Apparently Bremer felt he was blamed unfairly for the decision, and in truth, it wasn’t all Bremer’s fault. Many shared responsibility for the policy. I was told of Bremer’s decision and possibly could have stopped it.42 Members of the NSC had been informed of his decision before Bremer announced it, and not one participant registered an objection.43 My impression was that President Bush wanted Bremer to have considerable freedom of action. However, it is now clear that the NSC should have deliberated the decision more fully. We should have had more clarity about the critical details of implementation, ensuring that the stipend payments and the size, purpose, and timeline for it were well understood and agreed to beforehand.
There is no mistaking that the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army had consequences, but as time has gone on we may be finding it has had some advantages as well.44 Perhaps because much effort was poured into building a new force from scratch, it is emerging as one of Iraq’s more effective institutions. By way of contrast, its police force suffers from lack of training and discipline, sectarianism, and corruption. As in Afghanistan, the State Department was, by U.S. law, placed in charge of police training in Iraq. However, State sent very few qualified people to either country.45 In the case of Iraq, for reasons still unclear, the training program was delayed for six months. As a result, the country was without any sort of internal security force for a critical period following the war.
Defense officials repeatedly urged State and its representatives at the CPA to improve police training and devote more resources to the task.46 But just as he had with regard to the training of the army, Bremer argued against having the U.S. military take over Iraqi police training. “I do not agree with placing the Iraqi police program under the military command,” Bremer wrote me in February 2004, after I informed him that DoD would be assuming responsibility for police training. He said the transfer would “convey to the Iraqis the opposite of the principle of civilian standards, rules and accountability for the police.”47 This would have been a compelling argument if Iraq were Nebraska. But it wasn’t. It was a war zone that was suffering from a vicious insurgency. We needed a capable police force to bring law and order and gather intelligence to stop the insurgency from metastasizing further, and we needed it fast. Too much time had been wasted already. The whole process had cost us a year—and done incalculable harm to our country’s mission in Iraq in the interim.
The early months of the Iraq occupation—throughout the summer of 2003—saw the stirrings of an Iraqi insurgency. In August, the illustrious United Nations envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed when a flatbed truck filled with explosives barreled into the UN headquarters in Baghdad. Twenty-two other UN officials were also killed. The attack sent a chilling message to nations and organizations that were then considering joining the stabilization and reconstruction efforts. From that point on, our efforts to persuade countries to contribute became considerably more difficult.
Military commanders told me that before the attack they had warned UN officials several times that cement revetments and gates were needed to protect the UN compound. In declining to heed those warnings, they explained to our commanders, “That would make us too much like you.” After the bombing, the United Nations closed its mission and withdrew from Iraq.
When the signs of a resistance movement emerged that summer—grenade attacks, small-arms fire, the occasional suicide bomber, or car bomb—we tried to identify who and what was fueling the movement. At first, the insurgency consisted of former regime figures and common criminals. On the eve of the invasion, Saddam had released one hundred thousand prisoners who contributed to the lawlessness.48 Eventually the insurgency extended to groups like al-Qaida, which tapped into popular Sunni hostility against the Shia as well as the resentment that many Sunnis felt at the loss of their political privileges. Though the Sunni resistance initially seemed to lack organization and strength, its forces were soon being augmented by foreign fighters, jihadists who began pouring across Iraq’s borders from Syria and Saudi Arabia.
The resistance was centered in Iraq’s western Sunni provinces. Because the 3rd Infantry Division had been denied access to Iraq’s north through Turkey, most of the Sunni territory was not covered by U.S. troops in the early days of the war. Major combat operations were over by the time U.S. troops reached those strongholds. This meant that cities like Fallujah, Tikrit, and Ramadi never experienced major battles with U.S. troops and became safe havens for insurgents.
In the list of intelligence shortcomings, the failure to highlight the dangers of an insurgency was among the more serious. Intelligence reports occasionally discussed the possibility of postwar disorder and instability, but I don’t recall seeing a briefing that anticipated the likelihood of a sustained guerrilla campaign against the coalition.* Our intelligence community lacked an appreciation for the Baathist regime’s ability to finance, command, and control an insurgency after Saddam’s overthrow. They repeatedly asserted that ideological conflicts between the secular Baathists and the jihadist religious extremists of al-Qaida precluded strategic cooperation between them—yet such cooperation became the heart and soul of the insurgency.
