No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

14 48 HOURS

JUST BEFORE OUR DEPARTURE for the Azores, the National Security Council met at Camp David on March 15 to review the situation. We decided that any military action had to be preceded by an ultimatum to Saddam. As had been the case with the Taliban, it was the unified view that decent nations do not go to war without warning. The President addressed the nation on March 17 from the Cross Hall in the White House. Flanked by a row of columns on one side and the flags of the presidency and the United States of America in the distance, the President issued a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Saddam to leave the country or face attack. And on March 19 the National Security Council met one last time with the military commanders joining by videoconference from the field. The President asked each commander by name if he had everything that was needed. Each in turn answered affirmatively.

The President closed the meeting by saying, “God Bless America.” I could tell that he was emotional, so I did not, as I usually did, follow him back to the Oval. Neither did Andy Card. When you work with the President of the United States, you come to see that being President is a very lonely job. Sometimes there is nothing that even the closest advisors can do or say to change that fact. At no time is that truer than when the commander in chief orders American men and women into battle. I never would have dreamed of encroaching on the moment when the President acknowledges that he, and he alone, is responsible for that decision.

I RETURNED to my office to review my to-do list. I had a number of calls to make to my counterparts around the world and several meetings scheduled about the war and its aftermath. The covert part of the operation was to commence that night with a lead element composed of British, Polish, Australian, and U.S. special forces.

At about 3:00 P.M. the President called and told me to come down to the Oval immediately. I always went immediately, and the fact that he said it that way was a bit strange. When I arrived, I saw George Tenet hovering over the desk, showing the President a map of a site near Baghdad. The Agency had gotten a tip that Saddam was moving to Dora Farms outside Baghdad. The source had revealed the approximate coordinates of the house in which he would be staying as well as an estimated time of arrival. We had even been told that he’d be traveling in a white vehicle. The question was whether to attack the site and try to kill Saddam before launching the military invasion.

Don Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers were already there, but I looked around and didn’t see Colin. “Get him here,” the President said.

I excused myself, went into the President’s little office adjacent to the Oval, and called him. “Get over here now!” I barked. I didn’t have time to explain why.

The President was perplexed. The military operation had been set into motion a few hours before. How would this fit in with the plan? Were we being lured into a trap? Perhaps Saddam had filled the compound with women and children who would be killed in an air strike, filling the screens of Arab satellite TV with innocent victims of U.S. aggression. The decision was made more difficult by changing reports from the source, leaving George to try to draw the new coordinates on a piece of paper while leaning on the white Oval Office sofa. The President was skeptical, and frankly, so was I—but all of us agreed that it was worth a shot. The President asked Don to make sure Tommy Franks agreed. We all saw the upside: if we could kill Saddam, war could be avoided altogether.

An attack plan had to be developed immediately to give the bombers time to reach the target. Dick Myers ran between the Oval and Steve’s office down the hall, communicating with the Joint Staff as it hastily developed a plan and readied the weapons package. The mission would be unorthodox, with minimal opportunity to suppress Iraqi air defenses before the bombers entered. The pilots would try to slip in and out undetected.

Around eight, I went to my office and woke up David Manning to tell him there had been a change in plans. I explained as best I could what we were trying to do. David in turn woke up the prime minister. The Brits were on board.

We all held our breath until the pilots completed the mission and left Iraqi airspace several hours later. The next day we received initial reports that a white vehicle had been hit and that “somebody important” had been taken out on a stretcher. Unfortunately, whoever it was, it was not Saddam. The planned military operation to liberate Iraq was launched that same day.

The next morning I was surprised to see our executive assistant Major Jen Easterly in her army uniform. The executive assistants at the NSC, which had included Kevin Moran, Michael Ma, Matt Waxman, and my former Stanford student Dave Travers, worked long hours and remained unflappable under great pressure. Steve and I were close to them.

“Jen, why are you in uniform?” I asked.

“We are at war and I am a soldier,” she said humbly.

