The Assassins' Gate (20 page)

SEN. CHAFEE
: Do you have a plan, either an exit strategy or some kind of planning if this turns into a debacle…?

FEITH
: The short answer is, yes. We are planning for worst-case eventualities, and what I'd like to assure the committee is that every one of the—

SEN. CHAFEE
: When will you share those plans with us?

SEN. DODD
: Tell me why you think the nation-building here and holding this together is something that can be achieved in, using your response to Senator Feingold, two years.

FEITH
: First of all, Senator, the two years was my esteemed colleague, Undersecretary Grossman's, answer.

SEN. DODD
: All right.

FEITH
: And I don't think I want to venture into the prediction business.

Feith later insisted that there had never been an intention to transfer power to Ahmad Chalabi. “The idea that we had a rigid plan for the political transition is a mistake,” he told me. “We developed concepts, policy guidelines—for example, organize as much authority as possible in Iraqi hands. That is a policy guideline. But as for specific names and timetables and rules, nobody here presumed to dictate that, because you can't possibly know that. That's like trying to tell a local commander in advance of the battle exactly how many people to put where as the fighting proceeds. Nobody can work with a plan that rigid. Nobody here in Washington is micromanaging.”

Just two or three days before leaving for Kuwait, Jay Garner held his first and only press conference. When a reporter asked whether he would hand power over to Chalabi and the INC, Garner replied, “I don't intend to empower the INC. I don't have a candidate. The best man will rise.”

That night, he received several agitated calls from Feith. Garner found him so difficult to work with, simultaneously overbearing and mentally scattered, that he had taken to sending his deputy, a retired lieutenant general named Ron Adams, to deal with the undersecretary. On the phone Feith lamented, “You've damaged the INC, you've caused Ahmad embarrassment.”

Garner snapped, “Hey, goddamnit, then what you need to do, Doug, is have a little press conference in the morning and say, ‘We're firing Garner because he embarrassed Ahmad Chalabi.'”

“We can't do that.”

“Then get off my ass.”

Wolfowitz, in his smoother way, urged Garner to be nicer to the INC. Garner was forbidden to speak to the press again, and when he complained about the embargo to Rumsfeld, he learned that the order had come from the White House. The word was that ORHA's chief was “politically tune-deaf” and needed to be kept under control.

*   *   *

BY EARLY MARCH
, Condoleezza Rice had given up on the Office of Special Plans. The Pentagon civilians turned out to be more skillful at arguing and winning policy fights than at actually doing anything. Their idea of training six thousand Iraqi followers of Ahmad Chalabi at a military base in Hungary to fight alongside the U.S. invasion force fizzled out when the Iraqis failed to materialize; at the end of training, the Free Iraqi Forces consisted of seventy men. Having seized the bureaucratic turf of postwar Iraq, the officials under Wolfowitz and Feith managed to pull together just one policy briefing, on oil. Mobbs's presentation was so long and unfocused—forty-eight slides instead of the usual five or six—that Rice decided to push Special Plans aside and hand the postwar policy issues to an official at her own agency named Frank Miller.

On March 10 and 12—barely a week before the start of the war—Miller briefed the national security deputies, the principals, and finally the president on dozens of postwar items. Debaathification would disqualify from government service the top 1 percent of Baath Party members; the Iraqi army would be reduced but not disbanded and employed to do public works projects; an interim government would be set up according to a timeline, with some ministries such as defense kept under American supervision longer than others. Everyone up to the president approved these eleventh-hour decisions. And yet, somehow, they would never matter in Iraq. They seemed to exist so that, in case anyone ever asked, someone could say, “Yes, the president was briefed and he signed off.”

Garner, who was about to head out to the Middle East with his ORHA team, wanted as little instruction as possible; he had his own ideas. He found Miller, Elliott Abrams, and the White House staff “at best disruptive. They were a pain in the ass. Whatever we were doing, they were trying to achieve the opposite. From my side of it, they were determined to make sure it failed. That's a strong statement, but they did everything they could to cause us problems.” Meanwhile, over at the Pentagon, Feith was planning on sending out his ideological appointees, Rhode and Rubin, to keep tabs on ORHA in Kuwait and give Chalabi a head start in Baghdad. Rumsfeld's spokesman, Larry Di Rita, would accompany Garner everywhere he went. Even as it prepared to take over a foreign country, the administration remained hopelessly at war with itself. No one in charge was asking the most basic question: what will we do if it all goes wrong?

