The War Within Read online

  In the early days of the war, the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Hadley, her deputy at the time, had worked on Iraq nonstop and yet they never got control over the policy making. They were no match for Rumsfeld. The president had signed a directive before the invasion, giving the authority for an occupation to the Defense Department.

  Bush and Rumsfeld's selection of L. Paul Bremer, a career diplomat, to act as the viceroy of Iraq further diminished the role of Rice and Hadley, as well as Powell at the State Department. Bremer all but ignored the National Security Council.

  "We're all told to stay out of it," Hadley complained to a colleague. "This is Don Rumsfeld's thing."

  Bremer, who as a presidential envoy had a direct reporting line to the president, bypassed even Rumsfeld and made important decisions unilaterally and abruptly. Some of those decisions proved disastrous, such as disbanding the Iraqi army and excluding from government service tens of thousands of former members of Saddam's Baath Party.

  Rumsfeld had his own view of how the U.S. should proceed. He would send out one of his "snowflakes," brief documents asking questions, looking for details, demanding answers, when it was unclear to him what had happened.

  Though unsigned, everyone knew they represented his orders or questions. But if a snowflake leaked, it provided deniability.

  The snowflake sent on October 28, 2003, was two pages long and classified SECRET: "Subject: Risk and the way ahead in Iraq. In discussing the way ahead in Iraq, all agree that we should give Iraqis more authority more quickly."

  Powell had a different view. Control was about security. In the first year after the invasion, Bush and Rice repeatedly expressed worry that the oil production in Iraq and availability of electricity were droppingóvisible signs that conditions were worse in Iraq than prior to the invasion.

  "Petroleum is interesting. Electricity is interesting," Powell said, but added, "Mr. President, none of this makes any difference unless there's securityÖSecurity is all that counts right now."

  Chapter 2

  As Casey set off in July 2004 to decipher the puzzles of Iraq, Hadley worked the problem in Washington. At a meeting with NSC staff members on September 7, 2004, he told the group they had to find a way to measure success.

  "We need a framework," he said, "to think about or use to determine how we know if we are winning or losing."

  Everyone, it seemed, had a different focus. Rumsfeld wanted to hand off to the Iraqis and get out as soon as possible.

  Powell believed the United States now owned Iraq and must protect its citizens. Rice and Hadley were intent on getting a functioning government in place.

  Some suggested measurements included: how many countries were withdrawing their troops; how many companies were leaving Iraq, and which ones; recruitment rates in the Iraqi security forces; the number of flights that came under fire; assassination attempts.

  The Pentagon's chief measure was how many Iraqi security forces were being trained and sent into the field. Quality control received little emphasis. Tens of thousands of Iraqis supposedly had been trained, but the Pentagon threw around numbers and cited so many increases that Powell could only laugh. An army could not be built in a matter of months or even a year. These numbers came from nowhere. Powell knew how the Pentagon worked: pumping up numbers that were guesses from the people on the ground.

  And yet, some numbers seemed depressingly accurate. A SECRET analysis showed that in September 2004, about 50 percent of assassination attempts in Iraq were successful. By December, the success rate had jumped to 81

  percent.

  * * *

  While the leaders in Washington wrestled one another for control, debated the strategy, and tried to determine how to measure progress, Iraq seemed to be blowing up. An epidemic of violence erupted around the end of October 2004, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Daily attacks doubled from about 70 early in the month to nearly 140 at the end of the month. Derek Harvey's take on the insurgency now seemed prescient. Rumsfeld summoned the lone-wolf DIA intelligence analyst to brief him and other Pentagon intelligence brass. They sat around the conference table in the secretary's office.

  The insurgency is gaining strength, Harvey said again. They have a strategy, they know what they need to do to win, and they are on the right trajectory. The insurgency continues to be driven by former beneficiaries of the old Saddam regime, motivated by both nationalist and religious messages, who fear the loss of power. Rumsfeld's pointed questions to Harvey suggested that he disagreed. The secretary viewed the insurgents as thugs.

  They're not just thugs, insisted Harvey, who'd acquired the nickname "Grenade" when he served a tour in the State Department. "This is not a bunch of disenfranchised, decentralized, incoherent, local-generated insurrectionists going around." They are not just pissed-off Iraqis. They want power, influence and authority, and they're rejecting this forced change. The war had actually gone pretty well in the early part of 2004, but the dual catastrophes of Abu Ghraib and the botched coalition attack on Fallujah had added fuel and purpose to the insurgency. Recruitment and support are going up, Harvey told Rumsfeld.

  "This is all very interesting," Rumsfeld replied, "but it's more opinion than fact."

  "We've got good evidence," Harvey said. He cited documents, messages, interrogation reports. We are not doing the right things to check and thwart the insurgency, he said. One solution was tribal outreach.

  "What underpins this?" Rumsfeld asked him. "Why are you saying that?"

  Harvey reminded him that for years he had visited the tribes and their leaders. "We are constantly understating the violence." There was no good way to collect numbers, and the violence was much greater and more widespread than reported. He estimated that only about 25 percent of the attacks were being reported.

  "Well," Rumsfeld said, "you can't count every bullet that's being fired."

