No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

18 “IRAQIS NEED TO GOVERN THEMSELVES”

THE TRANSITIONAL administrative law that Jerry successfully shepherded through the Iraqi Governing Council gave Iraq an institutional framework for governance. But it’s one thing to have a piece of paper that outlines principles and quite another to put those principles into practice. That needed to be done not by the United States but by Iraqis, who were increasingly anxious to assert their independence. I met with several members of the Iraqi Governing Council on January 20, 2004, and listened to their many complaints. It was clear that the representatives agreed on very little and were pressing largely sectarian agendas.

Ahmed Chalabi was one of my visitors. He was then and remains a controversial figure. There was no doubting his intelligence, and I found him an interesting—if somewhat manipulative—interlocutor. On this day, though, he crystallized something that I had been thinking and that drew approving nods from the others. “We need you to respect our need for sovereignty,” he said simply. I walked down to the Oval and talked to the President, saying that I felt we were running out of time because the Iraqis were running out of patience. I don’t know what I expected him to say, but it was clear that the Iraqis had an ally in the President of the United States. “They’re right,” he said. “The Iraqis need to govern themselves.”

There was a lot to do to achieve that goal. The training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces were proceeding in fits and starts. Practical problems such as the fact that very few Iraqis had bank accounts meant that recruits would leave their units when they were paid to take money home to their families. Sometimes they didn’t come back. When we received the weekly briefings about progress in building the forces, there seemed to be a contradiction: on one hand, a rising numbers of trained security forces and, on the other, a worsening security situation. I came to the conclusion that the Pentagon simply didn’t have reliable metrics. That led me to employ a substantial “discount” factor whenever I listened to the briefings.

Rebuilding the economy was an equally difficult task. Oil production resumed shortly after the war, giving the Iraqis something that most new democracies lacked: resources. But attacks by insurgents against key pipelines were taking their toll, particularly in the south of the country, and it was hard to keep production steady. After falling from a prewar average of 2.5 million barrels per day, oil production climbed through the summer of 2003 but plateaued in October at about 2 million barrels per day. It remained at that level through June 2004, due largely to insurgent attacks.

Congress had approved a grant of $18.4 billion to help reconstruct Iraq. It had not been easy to argue for a grant to the oil-rich nation. Josh Bolten, by now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and I carried the case to Congress in scores of individual meetings and group briefings. The United States, we said, needed to show generosity toward Iraq, which could use the grants to get back onto its feet and then use its own resources to sustain economic development and growth. Some very good work flowed from that commitment of money, particularly rehabilitation of agricultural lands and the construction of schools, hospitals, safe water sources, bridges, and the like. We made progress on pipeline renovation and rebuilding the electrical grid. But the larger projects were difficult to complete as insurgent attacks increased. The electrical grid was especially vulnerable. The creaky system was already overburdened by the decision after the invasion to distribute power more evenly throughout the country. We quickly learned that Saddam had been quite willing to starve most of Iraq of energy in favor of Baghdad. Countrywide demand increased too as Iraqis used their new freedom to buy goods such as satellite dishes in huge numbers.

In retrospect, reconstruction might have been better served by smaller, more localized projects. That was essentially the strategy that we would prioritize starting in 2005 and accelerate with the surge of 2007, which focused the U.S. military and civilian reconstruction in the provinces and localities.

Nonetheless, at the macroeconomic level, there were many positive developments. The Treasury Department, led by Secretary John Snow and Under Secretary John Taylor, had pulled off a major miracle in 2003, replacing the existing Iraqi currency with a new dinar. Prewar planning for economic recovery had included consideration of how to prevent monetary and financial collapse and stabilize a currency badly in need of reform. Iraq’s economy under Saddam had been plagued by rampant inflation, not to mention problems with counterfeit notes. Largely out of public view, billions of dinars had been printed, shipped into the country, and swapped. Iraq’s currency was quickly made stable and largely remains so today.

The Iraqis also needed international help with their debt, which included more than $42 billion that was owed to the Paris Club, a collection of creditor states including the G8 countries, and other industrialized nations. Iraq owed an estimated $45 billion to other Gulf States, principally Saudi Arabia. I thought that important enough to ask former Secretary of State Jim Baker to act as a presidential envoy to the G8 and the Arabs, which he agreed to do. Jim negotiated a reduction of the Iraqi Paris Club debt by 80 percent. The new debt framework helped create a basis for IMF assistance to the Iraqis, capably championed by Anne Krueger.

