Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (5 page)

A mirthful note was added many hours later. In my remarks at the swearing-in, I had said that my ninety-three-year-old mother was present for the ceremony. Comedian Conan O’Brien picked up on that on his show that night. He joked that my mother had come up to me after the ceremony, offered her congratulations, and then told me, “Now, go kick the Kaiser’s ass.”

CHAPTER 2

Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq

My highest priority as secretary was to turn the situation around in Iraq. Political commentators before and after my confirmation were virtually unanimous in saying that my tenure as secretary would be judged almost entirely by what happened there, a rather daunting challenge given the rising tide of violence and the deterioration of the security situation, dysfunctional Iraqi politics, and the obvious failure of American military strategy there by mid-December 2006.

The United States was engaged in two major wars every single day I was secretary of defense for four and a half years. I participated in the development of our strategies both within the Pentagon and in the White House, and then had primary responsibility for implementing them: for selecting, promoting—and when necessary, firing—field commanders and other military leaders; for getting the commanders and troops the equipment they needed to be successful; for taking care of our troops and their families; and for sustaining sufficient political support in Congress to provide time for success. I had to navigate the minefields of politics, policy, and operational warfare, both in the field and in Washington. The military battlefields were in Iraq and Afghanistan; the political battlefields were in Washington, Baghdad, and Kabul. I was, next to the president, primarily responsible for all of them.

I did not come to the Iraqi battlefield as a stranger.

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I was one of a small group of senior officials in Bush 41’s administration who were deeply involved in planning the Gulf War in 1991. At its conclusion, I believed that we had made a strategic mistake in not forcing Saddam personally to surrender to our generals (rather than sending an underling), in not making him take personal responsibility and suffer personal humiliation, and maybe even in not arresting him at the surrender site. On February 15, 1991, Bush, as he wrote in his memoir, had ad-libbed at a press conference that one way for the bloodshed in Iraq to end was “to have the Iraqi people and military put aside Saddam.” The entire Bush team was convinced that the magnitude of their defeat would prompt the Iraqi military leaders to overthrow Saddam.

To our dismay, almost immediately after our military offensive ended, both the Shia in the south and the Kurds in the north spontaneously rose up against Saddam. They had interpreted the president’s words—aimed at the Iraqi military—as encouragement of a popular uprising. We should have been more precise in saying what we were after, even though I don’t think it would have forestalled the uprisings. We were criticized widely for allowing the regime to continue to use their helicopters to put down the uprisings (the Iraqis said they were needed because we had destroyed most of their highway bridges), although it was Iraqi army ground forces and armor that brutally ended the rebellions. Meanwhile Saddam used the time provided by those uprisings and their suppression to murder hundreds of his generals who might have done the same to him. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia—especially the latter—would forgive us for not coming to their assistance after they thought we had encouraged them to take up arms.

Another lingering criticism was that Bush 41 had not sent our military on to Baghdad to force regime change. Our view was that such action was not sanctioned by the UN Security Council resolutions on the basis of which we had constructed a broad coalition, including Arab forces. Thus the coalition would have shattered had we gone on to Baghdad. While that might not have mattered in the short term, by breaking our word then, we would have had an awful time trying to assemble another such coalition to deal with an international problem. Further, I made the point many times that Saddam was not just going to sit on his veranda and let U.S. forces drive up and arrest him. He would have gone
to ground, and we would have had to occupy a significant part of Iraq in order to find him and/or defeat a determined and ruthless resistance movement that he almost certainly would have put together, with home field advantage.

So the war ended in February 1991 with Saddam still in power, Iraq under severe international sanctions limiting imports and controlling the export of Iraqi oil, and the Shia and Kurds even more brutally repressed. In the ensuing years, Saddam did everything possible to evade the sanctions, diverting proceeds from the “oil-for-food” program (under which the Iraqi regime was allowed to sell just enough oil to buy food and medicine) into his own pocket and overseeing a vast operation smuggling oil across the border into Iran for sale. He used a lot of that money to build dozens more gigantic, tasteless palaces that we would later occupy.

None of us doubted in the early 1990s that, just as soon as he could, Saddam would resume the programs he had had under way before the war to develop biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. The intensive inspections program instituted after the war uncovered evidence that the Iraqis had, in fact, been considerably further along in developing nuclear weapons than U.S. intelligence had estimated before the war. We were so confident he had deployed chemical weapons that our first troops to cross the border wore chemical protection suits (which were unbearably hot and uncomfortable even in February). As long as the inspections effort continued and the sanctions were strictly enforced, his opportunities to resume the programs for weapons of mass destruction would be very limited.

But as the years went by, Saddam became much more aggressive in limiting the reach of the inspectors, and the inspections for all practical purposes ended in 1998. Adherence to the sanctions also gradually weakened as a number of governments—France, Russia, Germany, and China, among others—angled for oil contracts and other business opportunities with the Iraqis. By 2003, most governments and intelligence services had concluded that Saddam had been successful in resuming his weapons programs. That view was reinforced by his boasting and his behavior, intended to persuade his own people—and his neighbors—of that success. The result was unanimous adoption in the fall of 2002 of UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which demanded a full accounting of progress in Iraq’s weapons programs and a rigorous international inspection effort. Serious consequences were threatened for noncompliance.
Saddam nonetheless continued to play games with the inspectors and the international community. As Condi Rice would write years later, “The fact is, we invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options. The sanctions were not working, the inspections were unsatisfactory, and we could not get Saddam to leave by other means.” Particularly later, as the war dragged on, fewer and fewer people accepted that logic.

