The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Over time, this official began to wonder if the appearance of weakness was misleading. By the end of the first term, when Rice was appointed to replace Powell as secretary of state, the official was entertaining a far different account of her work as national security adviser. In this version, Rice knew exactly what she was doing by failing to reach decisions through the interagency process and instead allowing Cheney and Rumsfeld to do end runs around it. “Either she was complicitous with the president and the vice president, and to a certain degree with the secretary of defense, or she was using the secretary of defense and the secretary of state to further what were in fact the vice president’s and the president’s goals.” In other words, Rice wasn’t letting her boss down; she was doing his will in a particularly agile way. “How better to get your decisions made in ways that they will be easily implemented, rather than difficultly implemented, than to have an alternative NSC in which the national security adviser for the statutory NSC is complicit? And to pull the wool over your secretary of state’s eyes?”

  Eventually, not just the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, but a who’s who of foreign policy and military think tanks—the Rand Corporation, the Army War College, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies—produced reports that were striking for their unanimity of opinion. Security and reconstruction in postwar Iraq would require large numbers of troops for an extended period, and international cooperation would be essential. This had been Drew Erdmann’s conclusion as well. “It’s just common sense,” said Ray Salvatore Jennings of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the author of two separate reports. But none of the forecasts penetrated the Pentagon or the Oval Office.

  Thomas E. White, secretary of the Army until he was fired after the invasion, later said, “With DOD the first issue was, we’ve got to control this thing—so everyone else was suspect. And the second thing was, we had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.”

  Where it mattered and could have made a difference, the advice of experts was unwelcome. At the Pentagon, officials in the Office of Stability and Peace Operations—the former Office of Peacekeeping, which was a dirty word in the Rumsfeld Pentagon—were systematically excluded from planning meetings on Iraq, and their memos went ignored. With one reconstruction task already in trouble in Afghanistan and another looming in Iraq, the Pentagon nonetheless had plans to close its Peacekeeping Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In mid-February 2003, Rumsfeld gave a speech in New York titled “Beyond Nation Building.” The postwar reconstructions of the 1990s had bred a culture of dependency, he said, and Iraq would follow a new model—the minimalist approach of the United States in Afghanistan. The experience of peacekeeping specialists in Haiti, the Balkans, and East Timor was an actual liability in the eyes of the Iraq planners. “The senior leadership at the Pentagon was very worried about the realities of the postconflict phase being known,” a Defense official said, “because if you are Feith or if you are Wolfowitz, your primary concern is to achieve the war.” This official and his colleagues, whose careers had been devoted to preparing for such contingencies, spent the months leading up to the war in a state of steadily deepening demoralization. But none of them was willing to speak up loud enough inside or outside the five-sided building to get Rumsfeld’s attention. The one who did showed the others the price they would pay.

  In February, General Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and was asked about troop requirements. He did his best not to answer the question directly, for he must have understood the consequences. Finally, Shinseki said that, based on his experience of peacekeeping in the Balkans, postwar Iraq would require “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers.” This estimate prompted Paul Wolfowitz to get on the phone with White, the Army secretary. “He was agitated that we in the Army didn’t get it,” White said. “He didn’t give arguments or reasons. Their view was almost theological in nature—that it was going to go the way they said it was going to go.” A few days later, Wolfowitz appeared before the House Budget Committee and pronounced General Shinseki’s estimate “wildly off the mark.” The deputy secretary explained, “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.”

  Paul Wolfowitz was the intellectual architect of the war. He made the case for war with more passion and eloquence than anyone else in the administration, often speaking publicly about the nature of Baathist tyranny and the stifled talents of the Iraqi people that were just waiting to be set free. Listening to him, you sometimes felt that he had dozens of close Iraqi friends and perhaps even a few distant cousins in Baghdad and Basra. He once told an interviewer who asked whether democracy in Iraq might lead to Islamist rule, “Look, fifty percent of the Arab world are women. Most of those women do not want to live in a theocratic state. The other fifty percent are men. I know a lot of them. I don’t think they want to live in a theocratic state.” This, too, it seemed, was hard to imagine.

  More than Perle, Feith, and the neoconservatives in his department—certainly more than Rumsfeld and Cheney—Wolfowitz cared. For him Iraq was personal. He didn’t seem driven by other agendas: Military transformation and shoring up the Likud Party and screwing the Democrats were not his obsessions. He wasn’t a religious ideologue possessed by eschatological visions of remaking biblical lands. He was the closest thing to a liberal in the group. He had been pursuing this white whale for years, and he had everything to lose if Iraq went wrong. Why, then, did he find it all so hard to imagine?

  Whether he agreed with the war plan or not, Wolfowitz was not about to go up against his hugely powerful boss on the subject Rumsfeld jealously owned. Wolfowitz was a true believer, but he was also a bureaucratic survivor of many administrations, and when it mattered he was more than capable of bowing to political reality. In the late 1990s, when regime change in Iraq became his signature issue, Wolfowitz lined up behind the flimsy idea of overthrowing Saddam with a few thousand followers of Ahmad Chalabi, because he understood that the public had no interest in committing large numbers of American troops to the cause. And now that America was about to go to war and finish the job that Wolfowitz had long felt had been left incomplete in 1991, he accepted the terms: light force, little commitment in the postwar. He told the public again and again that the reconstruction would be cheap, that it could be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. He said this in the face of expert advice from oil company executives who knew the state of Iraq’s neglected oil facilities. The White House’s estimates of cost were absurdly low: By April, the Office of Management and Budget had asked Congress for only $2.5 billion for postwar reconstruction. When Bush’s economic adviser Lawrence Lindsay candidly predicted that the war could cost as much as $200 billion—a figure that would turn out to be low—the administration’s only public dissenter besides General Shinseki was quickly reprimanded and eventually fired. The administration systematically kept forecasts of the war’s true cost from the public and, by the insidious effects of airtight groupthink, from itself. This would be historic transformation on the cheap. Wolfowitz as much as anyone else was responsible.

  Like Kanan Makiya, Wolfowitz believed in the ability of Iraq’s people to transform their society. And, like Makiya, he believed this in spite of everything he knew about the Middle East. When he was appointed assistant secretary of state for East Asia in 1982, leaving behind Middle East policy for Asia was “like walking out of some oppressive, stuffy room into sunlight and fresh air,” he said. “I felt that I was going from a part of the world where people only know how to create problems to a part of the world where people solve problems.” Twenty ye
ars later, he was now a tireless booster of the new Iraq. He had no trouble imagining its promise, and at planning meetings he spoke about Iraq after Saddam as if it would be like Poland after the fall of communism—like “Eastern Europe with Arabs,” said one official. His ardent desire for the war led him to accept compromises that were bound to put its gains in jeopardy. Eventually, the deals one makes with others turn into deals made with oneself.

  Once, in mid-2002, Wolfowitz visited Kabul just after a disastrous incident in which an American AC-130 gunship had bombed four Afghan villages, killing forty civilians, including members of a wedding party. The fragile new government of Hamid Karzai was enraged, and the U.S. embassy had sent its Pashtun-speaking political officer to drink tea with the survivors, attend a funeral, and apologize. No one doubted that innocent lives had been lost; the only uncertainty was whether celebratory gunfire or perhaps even anti-aircraft fire from guerrillas in the area had provoked the attack. But when Wolfowitz met with embassy officials, he began to grill the political officer: “Why do you assume there was a wedding party? How do you know?” Maybe, Wolfowitz said, the Taliban had disguised themselves as revelers—that was his hunch about the incident. “We shouldn’t be so passive in apologizing. We should be more confident.” The officials listened in silence, appalled. Later, one of them told me, “It was almost like he was creating this alternate reality.” With Wolfowitz, self-righteousness had a dangerous habit of overwhelming inconvenient facts. A government official who worked with him on Iraq said, “Paul Wolfowitz, for all his good qualities, has an unfortunate ability to delude himself because he believes so passionately in things.”

  So it was Wolfowitz who ended the one serious public discussion of the fundamentals of the war plan before it had even begun. There would not be another. His message to Shinseki was a message to everyone in and out of uniform at the Pentagon: The cost of dissent was humiliation and professional suicide. An Air Force officer involved in the war planning later said, “After seeing Wolfowitz chew down a four-star, I don’t think anyone was going to raise their head up and make a stink about it.” Less than a month before the start of the war, Wolfowitz had helped to kick the props out from under his own grand project.

  The warning from Shinseki, and from the experts and dissenters at the Department of Defense, the State Department, the CIA, the NSC, Congress, and the think tanks, was “hard to imagine” only where it was ideologically suspect and politically inconvenient. It went against the whole thrust of Rumsfeld’s Defense Department, in which the overriding goal was military transformation: to continue the post–Cold War drawdown of active-duty divisions and focus strategy and spending on Special Forces, air power, and advanced weapons systems. Peacekeeping—never fully embraced by Clinton and openly dismissed by Bush in the 2000 campaign—became a discredited relic of an earlier era. “The type of operation a stability operation is—troop presence, police presence, these mundane activities—that’s not high-tech, exotic, ‘we’re going to have satellites and Predators and hunt these guys down in the back roads of Yemen,’” Thomas White said. “This is boots on the ground and it is very untransformational.” Afghanistan, with stunningly precise air power and small numbers of Special Forces working on the ground with local militias, was the brilliant new model for warfare. In planning for Iraq throughout 2002, Rumsfeld obliged General Tommy Franks of Central Command to whittle his invasion force down from an original half million (the maximum number in the war plan of Franks’s predecessor, Anthony Zinni, which Rumsfeld called “old and stale”) to around 160,000. It was partly done by picking out units from their normal command structure and interfering with the military’s standard deployment schedules in order to preserve an element of disguise during the buildup and continue sending troops into the theater after the invasion. If Franks hadn’t offered some resistance, the number would have dropped well below 100,000. But again and again, the secretary with the overpowering will got his way.

  It wasn’t the job of the uniformed services simply to salute their civilian leaders and march off to war. Franks, who was known to rule by fear, and his staff also had an obligation to the men and women under their command. Yet they never seemed to ask themselves what would happen if Rumsfeld was wrong—what might happen to their troops once they were in Iraq, without the necessary forces and protection, if things did not go according to plan. Plan A was that the Iraqi government would be quickly decapitated, security would be turned over to remnants of the Iraqi police and army, international troops would soon arrive, and most American forces would leave within a few months. There was no Plan B. Many of the officers at Central Command and the Joint Staff had concluded that Rumsfeld, however much they despised working for him because of his high-handed arrogance, must know what he was doing. His reputation was at its height, inside the administration and with the public. He was dazzling at press briefings and relentless at staff meetings. To the Air Force war planner, a major in the reserve named Glade Taylor, Rumsfeld’s triumph in Afghanistan discredited the Army, which had predicted that huge numbers of troops would be needed there. Shinseki sounded like a throwback to the Cold War. This was the future: Iraq would be won with shock and awe. One day, a crusty Army colonel who had served with the military police in Bosnia and Kosovo pulled Taylor aside and said, “Major, you’re deluding yourself.” In the Balkans, the colonel had seen incomprehensible numbers of factions vying for power in the postwar vacuum. The same could happen in Iraq; the country could disintegrate.

  General Anthony Zinni, who preceded Franks at Centcom, had anticipated just that. The allied bombing of Iraqi targets in December 1998 had rattled the regime in Baghdad, and Arab leaders had warned privately of a power vacuum if Saddam fell. Zinni, realizing that the responsibility for a postwar would fall on the military, began to work on a plan for Iraq’s reconstruction to go along with his war plan. “Desert Crossing” covered the protection of infrastructure, the sealing of borders, humanitarian crises, politics, economy, even social issues like the role of women. “It should be seamless with the military plan,” Zinni told me. “In 2000 I left it with General Franks. It was not complete, but it was far along.” In the weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Zinni, by then retired, sensed that the Bush administration was unprepared for what awaited it after the fall of the regime, especially given the troop numbers he was hearing about. Shortly before the war, he called Centcom and said, “You know, you guys ought to dust off Desert Crossing, take a hard look at that.” The deputy commander asked, “Desert Crossing? What’s that? Never heard of it.” At the Pentagon, Zinni learned, Desert Crossing had been dismissed because its assumptions were “too negative,” almost as if, he thought, it was tainted for having been drafted when Clinton was in office, though the military was supposed to be nonpartisan. Franks made one effort to get Zinni’s advice before the Iraq War began. He was stopped by someone higher up.

  The military term for postwar operations in Iraq was Phase IV. Planning for Phase I (the buildup of troops in the region), Phase II (initial, mostly covert operations), and Phase III (main air and ground assaults) went on for the better part of a year. Iraq was a war of choice, and few wars have given war leaders more time to get ready. But for months, postwar matters appearing at the bottom of progress reports from Central Command to the Pentagon remained “open items,” still to be answered. By March 2003, the planning for Phase IV was barely under way. “There’s a real problem with the idea of Phase IV, doctrinally,” a retired Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel named Kalev Sepp told me. “The idea that the conclusion of Phase III is the point of victory, that’s the intellectual failure of the design of the four phases.” Phase IV should be seen as the objective of a war, he said, not the aftermath. “But what Phase IV became over the years for American military planners was that’s when you put everything back in the sea, air, and land containers and ship it back to Fort Stewart, Georgia.” This was war without politics, the opposite of Clausewitz’s famous dictum. Franks always insisted tha
t he was determined not to make the same mistake as General William Westmoreland in Vietnam: Franks would tell the civilians to stay the hell out of military matters, and he would keep out of their business. When an officer at a Centcom meeting raised the question of Phase IV planning, Franks said, “Mr. Wolfowitz is taking care of that.” His approach to war was that of a professional engineer. As a result, Franks had no strategic vision of what it would take to win in Iraq.

  Major Taylor got the impression that Franks and his planners at Central Command didn’t even think of the postwar as their responsibility. “The amount of pressure we would get from Centcom on Phase IV wasn’t enough, frankly. The attitude was: ‘Don’t worry about that—that’s ORHA. ORHA will take care of that.’ But what is ORHA?”

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  ON JANUARY 20, 2003, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive No. 24. He signed it without hearing the strenuous objections of his State Department, and yet it would prove to be one of the fateful decisions of the Iraq War. NSPD 24—drafted at the Office of Special Plans—gave control over postwar Iraq to the Department of Defense, and it established a unit within the Pentagon that would administer Iraq immediately after the fall of the regime. The unit was called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

  In the history of American bureaucracy, ORHA was a new kind of organization. It drew its personnel from various agencies of the government, including the Departments of State, Treasury, Defense, and Commerce, and from among private citizens. It was also “expeditionary”—the team would travel to the region, and eventually to Iraq after the war. For an indeterminate period of time it would function as the administration of Iraq but under the operational command of the ground force, ultimately reporting to Rumsfeld.