Known and Unknown (113 page)

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Powell remarked, “All of the countries in the region—the United States, Russia and, as you heard, Pakistan, through Musharraf last evening—say, it's better that they not enter Kabul. There's too many uncertainties as to what might happen.” Secretary Powell went on to say, “Entering a city is a difficult thing. You put people in close quarters, they are of different tribal loyalties. We have seen what has happened previously when you had an uncontrolled situation and two forces arriving in Kabul at the same time not meaning each well.”
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Early on, Karzai emerged as a possible candidate for a national leadership post. As such, we wanted him protected. At one point during the fighting against a much larger Taliban force, Karzai was evacuated briefly to Pakistan. In talking with Pentagon reporters, I mentioned Karzai's evacuation. Though my remarks were accurate, I did not want to give a false impression that Karzai had sought to retreat, which he most certainly had not. Karzai, understandably, didn't want it known that he had been taken out of Afghanistan, even for a short period. I later apologized to Karzai. He responded graciously.

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At one point I watched a Predator video feed of a tall, lanky man wearing a turban and white robes and surrounded by what looked like an entourage of bodyguards. Our military command center was abuzz with anticipation. There was not a doubt in anyone's mind that the image on the screen in front of us was Osama bin Laden. As they made final preparations to take out the target, something spooked the man we were observing, perhaps an intelligence tip or someone catching sight of our Predator UAV above. He took off, running like a gazelle over rocky, rugged terrain. He couldn't have been more than twenty years old. Bin Laden was in his midforties in 2001. Intelligence later corroborated that the man we all were absolutely convinced was bin Laden was not.

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One soldier confided that they had encountered a phenomenon largely unknown to them until that point: saddle sores. The problem had become so severe, in fact, that they found it difficult to ride. Some tried Vaseline to make it more comfortable, but the conditions were so windy and dusty that the sand turned the Vaseline into a scratchy paste. Then some clever mind came up with a different solution: pantyhose. It was another example of the often unexpected challenges our forces had had to meet and overcome.

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Leaflets dropped from U.S. aircraft encouraged Iraqi army units to rebel. CIA-sponsored radio broadcasts spread the same message.

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The French ended their participation in the no-fly zones in 1998.
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In the days after the liberation of Iraq in 2003, I was given a video that U.S. Army soldiers had found. It was a twelve-minute film Saddam's internal security services had put together. The video documented various methods of torture that his regime used, including beatings, limb and tongue amputations, and beheadings. Men were thrown off three-story buildings. Some were forced to hold out their arms to have them broken by lead pipes. Saddam's men proudly videotaped their atrocities to terrorize others.

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Republicans voted 202 to 9 and Democrats voted 157 to 29 in favor of the bill.

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On the dangers posed by Iraq, General Jim Jones, then commandant of the Marine Corps, was among the most vocal. He was concerned that our operations over Iraq were, as he put it, “a high risk strategy without clear objectives or a discernible end state.” “I am working [on] the problem and certainly agree with your concern,” I wrote back on September 10, 2001.
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When the strike took place, President Bush was on a state visit to Mexico. He and I had both approved the strikes, but neither of us was informed of their timing. So when reporters asked the President about them at the joint press conference he was having with Mexican President Vicente Fox, Bush was caught by surprise. Keeping the Commander in Chief in the dark about the timing of a strike was not the preferred course of action. But, one month into the new term, I was the only Senate-confirmed Bush-nominated official in the Department of Defense. We were still missing the entire layer of senior civilians who would coordinate communication with the White House and other members of the National Security Council.

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After his capture in Iraq by the American military in 2003, Saddam told an FBI interviewer he was interested in pursuing a “security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region” before the invasion occurred. For someone supposedly interested in cultivating a new relationship with the United States, Saddam had an odd way of showing it: firing on American pilots, praising and rewarding terrorists, and applauding the 9/11 attacks.
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Since he admitted himself into treatment in September 2001, Nick has lived a drug-free life with the support of his wife, Anne.

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In Desert Storm, 10 percent of U.S. weapons were precision guided. By 2001, a decade later, some 70 percent of U.S. air-delivered weapons were guided by lasers or GPS with devastating accuracy.

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In 1990 and 1991, the military had shipped some four hundred thousand short tons of ammunition into the Iraq theater. More than 80 percent was returned to the United States untouched.
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David Kay, the chief UN weapons inspector in 1991, believed it would have been only twelve to eighteen months until the regime reached “regular industrial-scale production of fissile material,” or enriched uranium, that could be used in an atomic bomb.
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I considered it my responsibility to ask questions and seek needed information from briefers. In my experience, the good briefers and analysts did not show discomfort when I engaged them. In fact, they tended to enjoy the give-and-take and seemed appreciative of the interest of a senior official. Some commented that the interchanges helped them do their work better and provided useful input for their colleagues. After a few in the CIA alleged that some policy officials had “politicized intelligence,” in 2004 I asked not to receive my daily oral briefings from the CIA. If questions were going to be reported as efforts to distort rather than to better understand or clarify the information we were receiving, it not only wasn't worth taking time to receive the briefings, it had risks. As a result, I began simply reading the CIA briefing materials and asking the undersecretary of defense for intelligence to pose any questions I might have.