Out of the dozens of intelligence and military briefings on what might be expected from a war in Iraq, the first time I had heard of the possibility of “protracted guerrilla war” came from someone removed from the intelligence community. In April 2003, as our troops raced northward through Iraq, a retired Marine colonel named Gary Anderson wrote an op-ed on the possibility of a guerrilla war. Anderson had served in Somalia and Lebanon and was steeped in the lessons of asymmetric warfare. “Many observers of the war with Iraq are focused on the looming battle for Baghdad in anticipation that it will be the culminating event of the conflict ... ,” he wrote in the Washington Post several days before the fall of Baghdad. “But in the view of the Iraqi leadership, it may be only the end of a first stage in a greater Iraqi plan.” He warned about the rise of “a protracted guerrilla war against the ‘occupation,’ which the American-British coalition bills as liberation.”50 He even raised the specter that the new phase of the war could be managed by Saddam himself. After reading Anderson’s article, I decided it should be of interest to Bremer and Abizaid. Because I found it different from what we were being told, I also sent it to Myers, Wolfowitz, and Feith and asked them to give it some thought.51
Senior DoD officials discussed what we should label this resistance movement in July 2003. I did not want to label the enemy inaccurately or give it legitimacy that it didn’t deserve. As the new CENTCOM commander, Abizaid did an initial assessment of the problem. In one of his first press briefings as CENTCOM commander, he called it “a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us.”52 Guerrillas can have positive connotations in many parts of the world. Many saw guerrillas as the brave vanguard of an outmatched force committed to bringing down a government through asymmetric means. I was also cautious about using the word “insurgency” at first. Insurgency struck me as an organized effort with a central command and control committed to the overthrow of a government. DoD’s official definition of the term supported this interpretation.* In summer 2003, Iraq didn’t have its own government and, moreover, the attacks seemed to lack central coordination. I told senior DoD officials that we had “to do a better job of using words that are well thought through and calculated to express exactly what we mean.”54 I didn’t want to end up with another label like “war on terror” that we might regret down the road.
Abizaid didn’t back down. In response to my queries, he gave the reasons why he believed it was a guerrilla war: The resistance had some public support; the attacks were sustained and asymmetric; and it was beginning to demonstrate some organization. The growing momentum of the attacks, particularly in western, Sunni-populated areas, proved Abizaid’s point. He had done what I expected of all those who served in the U.S. military: When questioned by the Secretary of Defense, he marshaled the facts and arguments to support his position. He convinced me t
hat we were indeed facing an insurgency. In November 2003, I asked for information and briefings on historical insurgencies and what the lessons learned of Britain’s successful counterinsurgency in Malaya (now Malaysia) during the 1950s were.55 There was no mistaking that there was a gaping blind spot where our government and intelligence community might have anticipated the possibility of an insurgency in Iraq.
As the months went on, it was clear that when I made suggestions to Bremer, he did not take them well. His formal direction from the President to report through me was being ignored. He was receiving guidance directly from many in the administration—the President, Rice, Powell—and choosing which guidance he preferred. After four months of what looked to me to be a series of unfortunate decisions, I felt a need to intervene.
I was onboard a military plane returning to the United States after a four-day trip to Iraq and Afghanistan on September 8, 2003, when I scanned the Pentagon’s “Early Bird,” a compilation of the top national security–related stories in major newspapers. One item that caught my attention was an op-ed by Bremer in the Washington Post entitled, “Iraq’s Path to Sovereignty.” This was the first I’d heard of the article’s existence. In fact, I had just spent two days in Baghdad with Bremer, and he had mentioned nothing about it, nor had he even hinted at the startling news it contained.
“[H]ow can we get Iraqis back in charge of Iraq?” Bremer asked in his article. “Elections are the obvious solution to restoring sovereignty to the Iraqi people. But at the present elections are simply not possible.”56 He outlined seven steps that Iraq would have to take on its path to self-government, including economic progress, ratification of a constitution, and then elections. Only after the completion of these steps, Bremer wrote, would the CPA relinquish control of the country. I thought to myself that a turnover could take years under Bremer’s policy—and if there were a stalemate at any step, it could take longer. This was quite a departure from our approach in Afghanistan. Afghans had had a sovereign interim government operating before their new constitution was drafted, let alone ratified, as a number of increasingly frustrated Iraqis noted.
I recognized, of course, that the plan Bremer was now outlining was similar to the approach long favored by the State Department, in which Iraq would regain sovereign power only after a multiyear period of U.S. administration. Indeed, Secretary Powell, at Bremer’s request, flew to Baghdad to insist that this plan was the only way to ensure a successful and stable Iraq.57 Bremer recounts Powell declaring to a meeting of the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad that giving sovereignty to the Iraqi leaders at that time was “entirely unacceptable.”58 Bremer’s decision to publish his op-ed without informing me—and his apparent decision to follow the State Department’s view—ended even the pretense that he reported through the Department of Defense, or that I was in any way in Bremer’s line of authority.
Yet I was astonished to learn much later that Bremer had approached the President about moving out from under his theoretical reporting relationship through me, citing my “micromanagement.” “Don terrifies his civilian subordinates,” Bremer reportedly told the President. “I can rarely get any decisions out of anyone but him. This works all right, but isn’t ideal.”59 The micromanagement charge was ironic coming from Bremer, of all people. Over the previous months I had worked to try to develop a good working relationship with him. I commended him for his work and made a point of noting whenever he seemed to be on the right track.60 I still had considerable sympathy for the challenges he faced. He was in a tough job and getting criticism and advice from all sides. The Iraqis were pressing for more authority. The insurgency was blossoming. But Bremer and his CPA suffered not from too much oversight on my part but from too little. That needed to change. Bremer’s op-ed reflected the still unresolved internal conflicts in the administration’s Iraq policy. I decided it was worth a last-ditch effort to get it back on track.
