Known and Unknown (57 page)

B
efore the war, officials in the Department of Defense spent many months analyzing contingencies and risks—both the risks of war and the risks of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. We knew the United States could defeat Iraq's forces in a reasonable period of time, but the more difficult challenge came after the end of major combat operations. Our military was well organized, trained, and equipped to win wars. Winning the peace after an enemy regime has been removed is quite another matter. There were many difficulties still ahead when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down in Firdos Square on April 9, 2003, but it was not the absence of postwar contingency planning that caused them.

Some who might have been in a position to know better suggested that the Iraq war would be a “cakewalk” and that the risks were few.
¹
That was not the view of those who would be ordering the men and women of our military into combat—not President Bush, not me, and not any of those I worked closely with at the Pentagon. In fact, the members of our Defense Department team were thinking long and hard about potential problems in post-Saddam Iraq.

No war has ever gone according to plan, but that did not absolve any of the President's advisers of their duty to prepare carefully and consider the possible perils that our forces might face. Because of the public controversy and divided opinions over the impending war, I believed it was important to give the President a full set of things to consider, especially those arguing against military conflict.

In the autumn of 2002, during a National Security Council meeting on Iraq, I departed from the agenda to read a handwritten list of possible problems, later referred to as the “Parade of Horribles,” that I believed could result from an invasion. Sitting at the table in the Situation Room, with Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Tenet, and the others in attendance, I went through the items one by one. The list was meant to generate serious, early thinking about the potential risks and what might be done to assess and reduce them. I also hoped to encourage others on the NSC to raise their concerns. That discussion was brief.

Because I considered the topic so important, when I returned to the Pentagon I used my notes to draft a memo, which I sent to a few of the Department's senior civilian and military advisers for comment. The DoD policy shop and dozens of military planners at CENTCOM and on the Joint Staff had been working long hours on contingencies in the event of war. Taking their suggestions into account, I expanded my original list and submitted it as a memo to the President and the members of the NSC. “It is offered simply as a checklist,” I noted, “so that they are part of the deliberations.”
²

With regard to the risks of an invasion, my memo listed a number of problems that were worth thinking about in case they materialized, though they ultimately did not:

• While the US is engaged in Iraq, another rogue state could take advantage of US preoccupation—North Korea, Iran, PRC in the Taiwan Straits, other?
  
• There could be higher than expected US and coalition deaths from Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction against coalition forces in Iraq, Kuwait and/or Israel.
  
• Fortress Baghdad could prove to be long and unpleasant for all.
  ³
  

My memo to the NSC also directed attention to some serious risks that did in fact materialize, in whole or in part:

• US could fail to find WMD on the ground in Iraq and be unpersuasive to the world.
  
• US could fail to manage post–Saddam Hussein Iraq successfully, with the result that it could fracture into two or three pieces, to the detriment of the Middle East and the benefit of Iran.
  
• Rather than having the post-Saddam effort require 2 to 4 years, it could take 8 to 10 years, thereby absorbing US leadership, military and financial resources.
  
• Iraq could experience ethnic strife among Sunni, Shia and Kurds.
  
• World reaction against “pre-emption” or “anticipatory self-defense” could inhibit US ability to engage [with other countries in order to deal with problems of common concern] in the future.
  ⁴
  

To take just one for example, I understood that if WMD were not found, the administration's credibility would be undermined. That was why I felt we needed to make sure everyone understood that WMD was only one of the many reasons underlying the decision to remove Saddam. If we had had a full discussion of this possibility then, it might have made an important difference in the administration's communications strategy. It also might have tempered the WMD-focused briefing Powell would make to the UN Security Council several months later in February 2003.

My memo did not argue for or against military action in Iraq. That was not the intent. Indeed, at the end, I noted that “it is possible of course to prepare a similar illustrative list of all the potential problems that need to be considered if there is no regime change in Iraq.”
⁵
I wrote the memo because I was uneasy that, as a government, we had not yet fully examined a broad enough spectrum of possibilities. Unfortunately, though the Department of Defense prepared for these contingencies in our areas of responsibility, there was never a systematic review of my list to the NSC.

 

T
o analyze what an American presence in postwar Iraq might look like, we needed to know with precision what the desired objective was—what were America's goals. In March 2001, six months before 9/11, I had written a short paper titled “Guidelines When Considering Committing U.S. Forces” that summarized what I believed the commander in chief should consider before ordering combat operations.
⁶
The memo was intended to help the administration establish a framework for when and how military force should be applied, and under what circumstances. I had seen over the years that there often was pressure on presidents to use military force without clearly achievable military objectives.

When it came to the administration's goals in Iraq, my views were straightforward. They were to help the Iraqis put in place a government that did not threaten Iraq's neighbors, did not support terrorism, was respectful to the diverse elements of Iraqi society, and did not proliferate weapons of mass destruction. Period. The aim was not to bestow on it an American-style democracy, a capitalist economy, or a world-class military force. If Iraqis wanted to adapt their government to reflect the liberal democratic traditions espoused by Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith, we could start them on their way and then wish them well.

