meetings at which I was present stated or hinted that they were opposed to, or even hesitant, about the President’s decision. I took it that Bush assumed, as I did, that each of us had reached the same conclusion.
The process toward war had been incremental. Up until the very minute the President authorized the first strike, there was no moment when I felt with razor-sharp certainty that Bush had fully decided. Like the rest of us in the chain of command, Bush was reluctant to use force and invite the serious challenges it entailed. This came through in his dogged attempts to bring the UN onboard to enforce their own sanctions and his ongoing diplomatic initiatives to stave off armed conflict. It seemed to me Bush was balancing a growing imperative to take military action and a natural reluctance to commit American troops and our nation to such a struggle.
Wars, it has been correctly said, are failures of diplomacy. And in the run-up to the war with Iraq, institutions, nations, and individuals failed. The United Nations failed to live up to its charter by not enforcing its resolutions. France, Germany, and Russia contributed to the failure by allowing Saddam to believe they would forestall action and he did not need to comply with the UN resolutions. For our part, we as an administration and as individuals failed to persuade Saddam or his top generals that we were prepared to take down his regime if necessary.
I wondered if we worked hard enough through intermediaries to encourage him to find another way out.* I thought, or at least hoped, to the very end that he might decide at the last minute that he would prefer a comfortable exile to the risk of capture and death. Other dictators, such as Haiti’s Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and Uganda’s Idi Amin, had made similar choices to save their lives. Why not Saddam Hussein? If Saddam actually believed we were serious, I thought that his instinct for survival might work to our advantage. It would not be easy to stomach Saddam sipping Campari on the coast of southern France, but if his comfortable exile meant sparing the world—and thousands of American men and women in uniform—a war, I was all for it.
On March 17, 2003, President Bush made yet another effort to avert war by offering Iraq’s ruling family one last chance to avoid an invasion. It was an overture I urged and supported fully. “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours,” Bush said in a primetime address from the White House. “Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.”37
Unmoved, the Iraqi leader was shown on Iraq’s state television in full military uniform chairing a meeting of his ruling Baath Party and his top generals. Saddam’s eldest son, Uday Hussein, even issued an ultimatum of his own, urging President Bush to “give up power in America with his family.”38 Saddam Hussein was defiant—for the last time.
CHAPTER 33
Exit the Butcher of Baghdad
Only a few hours before the forty-eight-hour deadline for Saddam to leave Iraq for a life in exile expired, George Tenet called me from CIA headquarters in Langley. He said he had an urgent matter to discuss and would be coming to the Pentagon immediately.
The CIA had developed a network of informants across Iraq who reported tips on Saddam’s activities. In my office, Tenet informed General Myers and me that two of the Agency’s sources had information that Saddam Hussein and possibly his sons, Uday and Qusay, were en route to a family compound called Dora Farms, south of Baghdad. We knew there was a possibility that the informants could be compromised, or in error. Saddam constantly tested the loyalty of those around him. If the dictator had penetrated the CIA’s network of informants, he could be using the sources to encourage us to strike a false target, possibly one where American bombs might kill innocents. The campaign might therefore begin amid charges of American war crimes against Iraqi civilians.
If Bush authorized a strike, it might have to take place before the public deadline set for Saddam to resign expired. Though we had no indication that Saddam might comply, Bush would be accused of going back on his word. Tenet and I agreed that the issue needed to be brought to the President, so we drove across the bridge over the Potomac to the White House.
By mid-afternoon Bush had hastily assembled the NSC in his small dining room just off the Oval Office. Tenet repeated what he had told me. “How solid are your sources on this?” Bush asked. Tenet expressed his high level of confidence.
We discussed the possible outcomes if a strike were ordered, the risk of action as well as the risk of inaction. Suppose it turned out that Saddam was meeting at the compound to comply with the President’s ultimatum to resign and leave Iraq? What if it turned out to be a civilian target? What if our aircraft accidentally killed innocent Iraqis and Saddam got away?
As we contemplated these risks, Tenet left the room to speak by secure phone to Agency officials who were in touch with their source on the ground in Iraq. He came back with another promising report: Saddam had just arrived at the site in a taxi. The Iraqi dictator was known to use cars painted like taxis to move around the country inconspicuously. The Agency’s contacts also reported that Saddam’s whereabouts had been verified by a sophisticated electronic tracking system used by his bodyguards. Tenet believed the intel was as solid as it could be.
