Known and Unknown

by Donald Rumsfeld

  * Since he admitted himself into treatment in September 2001, Nick has lived a drug-free life with the support of his wife, Anne.

  † In Desert Storm, 10 percent of U.S. weapons were precision guided. By 2001, a decade later, some 70 percent of U.S. air-delivered weapons were guided by lasers or GPS with devastating accuracy.

  * In 1990 and 1991, the military had shipped some four hundred thousand short tons of ammunition into the Iraq theater. More than 80 percent was returned to the United States untouched.2

  * David Kay, the chief UN weapons inspector in 1991, believed it would have been only twelve to eighteen months until the regime reached “regular industrial-scale production of fissile material,” or enriched uranium, that could be used in an atomic bomb.4

  * I considered it my responsibility to ask questions and seek needed information from briefers. In my experience, the good briefers and analysts did not show discomfort when I engaged them. In fact, they tended to enjoy the give-and-take and seemed appreciative of the interest of a senior official. Some commented that the interchanges helped them do their work better and provided useful input for their colleagues. After a few in the CIA alleged that some policy officials had “politicized intelligence,” in 2004 I asked not to receive my daily oral briefings from the CIA. If questions were going to be reported as efforts to distort rather than to better understand or clarify the information we were receiving, it not only wasn’t worth taking time to receive the briefings, it had risks. As a result, I began simply reading the CIA briefing materials and asking the undersecretary of defense for intelligence to pose any questions I might have.

  * I have no knowledge of what Powell may have said to individuals when not in my presence—such as news reporters. But in the National Security Council meetings I attended, this was the only time I heard Secretary Powell discuss the issue. A few years later, when that issue started to surface in the press, I asked both Rice and the President if they had any memory of Powell ever suggesting a need for more troops. Bush said Powell might have said something to him, but was uncertain. Rice said she was at all the meetings between Powell and the President and had no memory of Powell raising the issue.21

  * In the wake of the Vietnam War, the Army organization structure was changed so that the Army Reserves would have to be called up in the event of war. “They’re not taking us to war again without calling up the reserves,” General Creighton Abrams remarked. The TPFDD was a legacy of the military’s post-Vietnam mindset.24

  † At a commander’s conference in February 2003, a midlevel officer stood up and, in his question, informed me for the first time that the Army was giving only five days’ notice for National Guard and Reserve call-ups. It was a strikingly and unacceptably short lead time, given that members of the Guard and Reserves had full-time jobs and lives outside of that in the uniform. I felt they needed and deserved at least thirty days’ notice of a possible call-up, if at all possible. And, in this case, it was possible, and in short order we managed to get the Army to fix its system.

  * Other instances of military action without UN Security Council approval are: Vietnam War (1959–75); the liberation of Grenada (1983); the liberation of Haiti (1994–95); NATO’s bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995); the U.S.-UK bombing of Iraq (1998); and NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia (1999).

  * According to the Volcker report, “[D]ifferences among member states impeded decision-making, tolerated large-scale smuggling, and aided and abetted grievous weaknesses in administrative practices within the Secretariat…. As a result, serious questions have emerged about the United Nations’ ability to live up to its ideals.”28

  * I was reminded of that fact during a meeting in Vilnius with Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus. “Secretary Rumsfeld,” he said, “I remember you when you first ran for Congress in Illinois in 1962.” Adamkus had lived in the Chicago area for a number of years. He told me that he ran on the Republican ticket for sanitary district trustee in Cook County at the same time I was running for Congress. “You won your race and I lost mine,” he added. “But you’re now a president,” I replied. “I’d say you’ve made out all right for yourself.”

  † “If Americans had listened to some European leaders during the past 50 years,” the President of Latvia told me, “we [Latvia] would still be in the Soviet Union.”3

  * As the CIA noted at the time, “[I]t would be difficult for al-Qaida to maintain an active, long-term presence in Iraq without alerting the authorities or obtaining their acquiescence.”10

  * A majority of the Turkish lawmakers voted in favor of the law allowing our forces to pass through Turkey on the way to Iraq, but the 264 to 251 vote failed to meet a parliamentary rule that required a majority of those present to vote in favor. Because there were 19 abstentions, three more votes in favor of the resolution were needed for it to pass.

  * Both generals went on to serve in the Obama administration: Shinseki as secretary of veterans affairs and Jones as national security adviser.

  * On September 30, 2002, for example, I dictated a note: “I want to talk to the Vice President about getting Tenet active in getting Arabs in states to help offer Saddam a way out.”36

  * The reality was different from the media storyline. In the fog of war, Lynch’s unit had become lost after taking a wrong turn, and in a firefight she had been wounded and captured. Lynch’s captors took her to a local hospital, where a courageous Iraqi reported her whereabouts to U.S. forces. After her rescue, Lynch reportedly remembered little about the ordeal, but like most American troops who had volunteered to serve their country, she was brave and dedicated.