But the most important task would be to replace the Iraqi Governing Council with an interim government. The Council was by its nature unwieldy, with a change in the presidency every month. The new interim government would have a prime minister and a cabinet to take over as many functions as possible. On January 28, 2004, the NSC met to approve a “transition matrix” that detailed the process for handing over functions to the Iraqis. The new government would also receive sovereignty from the CPA, ending the occupation. And preparation would commence for landmark elections in the Arab world.

The task of forming the interim government to administer the country until the January 2005 elections was entrusted to Lakhdar Brahimi of the United Nations, who worked closely with Jerry Bremer, Bob Blackwill, and British envoy Jeremy Greenstock. I talked to Blackwill every morning and again before the day ended. I felt that I could do little to help them sort out the complicated process as the fortunes of various candidates for ministerial positions and other posts in the interim government rose and fell.

In time the Iraqi interim government would be formed, with Ayad Allawi serving as prime minister. Allawi is a secular Shia who managed, to some extent, to bridge the sectarian differences that had several times prevented the formation of a more effective opposition in exile, even though many of the personalities were the same. He was not without controversy, sometimes lacking the patience for consultation with his fellow leaders when making decisions. But he would serve well enough to lead the country toward elections.

In the midst of the delicate negotiations to form the government, however, we suffered a major blow militarily when a small SUV convoy in Fallujah was attacked, killing four private security contactors. Images of their charred bodies hanging from a Euphrates River bridge were broadcast worldwide. No doubt the insurgents hoped to attract new recruits and undermine domestic American support for the war effort. Fallujah, in Al Anbar province, had emerged as a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency, a loose confederation of disgruntled Baathists and xenophobic tribesmen. It was also the home of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the self-appointed leader of what became known as al Qaeda in Iraq whose suspected WMD laboratories we had discovered before the war. It seemed that the terrorists had decided to fight us on Arab soil, sensing that a defeat of the U.S. military would be an even greater victory than 9/11 had been. And instinctively they knew something that our critics seemed not to understand: that the emergence of a democratic Iraq would be a tremendous blow to extremists’ ambitions for a new caliphate that could avenge the loss of the Islamic empire that reigned throughout the Middle East and parts of Europe for centuries. It would also deny the extremists their goal of expelling Western influence from the Middle East.

It’s in that context that the deliberations about Fallujah must be understood. Some military commanders and the civilian Pentagon leadership favored an assault on the city, which had become an epicenter of the Sunni insurgency. They reasoned that a large retaliatory offensive could target those who killed the contractors and committed other atrocities and might simultaneously strike a crippling blow to the insurgency.

Although such a campaign would make sense in a traditional battlefield environment, the deliberations over Fallujah quickly revealed how difficult it would be to balance the security and political situation in Iraq. The campaign would occur as government formation was proceeding and just months before the Coalition Provisional Authority was scheduled to transfer sovereignty. Lakhdar Brahimi, the leader of the UN mission in Iraq, said he would withdraw if the United States attacked the city. Even worse, fractures had begun to emerge within the Iraqi Governing Council, with its Sunni members threatening to abandon the effort should the United States assault Fallujah.

I called a Principals meeting to prepare for an NSC meeting with the President on April 5. At that point the marines had just launched Operation Vigilant Resolve, a major offensive to secure Fallujah that constituted the largest mission since the end of major combat operations in May 2003. The forces confronted insurgents whose ruthless tactics were designed not only to murder U.S. troops but also to goad them into attacking civilians inadvertently. They took foreign hostages to undermine the support of our coalition partners. And in a move that was doubtlessly a bid to inflame the Iraqi population against our cause, they took up positions in public buildings such as hospitals and religious sites, forcing our troops to open fire in those heavily civilian environments.

The atmosphere in the Situation Room that day of the NSC Principals meeting was electric, with strong support for the continued assault on Fallujah. Rich Armitage, who represented the State Department, consulted Colin, and the State Department didn’t object. As a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin always seemed to feel constrained in a situation of this kind—a little like a former CEO wanting to avoid second-guessing his successor. He did intervene on occasion, as he had in the summer before the war, when Don had favored attacking Zarqawi’s laboratories in northern Iraq. But he picked his battles very carefully, and in this one, either he agreed that we should assault Fallujah or chose not to disagree.