The President went around the room asking each of us if we favored a strike. Cheney, Powell, Myers, Tenet, and Rice all said yes, as did I. I felt Saddam had made his choice. He was not going to stand down. Removing him and his sons with an early air strike would eliminate the top of the Iraqi military command structure with a single blow. That might lead to a large-scale surrender of Iraqi military forces, saving many American and Iraqi lives. Any chance to avert a broader war had to be seriously considered. The President agreed. But keeping his word, he ordered that the attack commence after his forty-eight-hour deadline expired.
As we awaited confirmation that the attack had hit the target, early reports were promising. An eyewitness reported that Saddam Hussein had been brought out of the rubble on a respirator. Then the story started to change. Despite the multiple sources, at least one eyewitness, and the sophisticated tracking devices, Saddam was not, as it turned out, at Dora Farms. Neither were his sons. This first salvo in the war with Iraq foreshadowed the various intelligence failures that would later come to light.
Forty-five minutes after U.S. aircraft had dropped the first bombs targeting Saddam, President Bush appeared on television from the White House to inform the country that the war in Iraq had begun. Saddam responded with a broadcast to the Iraqi people, claiming that Americans would soon lose “patience” with the war effort.1 He ended his message with language characteristic of Islamists: “Long live jihad and long live Palestine.”2 It was a notably unsubtle message—one that made clear the allies he sought.
General Franks had realized that it was not possible to achieve strategic surprise against Saddam’s forces given the purposefully ill-disguised fact that our military had been building up in the region over several months. Nonetheless, Franks thought he might still gain an advantage through tactical surprise. In the 1991 Gulf War, and in our recent operations in Afghanistan, coalition forces conducted a long air campaign before the ground invasion. This was undoubtedly what Saddam and his generals expected to happen again, which would give the Iraqis time to lobby leaders in the Muslim world and Saddam’s supporters at the United Nations to come to his aid before our tanks started rumbling across the desert. Instead, Franks decided to order the air and ground offensives to start simultaneously.
Franks was concerned that a delayed ground invasion might expose American forces staging in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Gulf to the risk of chemical or biological attack. Intelligence and military officials warned that once Saddam judged that our forces were on the march and approaching Baghdad to remove his regime, he would have nothing left to lose and would likely use WMD against the coalition forces. Based on the intelligence, Franks ordered American soldiers and Marines advancing into Iraq to be outfitted with the bulky and uncomfortable chemical and biological protective suits.
The initial coalition push toward Baghdad from the south had two thrusts. The first was spearheaded by the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, and the second by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) and Task Force Tarawa. At the same time, a contingent of Marines took their objectives in the southern Rumaila oilfields to prevent Saddam from sabotaging the Iraqi people’s most valuable natural resource, as he did during the first Gulf War. While British forces successfully took the southern city of Basra, American forces moved rapidly toward Baghdad, engaging the enemy along the way only as necessary.
There was less fighting in the south than had been expected. Many of Saddam’s conscript forces, fearing the fate they would meet against coalition armor and airpower, deserted their positions, removed their uniforms, and fled to their homes.
During the first nights of the campaign, some American special operations commandos dropped into northern Iraq while others stalked the western deserts. As in Afghanistan, they used night vision and handheld laser devices to identify Saddam’s forces, which American aircraft proceeded to attack with pinpoint accuracy.
Coalition forces met their first sustained challenge when they advanced on the city of Nasiriyah, a key strategic target because it commanded crossings over the Euphrates River. Given the city’s importance, American forces expected resistance from the Iraqi army. Instead, the enemy took the form of hundreds of Fedayeen irregular forces that had arrived in trucks, buses, and taxis. Eleven U.S. troops were killed in the fighting. A nineteen-year-old private named Jessica Lynch was captured by the enemy and extravagant reports about her resistance to capture flooded the media.* In hindsight, the real story out of Nasiriyah was the role of the Fedayeen Saddam and the magnitude of the threat they posed. Our intelligence community had not anticipated the kind of enemy that coalition forces eventually faced in Iraq—or the kind of irregular operations by Saddam’s paramilitary forces that foreshadowed the insurgency. Not until our forces were on the ground did we learn the extent to which the Fedayeen Saddam had stockpiled weapons and ammunition in nearly every city, town, and village in the country to help quell any uprising against Saddam. The Fedayeen were trained in counterinsurgency and capable of promptly and ruthlessly suppressing revolts against him.
