Known and Unknown (65 page)

In April 2004, I suggested to Bremer that he put together a strategy designed to “change the mindset of disenfranchisement and hopelessness” among the Sunnis.
²⁶
Senior military officers and I had been concerned for over a year that the Sunni tribes were being neglected, but we had found a less than receptive ear in the CPA.
²⁷
The Sunni outreach I outlined included easing up on de-Baathification efforts by moving Ahmad Chalabi out of the process.
^*
I urged Bremer to focus on “labor-intensive projects in Sunni areas” and those near moderate Sunni mosques. I also asked him to build ties to Iraq's Sunni tribes through regular visits with their leaders. We could contract with members, as Saddam did, to provide essential services, such as protecting the electrical grid from sabotage. The tribes and their leaders—in Shia and Kurdish communities as well as Sunni areas—were the backbone of Iraqi society. Not engaging them was unwise. Tribal leaders, I suggested, also could help us recruit for the security forces and put pressure on members of their tribes who helped the insurgency.

But Bremer was not inclined to work through the tribes. Despite his agreement to turn over sovereignty by June, it remained difficult to get him to accept the idea that Iraq belonged to the Iraqis, and that the Iraqis were entitled to their own culture and institutions.

 

I
n the spring of 2004, we faced the danger of a two-front insurgency. Sunni insurgents were gaining ground and establishing sanctuaries in Iraq's west, in places like Fallujah. Meanwhile, Shia militias, under Muqtada al-Sadr, were threatening rebellion in the south. The son of a revered ayatollah who was murdered by Saddam's lieutenants, Sadr demonstrated little of his father's intellectual prowess. As a failing seminary student, he had earned the nickname “Mullah Atari” in recognition of his fondness for video games. Yet he developed a following and became a powerful and violent leader of opposition to the American occupation. His angry sermons drew flocks of young men from Shia slums, enabling him to establish a militia that gained influence through a combination of social services and mob terror. Sadr intimidated other Iraqis by being able to put thousands of thugs and young males on the street. These mobs, called the Mahdi Army (though it was in no sense an army), were a potent force for disruption, demonstrations, and terror.

That April, long-simmering tensions with Sadr came to a head in Najaf, Iraq's holiest Shia city. Taking advantage of the Fallujah flare-up, Shia gangs heeded Sadr's call, televised on Al-Jazeera, to attack coalition forces throughout southern Iraq.
²⁸
Sadr had established his own Islamic courts and prisons in Najaf—the heart of the Shiite clerical establishment—where eyewitness accounts reported torture in the style of Saddam's regime.
²⁹

There were several discussions in the National Security Council about whether, and if so when, our forces should take Sadr into custody. As early as August 2003 I had recommended that Abizaid and Bremer begin to think through “what we are going to do if red lines are crossed.”
³⁰
When Sadr began calling the coalition “the enemy,” I felt he had crossed the line.
³¹
If he wanted to define us as his enemy, my view was that we should treat him as one. He had evidently ordered the murder of one of Iraq's most respected moderate Shia leaders, Abdul Majid al-Khoei. I felt it was important to establish the principle that no one—not even a cleric with the loyalty of tens of thousands of Shia—should be above the law. In January 2004, I recommended that the CPA arrest Sadr to demonstrate “that the rule of law applies to Shi'a as well as Sunni.”
³²

But there was another legitimate consideration that preoccupied us. Arresting Sadr risked making him even more popular, and could further inflame tensions with the Shia majority, possibly triggering an outright civil war. When Sadr was holed up in the holy city of Najaf, for example, several senior clerics who opposed him nonetheless argued strongly against storming the city to arrest him. They feared it would aggravate sectarian tensions and damage holy sites.
³³
Still, my view was to arrest the demagogue.

Since this was a decision that could have a significant impact on the relationship between the coalition and our Iraqi allies, the President concluded that Bremer had to decide the best course to take. As coalition forces surrounded Najaf, Bremer and Sanchez decided to let the Iraqis take action on their own to deal with Sadr and his so-called Mahdi Army.
³⁴
I understood the reluctance to storm the city. But the idea that the Iraqi clerics or politicians would take on Sadr seemed unrealistic.

