The War Within (8 page)

At the study group meeting, Panetta later recalled, Powell said he had warned the president. "I did make clear that once this happens, you're the one who is going to have to pick up the pieces and put it back together again. And it's not going to be easy to do." Or as he put it later: "We not only did not have enough troops to stabilize the country and act like an occupying force, we didn't
want
to act like an occupying force. But we
were
the occupying force. We
were
the government."

In the classic sense, Powell told the group, there had never been a "front" to this war. The insurgency had begun from behind.

After his recapitulation on force levels, Powell moved without pause to the lack of postwar planning. He said he was stunned that Rumsfeld, when asked publicly about rampant looting in Iraq, had said, "Stuff happens." At a Pentagon press conference three weeks after the invasion, Rumsfeld had said that freedom was "untidy" and the extensive looting was the result of "pent-up feelings" from decades of Saddam Hussein's oppression. Powell quoted the defense secretary's "stuff happens" with utter disdain, suggesting it was an absurd evaluation and an abdication of responsibility.

Throughout that spring of 2003, Powell said, he'd kept thinking to himself, "When are we going to get this together?"

All the Pentagon would say was, "Chalabi is coming, Chalabi is coming," a reference to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile with a checkered past who had long opposed Saddam Hussein. Chalabi had been the poster boy for a new democracy in Iraq, but Powell was dismissive.

"It was just Chalabi and 600 thugs," Powell said, noting that Chalabi failed to live up to the promise he'd made to the Pentagon to show up in Iraq with 10,000 men.

As secretary of state at the time of the invasion in 2003, Powell said he wasn't told about the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army until it happened. It was a monumental decision that disbanded the entire Iraqi army with the stroke of a pen, and its enactment was contrary to previous briefings that had been given to the president and to Powell. Nor was Powell told in advance about the sweeping de-Baathification order banning members of Saddam's Baath Party from many levels of government. It had effectively pulled the rug out from under the bureaucracy that made the country run, as many Iraqis had needed to be Baathists simply to get a job within Saddam's government.

Powell expressed astonishment that officials who lacked proper credentials had been sent to Iraq. He specifically mentioned Bernard Kerik, the troubled former New York City police commissioner, whom Bush had named to head the Iraqi national police and intelligence agency. "Bernie Kerik is in charge of police?" Powell asked, with a mixture of mock surprise and disgust. "Where did Bernie Kerik come from?"

Though he had been out of government for a year and a half, Powell's anger seemed fresh and raw. And now it had risen to the surface for them to see as he channeled years of accumulated resentments into his testimony.

Had it been anyone else, Baker and Hamilton probably would have interrupted. "We don't want any hand-wringing about the past," they were both fond of saying. But in this case, they let Powell unload without interruption. He was taking them on a journey inside the trauma and dysfunction of the war.

"This guy was speaking from the gut," Alan Simpson later recalled. "He'd been through the fire, you know, and he had deep feelings about his situation."

Powell, who had been national security adviser to President Reagan for a year as a three-star general, complained about the NSC process, a not-so-subtle criticism of Rice. Huge issues were never brought to hisóor the president'sóattention, he said. The whole purpose of the NSC was to present issues and options for debate and decision to the national security team and the president. For instance, he said, when Bremer headed the Coalition Provisional Authority overseeing Iraq for more than a year, he operated outside anyone's control. Powell said he learned of Bremer's seven-point plan for Iraq in
The Washington Post.
In addition, Bremer had used the word

"occupation"óa humiliating notion in any honor-bound Arab societyómaking it clear that he considered himself the sovereign authority.

The NSC had no apparatus to make sure things happened. Powell said the philosophy was "We're hoping things will improve. We say it'll happen. Therefore, we believe it will happen." There was no follow-through, no discipline.

To the essential question "Who are we fighting?," Powell said that the White House and Pentagon's answer would be Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader in Iraq. That was too limited an answer, he said, but the Pentagon did not want to consider wider possibilities.