THE MILITARY CAMPAIGN went swiftly, with the Iraqi forces retreating and ultimately disintegrating. The President received briefings several times a day. We continued Principals and NSC meetings about the aftermath. But there was little for us or for the President to do. The operation was now in the hands of the commanders. In fact, looking back on those days, I am struck by what the President did do. The president of Cameroon made a visit, complete with an Oval Office meeting and lunch on March 20. In retrospect, I can’t help wondering why. Perhaps my not remembering that the meeting even took place (until reviewing my calendar for this memoir) says something about the level of distraction that we really felt, even if on the surface things seemed normal.

Unlike during the early operations in Afghanistan, there was no sense of being bogged down. Coalition forces were making steady, even rapid, progress and were approaching Baghdad. We wondered whether Saddam would indeed make a stand there. He didn’t, and on April 9 U.S. forces entered the capital city. There was pandemonium in the streets. I watched on TV as Saddam’s statue toppled to the ground. Iraq had been liberated. But when a soldier climbed upon the rubble to plant a U.S. flag, he was quickly admonished to take it down. We did not want our presence there to be—or to seem to be—an occupation.

Seeing the images, I rushed down to the Oval Office. The Vice President and Kanan Makiya, one of the Iraqi exiles with whom we had worked, were there. Everyone was hugging. But the President was just sitting at his desk. “You did this,” I said to him. He didn’t really respond. Again I walked away because he was very much inside his own thoughts.

I later learned that a few nights later the Vice President had invited Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and several other people to his house to celebrate the liberation of Iraq. I am not sure whether Don was invited, but Colin and I weren’t included. For a brief time there was a kind of hubris among those who had been the most persistent and long-standing advocates for the overthrow of Saddam. It was summed up by the Vice President who, when challenged on the need for interagency coordination in the postwar period, said, “The Pentagon just liberated Iraq. What has the State Department done?” I knew that I had my work cut out for me. We all did.

THE JOY of the liberation was short-lived. There was widespread looting, perhaps to be expected immediately after the overthrow of a hated dictator. But it went beyond that to systematic attacks on important buildings, including the museum containing Iraq’s significant antiquities. Unidentified people were raiding weapons depots. At least there was no attempt as in 1991 to set the oil fields on fire, but the pictures from Iraq were very ugly.

I’ve always believed that those Baath party members loyal to Saadam, not ordinary Iraqis, created much of the chaos to embarrass us and sow the seeds of a comeback. Within a few days we began to get reports of armed thugs calling themselves “Fedayeen Saddam.” “Who is Fedayeen Saddam?” I asked George, temporarily forgetting the somewhat cursory mention of the group in the prewar briefings.

In the midst of the increasing turmoil, we began carrying out the plans we’d made for the postinvasion period. It was immediately obvious that some of our assumptions had been faulty. No one could locate most of the civil servants who had been expected to keep the country running. I remember well standing at my desk a week after U.S. forces entered Baghdad and yelling, “Where are the oil workers?” Along with members of the army and police, they seemed to have vanished into thin air.

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that we could not get Jay Garner and his team into Iraq due to the security situation. That was hard to explain, given that we had just deployed almost 200,000 troops to Iraq, but the Pentagon insisted that it was too dangerous to send Garner in. Finally, almost three weeks after the invasion, he arrived and was almost immediately overwhelmed.

I called Margaret Tutwiler, our ambassador in Morocco. Margaret had been Jim Baker’s closest confidante during his State Department years. She was a lot like Karen Hughes, a great communicator but also a savvy political advisor. “Go help Jay Garner,” I implored her. “He can’t seem to get a handle on what to do or what to say.” She made clear that she didn’t want the mission. But she is a patriot, and she agreed to go.

The Garner operation was to have worked hand in hand with an Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA) composed of exiled Sunni and Shia leaders and the Kurds. The President had been briefed on the concept before the war broke out. Doug Feith presented a more elaborate version on March 31, complete with principles for the authority and pledges by its members to uphold them. The Defense Department was given full authority to implement the plan, again with a caution from the President to make certain that indigenous, not just exiled, leaders were included.

In addition to planning for the new administration to have an Iraqi “face,” Doug Feith’s office had hired outside civilian experts to help run the government. Defense contracts had been awarded for various functions. Some of them made sense, and others did not. I learned later, for instance, that Science Applications International Corporation had been engaged to set up and run the Iraqi state television station. SAIC was a fine technical company, but it was hardly versed in media content, let alone Arab media content.