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After I retired as director of central intelligence in January 1993, I had no access to classified information—and didn’t want any. I was happy to leave Washington, D.C., in my rearview mirror, and one of many reasons to move to the Pacific Northwest was to avoid being asked to serve on any of the countless special commissions, blue ribbon panels, or study groups whose work almost invariably ends up collecting dust on some policy maker’s shelf. But I did read a lot of newspapers, and based on what I read—and my knowledge of Saddam’s behavior in the 1980s and early 1990s—it seemed highly likely to me that he had resumed working on weapons of mass destruction, that the sanctions were largely ineffective, and that the man was a very dangerous megalomaniac. So I supported Bush 43’s decision to invade and bring Saddam down.

However, I was stunned by what I saw as amazing bungling after the initial military success, including failing to stop the looting of Baghdad, disbanding the Iraqi army, and implementing a draconian de-Baathification policy (Saddam ran the Baath Party) that seemed to ignore every lesson from the post-1945 de-Nazification of Germany. I was equally surprised that, after Vietnam, the U.S. Army seemed to have forgotten as quickly as possible how to wage counterinsurgency warfare.

I gave a speech on May 1, 2003, less than six weeks after the war began, that summed up my views:

The situation we face now [in Iraq] reminds me a little of the dog catching the car. Now that we have it, what do we do with it?

I believe the postwar challenge will be far greater than the war itself. Only in recent days has the American government begun to realize the extraordinary potential power of the Shia Muslim majority in Iraq, and the possibility that a democratic Iraq might well turn out to be a
fundamentalist Shia Iraq.… The Kurds will, at minimum, demand autonomy in the north. And what happens to the [minority] Sunni Muslim population in the center, having oppressed both the Kurds and the Shia … for so long? Finally, the challenge of rebuilding Iraq, providing food and services, and rebuilding the economy after a dozen years of privation and decades of Baathist socialism will be no small task—though I believe a more easily achievable task than our political aspirations for the country.

For all these reasons, I believe the United States should agree to begin replacing our forces with a large multinational peacekeeping force—perhaps from NATO—as quickly as the security situation allows.… We will be making a big mistake if we keep a hundred thousand or so American soldiers in Iraq for more than a few months.

Even as the security situation continued to deteriorate, the Iraqis—with a lot of help from us and others—held what were broadly considered two reasonably fair elections in 2005, one on January 30 and another on December 16, both with a pretty good turnout, considering the circumstances. Forming a coalition government composed of several Shia parties, the Kurds, and politically acceptable Sunnis after the December election, however, was a major challenge. As those negotiations were dragging on, the bombing of a historic Shia mosque, the Askariya Shrine at the Golden Mosque of Samarra, on February 22, 2006, ignited horrific sectarian violence that escalated around the country. By October some three thousand Iraqi civilians were being killed every month. Attacks against U.S. troops increased from an average of 70 per day in January 2006 to an average of 180 per day in October.

As the security situation in Iraq deteriorated through 2006, the political situation in Washington did as well. The president’s approval ratings further declined, public opinion polls on the war turned increasingly negative, and a Congress that had prided itself for decades on bipartisanship in national security matters became increasingly divided about the war along party lines—most Democrats opposed, most Republicans supportive (but increasingly uneasy).

The growing divide at home and the deteriorating situation in Iraq prompted Congressman Frank Wolf, a longtime Republican from northern Virginia, early in 2006 to propose creating a bipartisan group of well-known Republicans and Democrats from outside the government
to see if a new strategy could be developed for the United States in Iraq that could win the support of the president and both parties in Congress. He proposed that it be funded—to the tune of a little over a million dollars—through the congressionally chartered Institute of Peace. The effort ultimately would also be supported by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. Former secretary of state Jim Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton agreed to cochair what would be known as the Iraq Study Group.

Baker called me in February to ask me to be one of five Republicans in the group. While he and I had had a few disagreements during Bush 41’s time in office (when I was deputy national security adviser), I had great respect for him and thought he had been a very effective secretary of state. I had written of Jim that I was always glad he was on our side as a negotiator. My first question to him was whether the president supported this initiative, because if he didn’t, it would be a waste of time. Jim said that when he was approached about cochairing, his first call had been to Bush 43 to ask the very same question. He did not want to be involved in an effort that the president or others saw as undermining the administration. He assured me that 43 was on board. I later decided that the president wasn’t so much supportive as acquiescent, perhaps hoping we could make useful suggestions or provide some political help at home.

Because the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, released the day of my confirmation hearing, would play a major part in the debate over Iraq in 2007–8, it is important to know something about how the group did its work and how the thrust of the group’s final recommendations surprised me.

The other Republicans involved were retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, former attorney general Ed Meese, and former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson. The Democrats were led by Hamilton and included former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director and White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, former Virginia senator Chuck Robb, Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan, and former secretary of defense William Perry. Hamilton had chaired both the House Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and I had known him for nearly twenty years. Lee is a man of extraordinary
integrity and intellectual honesty, and I looked forward to working with him.

What you won’t find in the report of the Iraq Study Group was how much fun we had. Simpson is simply hilarious, Panetta and Jordan both have a great sense of humor, Baker is a fount of wicked one-line asides, Hamilton has a very dry Indiana sense of humor, and everyone was easy to get along with. We understood the seriousness of our purpose but saw no reason why it should be boring.