The War Within (23 page)

"Why don't you tell me how you see things here?" Rice began.

Dr. Adnan al-Dulaimi, the elderly head of the largest bloc of Sunnis in the parliament, said sectarian violence was paralyzing Iraqi society, especially in Baghdad. "The school year has started," he said, "but no oneóteachers or studentsócan go to class." Trade was on the verge of collapse because Iraqis were too afraid to leave their homes.

We're victims, he and his fellow Sunnis insisted. Nobody's doing anything to protect us. The leaders presented Rice with eight-by-ten glossy photographs, some in color, showing Sunni victims of tortureódecapitations and bodies with holes drilled into their heads and handsóa gruesome portfolio. They insisted that the killings and torture were the work of Shia death squads linked to people in the highest ranks of the government.

Rice knew that these pictures conformed with recent intelligence reports that sometimes showed 150 bodies turning up overnight in Baghdad.

The Sunnis' message was simple: We need to be protected. The leaders provided details and names from the Ministry of Interior, which ran the national police. Most of it involved crimes of omission, looking the other way, but there were clear acts of barbarism. On the political side, they claimed, Moqtada al-Sadr was trying to force a resolution on a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, in their view an item on Iran's agenda. They complained that the Shia had not followed through on promises made during the formation of the government and that they viewed their Sunni counterparts as adversaries, not partners. Those Sunnis who had been given roles in the government were regularly circumvented by officials from the prime minister's office. In their eyes, all the political and security troubles were traceable to the Shia.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 a devastating earthquake, Rice concluded the situation warranted a 9.

After an hour with these Sunni leaders, she met with the Shia leadership, most notably Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

"We tried to do this the right way" by accommodating the Sunnis, who used to rule Iraq, Hakim said. "We could have said, 'They killed our fathers. They killed our brothers. They destroyed our families and our villages. They gassed our people, and therefore we're going to do the same thing to them.' There were those among us who thought that's exactly what we should do. But we didn't. We've tried to bring them into the government. We tried to work with them. They don't want to work with us." He added in frustration, "Don't you see that they don't really want to be a part?" They wanted everything as in the old days of Saddam. They want to be in power again, he said.

The Shia narrative was the mirror image of the Sunni narrative. Each saw the other as the enemy.

Rice, who listened intently for more than an hour, finally said she wanted them to understand how Americans looked at Iraq. "Americans understand that there are people who lost their standingóSaddamists who are fighting us. And they understand al Qaeda" because of the brutality of the 9/11 attacks. "Americans understand that there might be some people who think we're occupiers, and they're fighting us. But Iraqis killing Iraqisóthey don't get that. And Americans are not going to stay with you if you're asking us to be in the middle of your centuries-old fights. And so what is going to happen is we're going to leave, because we won't be able to stay, and within six months you'll all be swinging from lampposts."

Afterward, Rice realized that the "swinging from lampposts" description might have been a touch indelicate. But it had gotten their attention. Rice asked her translator how it had gone over.

"It translated just fine," he replied.

Around 10:15 P.M., weary from her trip and consecutive frustrating meetings, Rice met again with Prime Minister Maliki, with only their interpreters in the room.

No matter what we do, she told him, this will not work if the Iraqis are not resolved to bring about some kind of reconciliation. "I don't mean by reconciliation that you all have to love each other," she said. After years of bitter internal warfare, she understood the tensions. She had heard the awful stories from both sides. "I have reason to believe that these stories are trueóthat when the army or the police want to defend a neighborhood, they're either called off or they're punished if they're going after Shia who are killing Sunnis. Innocent people are innocent people.

And I need to know, do you believe that?"

Yes, he said, he believed it.

"This is our problem," she said. "We don't see it." Your words do not match your actions, and the United States would not keep its troops in Iraq if it was not fixed. She repeated the warning she had given the others: "In six months, you'll all be swinging from lampposts."

