Known and Unknown (58 page)

A chaotic post-Saddam free-for-all was the last thing we wanted if President Bush decided to go into Iraq. I was reasonably certain that the memo was read, but it did not lead to any resolution on a postwar strategy by the NSC.

 

A
t CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, General Franks and his staff prepared the Iraq war plan in its four required parts: Phase I, preparations for a possible invasion; Phase II, shaping the battle space with the start of air operations; Phase III, decisive offensive and major combat operations; and Phase IV, posthostilities stabilization and reconstruction. In the summer and fall of 2002, Franks and his team had a lot on their plates. In addition to Iraq war planning, they were still engaged in counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and maritime interdiction operations off the Horn of Africa.

Recognizing the burdens on CENTCOM, Myers expressed concern that it might not be paying sufficient attention to Phase IV.
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Franks admittedly had little enthusiasm for setting up a postcombat government or dealing with the related tangle of bureaucratic and interagency issues. As the general noted in his memoir, “I'm a war fighter, not a manager.”
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Myers advised me that he had decided to establish a new group to help CENTCOM plan for postcombat operations. He asked Franks to stand up Combined Joint Task Force 4, which would work in Franks' Tampa operation on Phase IV.

Outside of the Pentagon, teams at the United States Agency for International Development, the NSC, and the State Department also were working on plans for the postwar period. Among these initiatives was the Future of Iraq project at State, which consisted of a series of documents addressing aspects of postwar Iraq.
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Later, the State Department effort was dubbed in the press as “the earliest and most comprehensive planning undertaken by the U.S. government for a post-Saddam Iraq.”
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Some of the participants in the project later mischaracterized that work as a State Department plan that Pentagon officials ignored. “Many senior State Department officials are still bitter about what they see as the Pentagon's failure to take seriously their planning efforts, particularly in the ‘Future of Iraq' project,” the
Washington Post
wrote some years later.
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In fact, senior DoD officials did review and consult those papers, finding some of them to be helpful. But the Future of Iraq project—outlining broad concepts—did not constitute postwar planning in any sense of the word. There were no operational steps outlined in them nor any detailed suggestions about how to handle various problems. One State Department official, Ryan Crocker, a future ambassador to Iraq, was heavily involved in the project and he later acknowledged, “It was never intended as a post-war plan.”
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If it had been, it could at least have given us a blueprint to discuss and consider.

The Future of Iraq papers were likely circulated at lower levels within the government, as is often the case with concepts and proposals. But I was not aware of an effort by any senior official at State to present these papers for interagency review or evaluation, as would certainly have been needed had they been intended as a plan. The notion that a few in the State Department may have alerted people to potential problems in postwar Iraq—even if quite helpfully—was not on its face a seminal achievement. I had listed problems that might arise in postwar Iraq in my “Parade of Horribles” memo. That does not mean my memo was a plan or a solution.

Further complicating matters prior to the war was an undercurrent of concern about the wisdom of even conducting large-scale planning. This could signal that America considered war inevitable and derail President Bush's diplomatic efforts, which continued almost until the day the war began.

In discussions of postwar Iraq, the toughest challenge was the tension between two different strategic approaches. The debate between them was legitimate, but it remained just that—a debate. It was never hashed out at the NSC and never finally resolved. Right up until the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis in 2004, the basic difference was between speed—how quickly we could turn over authority—and what was called legitimacy—exactly what political and constitutional processes needed to be in place prior to turning the reins over. The Pentagon leaned to the former, the State Department to the latter.

Postwar planning for Iraq lacked effective interagency coordination, clear lines of responsibility, and the deadlines and accountability associated with a rigorous process. I suspect that the failure to fashion a deliberate, systematic approach by which the President could establish U.S. policy on the political transition in post-Saddam Iraq was among the more consequential of the administration. Trying to achieve a bridge or compromise between the two different approaches was not a solution.

 

T
he postwar planning for Iraq exposed a gap in the way the United States government is organized. No template exists for the kind of postwar planning that proved necessary in Afghanistan, Iraq, and, for that matter, in Kosovo, Bosnia, and elsewhere. There was no single office that could take charge of the military and civilian elements of postwar reconstruction.
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That left the Department of Defense, with its expertise in war-oriented planning—but not in postwar reconstruction—as the only practical option.

In the fall of 2002, President Bush and I considered the advantages of unity of command and effort in postwar reconstruction. Dividing responsibilities between security and reconstruction, as had been the case in Bosnia and Afghanistan, was not an encouraging model.
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The President agreed. When the President issued National Security Presidential Directive 24 (NSPD 24) on January 20, 2003, directing the Defense Department to coordinate postwar planning and assume the lead for postwar reconstruction, some critics grumbled about a Defense power grab.
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I don't know of anyone at the Pentagon, myself included, who was looking for more assignments. The Department of Defense was engaged enough in the military aspects of the global effort against terrorists, including in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and Asia.

With the President's decision, in January 2003 the Department of Defense created the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). The office's mission was to help CENTCOM manage the transition to the post-war phase in Iraq.
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To run the organization, I recruited Jay Garner, a barrel-chested retired lieutenant general who had spent nearly four decades in the U.S. Army. I had met him when we served together on the Space Commission in 2000. General Garner knew Secretary Powell and had fought in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In what was called Operation Provide Comfort, Garner had led twenty thousand troops to assist Iraqi Kurds battered by Saddam's regime. He helped to secure an autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. When U.S. troops withdrew from Kurdistan and the American flag was lowered in July 1991, Garner was the last American to cross into Turkey. Thousands of Kurds delayed his departure by lifting him on their shoulders in celebration of his work.
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I saw Garner's military background as a valuable asset. I knew the civilian reconstruction effort in Iraq would have to be done in close cooperation with CENTCOM's military personnel—the unity of effort envisioned in the President's directive. Once on the ground in the Gulf region, Garner's office would become an element of CENTCOM, reporting to Franks, and thereby assuring unity of command. I believed a retired general, one who knew many CENTCOM officers and understood military culture, would have the best chance of avoiding friction with the military personnel. I also thought that Garner's prior association with Colin Powell would foster good relations between the reconstruction office and the State Department.