The State Department was prepared to deploy employees, many of whom were Arabists. Some were sent without incident, but Feith vetoed several State recommendations on what could only be called ideological grounds. When I learned of this, I went to the President and told him that it was an affront to Colin to act that way and we needed the expertise. But it was the Defense Department’s show, and the President was reluctant to intervene. Steve dutifully worked to get as many State employees in as possible.

Unfortunately, the Pentagon had minimal ability to implement the elaborate IIA plans given the chaos on the ground. They managed to get some of the exiles into Iraq with the assistance of American military personnel. But the Garner mission collapsed almost on arrival and could barely manage itself, let alone the country and the Iraqi Interim Authority. The nightmare that we had tried to get Defense to avoid through planning for “rear-area security” was unfolding. There was a serious manpower shortage in Baghdad, and, though pressed by the President about the number of troops on the ground, Don continued to insist that there were enough.

Colin Powell had once said that military force has to be overwhelming in its application. That was known as the Powell Doctrine and certainly described the strategy in Gulf War I, when 500,000 forces had been used. He would later tell me that he had personally expressed concern to Tommy Franks about the troop levels. But the Pentagon had decided upon a different approach, using a so-called light footprint. It worked well for the defeat of Saddam’s army and his overthrow, but we had too few troops to stabilize the postwar environment. As I watched the chaos unfold, I kept harkening back to all those briefings when the President had been told that the plan was “adequately resourced,” meaning there were enough troops. If there were any objections in the ranks of the senior generals to the assessment, they were not made known to the President.

I caught up with Don outside the Situation Room after an NSC meeting as all of this was unfolding and asked him if he realized that the Garner mission was not working. “We can’t even get Garner into the country,” I told him. He said that he did see the problem and was considering a different model. On April 11, Don recommended that the President appoint a new presidential envoy, who would replace ORHA (Garner had finally arrived in the country the same day). Don and his staff put together a diverse and wide-ranging list of more than a hundred candidates, including Paul Wolfowitz, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former California Governor Pete Wilson, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer.

Bremer was well known to most of us and was working for Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm. He seemed a reasonable choice and immediately impressed the President with his presence and can-do attitude. We did not, frankly, go through a long vetting process because the situation on the ground demanded an immediate response. On May 6 Jerry was appointed to lead the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). After a session with each of the NSC Principals and then alone with the President, Jerry Bremer was dispatched to Iraq. Don’s instructions to Bremer empowered him with all executive, legislative, and judicial functions in Iraq. Jerry immediately did what Garner had not: he took control and brought a semblance of order.

That is how the Coalition Provisional Authority came into being. Some people in the Defense Department continued to argue that we needed to hand over more power to the Iraqi Interim Authority, but that contradicted the instructions Don had given Jerry. Did Don want Jerry to have all executive, legislative, and judicial functions or not? The issue wasn’t between State and Defense. If there was a coordination problem, it was that Defense wouldn’t or couldn’t reconcile Doug Feith’s Iraqi Interim Authority and Jerry’s CPA within its own building.

In order to give maximum flexibility to the CPA, Steve Hadley “shut down” the Deputies process and Frank Miller’s interagency Executive Steering Group. The coordination would be done in Baghdad under the direction and guidance of the Pentagon in Washington.

Upon his arrival Jerry made clear that the United States, at least for a while, needed to show a strong hand. It wasn’t a matter of a binary choice: turn the country over to the IIA or not. It was a matter of how quickly the Iraqis could assume authority, particularly given the security situation on the ground and the fact that most of them hadn’t been in the country for years, giving them no indigenous base. The President had confidence in Jerry and believed that he had to give his “man on the ground” flexibility to organize in the way he saw fit.

The Bremer mission could have been helped, nonetheless, by continuing to use Zalmay Khalilzad as a political envoy. Zal had been the very successful ambassador to Afghanistan and had long experience with exiles from all parts of Iraq. He was already working effectively with tribal and provincial leaders who had survived in Saddam’s Iraq, calling them together for a conference in Salah ad-Din province. Together with the exiles, those leaders might have given the Baghdad-based interim authority greater legitimacy.