To my amazement, Bremer has since claimed that he wanted to go after Sadr but “[W]e got word that Rumsfeld had given instructions not to execute the plan to arrest Muqtada until ‘further notice.'”
^*
That was not the case. It is possible that others on the NSC with whom Bremer regularly communicated might have opposed arresting Sadr, but I did not. In fact, I was so taken aback by Bremer's suggestion that I later asked Pentagon officials to examine the issue and find out if anyone else at the Defense Department might have led Bremer to think we had wanted him to refrain from acting. The conclusion was that no one had done any such thing.
³⁶
Again, through no fault of their own, our military appeared ineffective, not only against the terrorists in Fallujah but also against the vocal cleric looking to cause trouble.

There was another cleric who was in many ways Sadr's polar opposite—sage and learned, modest, moderate, and, above all, restrained. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani kept his distance from Americans, declining to meet with U.S. officials—military or civilian. At critical points he calmed passions among the millions of Shia who revered him. He encouraged them to accept the separation between religion and the state in a constitutional democracy, rejecting Iran's form of clerical rule. In the face of consistent provocations by al-Qaida and Sunni insurgent groups against Shia people, shrines, and mosques, and the rebellions urged by Sadr, Sistani counseled calm and patience. Without him, I have no doubt that Iraq would be very different today—and not for the better. His leadership, along with many others who truly wanted a better life for their people, offered hope as we moved toward finally giving them the sovereignty they desired.

 

T
hough a latecomer to relinquishing power to the Iraqis, Bremer worked to organize the transition once the decision was made. He planned a timetable with the Iraqi Governing Council that set out dates for writing an interim constitution and setting up a transitional national assembly. With the CPA's assistance, they drafted their interim constitution in March 2004. Though based in part on principles from our Constitution, it was by no means an American document, but appropriately an Iraqi document. It protected the rights of minority Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians and gave the long beleaguered majority Shia a full role in their government. Bremer and
the Coalition Provisional Authority deserve credit for helping Iraqis craft the most representative constitution in the history of the Arab world.

In May 2004, following the recommendations that the Defense Department's policy shop and the Joint Staffhad developed, Iraqis on the governing council met to select an interim prime minister. Ayad Allawi, a medical doctor by training, became the first Iraqi leader to assume power since Saddam Hussein. He was a symbol of opposition to Saddam. In years past Allawi, along with some of Saddam's generals, had attempted to overthrow the Iraqi regime. He fled to London, where Saddam's hit-men broke into his residence and attacked him with an ax as he slept, wounding him in the head and chest. Miraculously, he survived and remained resolute in his opposition to the regime. Though a secular Shia, Allawi had launched the Iraqi National Accord in 1990—a group comprising many Sunni, Baathist military officers who had become disaffected with the Saddam Hussein regime. The Iraqi Governing Council selected him unanimously as prime minister.

The approach of the June 30 handover date proved an irresistible draw for terrorists and insurgents. They staged several bloody suicide bombings, which seemed designed to intimidate the Iraqis and cast doubt on whether they would be able to lead. The enemy understood well that attacks against a sovereign government would not be nearly as popular or as widely supported as attacks against coalition “occupiers.”

After several of these bombings, doubts resurfaced within and outside of the U.S. government about whether the Iraqis truly were ready to govern themselves. Reporters frequently asked Bremer and others if the date for the transfer was still on track. Bremer defended the plan steadily.
³⁷
I did as well. I had no doubt that the turnover was the right thing to do.

As June 30 approached, intelligence reports warned that enemy fighters were planning an ugly reception for the new government, in the form of massive attacks across the country. Bremer wisely decided to outmaneuver them by moving the date of the handover forward by two days.

At the time, I was in Istanbul with President Bush at a historic NATO summit meeting. The alliance was going to admit seven new members, all formerly part of the Warsaw Pact. Three were former republics of the Soviet Union. The alliance had fifteen members when I served as U.S. ambassador there in the early 1970s. It would now have twenty-six. The meeting in Istanbul, in fact, would be the largest gathering of NATO heads of state ever assembled. I felt a great sense of satisfaction seeing the leaders of those once communist nations free to chart their own courses and voluntarily, indeed eagerly, join the NATO alliance. It was a vindication of the tough, nerveracking, long-sustained, costly, and high-minded half-century struggle by the allied countries, with bipartisan U.S. leadership, to contain and eventually defeat Soviet communism.

