Part 4 (1/2)

”In specific numbers, I would have to rely on the combatant commander's exact requirements,” s.h.i.+nseki replied, obeying the military protocol of deferring to the responsible commander-in this case, Gen. Franks. ”But I think-”

”How about a range?” Levin interrupted.

”I would say that what's been mobilized to this point, something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers, are probably, you know, a figure that would be required.” His reasoning, he added, was that Iraq was a large country with multiple ethnic tensions, ”so it takes significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this.”

s.h.i.+nseki didn't know it, but that exchange-virtually the only discussion of Iraq in a hearing that focused more on mundane issues of military force structures and budgets-would be the most remembered public moment of his four years as chief of staff of the U.S. Army. His comments were not greeted warmly by his civilian overseers at the Pentagon. White, the Army secretary, recalled being told by Wolfowitz that s.h.i.+nseki had been out of line. ”He was not happy that we had taken a position that was opposed to what his thinking on the subject was.”

Wolfowitz told senior Army officers around this time that he thought that within a few months of the invasion the U.S. troop level in Iraq would be thirty-four thousand, recalled Riggs, the Army general then at Army headquarters. Likewise, another three-star general, still on active duty, remembers being told to plan to have the U.S. occupation force reduced to thirty thousand troops by August 2003. An Army briefing a year later also noted that that number was the goal ”by the end of the summer of 2003.”

When Wolfowitz was on the Hill two days later he slapped down s.h.i.+nseki's estimate. ”There has been a good deal of comment-some of it quite outlandish- about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq,” he told the House Budget Committee. ”Some of the higher end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.” His reasoning, he explained, was that ”it is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army-hard to imagine.”

In an intellectually snide aside, he also said that ”one should at least pay attention to past experience.” Bosnia, Wolfowitz maintained, wasn't the proper precedent to study. ”There has been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in Bosnia,” he said. Rather, one should look to the far more benign environment of Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq. At any rate, Wolfowitz said, he had met with Iraqi Americans in Detroit a week earlier. Based on what he had heard about Iraq from them, he said, ”I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us keep requirements down.” So, he concluded, ”we don't know what the requirements will be. But we can say with reasonable confidence that the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off” the mark.”

In keeping with this extraordinarily optimistic a.s.sessment, Wolfowitz also would a.s.sert that same day that oil exports likely would pay for much of Iraq's postwar reconstruction. ”It's got already, I believe, on the order of $15 billion to $20 billion a year in oil exports, which can finally-might finally be-turned to a good use instead of building Saddam's palaces,” he told the House Budget Committee. ”There is a lot of money there.” He repeated the point a month later to another congressional committee, saying that Iraq ”can really finance its own reconstruction.” As for an administration official who had told the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post that the war and its aftermath could cost as much as $95 billion, Wolfowitz said, ”I don't think he or she knows what he is talking about.” (By mid 2006, the cost of the war, counting the expenditures in Iraq of all parts of the federal government, would be close to triple that.) that the war and its aftermath could cost as much as $95 billion, Wolfowitz said, ”I don't think he or she knows what he is talking about.” (By mid 2006, the cost of the war, counting the expenditures in Iraq of all parts of the federal government, would be close to triple that.) The Army wasn't buying the optimism. Retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, who had led the U.S. peacekeeping forces into Bosnia, forecast that spring that the occupation would take 200,000 troops-almost exactly the troop total in much of 2004-5, if to the 150,000 U.S. personnel there are added 20,000 private security contractors and 30,000 allied soldiers.

The debate was far more than a technical squabble about troop numbers. Andrew Bacevich observed that s.h.i.+nseki's comments amounted to a broad attack on Wolfowitz's entire approach to the Middle East. ”Given that the requisite additional troops simply did not exist, s.h.i.+nseki was implicitly arguing that the U.S. armed services were inadequate for the enterprise,” Bacevich wrote in the American Conservative. American Conservative. ”Further, he was implying that invasion was likely to produce ”Further, he was implying that invasion was likely to produce something other than a crisp, tidy decision_________ 'Liberation' would leave loose ends. Unexpected and costly complications would abound. In effect, s.h.i.+nseki was offering a last-ditch defense of the military tradition that Wolfowitz was intent on destroying, a tradition that saw armies as fragile, that sought to husband military power, and that cla.s.sified force as an option of last resort. The risks of action, s.h.i.+nseki was suggesting, were far, far greater than the advocates for war had let on.”