I’m not given to cultural arguments, but there was something about Zal’s effectiveness that seemed attributable to his comfort level with the ways of the region and the region’s comfort level with him. I asked the President to keep Zal on to help Jerry with the very difficult Iraqi personalities. The President said that it would be Jerry’s call. Jerry demurred, saying that he would have to do the work himself. That was a mistake.

Yet Jerry would eventually become effective in dealing with the Iraqis. The criticism that the CPA became overblown and grandiose has some merit; at its height there were more than 1,200 people working for it. The CPA would make mistakes, including the decision to disband the army. But through the ups and downs of the next year, Jerry did heroic work under the most difficult of circumstances, including deteriorating security. The President appreciated that, and so did I.

IN THE immediate aftermath of the war, we began to consider how to restore at least a semblance of normalcy to our relations with the French, Germans, and Russians. The President was particularly concerned about the Russians, whom he saw as at least having been straightforward about their opposition to the war. I felt the same way but uttered what I thought was a clever quip in what I thought was a private moment with the President and a couple of aides standing in the Oval Office: “Punish France, forgive Russia, and ignore Germany,” I said. We all laughed, but I was horrified to see that someone had passed the tidbit on to the press. I was reminded of a Benjamin Franklin saying that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. He must have been talking about Washington.

The President called Vladimir Putin and told him that he wanted to send me to Moscow. Putin appreciated the gesture and said that he would gladly receive me.

I arrived in Moscow on April 6 and went to my room in Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence. The house is a beautiful neoclassical estate, which has been inhabited by the U.S. envoy since the establishment of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1933. I turned on the television to a Russian news station. My Russian was once very good, but it is a difficult language to retain because of the peculiarities of its grammatical structure. I always found it helpful to get my Russian “ear” as soon as possible.

As I unpacked, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: a convoy of Russian diplomats and journalists had been wounded when their motorcade became trapped in a firefight while leaving Baghdad. This is going to be a great trip, I thought. I called the President, who said that we didn’t have the facts but of course I should give Putin his deepest regrets.

Despite some back-and-forth about the responsibility for the accident, my meetings in Moscow went smoothly. I met with the secretary of the Russian Security Council and others and then made my way across the cobblestoned square to Putin’s ornate Kremlin office. I had last been there on my own during a mission to smooth the diplomatic path before our withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in the summer of 2001.

Putin knew that I had been a student of Russia, a fact that he seemed to find reassuring—at least in the early days. Our personal chemistry was good, and though I always spoke to him in English (I wanted to be precise in delivering messages), I always listened to him in Russian. Putin spoke in a rough, unvarnished manner, and I wanted to hear him in his own language, not through translation. In any case, I told him that the President wanted to get relations back on track. He said that he wanted to do the same and then made clear that President Bush needed to be aware of Russian economic interests in the rebuilding of Iraq. Those included both the large debt that Saddam Hussein owed to Moscow and pending oil contracts. At least he was straight with me.

The first encounters with the French and Germans since the invasion would be on the margins of the G8 meeting in Evian, France, that June. The President began his trip in Poland and then went on to St. Petersburg for the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city. Millions of dollars had been spent to restore Peterhof, the spectacular palace of Peter the Great. Everywhere you looked there was gold: gold-leaf–covered cathedral domes, gold fountains, and gold people. Yes, gold people. What appeared at first to be statues were indeed human beings spray-painted gold. The grand performance following dinner featured those beings whirling around as classical ballet dancers performed Swan Lake. Not surprisingly, the finale was Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with cannons blasting across the river. The whole thing was a bit like the Bolshoi meets Caesar’s Palace, but the Russians and Putin were bursting with pride. As we left, I noticed that the back of one of the cathedrals had not been painted. The phrase “Potemkin Village” came to mind: in days gone by, local officials would paint the fronts of houses whenever the tsar was passing through a village. They didn’t bother with the part he couldn’t see. Some things don’t change.