  * One mile east of the airport, Army Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith and the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division were clearing a position to hold enemy prisoners of war. Without warning, Republican Guard troops began firing from a nearby watchtower, and nearly one hundred Iraqi troops threatened to overrun his position and an aid station where dozens of wounded American soldiers were receiving medical attention. Smith manned a machine gun and led a counterattack from an exposed position. Though he would not survive the battle, Smith prevented Saddam’s men from attacking the aid station, saving the lives of over a hundred American soldiers. For his courage, Paul Ray Smith became the first to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor in the wars that began after September 11, 2001.

  * The list also included hospitals, mosques, and schools.

  * At one point, I commented to General John Abizaid and General Myers: “The history books suggest that the way they stopped looting in earlier era[s] in Iraq was to get the tribes to provide security for things like electric power lines and oil wells.” I asked, “Have we considered talking to some of the tribes about providing that security and paying them for it, like we would police, and having them be responsible?” It would be precisely these tribes that would prove critical to achieving a level of security in the country three years later.10

  * The intelligence community assessed that the Iraqi “police and justice personnel appear to have extensive professional training,” as one brief provided to the NSC principals asserted. This proved to be off the mark. To a great many Iraqis, the police force was equated with the abuses of Saddam’s regimes. The police lacked legitimacy and thus authority, posing a major problem for the coalition as an insurgency took root.12

  * Today the Baghdad Museum is open and thousands of ancient Near Eastern artifacts have been moved back into their displays.

  † The situation brought to mind a quote I had read: “The power of the media is willful and dangerous because it dramatically affects Western policy while bearing no responsibility for the outcome. Indeed, the media’s moral perfectionism is possible only because it is politically unaccountable.”19

  * In the 2000 campaign, candidate George W. Bush had indicated that he was similarly ill disposed to sending American troops to take on “nation-building” missions. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building,” Bush said.8r />
  * Rodman had come of age as a protégé of Henry Kissinger during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Like Kissinger, he was a strategist who thought long term, the kind of adviser I favored. Rodman was a quiet presence in Department meetings. When he spoke, it was with unusual precision and insight.

  † The deputies committee was the most senior interagency forum below the cabinet level. Departments were represented by the deputy secretaries or under secretaries in the meetings.

  * In late 2003, when this deficiency became apparent, Doug Feith and I joined White House officials in urging the State Department to undertake the responsibility of creating an office of stabilization and reconstruction and a civilian reserve corps that could deploy as our military reserves did. Powell agreed eventually on the condition that it would be “small scale.” He was understandably concerned about State being assigned additional missions without increasing its budget, personnel, and resources. Such an office came into being only in 2004, but with less authority and a smaller mandate than it merits.

  * The State Department and CIA had also not favored having the Northern Alliance advance on Kabul for fear the Afghans might not be able to settle disputes among Afghanistan’s ethnic divisions. Their view seemed to be that the United States needed to orchestrate the takeover of the Afghan capital and set up a balance of power for them.

  * More than a year before the war began, in January 2002, Pentagon officials were pushing for a U.S. government-sponsored conference for all the external groups to show a united front against the Saddam regime. Deputy Secretary of State Armitage generated a series of bureaucratic impediments to stop or delay the meeting. Eventually, in December 2002, the administration organized a conference in London. By then, nearly a year had passed, to the detriment of our country’s planning efforts. Even then, State and CIA remained skeptical of the Iraqi externals, and voiced doubts about the Iraqis’ ability to come together to build a new country.

  * I recommended to President Bush that Garner be appointed ambassador to Afghanistan soon after he returned to the United States, but without success. I believed he could inject a sense of urgency into the State Department mission in Kabul.18

  * The failure to take responsibility for leaks that threatened to damage the administration ultimately belonged to the White House. In April 2003, a few weeks after my phone conversation with Powell, I assembled a package of news articles quoting officials from the State Department, including Armitage, that revealed damaging assertions against the administration, and sent the memo to Card. The articles, I noted, “reflect a hemorrhaging in the administration. It is clearly not disciplined.” Though it was seldom noted, Armitage also leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name to the press, causing further damage.22

  * After a brief talk with Bremer, I told Card that “I think he is the man” to head the CPA. Tenet said he had heard good things about Bremer, and Powell said he thought well of Bremer but wanted to “run a couple of traps” before he could say he was comfortable. I later learned a slightly different version of the story of the Bremer selection. Apparently when I mentioned Bremer, Powell was delighted, because Bremer had close links to the State Department.27

  * Bremer quotes himself as saying, “I’d settle for MacArthur’s problems.”1

  * When I met with the two of them on my visits to Iraq, their body language signaled a lack of rapport. By the end of their tours in mid-2004, I received reports that they were barely speaking.