Rice left Baghdad the next morning, realizing that she had miscalculated. She had thought that some political deal was possible, a kind of grand bargain whereby the Kurds, Shia and Sunnis would all opt for a place in the sun and compromise on the division of power, oil and money. But the sectarian violence was all-consumingóespecially with the Maliki government sanctioning and even abetting killings. It was tearing the country apart.

* * *

Back in Washington, Rice quickly beat a path to the White House. She met with the president in the Oval Office.

Cheney and Hadley came to listen.

"What we're doing isn't working," Rice told the president. She said she thought there hadn't been an adequate response to the deteriorating situation since the Samarra bombing. And as she had in August, she again raised with Bush the image of an Iraqi society that was "rending," stretched to the breaking point and on the precipice of coming apart.

She recounted her conversations with the Iraqi leaders and told the president that Maliki wasn't the main problem. It was bigger than that. The problems seemed systemic. For example, no one trusted the police.

"We have a Bull Connor problem," she said, recalling her childhood during the turbulent 1960s in Birmingham, Alabama. Bull Connor, the notorious commissioner of public safety, had made his own law. He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and a rabid segregationist, a lawman who ignored the law and fought integration with fire hoses, attack dogs and intimidation. "If the police came into my neighborhood, it wasn't for good," Rice said, adding that Iraq had a similar problem. "And until they find a way to make people think that the police or the army or somebody is there to evenly protect the population, this isn't going to work."

"You really think it's gotten to that point?" Bush asked.

"Yes," she said. The Iraqis had a lot to prove to their own people. Maliki had to prove he would not countenance, participate in or ignore organized violence. "And, frankly, they have a lot to prove to us."

She said she was worried that the effort the United States was making was no longer relating to the reality on the ground. Bush, usually given to a back-and-forth, mostly listened.

"How do you know that?" he finally asked. "How do you know that they aren't making the tough choices? What is it that you see?"

There are certain metrics to watch, indicators that would make it clear one way or another, Rice said. Most important, the Shia-led government must not act in a sectarian way. It must take on the Shia militias.

The average Iraqi has nobody to trust, she said. Not the government, not us. We are losing the population. Life is far from normal in Iraq. "It's not approaching normal," she said. "And it's not going to be normal unless the security situation is better."

They eventually got around to the obvious questions: What do we do about it? How do we fix it?

"Mr. President, I can't give you any easy answers," Rice said. "I want to go think about it. I want to go think about what we can do about it."

She had gotten off the plane from Iraq only hours earlier. She needed time to contemplate what she had seen, and more important, to figure out what must come next.

Rice and Hadley talked about which direction to head. "Obviously, we're going to need some way to think through this," Rice said. Maybe it was time to get people together and study the situation in a more formal, aboveboard way.

But they both were worried about the upcoming elections and wanted to avoid drawing attention in the charged political environment.

So the reviews continued under the radar.

Chapter 17

O
n Friday afternoon, October 6, the Council of Colonels headed to their first full session with the Joint Chiefs. They descended into the secure conference room known as the tank, a World War II moniker from when the chiefs had met in a basement room of the Public Health Service Building on Constitution Avenue. The entrance to the room was down a flight of stairs and through an arched doorway, giving the impression of entering a tank.

Officially known as the JSC conference room, or the "gold room," the current room in the Pentagon is trimmed in gold carpet, heavy gold drapes and dark wood paneling, much like a down-at-the-heels men's club. The tank is the military's secret society, a sacrosanct place where candid debates take place and what's said is not supposed to be reported to outsiders.

Chairman Pace and the service chiefs were seated in dark leather chairs around a long wooden conference table. The 12 colonels and four Navy captains sat along the walls.

For any military officer, participating in a tank session is a heady experience. But for Colonel McMaster, it qualified as downright surreal. His 1997 book,
Dereliction of Duty,
had blasted the Vietnam era chiefs who had met in this same room as "five silent men," meek and indecisive, utterly failing to be forceful and honest with President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara.