Powell singled out the handling of Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who had argued for a larger force after the invasion. Rumsfeld had destroyed Shinseki's career, he said. No senior Defense official had attended Shinseki's retirement ceremony, he added with disgust. Dissent simply was not allowed at the Pentagon. Those who speak up get treated like Shinseki, he said.

"He revealed in very great detail his frustrations with Rumsfeld," Hamilton said later. "He felt like he'd lost every argument internally within the administration."

Speaking about the raging sectarian violence between the Shia and the Sunnis that was exploding in Iraq at the time, Powell told the group, "The American armed forces have little ability to understand what is happening and to react."

He said he felt the military was stuck, that the Americans had lost all authority. "We are no longer the occupier," he said. "We are watching the cabinet of 30 Iraqis sitting in the Green Zone"óthe walled-off enclave in Baghdad that housed the Iraqi government and U.S. embassy. "We have little control over the events in Iraq."

Noting that the American public no longer supported the war, Powell added, "All we can do is hope that the Iraqi government pulls it togetherÖ. We are not driving this train anymore; the Iraqis are in charge."

How about sending more troops?

"Colonels will always ask for more troops and resources," Powell replied. "Generals should have asked for more troops when they had the chance to," meaning before the invasion. That opportunity had vanished, in his opinion.

The Army and Marines were now stretched to their limits with multiple deployments and were cracking under the strains of perpetual war.

"You saw a very discouraged man when he talked to us," Hamilton said later. "And a very pessimistic man about the future. He really did not think that Iraq was salvageable at all."

What are the consequences of failure in Iraq? Hamilton asked.

The United States would be seen as impotent, Powell said, then quickly shifted to the present tense, as if that already were the case. "Mubarak"óthe Egyptian presidentó"is putting people in jail. Putin is making sarcastic comments."

The Chinese are listening politely, he said, but in reality they are ignoring us.

"Folks are tired of getting slapped around by the United States," Powell added. "They've stopped listening."

Throughout the interview, the temperature in the conference room kept rising and falling, and staff members kept slipping out to adjust the air-conditioning. But Powell himself stayed at a steady boil.

"All that we can do is to build up the army and the police to build a Humpty Dumpty," Powell said sarcastically. "An army isn't guys with five weeks training. An army is part and parcel of society."

What about the intelligence on the ground in Iraq?

"Station chiefs have been shooting up red cluster messages for years," Powell said, referring to the regular CIA reports of escalating violence and trouble. "We've got a mess here. Washington didn't want to hear it."

Is there any reasonable chance of getting help from the international community? Hamilton asked.

"No," Powell said sharply.

Any chance of getting help from Iraq's neighbors?

"No."

Several people in the room chuckled uncomfortably and shook their heads at the near hopelessness of what Powell was describing.

"He had a general view that the world, whole world, was down on us," Perry later recalled. "Which nobody argued with him about at the meeting."

"I thought of it very much as a therapy session," Panetta said later, "in that he felt he could sit down with people who were brothers in armsÖpeople he related to from past experiences. And felt comfortable just kind of unloading."

The briefing, scheduled for an hour, had stretched longer, and the study group had an afternoon of interviews still to come.

"Well, Colin," Baker finally said, "you're going to have a great book."

Powell left as quietly as he had come, alone. Baker turned to Panetta and said solemnly, "He's the one guy who could have perhaps prevented this from happening."

Chapter 5

I
n late spring, Bush met with his entire cabinet and made a strong pitch for everyone to participate in the war effort.

Abizaid, Casey and Khalilzad all briefed, and the president gave an all-hands-on-deck speech. Several weeks later, at an NSC meeting on May 26, 2006, Rice, who was in charge of assembling personnel willing to go to Iraq from various departments and agencies, announced the final numbers: 48 people had signed on.

"Ma'am, that is a paltry number," blurted Casey, who was in the meeting by secure video from Iraq. To him, it proved that the civilians weren't contributing enough to the waróthe most important undertaking of the Bush administration and a venture with so many U.S. interests at stake. He hoped the president would demand more action.