*   *   *

ON MARCH
16, three days before the first bombs fell on Baghdad, 169 ORHA members flew from Washington to Kuwait. Among them was Drew Erdmann.

Though he had left academia behind, Erdmann's reasons for going to Iraq were, in a sense, professional. “My analysis was that we really are at a defining turning point in history. I had a particular historical perspective. I felt that this was a defining event which, good or bad, would have an impact for the next decade. If it went bad, the consequences would be worse than Vietnam. And second—this was not exactly rocket science—the postwar phase was going to be the most important. So that's the syllogism: postwar, defining turning point, and you have an offer to participate.”

In Erdmann's view, Saddam was becoming an increasing threat as containment eroded with the expulsion of inspectors and the weakening of sanctions. This was the “realist” argument for war, but Erdmann, like most people, didn't think entirely in the categories of international relations theory. He also believed in American exceptionalism—the idea that America's role in world affairs was something higher than mere power politics, that from the founding of the republic American liberty was inextricably bound up with human liberty (this was the subject of one of his dissertation chapters). He differed from the neoconservatives less in what he thought than how he thought. His idealism was tempered by a historian's natural attraction to facts and a sense of the fallibility and occasional folly of American behavior in the world.

He had to convince both his boss, Richard Haass, and his wife, who didn't see the need for a war, to let him go to Iraq. “I knew if I didn't, I'd always regret it. And my wife did, too—she knew that my regret would be corrosive.”

Erdmann asked to join the civil administration team, led by Feith's ex–law partner Mobbs. By the time they reached the beachfront villas at the Hilton Hotel south of Kuwait City, where ORHA set up headquarters, the operation was in disarray. Upon arrival, Garner and his inner circle disappeared without a word into their own villa, and the other ORHA members didn't see their leaders for two days. Among the fishing buddies and Space Cowboys there was tremendous élan, but it never traveled outside their group. Everybody liked Jay, but nobody understood the mission. Mobbs, looking as if he were dressed for West Palm Beach, was frozen out of the retired generals' deliberations, and his sporadic meetings with his own civil administration team never produced any decisions. Garner had almost no contact with the team at all. Gordon Rudd, the military historian, was worried enough to speak to him about it. “We're not putting enough attention on civil administration,” Rudd said. “Gordon, that can wait,” Garner replied. “We've got to focus on humanitarian assistance.” At the time, Rudd thought, the choice made sense: Save lives first, then reform Iraq.

But in the humanitarian assistance pillar, led by a peacekeeping expert named George Ward, things weren't much better. Meghan O'Sullivan found herself tasked with spending the day as an extra body in a car to fulfill security requirements. She was kept out of meetings where larger policy questions, the kind that had been her bread and butter at State, were discussed; she and her colleagues couldn't even get phones. O'Sullivan was an attractive, fair, slender redhead from Massachusetts whose light self-mockery could be misleading, since she was also ambitious and cool under pressure and had a knack for landing professionally on her feet (it would happen again after she got to Baghdad). She had written a book on “smart sanctions” as a fellow at the Brookings Institution before joining the State Department—which, in the eyes of the neoconservatives, made her soft on Iraq. Iraq had been one of America's biggest foreign-policy problems her whole adult life: What Europe had meant to a previous generation, Iraq and the Middle East meant to hers. O'Sullivan's reasons for supporting the war were essentially the same as Erdmann's, her colleague from policy planning. As far back as September, she had told Richard Haass during a walk on the Mall that, if there was a war, she wanted to go to Iraq afterward. By the early spring of 2003, after advocating the administration position at conferences in Europe and being repeatedly hammered, after months of almost unbearable pressure, she had also reached the point of simply thinking: Let's just do it, for God's sake! Now the war had started, and she was seventy miles away in Kuwait and desperate to get to Iraq.