The temperature was a bit high for my taste, though, so I introduced a series of what-ifs, especially related to the formation of the government in Iraq. The meeting ended without a conclusion, precisely as I’d hoped. I didn’t want the President to be confronted the next day with a unanimous decision of the Principals to continue the assault on Fallujah. After the meeting, Frank Miller caught me in the hallway and said, “There was a lot of testosterone in that room, wasn’t there?” I just nodded and went off to see the President, asking him to consider the political context carefully when he made his decision.

Two days later, with the President in the chair, we reviewed the situation. Jerry was on the videoconference at the NSC session and fortunately made the same point I’d made about worrisome political repercussions. Both Brahimi and Sunni members of the Governing Council, he said, were telling him that the assault on Fallujah would scuttle the effort to establish a government. President Bush was receptive to those concerns and indicated that the United States could not risk destabilizing the political situation.

By April 11, U.S. forces and Sunni insurgents had negotiated a ceasefire. Our commanders believed certain tribal leaders seemed willing to back U.S. forces if it would usher in a new era of stability and security, and the expectation was that local security forces would join the fight against the insurgents. So there were now two reasons to hold off on an assault on Fallujah. The President concurred, and the Fallujah Brigade was formed. Unfortunately, the next morning’s newspapers carried pictures of the commander, General Jassim Mohammed Saleh, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Saddam Hussein. Every step forward in Iraq seemed to come with a step back.

The Sunni insurgent violence in Fallujah coincided with an uprising of Shia militias in the holy city of Najaf and Sadr City, a Shia neighborhood in Baghdad. The militants killed seven U.S. soldiers in April 2004 in response to a call for violence by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shia cleric who emerged as a fiery but influential player in Iraqi politics. Operating from the neighborhood bearing his father’s name, Sadr mobilized thousands of Iraqi supporters to take up arms against coalition forces within days of the Sunni uprising in Fallujah. Despite Sadr’s wide following, a courageous Iraqi judge had issued an arrest warrant for him in connection with the murder of another cleric at a mosque in 2003. Sadr’s militant Mahdi Army was dedicated to destabilizing the burgeoning governance institutions of Iraq and would eventually become a second front of the insurgency against U.S. forces. We discussed many times the wisdom of having the U.S. military act on the warrant and arrest Sadr. (He would take up residence in Iran.) The political risks of doing so always seemed to outweigh the benefits.

EVEN THE INSURGENCY didn’t have the counterproductive effect that the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib would. That spring, Don asked to see the President. He explained calmly that some U.S. soldiers had allegedly mistreated prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Though Don said that there were apparently “sickening” photos, he didn’t show any of them to the President. Shortly thereafter, 60 Minutes II aired photographs documenting the abuses. The President was blindsided and angry. He’d expected something bad; he’d had no idea just how bad. I didn’t know until years later that Don had offered to resign over the scandal. Though Don and I had our differences, I felt that the President was right to refuse to accept Don’s resignation. He was wrong to let the President be blindsided by the severity of the problem. But the Pentagon hadn’t authorized or condoned that kind of behavior. Don’s resignation would have obscured that fact.

I felt especially bad not only for the Iraqis who had been abused but for the hundreds of thousands of honorable men and women in uniform who were volunteering, fighting, and dying in dangerous places around the world. Those heinous acts of abuse were committed by a small number of personnel acting in defiance of their orders. Although the Defense Department had authorized military interrogators to use enhanced techniques in their questioning of enemy combatants, the approved techniques were nothing like the reprehensible abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib. Later, after a wide-ranging investigation into the allegations at Abu Ghraib and other facilities, Vice Admiral Albert T. Church III would release a comprehensive report concluding that there had been “no link between approved interrogation techniques and detainee abuse.” But the few people responsible for those acts became, for some, the public face of U.S. military forces. It was a stain that should never have touched them but did, and regrettably the image of the U.S. soldier around the world became associated with the depravity of Abu Ghraib.