  Harvey didn't disagree.

  "So you believe this?" Rumsfeld asked.

  "Yes."

  "We need to take this over to the White House," he said.

  Harvey brought his briefing to the Situation Room, where Rice and Hadley listened to his description of an organized, powerful, well-honed insurgency.

  "Well, this is the first time I've heard any of this," Rice said.

  Hadley too was surprised. He opened a three-ring binder. "We've got all these programs," he said, describing the massive efforts to help with electricity, water and sewage treatment.

  Harvey said he had been part of a team set up by General Casey to look at such programs, and it found that despite all the contracts, the money was being spent in the wrong places and sometimes not at all. Money needed to go to the areas of high unemployment where people felt most disenfranchised. But, he said, the response from those in command was "Well, it's not safe there."

  Harvey next briefed Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

  Libby had a different reaction from Rice and Hadley's. "I was worried that this was really what we're dealing with,"

  he told Harvey.

  In December 2004, Harvey came back to the Situation Room to brief President Bush. Rumsfeld, Rice, new CIA Director Porter Goss and CIA expert John Charles were present.

  Bush had been warned that Harvey had an unorthodox view. The president asked three questions right off the bat: Who are you? What's your experience on Iraq? And why should I believe what you're saying?

  "I've spent nearly 20 years working the Middle East" for the Army and DIA, Harvey answered. "I have advanced degrees. I've spent the last 18 months working, traveling, talking with insurgents, sitting in interrogation rooms." He described going into Fallujah, the epicenter of the insurgency, in the middle of the uprising when the city was walled off. He had entered the city without armed escort and spent the night talking with Abdullah al-Janabi, one of the clerics leading the insurgency. "We label him a religious extremist," Harvey said. "He's a Baathist who's very angry, has lost fami
ly members, okay? Drinks Johnnie Walker Black Label."

  "Okay," Bush said, "let's go on."

  You have a coherent enemy, Harvey said. They have a strategy. They're doing well by any measure. They're very well organized, and they're gaining popular support. All the measurementsóthe attack data, the logistics, the financing, external support, freedom of movement, ability to recruitóall these trend lines are going one wayóup. This enemy is made up of the old Sunni power brokers, not a bunch of angry young men. Holding elections right now would be counterproductive. The Sunnis would boycott, thereby fueling the insurgency.

  Harvey told the president that Syria was supplying support to the insurgents in Iraq, and though it was not absolutely crucial to the insurgency, it gave them strategic depth. Former senior members of Saddam's government were based in Damascus, the Syrian capital, and were providing direction, political guidance, coordination and money.

  Intelligence had traced at least $1.2 million a month of Syrian money going into Ramadi.

  Charles, the CIA man, countered that the insurgency was fractious and very local, lacked coherence, and was made up of the angry, unemployed and disenfranchised. Nor did the Syrians have that much influence, he said.

  Harvey began throwing out names, dates and amounts of money, saying that the intelligence showed that a certain man had left $300,000 in Ramadi, then another $250,000 in Diyala province.

  "You're extrapolating too much," Charles retorted.

  Harvey flashed some slides on the screen that named insurgency leaders in various provinces. "Here are their key leaders," he said.

  "Here's where they assess they're doing well. Here's where they don't think they're doing well." The charts showed tribal, religious trust networks that Harvey had pieced together.

  "We agree," Porter Goss, the CIA director, said unexpectedly, undercutting his own agency.

  "Thank you," was all the president said, and the meeting adjourned.

  * * *

  In December 2004, Robert L. Grenier, the CIA's mission manager for Iraq since before the invasion, wrote a classified paper for the agency's new director, Porter Goss. Iraq was poised to hold its first election the next month, and President Bush was touting the event as a significant step on the road to democracy. "With a month to go before elections, it's time to face facts," Grenier wrote. The Sunni insurgency was not going away, and elections were not going to fix things. The Sunnis had decided to boycott the elections. A new Shia-led government would only underscore that the Sunnis had lost power, doubtless fueling the insurgency. The result would be an increased likelihood of civil war. Already, the two branches of Islam had a violent history dating back centuries to the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The election could put them even more at odds.

  Charles Allen, the CIA assistant director for intelligence collection, visited Iraq and issued a stark assessment. He said he had not been prepared for how the situation had deteriorated. He was stunned by the level of disorder and violence. Iraq was coming off the rails.

  Rice summoned the NSC principals toward the end of the year to discuss both CIA reports.

  But Bush would not budge. Postponement of the Iraqi elections, as the CIA was recommending, was not going to happen. "We're going to hold the election on January 30," he insisted.

  * * *

  On Saturday, January 8, 2005, Hadley was in his West Wing office. He was about to take over as national security adviser for Bush's second term. Rice, his former boss, was set to become secretary of state. Tall and calm, with a warm smile and large eyeglasses, Hadley had a studious, professorial look. He wore his dark suit jacket even in his own office. When he was summoned to the Oval Office about 75 paces away, jacket and tie were mandatory, even on weekends. At the dawn of Bush's second term, so much seemed within reach. "The opportunity to spread freedom throughout the globe, and particularly in the broader Middle East and in the Muslim world," Hadley said that day, "that is, I think for the president, the defining idea of his presidencyÖit is not only a sort of moral duty, it's not only consistent with our principles, it's consistent with our interests, it's actually essential for our national securityÖ. For liberty to be secure at home, liberty has to be on the march abroad. Big stuff. Not big. Huge."