During the event, President Bush approached German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and shook his hand. It was about as warm a moment as the two could ever manage, but they maintained cordial relations for the rest of Schroeder’s term.

Prior to Evian, I had given an interview that was, in retrospect, a little brusque. Saying that our disappointment in our allies would not go away easily, I added that there were times it appeared that U.S. power was seen to be more dangerous than, perhaps, Saddam Hussein. I went to the President and said that I had been a little rough on the allies. He wasn’t concerned, saying that it left him room to be the nice guy.

In fact, the G8 went very smoothly, everyone trying to demonstrate, as Colin said, that we were “starting to talk about the future and not just grind our teeth over the disappointments of the past.” And people were starting to move on. The UN Security Council had been reunited with a resolution giving the United States and Great Britain a mandate to use Iraq’s oil revenues to rebuild Iraq.

There had been a silly debate inside the administration about how much authority to give the United Nations. The Defense Department and the Vice President’s office had scoured every word of the resolution to make sure that the United States had free rein to rebuild Iraq without the nettlesome advice of the international community. When I called Colin with yet one more “suggestion” from the White House, he said, “One day we’re going to be trying to give this tar baby to the UN.” He was, of course, right; our problem wouldn’t be too much UN involvement but too little. I closed down the vetting process by the agencies and gave Colin the go-ahead to finalize the resolution.

The hubris didn’t end there, however. As we were looking to the first proposals for the rebuilding of Iraq, we made what turned out to be a terrible and ultimately unenforceable decision. The Pentagon wanted the contracts to go to the countries that had supported the war. In theory that, of course, made some sense. But in practice it made the United States look petty. Eventually we would want help from everyone—a lot of help—to rebuild Iraq.

THERE HAD LONG BEEN a belief that action in Iraq could be made more palatable for the region if accompanied by efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Though the connection is not obvious, the fact is that the perception had become the reality. After the Gulf War in 1991, then Secretary of State James Baker convened the Madrid Conference, which garnered international support for the peace process. What followed was the Oslo Accords between Arafat and the Israelis, which established the Palestinian Authority and a modicum of self-governance for the Palestinian people. Arafat would famously renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist. The accords were not directly related to the conference (in fact, they were conducted in secret and without U.S. participation). Nonetheless, the two events did establish a new foundation for the “peace process.”

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein seemed to offer a similar opportunity. Since the end of the Israeli operations in the West Bank in the summer of 2002, there had been enormous pressure on Arafat to reform the Palestinian Authority. The adoption of a new Basic Law and the appointment of the moderate leader Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister were hailed worldwide as a real step forward.

The President decided to build on those developments, hoping that the “new” Palestinian leadership for which he had called in his Rose Garden speech was emerging. He would leave the G8 in Evian and go to the Middle East. To be sure, there was a kind of perverse pleasure in leaving Chirac’s soirée a little early to go make Middle East peace.

We sought and gained agreement from the regional parties to hold two meetings: one would be held in Sharm el-Sheikh, where the key Arab leaders, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah of Jordan, King Hamad of Bahrain, and President Mubarak of Egypt, would meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas to signal support for him and for a new effort with the Israelis. Abbas would then go on to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Sharon in Aqaba, Jordan.

We wanted the effort to be bold, but there was unanimous agreement that the parties were not yet ready to launch final-status negotiations. Abbas was on something of a short leash from Arafat, and Sharon was still declaring that he had “no partner for peace.” Our aims were modest but significant. We wanted the Palestinians to be clear that they sought a negotiated solution to the conflict and that there would be no more intifadas. We wanted the Israelis to acknowledge the rights of the Palestinians for statehood. We wanted the Arabs, particularly the Saudis, to show their brethren throughout the Arab world that the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” as the king of Saudi Arabia is called, was fully behind this effort. We even hoped that the Saudis might make a gesture toward the Israelis, perhaps opening a trade office.