We never recovered fully from Abu Ghraib, which quickly became muddled in the press—and perhaps in people’s minds—with the detention facility in Guantánamo, Cuba, and the administration’s broader detention and interrogation policies. These provisions had been put into place in the aftermath of 9/11 to detain enemy combatants captured on the battlefield. We also put a premium on collecting time-sensitive information that might prevent another terrorist attack against the United States.

The early debates focused largely on legality and the President’s constitutional authority to detain combatants. But the policy implications of the practices began to emerge more clearly by the fall of 2002.

Many of the detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention center posed a significant and continuing threat to the United States. They include numerous hardened al Qaeda fighters, militants with links to major attacks such as 9/11 and the USS Cole bombing, and experienced bombmakers and terrorist financiers. Many of the most dangerous detainees expressed an enduring desire to kill Americans.

Reports began to surface, however, that several other detainees being held at Guantánamo had only a tangential affiliation with al Qaeda or hadn’t engaged in hostile actions against the United States. I personally reviewed the case of an Afghan man in his nineties who’d apparently been captured because of some suspected links to al Qaeda. The man was so old he couldn’t even recall his exact age, so his questioners estimated that he was about ninety-three based on his recollection of some distant Afghan monarch. It was clear that the feeble elder posed little threat to the United States and its armed forces, and was subsequently released.

In a theater like Afghanistan, where enemy combatants are nearly indistinguishable from civilians, it is understandable that there would be mistaken captures on the battlefield. As I saw it, the challenge we now faced was how to identify those who had been unnecessarily detained and find a way to release them responsibly.

The problem was compounded by misleading allegations that we intended to hold all detainees indefinitely, without any form of redress. In his November 2001 military order, the President required the establishment of military commissions for the very purpose of adjudicating cases against terrorist suspects. The tribunals would be sensitive to our security needs and our intelligence-gathering methods.

Unfortunately, the Defense Department was painfully slow in setting up these tribunals. An order was issued outlining the procedures for military commission trials in March 2002, but it took a full year for Defense Department lawyers to even decide what crimes could be tried before the commissions. Even some of our closest allies, including the United Kingdom and Australia, grew frustrated with the delays and pressured Colin and even the President for access to their citizens and a mechanism for redress.

With the help of my legal adviser, John Bellinger, and General John Gordon, then the deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism, I convened a series of Principals Committee meetings beginning in October 2002 focused specifically on detainee issues. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, Don Rumsfeld did not participate meaningfully in these meetings and eventually refused to attend them at all, sending his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, instead.

That produced one bizarre incident that remains vivid in my memory. I’d convened back-to-back Principals Committee meetings, one on Iraq and the other on detainee issues. (That wasn’t uncommon, given the scheduling challenge of convening all National Security Council Principals at the White House at one time.) When the first meeting concluded and I introduced the subject of detainees, Don got up and walked toward the door. “Don, where are you going?” I asked.

“I don’t do detainees,” he replied as he walked out.

Nonetheless, we made considerable progress thanks to very hard work by Steve Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Bellinger. First we sought to ensure that detainees were treated humanely. We worked with the Pentagon to grant access to Guantánamo for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Jakob Kellenberger, a quiet Swiss diplomat who headed the ICRC, was a reliable partner in achieving this. Though he harbored deep reservations about our policies, he was more interested in solving problems than generating headlines. I met with him every few months without fanfare to hear his concerns and take steps to address them. I later arranged for him to meet privately with the President. Moreover, we sought to improve conditions for those held at Guantánamo by providing culturally appropriate meals, medical services, recreational activities, reading materials, and time for religious observances. That led one visiting Belgian official to declare it “a model prison.”

And we laid the foundation for an effective review process for those detained at Guantánamo as enemy combatants. In May 2004 the Department of Defense announced the formation of an Administrative Review Board (ARB). The ARB assessed whether detainees posed a threat to the United States or its allies in the war on terror and whether other factors, such as a suspect’s intelligence value, required his continued detention. There were three options: release, transfer to a third country, or continued detention. In the Administrative Review Board’s first round of assessments, nearly 30 percent of detainees whose cases were reviewed were deemed eligible for release or transfer from Guantánamo.