As I surveyed the large, circular table and the representatives of our alliance partners, I thought about Iraq. I wondered if decades from now Americans might look back on the liberation of those long repressed Iraqis with the same kind of satisfaction that we felt about our liberation of Europe from Nazism and Soviet communism.

I was sitting with the U.S. delegation when an aide passed a cable from Iraq to Condi Rice. In a ceremony with little fanfare—certainly less than when he had arrived in Iraq a year earlier—Bremer presented Prime Minister Allawi with a letter from President Bush affirming the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
³⁸
Rice penned a note on the cable and passed it to me.

“Mr. President, Iraq is sovereign,” the note read, marking the historic day of June 28, 2004. “Letter was passed from Bremer at 10:26AM, Iraq time.” I handed the note to the President. He had been concentrating on the NATO discussion but looked down long enough to read it. He then took out his pen and wrote “Let Freedom Reign!” before turning to the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, seated to his right, and whispering the good news. The two leaders smiled at one another and shook hands.

The U.S. and coalition occupation was over. Not a moment too soon, I said to myself. For me the question was whether it was too late. We were still trying to regain the trust of the Iraqi people—a task that had been made more difficult not only by a long and heavy-handed occupation but by the crimes of a few military guards at a prison called Abu Ghraib.

APRIL 28, 2004

T
wo months before Iraqis assumed control of their country, the world was shocked by images of U.S. soldiers taunting naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The digital photos, taken by the soldiers in acts of pornographic self-indulgence, documented the sadistic abuse and torment they were inflicting on prisoners in their charge. The acts were inexcusable. The photographs threatened to weaken public support and call into question the legitimacy of our ongoing efforts on the eve of the transition to Iraqi sovereignty.

Prior to the public release of the images, I was shown a portion of them. Many depicted military guards performing humiliating acts on Iraqi prisoners—forcing them into what appeared to be a human pyramid, with naked detainees piled on top of one another. In some photos, the guards were shown pointing, laughing, or giving a thumbs-up.

A number of other photographs were not released to the public at the time. They showed soldiers engaged in similarly disturbing sexual, sadistic acts—but with each other: Americans on Americans. Had all of the pictures been released at once, the public might have drawn more quickly the conclusions that I drew: These acts could not conceivably have been authorized by anyone in the chain of command, nor could they have been any part of an intelligence-gathering or interrogation effort. Rather, they were the senseless crimes of a small group of prison guards who ran amok in the absence of adequate supervision.
^*

To my knowledge, no one in the Pentagon had forewarning of the issues that gave rise to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but that was beside the point. Unacceptable acts had been visited upon human beings in U.S. charge. The ramifications were so great that, as the head of this department of three million people, I felt compelled to step forward to take responsibility for the institutional failure.
¹
As I began to come to terms with what had happened at Abu Ghraib, the events left me feeling punched in the gut.

It was the U.S. military command in Iraq that first announced publicly that it was conducting an investigation into instances of abuse of Iraqi detainees in January 2004. At the time there was little media interest in the story, but once it was accompanied by photographs three months later, that changed dramatically. In another unique feature of war in the twenty-first century, the photographs made their way across the world within minutes, inviting a reaction that was as angry as it was swift. Leaders of nations across the world issued condemnations. The Vatican's foreign minister, invoking the word “torture,” called Abu Ghraib “a more serious blow to the United States than September 11.”
²

I shared the sense of outrage, but the reaction to Abu Ghraib in some instances seemed to be exacerbated by motivations other than simply getting to the bottom of what had transpired and bringing to justice those who had engaged in the illegal acts. The shameful abuse at Abu Ghraib would be exploited by many: America's enemies, of course, who skillfully used the outcry for their propaganda purposes; Arab governments that had an interest in making their populations think of the Iraqi liberation as dangerous and chaotic; opponents of the war, who used the abuse to justify their position that the efforts in Iraq were immoral; and, most obviously, political opponents of President Bush seven months before the 2004 election. In some quarters, the reaction quickly veered into overstatement.