The negotiations for the meeting were a real slog, as is every attempt to find common language when dealing with those parties. I handled the negotiations on behalf of the President from Washington, prodding each of the Arabs, the Palestinians, and the Israelis to accept language that would move the process forward. It isn’t unusual for the national security advisor to negotiate a document for a presidential visit. The State Department often steps back and supports such efforts rather than leading them. In this case, Colin and I worked closely together, sometimes tag-teaming our interlocutors to get the work done.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, negotiated the Arab statement. Anything that the crown prince could accept would clearly work for the Egyptians and the Jordanians, who already had diplomatic relations with the Israelis. I’d known Bandar from my time in the George H. W. Bush administration. He was already twenty years into his tenure as Saudi ambassador, and despite his flamboyant lifestyle—he had a spectacular house in Virginia, another in Aspen, and a private plane—the talented diplomat enjoyed the confidence of both the crown prince and the White House. It was hard to get the Arabs to be bold enough, and I was pushing really hard. At one point, Bandar almost walked out on our deliberations, declaring that he’d done more than any other Saudi had ever even contemplated. I backed off, realizing that he was caught between Abdullah’s reticence and Washington’s expectations. We managed to get a good statement.

Negotiating with the Palestinians and the Israelis was no easier. Every encounter seemed to produce either a history lesson or a lecture about some UN resolution. One of my aides, seeing my frustration, noted that Israelis are among the most legalistic people on Earth; after all, the Torah is mostly about keeping the law, he said. I asked how one explained the Palestinians’ behavior. “They are cousins,” he answered.

We finally managed to produce the documents that would be issued at the summits. Only a fool goes to an important meeting in which the President will be involved without an agreed text. I would have to violate that rule once in a while, but it made for sleepless nights and the potential for embarrassment for the United States. This time we had the language locked down.

We arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh from Paris late in the evening. I had one last meeting with Prince Bandar and went to bed. The next morning we arrived at the meeting hall and were greeted by Mubarak. King Abdullah of Jordan and Mahmoud Abbas arrived shortly after. But the crown prince was not there. We waited and waited. I called Bandar, who wasn’t answering his phone. Something had gone wrong. The press was antsy, knowing that the scheduled time of the meeting had come and gone.

Soon we learned from the Egyptians that the crown prince was at his hotel and threatening to go home. Here we go again, I thought. Fortunately, some last-minute changes to the document mollified him, and the meeting was completed successfully.

The follow-on meeting in Aqaba went more or less according to script in comparison with Sharm. The Palestinian delegation included Salam Fayyad, who was at the time finance minister. He impressed us all with his determination to do things right, including posting the budget of the Palestinian Authority on the Internet as a step toward greater transparency. The University of Texas–trained Fayyad was exactly the kind of leader the President had talked about in his June 24 speech: smart, honest, and capable. He would become our most important ally in helping to put Palestinian governance on a more democratic footing.

The President decided to take Sharon and Abbas on a little private stroll around the gardens to impress upon them the importance of moving forward for peace. The rest of us stayed behind with the delegations, which were busily engaging each other without our involvement. At one point, the Israeli intelligence chief turned to Mohammed Dahlan, one of Arafat’s security heads, and complimented him on his Hebrew. “I learned it in one of your jails,” Dahlan retorted. These folks knew each other very well indeed.

The Aqaba meetings ended with statements by Sharon and Abbas. Sharon pledged to improve the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories and to remove the unauthorized outposts that Israeli settlers had constructed in defiance even of Israeli law. He recognized the importance of territorial contiguity for a Palestinian state and said that it was not in Israel’s interest to govern Palestinians. These were extraordinary statements for the “father of the settlement movement,” as Sharon was called. At the time of Camp David in 2000, Ehud Barak had made pledges on behalf of Israel, but he was a Labor prime minister. The conservative Likud party had never countenanced a Palestinian state. A few months later, Sharon would deliver a pathbreaking address at the Herzliya Conference in which he talked about the need for compromise. “We are willing to proceed towards its [the Road Map’s] implementation,” he said. “Two states, Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in tranquillity, security, and peace.” Sharon had arrived at the conclusion that it was time for Israel to make, as he had put it a few weeks earlier, “painful concessions.” Now a broad swath of the Israeli body politic accepted the need for a two-state solution.