As soon as we had set in motion a process, I thought it important that we reduce the American military role in reconstruction and increase assistance from the United Nations and other willing coalition countries. Any U.S. troops remaining in Iraq would focus on capturing and killing terrorists and left over supporters of the old regime that were still fighting.

I questioned the way earlier administrations had used the military in post-conflict activities. When we took office in 2001, more than twelve thousand forces remained in the Balkans performing tasks that might have been turned over to local security forces earlier.
⁷
Throughout my tenure, I focused on reducing the American military presence in Bosnia and Kosovo and assigning security responsibilities to local security forces or international peacekeepers from countries more directly affected by potential instability in the area.
^*

I recognized the Yankee can-do attitude by which American forces took on tasks that locals would be better off doing themselves. I did not think resolving other countries' internal political disputes, paving roads, erecting power lines, policing streets, building stock markets, and organizing democratic governmental bodies were missions for our men and women in uniform. Equally worrisome, locals could grow accustomed to the unnatural presence of foreign forces acting as their de facto government and making decisions for them. The risk was that these nations could become wards of the United States.

My experience in Lebanon during the Reagan administration also demonstrated the problem of dependency on U.S. forces in countries facing internal strife and violence. By late 1983, the Marine presence in Beirut was just about the only thing keeping the country from either descending into a civil war or falling under Syrian domination. When President Reagan, spurred by the Congress, withdrew the Marines, Lebanon quickly succumbed to Syria.

One of the guidelines in my memo on putting American forces at risk was that a proposed action needed to be “achievable—at acceptable risk.” “We need to understand our limitations,” I wrote. “The record is clear [that] there are some things the U.S. simply cannot accomplish.”
⁹
Thus, at the Department of Defense, postwar planning for Iraq had begun with the generally accepted recognition that recent efforts to rebuild nations had been flawed. We had tried to avoid those mistakes in Afghanistan by emphasizing the importance of building up indigenous security forces, both army and police, and promptly establishing a new, independent government under the leadership the Afghans selected. But unfortunately the U.S. military seemed to be doing most of the postcombat stabilization and reconstruction work on its own. Despite tireless efforts by the Defense Department's comptroller, Dov Zakheim, to solicit funds and assistance from friends and allies for reconstruction, their contributions were minimal.
¹⁰
At the Bonn conference in 2001, the United Nations had treated Afghanistan's reconstruction like Solomon's baby, but without Solomon's wisdom. Reconstruction activities had been divided among different coalition nations—training the police and border guards (Germany), rebuilding a judiciary (Italy), counternarcotics (Britain), disarming militias (Japan)—without any realistic assessment of their ability to deliver. Afghanistan's reconstruction proved largely to be a series of unfulfilled pledges by well-intentioned but poorly equipped coalition partners. So too the contributions of the civilian departments and agencies of our government were modest.

I understood that there were times when the United States would not be able to escape some nation-building responsibilities, particularly in countries where we had been engaged militarily. It would take many years to rebuild societies shattered by war and tyranny. Though we would do what we could to assist, we ultimately couldn't do it for them. My view was that the Iraqis and Afghans would have to govern themselves in ways that worked for them. I believed that political institutions should grow naturally out of local soil; not every successful principle or mechanism from one country could be transplanted in another.

 

A
s early as the summer of 2002, well before the Iraq war, the Pentagon policy team, led by Doug Feith, was developing an approach that would allow Iraqi opposition elements—including the Kurds of semiautonomous northern Iraq and the sizable exile community—to participate in an interim governing body. A key member of our policy team, Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman, sketched out some of the imperatives we needed to consider.
^*

The post–World War II German and Japanese models of reconstruction, Rodman contended, were the wrong analogies. Rather, he suggested we look to postwar France, where Roosevelt and Churchill planned an Allied military occupation because they did not think Charles de Gaulle commanded the respect of the French people. When De Gaulle returned to France after D-Day and millions came to greet him, however, Allied military planners, led by Eisenhower, reconsidered. Rodman observed that if the Allies had gone ahead with the plan for occupation, the Communists, who were then the backbone of the French anti-Nazi resistance, “would have taken over the countryside while the allies sat in Paris imagining that they were running the country.”
¹¹

Rodman's point was that we didn't want Americans holed up in Baghdad deluding themselves that they were actually controlling the country. There were “bad guys all over Iraq—radical Shia, Communists, Wahhabis, al-Qaeda—who will strive to fill the political vacuum,” Rodman presciently warned. To prevent a vacuum, the U.S. government should begin preparing moderate Iraqis to take over their country. I agreed with Rodman's analysis.

Feith and Rodman alerted me that in the interagency discussions at the deputies committee level and below, the State Department had different ideas.
^†
Officials at State favored what they called a Transitional Civil Authority, led by the United States, that would govern post-Saddam Iraq for a multi-year period. State's idea, as Rodman wrote, “is that (1) the Iraqi opposition is too divided to fill the vacuum on its own, and (2) the U.S. will want to control what happens with Iraqi WMD, oil, etc.”
¹²

On July 1, 2002, I forwarded Rodman's assessment to Cheney, Powell, Tenet, and Rice, in the hope that they might be similarly persuaded that an American occupation would be a mistake: