The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  That fall, Powell circulated the memo to Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. “It may have been irrelevant,” Erdmann said. “Maybe it wasn’t read.”

  * * *

  THE REAL ACTION was elsewhere. In September, around the time that Erdmann’s memo was making the pro-forma rounds in Washington, across the river at the Pentagon, the Office of Near East and South Asia’s Northern Gulf Directorate was setting up an annex in empty offices one floor above its regular location on the fourth floor. The extra space would accommodate and also separate the overflow of people who were being brought in to work on planning for Iraq. The new unit was called the Office of Special Plans. It was overseen by Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, and his deputy William Luti. Feith, a Washington lawyer, had been out of government for almost two decades; in 1983 he had been fired by Reagan’s national security adviser William Clark and was then brought over to the Pentagon by Richard Perle. Feith’s political activities and writings were largely devoted to bolstering the hard-line policies of the Likud Party. He owed his important new job to his friend and former boss Perle, who had turned it down himself and then recommended this relatively unknown man to Rumsfeld. “All right, I’m taking Feith,” Rumsfeld told Perle, “and he’d better be as good as you say.” So it was Douglas Feith who assumed the administration’s crucial position on postwar Iraq. After the invasion, he would claim that Special Plans’ enigmatic name was necessary: “At the time, calling it Iraqi Planning Office might have undercut our diplomatic efforts.” This lawyerly reasoning didn’t explain why the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project was taking place in full public view with no adverse consequences—why the postwar planning effort couldn’t be seen as a credible threat that strengthened the administration’s hand at the UN.

  But for the Office of Special Plans, secrecy was not only convenient, it was necessary. One could even say that it was metaphysically necessary. The man brought in by Feith and Luti to direct the operation was Abram Shulsky, a former Perle aide and consultant at the Pentagon’s in-house think tank, the Office of Net Assessment. Shulsky, Wolfowitz’s housemate at Cornell and Chicago, had coauthored a short essay in 1999 called “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous).” Shulsky believed that the writings of his old professor Leo Strauss could be useful antidotes to the narrow-mindedness of the American intelligence community. Rather than relying on statistics and social science, which are based on universal categories, intelligence analysts should turn back to the giants of political philosophy, such as Thucydides, who understood that the nature of regimes differs profoundly. (“Regime,” translated by Strauss from the Greek politeia, suggested the character of a society’s ideals and its leaders; perhaps it’s not an accident that the rubric of the administration’s Iraq policy became “regime change.”) Tyrannies cannot be understood in the image of democracies, and the tendency of established analysts to try (known as “mirror-imaging”) guarantees that they will fail to grasp the essential nature of an Ayatollah Khomeini when he comes along. Tyrants rely on deception, which makes the work of the analyst harder but also more philosophically interesting, and which brings to mind the relevance of Strauss’s idea of esoteric or hidden writing in the great political texts: “Strauss’s view certainly alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception,” Shulsky wrote. “Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.”

  It isn’t such a long step from this insight to the creation of an office that conceals its work behind a deliberately obscure name like “Special Plans.” There’s mirror-imaging of a different kind going on here—not the mistake of seeing your enemy as a reflection of yourself, but the mistake of trying to see your enemy as he sees himself until you begin to reflect him. “When you look long into an abyss,” wrote Nietzsche, the bête noire of the Straussians, “the abyss also looks into you.” Something like this had already happened in Feith’s office before Special Plans was set up, in a predecessor unit, the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group. The idea for the unit was Wolfowitz’s, and it went all the way back to 1976 and Team B, the group of CIA-appointed outside experts, including Wolfowitz, that had come to much more alarmist conclusions about the Soviets than the intelligence agencies. This time, the purpose was to gather intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and their possible nexus in Iraq. The operation was led by David Wurmser, author of Tyranny’s Ally and the “Clean Break” strategy paper from which it emerged. Together with his partner, F. Michael Maloof, who had served under Perle in the Reagan Defense Department (all roads from Special Plans led back to Perle), Wurmser collected raw data, much of it from defectors provided by the Iraqi National Congress, in order to prove an assumption: that Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda and was likely to hand off WMD to terrorists. Wurmser and Maloof were working deductively, not inductively: The premise was true; facts would be found to confirm it. All the better that much of the data was doubted or even dismissed by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Energy Department. In the eyes of the Pentagon civilians, the methods of the intelligence agencies were deeply suspect, and mainstream analysts had a long record of failure in the Middle East. A new method was urgently needed, starting with the higher insights of political philosophy rather than evidence from the fallen world of social science.

  By the time Feith and Luti set up the Office of Special Plans, Wurmser had already moved on to work for John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, the lone high-level neoconservative in the State Department. (Wurmser would end up in the vice president’s office, suggesting that in the Bush administration lateral movement could be more important than the vertical kind.) Maloof would eventually have his security clearance revoked. But the work of their disbanded intelligence unit was absorbed into Special Plans, as bullet points on policy papers and PowerPoint slides, and then piped by Luti and Shulsky directly to the White House, where the neoconservatives had allies in Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Rice’s NSC director for the Middle East, Elliott Abrams. Just as the new methods of analyzing intelligence evaded the cumbersome old requirements of vetting, this configuration of like-minded officials dispersed on key islands across the national-security archipelago allowed the intelligence “product” and its effect on policy to circumvent the normal interagency process, in which the unconverted would have been among the participants and might have raised objections. It was an efficient way of working if you knew what you wanted to achieve.

  It’s difficult to say exactly what, all through that fall and winter, the Office of Special Plans planned. Luti would later claim the existence of hundreds of pages of documents, but they were never released. Luti, a former Navy captain, Newt Gingrich aide, and Cheney adviser, was a passionate supporter of war with Iraq and a man of occasionally manic temperament who could drive himself to public tears in his zeal about the subject. Once, in office conversation, he called retired General Anthony Zinni, the former head of Central Command and Bush’s envoy to the Middle East, a traitor for expressing doubts about an Iraq war. Luti was known among colleagues as “Über-Luti.” Under his and the gentler, professorial Shulsky’s leadership, the office’s main purpose was to manage information and control policy. Shulsky directed the writing of Iraq, WMD, and terrorism memos according to strictly supervised talking points.

  To think through the politics of postwar Iraq, Special Plans recruited Middle East experts. One of them was Michael Rubin, a young Iran scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who had lectured at universities in Jerusalem and Iraqi Kurdistan. Another was Harold Rhode, a protégé of the Princeton professor Bernard Lewis, who like Shulsky was brought over from the Pentagon’s in-house think tank. Rhode and Rubin were extremely close to Chalabi and the Iraq
i National Congress, and when one INC member visited the Pentagon, he found Rhode in an office wallpapered with quotations from the hadith, the sayings attributed to Mohamed and compiled a hundred years after his death. Rhode was musing that one way to transform the Middle East would be for Iran to change the Farsi alphabet to Roman, as Atatürk had done with Turkish. “But how are you going to do it, Harold?” the Iraqi asked. “It’s a concept,” Rhode replied.

  Rhode had begun his study of Islam with Sunnism, he told an Iraqi friend, but he soon decided that it had no intellectual substance, no room for original thinking. Then he met Fouad Ajami and other Arab Shia, and as he began to read in Shiite theology and jurisprudence, Rhode found a religion for intellectuals, like Judaism. He also subscribed to the idea, advanced in Wurmser’s book, of restoring the Hashemite kingdom in Iraq, with King Hussein’s brother Prince Hassan on the throne and Chalabi as prime minister, which would effectively return Iraq to its pre-1958 government, with a Shiite at the top. Shiite power was the key to the whole neoconservative vision for Iraq. Rhode even once compared Chalabi to the Prophet: “At first people doubted him, but they came to realize the wisdom of his ways.”

  The convergence of ideas, interests, and affections between certain American Jews and Iraqi Shia was one of the more curious subplots of the Iraq War. An administration official once put the obvious question directly to an Iraqi friend: “Do you ever wonder why a religious Jew who’s American would want to help the Shia in Iraq?” He answered his own question with a story. He and his wife had difficulty conceiving a child, and he approached his rabbi to ask if advanced fertility treatments fell within the rules of Orthodox Judaism. The rabbi gave his blessing. But the official wanted to know his reasoning, and the rabbi explained it. When the official went to the Middle East during the Iraq War, he found a Shiite cleric and put the same question to him. Not only did the official get the same answer; the theological reasoning was exactly the same, too. Eureka! The experience clinched his belief that the Shia and the Jews, oppressed minorities in the region, could do business, and that traditional Iraqi Shiism (as opposed to the theocratic, totalitarian kind that had taken Iran captive) could lead the way to reorienting the Arab world toward America and Israel.

  This thinking ran high up the policy chain at the Pentagon. Douglas Feith once told Kanan Makiya, “You Shia in Iraq have a historical opportunity. Do whatever you can—but don’t speak about it.” Not speaking about it fit the Shiite concept of taqiya—dissembling in defense of the faith, the sanctioned lying to outsiders that allowed a persecuted religious sect to survive. Taqiya also explained the decoy name and hidden work of the Office of Special Plans, home of that other persecuted sect newly arrived in power, the neoconservatives.

  Their indulgence toward Iraqi Shiism did not extend to the whole Arab and Muslim world, which the Pentagon’s thinkers saw more in terms of sickness than opportunity. Harold Rhode would report with satisfaction that some of his Muslim friends had grown so ashamed of what was being preached in the name of their faith that they hesitated to take their children to the mosque. A government official who had frequent dealings with Feith, Rhode, and the others came up with an analogy for their attitude toward Islam: “The same way evangelicals in the South wrestle with homosexuals, they feel about Muslims—people to be saved, if only they would do things on our terms. Hate the sin, love the sinner.”

  Among these ideological speculators, Ahmad Chalabi was a master politician, and he became their North Star in the project of transforming Iraq. “They thought that Ahmad’s loyalty was to the ideal of the group,” an associate of Chalabi said. “They were young, bookish, not politically savvy. Ahmad fooled them easily.”