The process of establishing the ARB assessments coincided with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which held that U.S. citizens detained as enemy combatants “be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision-maker.” The Defense Department responded to the mandate in July 2004 by creating Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which would serve as a forum for detainees to contest their status as enemy combatants. The review tribunals were made up of three military officers who had not been involved in the detainees’ apprehension, detention, or interrogation. Both the Administrative Review Boards and the Combatant Status Review Tribunals would ultimately allow for the responsible release of those who posed no threat and provide a process—in keeping with our legal traditions and values—for determining the ongoing detention of those who did pose serious threats to our nation’s security.

Those provisions would not resolve all of the lingering concerns about our detention policies. Even when we determined that detainees could be transferred or released, we had to ensure that recipient countries had sufficient rehabilitation programs in place to reintegrate former detainees into their societies. And there were places that were off limits for transfer due to concerns about human rights.

Despite their imperfections, however, those changes in policy produced results. By February 2004 the United States had released more than ninety detainees to other countries, including five of the nine British detainees held at Guantánamo. That outcome was not without a significant downside. Recidivism has been a problem, with as many as one in four of those released from Guantánamo suspected of engaging in terrorist or insurgent activity after their transfer. This underscores the difficulty of fighting the war and simultaneously acting on our international obligations concerning detainee treatment. It was a balancing act, and I believe that we eventually got it about right.

But there would continue to be challenges associated with Guantánamo and the administration’s broader detention and interrogation policies, and I would ultimately take them on directly as secretary of state.

DESPITE THE Abu Ghraib scandal and the strengthening insurgency, preparations continued apace to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis and end the occupation. Clearly, responsibility would also transfer from the Department of Defense to the Department of State, which would establish an embassy in Baghdad to conduct “normal” relations with another sovereign nation. Colin proposed John Negroponte to be the first U.S. ambassador to Iraq. John had had one of those storied careers in the Foreign Service that put him on par with some of the greatest diplomats in U.S. history. Colin believed, rightly, that John’s calm demeanor, professionalism, and storied career would help him lead what was bound to be a complicated mission where employees’ morale would be a constant source of concern.

The plan to return sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30 was proceeding too, but we were concerned that the insurgents might disrupt the transfer. They certainly seemed capable of spectacular attacks that could undermine the positive message that Iraqis were governing themselves.

I don’t really remember who first had the idea, but a number of us began considering making the transfer scheduled for June 30 early in order to “wrong-foot” the terrorists. Jerry Bremer liked the idea and shared it with only a handful of Iraqis, including, of course, Ayad Allawi, who had been elected by the Iraqi Governing Council to serve as the country’s interim prime minister. George Tenet wasn’t sure that it would matter but thought it worth a try. The British too believed that it might give the coalition the upper hand.

On June 28, we were at a NATO summit in Istanbul and had been on pins and needles that morning awaiting news from Baghdad. A few minutes after the appointed time, I received a phone call from Jerry. He’d handed the letter to Allawi that formally transferred authority from the CPA to the Iraqi interim government. The occupation was over.

I returned to the chamber, scribbled a note, and asked Don to pass it to the President, who was seated directly in front of him. “Mr. President,” the note said, “Iraq is sovereign. Letter was passed from Bremer at 10:26 A.M. Iraq time.”

I saw the President turn to the man seated next to him, simply by virtue of alphabetical order. George W. Bush and Tony Blair shook hands and acknowledged one step forward in the historic and controversial course on which they had embarked together. President Bush sent the note back to me with a line written across it: “Let freedom reign!”

When I saw the note in the newspaper the next day, the first thing that came to mind was how terrible my penmanship had become. My mother was an English teacher who had always insisted on writing in, as she called it, “a beautiful hand.” That was admittedly an odd thought at such a momentous time.

In any case, there wasn’t much celebration. The work ahead was getting harder and more complicated, and everyone knew it. The Iraqis had come a long way from the days of the Iraqi National Congress in exiled opposition to the Governing Council in the aftermath of the invasion and now to a sovereign interim government that would help pave the way to the country’s first free elections. But Steve Hadley had it right when, sitting in my office a few days after the return of sovereignty in Iraq, he said, “The Iraqis still have to liberate themselves. We’ve overthrown Saddam Hussein, but this won’t work until the Iraqis own their freedom.” That would take some time.