Abbas, for his part, made clear that a Palestinian state could not be born of terrorism and called it a deadly obstacle to Palestinian aspirations. He pledged to make Palestinian institutions, including the security services, more democratic and accountable.

The President appointed an experienced diplomat, John Wolf, to monitor the progress on the obligations the two sides had taken. I took direct responsibility for overseeing U.S. efforts, traveling to Jerusalem and the West Bank to carry the President’s message to the region. I was concerned that I might be taking on too much of an operational role for a national security advisor. But it seemed to be one of those times when it was important to use my close relationship with the President to push the process forward. I felt bad that this produced press stories of a split between Colin and me. There was not. I kept him informed, and State supported my work. But some saw it as an affront to the nation’s chief diplomat.

In any case, the effort soon bogged down. I would learn valuable lessons about how frustrating it can be to get the Israelis to actually carry through on promises relating to the Palestinians. The illegal outposts were always going to be moved but were never quite moved. Gratuitous “security” roadblocks that kept the Palestinians from moving around in the West Bank were always going to be taken down but were never quite taken down.

The Palestinians were frustrating too. Abbas meant well, but Yasser Arafat would soon grow jealous of the prime minister’s new international stature. When the cautious Abbas tried to carry out reforms, he’d find resistance from Arafat’s security chiefs and from the old guard of the ruling party, Fatah; he almost always backed off or simply postponed actions. Then, on September 6, 2003, Abbas abruptly resigned.

Meanwhile, Salam Fayyad’s efforts to put PA finances on a more transparent footing continued, but he needed our help. The Israelis had long collected tax revenue on behalf of the Palestinians and then transferred it to the PA at their discretion. After the intifada began, the Israelis stopped the payments to the Palestinians, leaving them without their most important source of revenue. Fayyad had begged me to prevail on the Israelis. He was trying to build a decent economy, but the PA was out of legitimate funds and he did not want to be dependent on the somewhat suspect sources that Chairman Arafat had used to run the authority.

I called Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s closest advisor. The prime minister always traveled with this lawyer, who, though not an elected official, was extraordinarily savvy in the snake pit of Israeli politics. Dubi, as he was called, was Sharon’s fixer. When I described the problem with the Palestinians, he explained that the Israelis never knew where the money was going and couldn’t take the chance that it was funding terrorists. I told him that Fayyad was different and asked him to meet with the finance minister.

After their meeting, Dubi called back to say that he was impressed with Fayyad’s good intentions, particularly his decision to hire an American financial services company to improve the management and transparency of the PA’s accounts. As Fayyad continued to implement sound financial reforms, the Israelis began to deliver the tax revenues. It was the first step in helping the new Palestinian leadership build a decent and honest government.

Thus, despite the setbacks, the period just after the Iraq war was important for the peace process. Long-standing conflicts are rarely resolved in one huge leap forward. Rather, progress is like a stepwise function, each step forward being followed by a plateau—but a new plateau.

The events of June put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict onto a new foundation, and after the terrible events of the intifada and its subsequent defeat, the two parties started, haltingly, to move forward. The international community would endorse the Road Map, a step-by-step plan in three phases that outlined the obligations of the two sides on the path to peace, in November 2003. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians would accept it, though the Israelis did so with stated reservations.

More important, we’d established that the character of the Palestinian state mattered as much as its boundaries. And most Israelis, as represented by Ariel Sharon, had accepted that the State of Palestine and the State of Israel should live side by side in peace and security. The Bush vision for a two-state solution was now the policy of the international community as a whole.

THE PRESIDENT DECLARED an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003 (under the unfortunate “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln), and, with the CPA established in Baghdad, our attention turned to finding Saddam’s alleged WMD so that they could be destroyed. George Tenet selected David Kay to lead the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which was to undertake a fact-finding mission concerning Saddam’s weapons; no weapons caches or stockpiles had been uncovered by our forces as they pushed through the country. Occasionally someone would make a remark about the absence of weapons. David Manning called one morning to report that the inspectors had dug up some devices in the garden of one of Saddam’s scientists. The devices turned out to be old, rusted pieces of weapons that were of no consequence. But despite finding nothing in the early days, we assumed that Saddam had simply been very good at hiding and dispersing weapons as war approached.