Garner believed, as I did, in empowering local populations to do things for themselves. “We're notorious for telling people what to do,” he said. Garner thought American heavy-handedness had been a mistake in Vietnam, one he didn't want to repeat in Iraq.
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Once the military had toppled Saddam's regime, I thought it was strategically important to put the United States in a supporting role to the Iraqis as soon as possible. This was the Pentagon's and—at least as I understood it—the President's vision.

 

M
onths before the war began in Iraq, we encountered strong resistance from State and the CIA to the idea of working with Iraqi expatriates. I couldn't quite understand why the idea was controversial. One of the first things we did in Afghanistan, after all, was develop relationships with the Northern Alliance and Afghan exiles. Hamid Karzai, in fact, had lived for years abroad. I thought it made sense to do something similar in Iraq: reach out to the anti-Saddam elements (largely confined to the autonomous areas of Kurdistan) and to the Iraqi exiles who had been advocating the liberation of their country for many years.
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These Iraqi “externals,” many living in the United States or London, included some highly educated and skilled professionals. Some clearly had ambition. While by no means monolithic in their politics or their views, they shared an interest in Iraq's freedom and success. I thought the diversity of views among them was not only natural, but healthy. Why, I wondered, wouldn't we want them involved in a post-Saddam Iraq early, rather than late or never?

Key officials at State and in the CIA, including at senior levels, viewed the externals in general as untrustworthy, however. Particular animus was directed against Ahmed Chalabi, a secular Shiite from a wealthy Baghdad family who lived abroad. Chalabi had worked with the CIA in the 1990s to promote resistance to the Iraqi regime. The relationship soured after the CIA and Chalabi quarreled over responsibility for a failed operation in northern Iraq that led to the murder and exile of many hundreds of anti-Saddam Iraqis. Despite his differences with State and the CIA, Chalabi retained bipartisan support among elements of the U.S. Congress, having been a strong proponent for the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act.

Some concocted a myth that the Pentagon was engaged, as CIA Director Tenet put it in his book, in “thinly veiled efforts to put Chalabi in charge of post-invasion Iraq.”
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Chalabi knew a number of administration officials, including but not exclusively some at the Pentagon. I had met him once or twice at meetings set up for the Iraqi exiles. He struck me as one of a number of bright Iraqis looking to do what they could for their country. However, no one in the Department of Defense urged that Chalabi be “anointed” as the ruler of post-Saddam Iraq, although some officials admired his skills. Robert Blackwill, who served as Rice's director for Iraq and was previously U.S. ambassador to India, once remarked that Chalabi was the “Michael Jordan of Iraq.” I assumed Chalabi would participate in an interim government, but I had no idea who would emerge as its head. That was for the Iraqis to decide.

The State Department's and CIA's desire to ensure that Chalabi not have a leadership role in postwar Iraq may have led both organizations to oppose the exiles generally. For example, CIA officials opposed our efforts to constitute a force of Iraqi exiles to fight and act as interpreters and translators alongside our troops in the invasion. Tenet was cool to the idea. When “Agency officers suggested to DoD that they scrap the idea of a fighting force of Iraqi exiles ... [w]e were scoffed at once again,” he wrote.
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While not large in size, I believed the Free Iraqi Forces, as they were called, could be a useful corrective to the perception that the United States was invading Iraq to occupy the country rather than liberate it.
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At least in part because of a lack of cooperation from the State Department and the CIA, we were unable to recruit and train enough Free Iraqi Forces to show that Iraqis were involved in the military campaign to rid their country of Saddam.
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State Department and CIA officials instead argued that the United States should assist Iraqis from inside the country to emerge as the new leaders. I had no problem with that approach—in theory. But in reality it would take a long time to assemble a team of acceptable and capable candidates within Iraq after Saddam's ouster. His Iraq was hardly a training ground for aspiring leaders. Visible political opponents tended not to have long lives. Regrettably, because of State Department wariness of the Iraqi externals, the United States did little to include them in planning for the postwar period until after Saddam's regime had fallen.
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Instead of putting an Iraqi face on postwar Iraq as soon as possible, the State Department proposed an American-led civil authority for an indefinite period.
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On March 1, 2003, Powell sent a memo from the State Department historian labeled “informative.” The paper argued that any occupation would take “time.” That apparently was Colin Powell's position on the matter.
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At a principals meeting in the White House on March 7, 2003, two weeks before war would begin, we discussed whether to put Iraqis in charge of the post-Saddam government sooner rather than later. In Powell's absence—he was in New York at the United Nations—Richard Armitage represented the State Department.

In late 2002, I had proposed that after Saddam's regime was toppled, we should promptly announce a provisional council, the Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA). This Interim Authority, designed as an Iraqi variation on the one in Afghanistan, was intended to bring Iraqis from all parts of the country, plus externals, and all political factions into a temporary national governing coalition. Its immediate but limited responsibilities would include supervising the drafting of a constitution, playing a significant role in the conduct of Iraq's foreign policy, and administering selected departments of the government. Membership would include representatives from Iraq's Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite populations. For several months, the deputies and the interagency coordinating committees discussed, debated, and refined the concept. The State Department had been uncomfortable with the proposal.