One day early in the war, O'Sullivan saw a Silkworm missile fly overhead and realized that if she were back at policy planning in the State Department she would have her hands on all sorts of classified intelligence about what was happening just to the north; as it was, she knew nothing beyond what she saw on CNN. She started waking up in the middle of the night with an unfamiliar emotion that she couldn't at first identify but that seemed to be consuming her physically. It was regret. She lay awake second-guessing the decision that had brought her to Kuwait.

Even Barbara Bodine, a senior member of the team, was cut out of the loop. Bodine had served in the Baghdad embassy in the 1980s and been held hostage in the embassy in Kuwait for several months after the Iraqi invasion in 1990. Her tenure as ambassador to Yemen under Clinton was controversial: After the bombing of the USS
Cole
at Aden in 2000, she and the FBI's chief investigator, John O'Neill, clashed over his team's comportment in the country, and eventually she barred his reentry. O'Neill quit government service in disgust and took a job as chief of security at the World Trade Center, where he died on September 11. Among the senior people in Kuwait, Bodine was one of the few nonmilitary and the only woman, and she found herself slowly disappearing from the circle of leaders like the Cheshire Cat. Just to keep in touch with the State Department, she had to go around Garner and the Pentagon and have communications gear flown in from Washington to the embassy in Kuwait City. In furtive conversations she urged her colleagues at State whose appointments were being blocked by Feith's office to fly in under embassy country clearance. And she spent hours counseling and consoling tearful young men and women who had left interesting jobs in Washington to languish in Kuwait on what felt like a terrible five-week holiday at the beach, amid the stress of frequent gas-attack alerts, the close quarters, the humiliations of menial work and intellectual idleness, the information blackout, and the confusion of not knowing what they would do once they got to Baghdad. No planning documents were distributed to the team; there weren't even org charts of the Iraqi ministries. In the end, ORHA produced a single, elegantly written twenty-five-page paper called “A Unified Mission Plan for Post-Hostilities Iraq.” It was never sent back to Washington for approval, so its only real function was historical. The document began, “History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.” The top of the title page read “Initial Working Draft,” and it was dated April 16, 2003—three days before the first members flew up to Baghdad, which had fallen a week earlier. “That wasn't a plan,” Bodine said. “It was an outline that never saw the light of day. The ‘plan' was to be out of Iraq by the end of August.”

Garner was talking about putting in ninety days in Iraq and then heading home. This struck O'Sullivan, Erdmann, and others as not even remotely realistic. At dinner in the Hilton restaurant with two Senate staffers who had flown in from Washington, Garner laid out his timetable: reconstruct utilities, stand up ministries, appoint an interim government, write and ratify a constitution, hold elections. By August, Iraq would have a sovereign, functioning government in place. There was a stunned silence. Someone at the table said, “Which August?”

Garner was carrying out his instructions from Defense as he understood them, but they were vague and sparse. The makeup of an interim government remained unknown; Garner knew that if he floated any names, one agency or another of the bitterly divided administration would shoot them down. The only subject on which Garner thought he had everyone's sign-off was the Iraqi army: He had briefed the president, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith, and they all agreed with his plan to keep it intact and pay salaries. There were daily video teleconferences in Kuwait with the Pentagon, and at Garner's side the whole time, shadowing him, was Rumsfeld's spokesman, Larry Di Rita.

The night Di Rita flew into Kuwait in early April, he was briefed by ORHA's senior officials, and when the deputy leader of the reconstruction pillar, Chris Milligan of USAID, spoke about the need to show early benefits to the Iraqi people, Di Rita slammed his fist down on the table. “We don't owe the people of Iraq anything,” he said. “We're giving them their freedom. That's enough.” A few days later, by which time ORHA officials realized that Di Rita had the full confidence of Rumsfeld, the secretary's spokesman stood up at a meeting of about fifty people in the Hilton conference room. The State Department messed up Bosnia and Kosovo, he told his audience (which included many foreign service officers), and the Pentagon wasn't going to let that happen in Iraq. “We're going to stand up an interim Iraqi government, hand power over to them, and get out of there in three to four months,” Di Rita announced. “All but twenty-five thousand soldiers will be out by the beginning of September.” To Paul Hughes, Garner's planning chief, “It sounded like they were going to package up five pounds of shit in a nice foil wrapper and hand it off and say, ‘Good luck.' It might look nice, but it would still be a package of shit.”