General, Rice replied tersely, you're out of line.

"On that happy note," the president said, "we will adjourn."

Rumsfeld immediately dashed off a SECRET snowflake to Casey: "My apologies to you for the comments that were made in the NSC meeting this morning. It is a pattern. There is not much anyone seems to be able to do about itÖ.

Thanks for all you're doing out there and for your patience today as well."

Casey didn't feel at all patient. Neither Rice nor Hadley had come up with a national strategy for the Iraq War or found a way to make sure it was properly resourced. David Satterfield, the deputy chief of mission in the embassy, had told Rice on a visit to Iraq once, "Here's the most important mission for the country, and they have three linguists that can speak Arabic at the highest level from the State Department."

* * *

"I just took a look at the attached page 49 from the quarterly report to Congress," wrote Rumsfeld, focused on details as ever, in a May 30 snowflake to Casey about troop levels. "I noticed the gray area is coalition, and we are increasing the number of combat operations every month. I would have thought that the ISF [Iraqi security forces]

would increase, the combined would increase, but the coalition would go down. It seems the opposite is happening.

Let's talk about it and figure out why."

Now in the fourth year of the war, the defense secretary was still asking about the elusive numbers of exactly how many Iraqi soldiers were trained and ready for duty. And he was still pushing for a U.S. military less involved in Iraq, not more.

* * *

Jim Jeffrey, Rice's coordinator for Iraq policy, was a 6-foot-3 Bostonian and a career diplomat who had served as U.S. ambassador to Albania and later as deputy chief of mission in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in 2004ñ05. He believed the United States could not abandon Iraq, as it had Vietnam in 1975. And like Zelikow, Jeffrey believed it was possible to devise a successful counterinsurgency strategy along the lines of what Colonel H. R. McMaster had done in Tall Afar.

On June 5, Zelikow and Jeffrey presented Rice with a SECRET 11-page memo titled "Possible political-military strategy for summer 2006." It reflected the sum of their frustrations.

They noted that Maliki and his new government continue "to roll out ill-prepared, ad hoc initiatives like last week's declaration of an emergency in Basra or this week's plan to announce a large-scale release of detainees" held by the U.S.

In bold letters, they wrote: "Likelihood of success for the proposed strategy is low."

This was still an American effort, and U.S. control was essential. "The argument that the U.S. should not strongly assert its preferences to the Iraqi government is wrong," they wrote, and saying "let-them-do-it-themselves" would be a cop-out.

"Maliki has never run a large organization," they noted. He had never even run a small one. A 56-year-old Shia, Maliki had been in exile for 23 years, apparently bouncing between Iran and Syria. His chief credential was that he had been a spokesman for the political party al Dawa (The Call), a relatively minor Shia party. The Iraqi parliament had selected him as the first permanent prime minister. He was a precarious compromise between the two real Shia forces in Iraq. The first was Moqtada al-Sadr, the young militant cleric and leader in Sadr City, the northeastern quadrant of Baghdad with more than 2 million people. The other was the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, one of Iraq's most powerful political parties and the largest party in the Iraqi Council of Representatives, headed by Iraqi theologian and politician Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

The SECRET memo offered three options: A) strong, B) medium and C) weak. Not surprisingly, Zelikow and Jeffrey encouraged the middle road.

Option A, which they rejected, was called "Full Counterinsurgency."

"This would apply a Tall Afarñlike approach to all the major trouble spots, starting with Baghdad. It is very soldier-intensiveÖ. It might require a significant additional infusion of American combat poweróperhaps several additional brigadesóto make it work."

The option was not presented as a surefire winning strategy, designed or guaranteed to achieve victory or to address the more important threshold question of whether victory was attainable. And it failed, like many other proposals, to address the problem of who would hold an area, assimilate the population, restore order, and demonstrate the benefits of signing up with the new Iraqi government and joining in the democratic process.