  That was the mission Hadley had signed on for. As for the president, he added, "The guy's really a visionaryÖ. He defies the conventional wisdom by his boldness. He's unapologetic. He sits there and reaffirms it, and clearly almost relishes it. And, you know, it traumatizes people. And they think, 'What's he doingÖthis cowboy?'"

  But it was different in the White House, Hadley said. "Those of us who are here believe in him. Believe in him and believe he has greatness in him. He has greatness in him and he could be a great president. We could use one right now."

  Hadley would repeat his awe-inspired theme months later, on another Saturday morning in his office. "He's a remarkable guy," he said of Bush. He said there was a style of discourse at Cornell and Yale Law School, from which he had graduated in 1972, that was academic, long-winded and analytical, but Bush had "rejected all of that."

  Bush had adopted the style of Midland, Texas, and many people think "it's simplistic, it's two-dimensional, it's not subtle."

  But what Cornell, Yale and most of the country had missed, Hadley believed he had discovered. "The guy is really strong," he said, and what "people don't recognize is, everybody else needs that strength. And he understands thatÖ.

  And all the rest of us need it. We're strong because he's strong."

  Hadley's acceptance of Bush's ways raises some basic questions.

  When I interviewed the president on August 20, 2002 for my book Bush at War, he mentioned a dozen times his

  "instincts" or his "instinctive" reactions as guides for his decisions. "I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player," he said. I wrote, "His instincts are almost his second religion."

  National security decision making normally requires a rigorous process of examining alternative courses of action.

  But a "no doubt" president can swamp any process, not allowing much reconsideration. The president and his team had become marketers of Bush's certainty. Hadley had acceded not only to Bush's judgments but to his method. He had sidelined the analytical style of Cornell, Yale and his own experience.

  A president so certain, so action-oriented, so hero-worshiped by his national security adviser, almost couldn't be halted. The administration lacked a process to examine consequences, alternatives and motives. There was no system to slow down the process so the right questions were asked and answered, or alternative courses of action seriously considered. The national security adviser has to be a negotiator and an arbiter, someone who tries to consider every angle to a problem. But Hadley had become the lawyer for the president's foreign policy, his unwavering advocate and a cheerleader for his greatness.

  * * *

  Throughout January 2005, the CIA kept up its dire warnings. A day before the Iraq elections, Bush slammed his briefing book shut at an Oval Office meeting when he was again warned that the outcome could be grim. "Well," he said, "we'll see who's right."

  When some 8 million Iraqis went to the polls, many waving their purple-inked fingers in the air to show they had voted, Bush hailed "the voice of freedom" coming from the Middle East. The CIA, in contrast, saw the seeds of deeper unrest and violence taking root.

  * * *

  On the evening of election day, January 30, 2005, Casey was about to meet with his staff in Baghdad when Rumsfeld called. He stepped into a hallway to take the call. "George, the eyes of the world were upon you, and you stood and delivered," the secretary said.

  "Well, thank you," Casey replied. "I'll pass that on to everybody."

  It was a high moment, the icing on the most emotional day of Casey's time in Iraq. He felt encouraged and moved that so many Iraqis had stepped forward to take a stake in their future. He'd been saying in the run-up to the elections, "Look, millions of people are going to vote."

  But
Casey also felt a little disingenuous. Eighty percent of the country was Shia and Kurds. Of course they would turn out. It was the Sunnis, who had held power under Saddam and now made up the bulk of the insurgency, who had boycotted the election.

  But for a fleeting moment, with his boss offering praise and the massive turnout dominating the airwaves, there was time to relax and wonder if this venture just might work.

  Chapter 3

  In early 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hired her old friend and colleague Philip Zelikow as counselor to the department. It was a normally low-profile but potentially powerful post. An intellectual with a law degree, a Ph.D. in history and a healthy ego, Zelikow had co-authored a book with Rice on German reunification after the Cold War and later served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission, which examined the terrorist attacks in detail and published a best-selling report that detailed their origins and execution.

  Rice, who had little confidence that she was getting the straight story on Iraq from the military, dispatched Zelikow and a small team to assess the situation on the ground.

  "If they want to send Zelikow over, he needs to look at the State stuff," Casey told Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace. "That's what's really screwed up."

  Pace said it made sense that Zelikow look at everything.

  "You can go anywhere you want," Casey told Zelikow when he arrived in Iraq, "and you can talk to anybody you want."

  On February 10, 2005, Zelikow issued a 15-page report classified SECRET/NODISósecret, no distributionómeaning that copies should go to no one other than Rice herself. It concluded, "Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence." Zelikow made two more under-the-radar visits to Iraq, carefully weaving in some good news with a heavy dose of realism.

  Rice praised Zelikow for his memos, which offered a clear conclusion: The United States didn't know what it was doing in Iraq.