“We're not going to recover from this damage,” Congressman John Murtha announced. “This one incident destroyed our credibility in Iraq and in all the Arab world.”
³
“Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management—U.S. management,” Senator Ted Kennedy declared on the floor of the United States Senate.
⁴
For a senior senator to equate the perverted escapades of a handful of guards on the midnight shift with the routine practices of rape, torture, and murder in Saddam's prisons was appalling, even by the low standards of a political season. I was surprised when my colleague Colin Powell mentioned Abu Ghraib in the same context as the My Lai massacre—an appalling episode from the Vietnam War that involved the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of civilians. “I don't know what to make of it,” Powell said. “I'm shocked. I mean, I was in a unit that was responsible for My Lai.”
⁵

Also lost in the melee was any recognition that the military command in Iraq first brought these abuses to light. A soldier discovered the photos and handed them to senior military officials. A prompt investigation began, leading to the suspension of seventeen personnel.

Critics nonetheless expanded their attacks by taking the inexcusable acts at the Abu Ghraib prison as the basis of a systematic critique of the Bush administration's war policies. An article in The
New Yorker
, citing anonymous sources, asserted that the abuses were part of official and systematic coercive interrogation methods.
⁶
Those false charges were widely disseminated and repeated by people who could and should have known better. “What happened at the prison, it is now clear, was not the result of random acts by a few bad apples,” stated Al Gore. “It was the natural consequence of the Bush administration policy.”
⁷

The Economist
placed a picture of a detainee on its cover under the headline “
RESIGN, RUMSFELD.
” Similar calls came from the
New York Times
, the
Boston Globe
, and Democratic members of Congress. Though I didn't often find myself in agreement with them, I was quickly coming to the same conclusion, although for quite different reasons. I believed my resignation as secretary might demonstrate accountability on the part of the U.S. government. I thought that my resignation might also allow the administration and the Iraqi people to move beyond the scandal.

On May 5, at 10:00 in the morning, one week After the photos became public, I walked into the Oval Office with a handwritten note. “Mr. President,” it said, “I want you to know that you have my resignation as Secretary of Defense any time you feel it would be helpful to you.”
⁸
I told him that if the controversy over the abuse kept growing, I might not be effective in managing the Department. I also said that I believed someone needed to be held accountable.

Bush had been deeply affected by the photographs. He shared my view on the importance of accountability.

“Don, someone's head has to roll on this one,” he said. I told the President he had my resignation, and I thought he should accept it. However, I left our meeting without a decision.

That evening, Bush called me at the Pentagon. He said he had thought the matter over. “Your leaving is a terrible idea,” he said. “I don't accept your resignation.”

He asked if there was anyone else he should hold accountable by firing them, and he raised General Myers as a possibility. “Mr. President,” I replied, “you would be firing the wrong person.”

There was a rationale for firing a senior official. I understood and shared the President's need to hold someone at the top accountable for what had happened. But it would have been unjust to fire General Myers, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not in the chain of command and had no direct line of responsibility in the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

I too wanted to demonstrate accountability by removing those at senior levels who were ultimately responsible for the lack of training, supervision, discipline, and professionalism that led to the inexcusable actions at the prison. As I discovered in the weeks After the abuse came to light, responsibility was diffuse.

Complicating matters was the fact that there were two lines of responsibility: the operational chain of command through CENTCOM, and the administrative chain of command through the Army. The operational chain of command started with the Commander in Chief and ran through me to the CENTCOM combatant commander to the U.S. commander in Iraq down to military officials at Abu Ghraib prison. The administrative chain of command started with me and ran through the secretary and chief of staff of the Army. I hoped that each chain of command quickly would identify where the primary responsibility lay and that we could hold accountable the appropriate senior officers.
^*
That is not what happened. To help put the matter behind the Defense Department, I determined that President Bush deserved an option, and that left nobody but me.