  * * *

  BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MASSIVE TASK of planning for postwar Iraq? The State Department’s Future of Iraq Project was toiling away, and an interagency working group was meeting regularly under the auspices of the National Security Council; but there was still no postwar policy. How long would the United States stay in Iraq? Would the country be under American military occupation or international supervision? When would a new Iraqi government be set up, and how, and who would run it? The press speculated, but no one really knew, because the Bush administration couldn’t make up its mind. Rice and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser and her deputy, allowed the questions to remain open while diplomacy at the UN broke down, troops poured into the Middle East, and the momentum toward war built irreversibly.

  In 1997, President Clinton had signed an obscure document called Presidential Decision Directive 56, which created an interagency planning group for “managing complex contingency operations.” PDD 56 amounted to an admission that the peacekeeping operations of the 1990s had not gone well, that extensive training and early planning were necessary, and that these efforts needed to be coordinated at a high level, that of the number-two official in the key departments and agencies. After President Bush took office with an undisguised disdain for peacekeeping, his first national security directive, signed on February 13, 2001, abolished Clinton’s system of interagency working groups and downgraded the “contingency operations” group to a bureaucratic level where it was bound to languish—and it did.

  In early 2003, a Marine major on the NSC staff drafted a memo that analyzed force levels and population size in previous peacekeeping operations. If Kosovo were used as a model, half a million troops would be required to secure Iraq. Rice saw the memo (it isn’t clear if she showed it to Bush), but it had no effect on the planning. State and Defense were at odds about every issue of the postwar, from the role of exiles in an interim government to the role of Americans in providing security. “This was the most important thing that did not occur in Iraq and did in Kosovo,” said a Pentagon official with experience in both operations. “NSC didn’t force the departments to reconcile a known disagreement that was very deep between the two agencies. They kind of papered over the differences instead of dealing with them.” Looking back on the prewar period, Richard Haass located a failure in Rice’s function as the national security adviser. “The N.S.A. is not just an honest broker but an honest balancer. Part of the job is to introduce arguments maybe not held by people around the table. What if there are better arguments not represented?” Rice, in charge of coordinating policy, proved more skillful at seconding the president than obliging him to consider the range of arguments and resolve them in a coherent way. At his meeting with the Iraqi exiles in early January, when the problems of postwar Iraq came up, Bush turned to Rice and said, “A humanitarian army is going to follow our army into Iraq, right?” Right, Rice affirmed, but she glanced down in a way that suggested she knew how inadequate the answer was.

  In October 2002, Leslie Gelb, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, had approached Rice and Hadley with an offer of help. The council and two other think tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, would form a consortium that would gather a panel of experts to provide facts and options for the postwar. Their work would be politically palatable, coming from across the ideological spectrum, not insisting on a single plan that would corner the administration. “This is just what we need,” Rice said. “We’ll be too busy to do it ourselves.” But she didn’t want the involvement of Heritage, which had been critical of the idea of an Iraq war. “Do AEI.”

  Chris DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, where the administration’s neoconservatives drew their support and many of their personnel, neither consented nor refused when Gelb broached the possibility. On November 15, the representatives of the think tanks met with Rice and Hadley in Rice’s office at the White House. John Hamre of CSIS went in expecting to pitch the idea to Rice, but the meeting was odd from the start: Rice seemed attentive only to DeMuth, and it was as if the White House was trying to sell something to the American Enterprise Institute rather than the other way around. When Gelb, on speakerphone from New York, began to describe his concept, DeMuth cut him off. “Wait a mi
nute. What’s all this planning and thinking about postwar Iraq?” He turned to Rice. “This is nation building, and you said you were against that. In the campaign you said it, the president has said it. Does he know you’re doing this? Does Karl Rove know?”

  Without AEI, Rice couldn’t sign on. Two weeks later, Hadley called Gelb to tell him what Gelb already knew: “We’re not going to go ahead with it.” Gelb later explained, “They thought all those things would get in the way of going to war.”

  From the beginning of the Bush administration, Rice seemed outmatched by the vastly more experienced men who were now her bureaucratic peers. She had served as a midlevel staff official and Soviet expert on George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council, after which she took the number two job at Stanford. It was a thin résumé indeed compared with Cheney’s, Rumsfeld’s, and Powell’s, and during her first two years as national security adviser nothing suggested that she was becoming their equal. On issue after issue—Iran, North Korea, above all Iraq—policy decisions were either never made or never argued out before they were made. Her only achievements seemed to be her closeness to the president and her controlled, brittle, relentless defense of him. At the State Department, which lost so many of those early battles, there was a sense that Cheney and Rumsfeld were simply rolling Rice. Richard Armitage, Powell’s deputy, began to call her office “dysfunctional.” One senior administration official had trouble squaring the near-brilliant woman he knew Rice to be with her seemingly feckless performance in office. “She brings all the right ingredients,” he said. “The work ethic, the sublimated whatever it is that turns into a drive for power, whether it’s a sublimated sexual drive or whatever—she’s got it. The Romans would say ‘ambition.’ She’s dexterous when it comes to manipulating people and getting what she wants. So it’s difficult for me to see her as an inept administrator.”