The day's session was to focus on the so-called long war against terrorism. Was the goal spreading democracy or simply stabilizing a country or a region like the Middle East? First up from the colonels was "Issue 1: Stability vs.

Democratization," an indirect shot at President Bush, the most outspoken advocate for spreading democracy around the globe.

The chiefs took the bait.

"Some folks are frenetic about us shoving Jeffersonian democracy down people's throats," said Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Moseley, who had joined the Air Force in 1971 during the height of the Vietnam War.

Pace said he had told the president that "'democracy' is not as effective a term or concept as 'representative government.'"

Admiral Michael Mullen, the chief of naval operations, a 1968 graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, cautiously inquired, "How far beyond military advice can we go on this point?"

"Can't avoid it," said General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, noting that they had to examine all elements of national powerónot just the military but diplomacy, and the economic and financial impact.

"I am comfortable taking anything to the president that negatively impacts our troops on the ground," Pace said.

The agenda then called for a discussion of America's "strategic vulnerability."

"We should be looking at how our current preoccupation with insurgents and terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq reduces our ability to deter other potential hostile actors," General Schoomaker said.

"We have forgotten how to use the other elements of national power except for the military," complained General Moseley. "We have at least one arm tied behind our back. That is why we are losing groundÖand our military is coming apart."

"We are not overstretched," Pace shot back testily. "Only a fraction of the nation has been mobilized, if thatÖGeneral Moseley, what do you mean we are coming apart?"

"By all standards of measurement we have lost standing in the world," Moseley replied. "Politically, our reputation and stature, the national treasure we are spending on the warÖall of itÖwe are in a downward spiral. I attended a NATO conference recently where they questioned our ability to sustain the fight and meet our global commitments."

Then he added, trying to lighten the mood, "On the bright side, I think the Poles are with us."

There were a few muted chuckles.

"Our ground forces are stretched to the breaking point," Schoomaker added.

"We must be a learning organization," Pace said, falling back on an old military clichÈ. They needed to adapt, he said, and the American public would adjust. "We need to help them turn the corner. They are waiting for us to do this."

Some of the colonels were dismayed by the aimless discussion. Here were the senior military advisers to the president, in the middle of wartime, more or less adrift. It was clear the chiefs were angry and shockingly disconnected from policy making. Worse, they had no plan of their own and no unified voice. It resembled a late night barroom chat.

Colonel Greenwood turned to Colonel McMaster at one point. "Doesn't this make you think no one read your first book?" he asked.

"Yeah," McMaster said.

* * *

At 10:45 A.M. on October 10, Rumsfeld dispatched a SECRET snowflake to Pace and Eric Edelman, his policy undersecretary. The subject was "New construct for Iraq."

"Two months ago I told you I wanted to change the construct for Iraq," he wrote. His proposal was not radical:

"Establish a public plan (benchmarks) to turn over responsibility for governance and security to the Iraqis and thereby permit reduction of Coalition forces." He said the president agreed with his proposal. Rumsfeld claimed this would be a "forecast," not a rigid "timetable," that could be carefully qualified by saying "we don't know if the Iraqis can meet the targets." It was little more than a public relations baby step.

But Rice saw it as something more. To her, it was Rumsfeld's way of speeding up a drawdown and shifting blame and responsibility to the State Department.

"I'm sick of hearing this line from the DOD," she told colleagues in private. "I'm sick of hearing that State's not in the fight, civilians aren't in the fight. I'm sick of hearing it. That's just wrong."

* * *

Meanwhile, Bill Luti on the NSC staff had spent 11 intense days working on the new operational concept for Iraq that Hadley wanted. Three months earlier, he had been to Iraq with Rumsfeld and noticed what he called "a subterranean burning." The Shia militias had launched their bloody campaign of reprisals, changing the nature of the war. The Abizaid-Casey strategy of turning the war over to the Iraqis might work if Americans were patient. But there was no more patience, Luti concluded.