  * A subtle but important semantic misstep was that the administration allowed the United Nations to label the United States “an occupying power” in Security Council Resolution 1483. The unanimous May 2003 resolution signaled broad international approval for the coalition’s efforts in a liberated Iraq, but it gave credence to the propaganda of our enemies that we were “occupying” Iraq.

  * It’s difficult to penetrate the fog of war even after the fact, but in the years that followed, some senior military officers who were on the ground now believe there were at least some Iraqi units that might have been called back to duty. Some believe that as many as three Iraqi divisions might have been available for use. “The idea,” Lieutenant General McKiernan later said, “was to bring in the Iraqi soldiers and their officers, put them on a roster, and sort out the bad guys as we went.” If McKiernan had been acting as the senior commander in Iraq on the ground, as I believed he was supposed to be, his view might have prevailed.31

  * The CPA called the proposed new army the New Iraqi Corps. Though it had been done unwittingly, the acronym NIC was a particularly foul word in Arabic.

  * In 2004, after the fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report could highlight only one small section at the end of a thirty-eight-page National Intelligence Council document suggesting that the CIA cautioned of an insurgency: “[R]ogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare against the new government or Coalition forces.” This point was not included in the executive summary at the front of the document. Though press reports and opportunistic politicians seized on this line years later, CIA Director Tenet, to his considerable credit, came forward and put it into proper perspective in his memoirs: “It’s tempting to cite this information and say, ‘See, we predicted many of the difficulties that later ensued’—but doing so would be disingenuous…. Had we felt strongly that these were likely outcomes, we should have shouted our conclusions.”49

  * According to the official Defense Department dictionary, guerrilla warfare was defined as “military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular, predominantly indigenous forces.” An insurgency was defined as “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict.”53

  * We learned that several Al-Jazeera correspondents were embedded with the terrorists. They knew when and where attacks against Iraqi and coalition forces would take place, and they videotaped the attacks showing our troops being killed.

  * The often cited statistics about electricity generation did not give a full picture. After insurgent attacks on the power grid began taking a toll on production, Iraqis began to figure out the best solution for themselves. They bought generators for their homes and businesses that were far less susceptible to attacks than the large, vulnerable, and expensive power plants, lines, and transformers that made up the national grid.

  * Two of the most promising leads were from two Sunni former army generals, Abdul Razaq Sultan al-Jibouri and Talalal-Gaood, who had reached out to the U.S. military in late 2003 and offered to help negotiate peace with Sunni tribes in Anbar province.

  * DoD’s willingness to remove Ahmad Chalabi from a governance role in de-Baathification if he continued to be too stringent seemed not to register with those critics who argued that DoD officials were somehow fixated on making Chalabi the leader of Iraq.

  * I wanted to make sure the details of a move to arrest Sadr had been properly considered before action was taken. With this in mind, at one point in 2003, I dictated a series of questions for Bremer and CPA security officials to consider before they moved against him. Bremer writes in his book that these “exasperating” questions were tantamount to my opposition to the plan. Asking questions about the operation and how it would be done was basic prudence. It was a mistake not to have asked similar “exasperating” questions about some of Bremer’s other decisions.35

  * Not all of the photos were released to avoid inflaming the situation on the ground in Iraq and other places where American servicemen and-women were at risk.

  * Another problem was that those at CENTCOM and the Army who had been in positions of responsibility and partly responsible for the circumstances that preceded the abuses at Abu Ghraib had already left their positions. By the spring of 2004, most of those still in the relevant posts had been in there for relatively short periods of time. On the operational side, General Abizaid had been on the job f
or only several months when the abuse occurred. Under him, General Sanchez was the officer directly overseeing operations in Iraq and, therefore, the officer most likely to be fired. But in my view the Army administrative chain had thrust Sanchez into a position he never should have been in, and proceeded to deny Sanchez the staff and support he required and requested and that I had authorized. The Army’s leadership had also been in flux. I had already fired Secretary of the Army Tom White in April 2003 for other reasons. Les Brownlee was an acting secretary when Abu Ghraib occurred. The Army chief of staff, General Shinseki, who had been in charge when the original deficiencies in training, selection of senior personnel, and establishing Sanchez’s headquarters occurred, had retired After his full four-year term in June 2003. The new Army chief of staff, Pete Schoomaker, had been in his position for only several months when the abuse occurred.