CHAPTER 37
Liberation from the Occupation
Beginning in September 2003, after Bremer’s article was published, I assembled a review group on Iraq policy, headed by Doug Feith and Lieutenant General Walter “Skip” Sharp, the director of plans on the Joint Staff. I hoped to bring resolution to the unresolved debate about our strategy for when to hand over authority to Iraqis. With input from Generals Myers, Pace, and Abizaid, we reformulated the five principal U.S. strategic goals for an Iraqi government: renouncing terrorism, abandoning WMD and long-range missile programs, seeking peace with its neighbors, remaining a unified country, and developing the Iraqi economy.1
Our plan called for the prompt assembly of a group of Iraqis to select an interim prime minister, help draft a constitution, and pave the way for elections. We also called for a date certain for the transfer of full sovereign authority: no later than the middle of 2004. I wanted to give Iraqis concrete assurance that the occupation of their country was going to end—and soon.2
I asked Bremer and Abizaid to fly to Washington to discuss it with us at the Pentagon. My hope was to sit down with Bremer and have him offer ideas and input, with the ultimate goal of getting him to buy in to our plan. I had a sense that our effort might prove successful.
Prominent Iraqis had protested Bremer’s views as set forth in his op-ed. They were not pleased with his assertion that Iraqis would be taking on substantive roles later rather than sooner. Their significant outcry seemed to have put Bremer in a more cooperative mood. In fact, I thought he might be ready to accept a dignified way for him to drop his plan altogether.
I cleared much of my calendar for the two days Bremer and Abizaid would be in Washington. Over the course of our hours-long meetings, we showed them our strategic review and solicited their thoughts.3 As I had hoped, Bremer was receptive. By the close of our discussions, he had reversed his position that the Coalition Provisional Authority could not be dismantled until after elections were held.
On October 29, 2003, with Bremer’s acquiescence, I presented the agreed-upon proposal to the President and the members of the National Security Council. As he heard our timetable, Powell again expressed reservations, calling the turnover plan “exceptionally ambitious.”4 The President liked it, however, which was not surprising since it was in line with what I thought he had preferred to do all along. Bush soon set June 30, 2004, as the deadline for turning over sovereign power to the Iraqis. The occupation now had a foreseeable end.
As this was going on in October 2003, there was a curious development. A number of news outlets began to report that there had been a shake-up in the administration’s Iraq policy—but it was not the one that actually had just occurred. “President Bush is giving his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the authority to manage postwar Iraq and the rebuilding of Afghanistan,” USA Today reported.5 In what the New York Times called “a major reorganization” of the postwar effort, it quoted a senior administration official as saying that “[t]his puts accountability right into the White House.”6
The news stories surrounding Rice’s announcement reported that she had established something called the “Iraqi Stabilization Group,” with undetermined responsibilities. CNN reported that it “will be responsible for handling the day-to-day administration of Iraq.”7 One newspaper ran a cartoon of Rice pulling down a statue of me in front of the Pentagon, as Saddam’s statue had been pulled down in Firdos Square.
I thought it would have been terrific if Rice and her staff had the interest and skill to manage all U.S. efforts in Iraq and improve the situation. But they did not. In fact, the lack of resolution on issues relating to the administration’s Iraq strategy at the NSC level had been a major contributing factor to the problems in the first place. Years later I learned that Bremer had been having a daily phone call with Rice at 6:00 a.m., Washington time. She had had ample opportunity to offer Bremer and the CPA management advice. After the press began speculating about the new powers of Rice’s group—and the supposed coup against the Pentagon—Rice tried to clarify the situation. Publicl
y she said she had consulted on the establishment of the group with various officials, including me. That was not the case. I was informed of the new group’s existence as a fait accompli, but not consulted about whether it was desirable, necessary, or appropriate.
I sent the cartoon to Rice with a note saying she should keep it for her scrapbook.8
The news stories about Rice’s new management plan also repeated the widely believed canard that the State Department had been cut out of postwar planning.9 The stories bore the unmistakable fingerprints of Powell’s top aides.
I had been eager for the State Department to accept more responsibility in Iraq and would have been the last person to shut them out. When we asked the State Department to send experts to Iraq, they failed to meet their quotas.10 When we asked for support for reconstruction teams in Afghanistan and Iraq, they struggled to fill them. When the State Department was in charge of training the Iraqi police, it did not get the job done. Powell was in National Security Council meetings and principals meetings on Iraq and shared in every major decision. It was a mystery as to what these State Department officials felt they were not involved in. I was skeptical that either the National Security Council or the State Department truly wanted to be accountable for the administration’s Iraq policy, and I was all too aware that Rice and the NSC were not able to manage it.
On October 6, 2003, I sent a memo to the President with copies to Cheney and Andy Card. “In Monday’s paper,” I wrote, “Condi, in effect, announced that the President is concerned about the post-war Iraq stabilization efforts and that, as a result, he has asked Condi Rice and the National Security Council to assume responsibility for post-war Iraq.”11 I recommended that Bremer’s reporting relationship be formally moved from Defense to the NSC or to State:
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