The Fedayeen soon emerged as the core of an irregular enemy that attracted hundreds, and eventually thousands, of foreign fighters from across the Muslim world looking to fight the West. American forces routinely found a variety of foreign passports on the bodies of enemies they captured or killed in battle. Most of the passports documented that their bearers had crossed into Iraq from Syria. These non-Iraqi jihadists tended to be poorly armed with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, but they had the ability to blend in well with the Iraqi civilian population, and they fought with the fervor of fanatics.
As it turned out, weeks before the war began, Saddam’s ministry of defense had made efforts to integrate Arab jihadists into Iraqi training camps.3 Captured documents describe legions of Muslim fighters from Syria, Libya, Bulgaria, Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and the Palestinian territories.4 One, dated March 27, 2003, describes an Iraqi intelligence official’s conversation with the leader of Hamas in Gaza in which “[h]e requested us [the Iraqi government] to open the checkpoints at the border to let the volunteer fighters participate in the war.”5 The report continued, “Hamas is willing to carry out demonstrations and suicide attacks to support Iraq.” Captured log records also documented the steady stream of foreign fighters into Iraq during this period.6 Saddam ordered that Arab Fedayeen volunteers receive the same salaries and benefits as Iraq’s Special Forces.7
It soon became clear that the gaps in our intelligence about the Fedayeen Saddam were signs of a broader problem. For years there had been an overreliance on reconnaissance from aircraft and satellites rather than on-the-ground human intelligence. The problem was not endemic only to the CIA. Intelligence agencies within the Defense Department, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency, also failed to assess correctly the threat posed by the Fedayeen. While the attraction of foreign jihadists to the conflict in Iraq was possible given their hatred of America, the fact is that our intelligence agencies failed to warn of the possibility, and, as a result, our forces were not well prepared for it.
We would discover more gaps in U.S. intelligence. We would find that the reality on the ground ran counter to the prewar intelligence reporting that had informed CENTCOM’s planning. It turned out that Iraqi infrastructure was not in serviceable condition; most of it was ramshackle and disintegrating. It turned out that the Iraqi army did not remain in whole units capable of being used for reconstruction after liberation; it dissolved itself. It turned out that the Iraqi police was not a trustworthy, professional force capable of securing the country after the invasion; they would have to be recruited and trained from scratch.
This intelligence failure on the existence and capabilities of the Fedayeen and foreign jihadists to wage an asymmetric war against our troops posed daunting consequences for the coalition effort. American forces that were prepared to fight more conventional forces had to adapt to an enemy that hid among civilians and fought by means of ambushes, car bombs, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The Fedayeen and foreign jihadists fighting our troops in March and April 2003 would form the core of an insurgency that would engulf Iraq later in the year.
The coalition force’s advance toward Baghdad coincided with a shamal, a massive sandstorm that turned the skies over Iraq orange. In some places, the
sand mixed with rain and became an unpleasant mud. Though the shamal slowed the U.S. drive northward, it did not stop it. Nor did it turn into the advantage for the Iraqi army that many thought it might.8 Iraqi forces around Baghdad believed the clouds of sand would give them cover. But our Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) aircraft in the sky above were able to penetrate the dust clouds with infrared cameras that could see the Iraqi forces below as they repositioned their armor. The Iraqis were stunned as American bombs, with demoralizing precision, broke through the clouds of dust and sand to destroy the Iraqi tanks.
One week after the invasion began, General James Conway, commanding general of the I MEF, and General William Wallace of the Army’s V Corps ordered a seventy-two-hour pause to resupply their troops. I understood the reason for the pause, given the logistical challenges involved with the movement of tens of thousands of troops, thousands of pieces of armor, trucks, and humvees, and supplies. The pause, however, led to news reports that U.S. forces were “bogged down,” this time in an Iraqi quagmire.9
Despite concerns about the accuracy of some of the press coverage, we decided to give news reporters unprecedented access to real-time information as the war was underway. During the planning phase, the Pentagon’s assistant secretary for public affairs, Torie Clarke, approached me with the creative concept of embedding reporters with American forces from the outset of the war. Clarke was aggressively engaged in making the Pentagon responsive to a continuously evolving media environment.
Myers and I weighed the pros and cons of Clarke’s proposal and came to the conclusion that embedding reporters was worth the risk. We believed it would give them a firsthand understanding of the courage and the professionalism of the men and women in our armed forces. Some seven hundred reporters and photographers were embedded with American forces when the war in Iraq began.10 The process created new burdens for our forces, since they had to provide the journalists with food, shelter, transport, and, importantly, be responsible for their safety. No single element of the invasion force had the whole picture. But we concluded they could do a better job presenting the reality of the conflict than they would pool reporting from coalition headquarters.
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