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I have no knowledge of what Powell may have said to individuals when not in my presence—such as news reporters. But in the National Security Council meetings I attended, this was the only time I heard Secretary Powell discuss the issue. A few years later, when that issue started to surface in the press, I asked both Rice and the President if they had any memory of Powell ever suggesting a need for more troops. Bush said Powell might have said something to him, but was uncertain. Rice said she was at all the meetings between Powell and the President and had no memory of Powell raising the issue.
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In the wake of the Vietnam War, the Army organization structure was changed so that the Army Reserves would have to be called up in the event of war. “They're not taking us to war again without calling up the reserves,” General Creighton Abrams remarked. The TPFDD was a legacy of the military's post-Vietnam mindset.
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At a commander's conference in February 2003, a midlevel officer stood up and, in his question, informed me for the first time that the Army was giving only five days' notice for National Guard and Reserve call-ups. It was a strikingly and unacceptably short lead time, given that members of the Guard and Reserves had full-time jobs and lives outside of that in the uniform. I felt they needed and deserved at least thirty days' notice of a possible call-up, if at all possible. And, in this case, it was possible, and in short order we managed to get the Army to fix its system.

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Other instances of military action without UN Security Council approval are: Vietnam War (1959–75); the liberation of Grenada (1983); the liberation of Haiti (1994–95); NATO's bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995); the U.S.-UK bombing of Iraq (1998); and NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia (1999).

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According to the Volcker report, “[D]ifferences among member states impeded decision-making, tolerated large-scale smuggling, and aided and abetted grievous weaknesses in administrative practices within the Secretariat…. As a result, serious questions have emerged about the United Nations' ability to live up to its ideals.”
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I was reminded of that fact during a meeting in Vilnius with Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus. “Secretary Rumsfeld,” he said, “I remember you when you first ran for Congress in Illinois in 1962.” Adamkus had lived in the Chicago area for a number of years. He told me that he ran on the Republican ticket for sanitary district trustee in Cook County at the same time I was running for Congress. “You won your race and I lost mine,” he added. “But you're now a president,” I replied. “I'd say you've made out all right for yourself.”

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“If Americans had listened to some European leaders during the past 50 years,” the President of Latvia told me, “we [Latvia] would still be in the Soviet Union.”
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As the CIA noted at the time, “[I]t would be difficult for al-Qaida to maintain an active, long-term presence in Iraq without alerting the authorities or obtaining their acquiescence.”
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A majority of the Turkish lawmakers voted in favor of the law allowing our forces to pass through Turkey on the way to Iraq, but the 264 to 251 vote failed to meet a parliamentary rule that required a majority of those present to vote in favor. Because there were 19 abstentions, three more votes in favor of the resolution were needed for it to pass.

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Both generals went on to serve in the Obama administration: Shinseki as secretary of veterans affairs and Jones as national security adviser.

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On September 30, 2002, for example, I dictated a note: “I want to talk to the Vice President about getting Tenet active in getting Arabs in states to help offer Saddam a way out.”
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The reality was different from the media storyline. In the fog of war, Lynch's unit had become lost after taking a wrong turn, and in a firefight she had been wounded and captured. Lynch's captors took her to a local hospital, where a courageous Iraqi reported her whereabouts to U.S. forces. After her rescue, Lynch reportedly remembered little about the ordeal, but like most American troops who had volunteered to serve their country, she was brave and dedicated.

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One mile east of the airport, Army Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith and the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division were clearing a position to hold enemy prisoners of war. Without warning, Republican Guard troops began firing from a nearby watchtower, and nearly one hundred Iraqi troops threatened to overrun his position and an aid station where dozens of wounded American soldiers were receiving medical attention. Smith manned a machine gun and led a counterattack from an exposed position. Though he would not survive the battle, Smith prevented Saddam's men from attacking the aid station, saving the lives of over a hundred American soldiers. For his courage, Paul Ray Smith became the first to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor in the wars that began after September 11, 2001.

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The list also included hospitals, mosques, and schools.

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At one point, I commented to General John Abizaid and General Myers: “The history books suggest that the way they stopped looting in earlier era[s] in Iraq was to get the tribes to provide security for things like electric power lines and oil wells.” I asked, “Have we considered talking to some of the tribes about providing that security and paying them for it, like we would police, and having them be responsible?” It would be precisely these tribes that would prove critical to achieving a level of security in the country three years later.
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The intelligence community assessed that the Iraqi “police and justice personnel appear to have extensive professional training,” as one brief provided to the NSC principals asserted. This proved to be off the mark. To a great many Iraqis, the police force was equated with the abuses of Saddam's regimes. The police lacked legitimacy and thus authority, posing a major problem for the coalition as an insurgency took root.
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Today the Baghdad Museum is open and thousands of ancient Near Eastern artifacts have been moved back into their displays.

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The situation brought to mind a quote I had read: “The power of the media is willful and dangerous because it dramatically affects Western policy while bearing no responsibility for the outcome. Indeed, the media's moral perfectionism is possible only because it is politically unaccountable.”
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