On May 7, 2004, I crossed the Potomac and headed up Independence Avenue to Capitol Hill to testify on the abuses. In Washington there was speculation as to whether I might resign on the spot. There were also suggestions that more members of Congress might personally demand my resignation at the hearing. As I made my way to the Capitol, protesters lined the entrances to the Senate and House office buildings, some carrying signs accusing me, the President, and the military of war crimes.

In my testimony and subsequent press conferences on Abu Ghraib, I wanted to express my deep feelings of disgust and outrage at these indefensible acts. But there was a legal limit on what I could say publicly. The servicemen and-women depicted in the photos were awaiting trial by courts-martial. In the military justice system, the judge, jury, and prosecutor are all members of the Defense Department, and any comment made by an official in the chain of command—military or civilian—risks exerting what is called “unlawful command influence” on the outcome of the trial. If I had expressed my strongly held opinion on the guilt of those involved, it could have made it impossible to hold them accountable by law. My public statements on Abu Ghraib were carefully calibrated with legal advice. Most Americans were understandably outraged at those who had committed these acts, and they wanted to know that President Bush and I were outraged as well. Unfortunately, because both of us were at the top of the chain of command, we had to take care that our words were properly measured.

In seven hours of testimony to the Senate and House Armed Services committees alongside General Myers and Army officials, I explained what we knew about the Abu Ghraib abuse and that we were determined to do our best to make sure it never happened again.
^*
I opened my testimony by raising the question of who bore responsibility for what had taken place. “These events occurred on my watch.” I said. “As Secretary of Defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility.”
⁹

On behalf of the Department, I apologized to the President, the Congress, the country, and the Iraqi detainees who were in military custody. Promising a full investigation, I regretted that those of us at the Pentagon had not known about the abuse—and had not seen the pictures—earlier. I stressed the importance of a full, open airing of what had taken place at Abu Ghraib and of a transparent system to punish the illegal acts. “[H]owever terrible the setback,” I said, “this is also an occasion to demonstrate to the world the difference between those who believe in democracy and human rights and those who believe in rule by the terrorist code.”
¹⁰
I ended with an appeal to the members of Congress, to Americans, and to the world. “Judge us by our actions,” I said. “[W]atch how a democracy deals with wrongdoing and scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes and weaknesses.”
¹¹

During my testimony, Senator Evan Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana, asked me if my resignation would help undo some of the damage to our reputation.

“That's possible,” I responded. I did not volunteer that I had already submitted it to the President.

Though Bush told me I should not resign, the matter still was not settled in my mind. The previous week had been excruciating because the scandal was so damaging to our armed forces and the country. I generally thrived under pressure, but I wasn't thriving now. Abu Ghraib was threatening to consume the Defense Department, eclipsing the fine work thousands of servicemen and-women did every day. The Democratic National Committee was already using Abu Ghraib to raise funds for its campaigns.

That Sunday—Mother's Day—our children called and told me they were with me no matter what I decided. Vice President Cheney said that with Iraq in such a difficult condition, the President wanted me at the Defense Department. “You have to stay,” he urged in a phone call.

I was later reminded of an episode more than a half century earlier. In April 1952, when I was studying naval science in college, the U.S. Navy destroyer USS
Hobson
struck the aircraft carrier USS
Wasp
in the dark of night. The
Hobson
sank to the Atlantic seafloor with 176 men aboard.
¹²
The commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander W. J. Tierney, went down with the vessel. A Navy board of inquiry ultimately concluded that Tierney was to be held responsible for the incident. It could not have been easy to demand accountability from a commanding officer who lost his life. Nevertheless, there is a tradition on the sea and in our Navy that with authority comes responsibility and accountability. The Navy's venerable tradition regrettably seemed not to have taken hold to the same extent in the other military services. The case of the
Hobson
said a lot about leadership—and its consequences.

On May 10, 2004, President Bush came to the Pentagon for a briefing on Iraq. At the end of the briefing, I asked the President if I could see him alone. As we sat at the round table in my office overlooking the Pentagon's River Entrance, I handed him a second letter of resignation.
¹³
“By this letter I am resigning as Secretary of Defense,” it read. “I have concluded that the damage from the acts of abuse that happened on my watch, by individuals for whose conduct I am ultimately responsible, can best be responded to by my resignation.” As he read my letter, Bush was quiet.