Yet around that time questions began to arise within the intelligence community about some of the prewar assessments on Iraq’s WMD programs. For instance, on May 25, the DIA’s civilian experts inspected two of the mobile labs that had been suspected of manufacturing biological weapons and concluded that they had not been used for that purpose, a fact that was not immediately reported to the President or the NSC.

Questions were arising about other reports as well. On May 6, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a column suggesting that in the lead-up to the war the administration had used intelligence that it had known to be false. Citing anonymous sources, Kristof wrote that the Vice President’s office had asked for an investigation into a claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. As early as February 2002 the envoy had told the CIA and State Department that the information was “unequivocally wrong” and that the documents associated with the claim had been forged. International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei had expressed doubts regarding the documents’ authenticity in his presentation before the UN Security Council on March 7.

George Stephanopoulos subsequently asked me on his Sunday-morning show on June 8 about Kristof’s claim and how information that some in the administration knew to be false had ended up in the President’s State of the Union address. I told him that it was possible that there had been some knowledge that the reports were not credible but that it might not have risen to our attention. I also reminded him that our entire case against Saddam did not hinge on a single statement in the President’s speech.

A few weeks later, as the President was preparing to leave for a trip to Africa, the story erupted. Former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times revealing himself to be the “unnamed former envoy” who’d investigated the Niger claims, purportedly at the request of the Vice President’s office. (The Vice President’s office had not been involved in establishing the Wilson mission. In fact, Wilson’s mission had been authorized by officials from the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division.) He stated that he’d traveled to Niger and concluded that it was unlikely that the sale had occurred, given the layers of government oversight over uranium mines and the physical difficulty of transferring the uranium to Iraq. He further alleged that he’d briefed the CIA and the State Department about his findings after his return.

The first time I’d ever heard of Wilson was when George Tenet had mentioned that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. George didn’t know her personally, but we both thought it an interesting coincidence, nothing more. Even George had not been aware of the mission.

The day before the President’s departure, George and I met with the President and the Vice President. George was uncomfortable with the chatter about the Niger report, noting that his agency couldn’t really vouch for the claim’s veracity.

We decided on the spot that the White House should just take the issue off the table and say that the claim should not have been included in the President’s speech. That seemed to me a pretty straightforward admission of a mistake. It was not that anyone had intended to mislead, but my view was that if the CIA couldn’t stand behind the claim, the President should never have said it.

The Vice President was dead set against taking any responsibility, arguing that the information had been in the NIE and was therefore legitimate. Some on my staff agreed, including my press advisor Anna Perez, who believed that the President’s critics would pounce on this one admission and draw a picture of a White House seeking to deceive. “They will smell blood in the water,” she said. I somehow believed that the press would understand a mistake as just that—a mistake. The Vice President and Anna were absolutely right.

The next morning, as we departed for Africa, the headlines were screaming that the President had used false language in the State of the Union. Given that no WMD had yet been found, there was now a growing presumption that the intelligence had been wrong or, worse, that we’d somehow manipulated it in a rush to war.

Before leaving, I called George Tenet, who was in Idaho. “George,” I said, “your people cleared that speech. You can’t leave the President hanging.” George said he would issue a statement that made clear that the Niger claim had come from intelligence sources. In other words, that the President hadn’t been lying.

By the time we got on the plane, the situation was spinning out of control. Ari suggested that I go on the record to explain the origin of the statement. I agreed to do so. But what I intended as a defense of the President and a matter-of-fact statement that the CIA had cleared the language was seen as an effort to blame the Agency. After almost twenty-four hours of negotiations, George issued a statement that more or less took responsibility for the “sixteen words,” but the story would not end there.

Throughout the Africa trip the traveling press hammered the President about the issue. Reporters can be that way, very much pack animals chasing one story relentlessly and then saying that the President can’t escape scrutiny on the story. I always thought, Well, that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you keep bringing it up. I remember visiting an impressive AIDS clinic in Uganda later that day and hearing orphans singing “America the Beautiful” while the reporters stood to the side, peppering Ari and Karen with questions about Niger and uranium.