That subtext about the nature of military force and the wisdom of using it in Iraq may have been one reason the effects of the exchange between s.h.i.+nseki and Wolfowitz were so far reaching. The message the top bra.s.s received in return was that the Bush administration wasn't interested in hearing about their worries about Iraq. ”There were concerns both before we crossed the line of departure and after,” said one four-star general, looking back much later. ”There was a conscious cutting off of advice and concerns, so that the guy who ultimately had to make the decision, the president, didn't get the advice. Well before the troops crossed the line of departure”-that is, invaded Iraq on March 20,2003- ”concern was raised about what would happen in the postwar period, how you would deal with this decapitated country. It was blown off. Concern about a long-term occupation-that was discounted. The people around the president were so, frankly, intellectually arrogant,” this general continued. ”They knew knew that postwar Iraq would be easy and would be a catalyst for change in the Middle East. They were making simplistic a.s.sumptions and refused to put them to the test. It's the vice president, and the secretary of defense, with the knowledge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the vice chairman. They did it because they already had the answer, and they wouldn't subject their hypothesis to examination. These are educated men, they are smart men. But they are not wise men.” that postwar Iraq would be easy and would be a catalyst for change in the Middle East. They were making simplistic a.s.sumptions and refused to put them to the test. It's the vice president, and the secretary of defense, with the knowledge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the vice chairman. They did it because they already had the answer, and they wouldn't subject their hypothesis to examination. These are educated men, they are smart men. But they are not wise men.”

This senior general said he had come to believe that this disinclination to listen to the doubters would go on to help create the insurgency. By refusing to consider worst-case scenarios, the Pentagon's civilian leaders didn't develop answers to questions about how to conduct an occupation or what to do with the Iraqi army if it were dissolved. ”It's almost as if, unintentionally, we were working with Zarqawi to create the maximum amount of chaos possible,” he said, referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who operated in Iraq and affiliated himself with al Qaeda.

At the time Pentagon officials publicly played down s.h.i.+nseki's comments, claiming he had been mousetrapped into making them. But a month later, when the Army chief was again on Capitol Hill, he was asked about them again. Yes, he told the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he stood by his estimate of the occupation force that could be necessary in postwar Iraq. ”It could be as high as several hundred thousand,” s.h.i.+nseki said. ”We all hope it is something less.”

Wolfowitz's slapdown of s.h.i.+nseki echoed for months across the military, said Sen. Jack Reed, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who as a young man had served in the 82nd Airborne. ”Not only was he honest, but he turned out to be right,” Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, noted two years later. ”He was treated very poorly. I think it's had a chilling effect, very destructive, corrosive.”

Inside the uniformed military, officers kept quiet, at least publicly. But their private unhappiness ran deep. A few weeks before the war began, one civilian deeply involved in Army affairs meditated on this sad situation. ”There is so much disdain in the services right now for OSD that it has just been reduced to, 'f.u.c.k you, whatever you want, we don't.' If OSD ordered the Navy to build another carrier, the Navy would say it wanted sail power.” It was not a healthy state for a military establishment to be in on the eve of war.

Myers: Iraqis will lead us to the WMD In early March, not long before the war began, Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, met with reporters for a breakfast in a plush meeting room in a downtown Was.h.i.+ngton hotel a few blocks from the White House. Like Cheney, Myers played the secret intelligence card. Some of the inside information about Iraq's WMD had been revealed by Powell in his United Nations speech, Myers said, ”but there are things you can't reveal because then your sources and methods are compromised, and in some cases, people get hurt.”

No, he conceded in response to a reporter's question, we don't know where the WMD are. But he wasn't worried, he added, because he was confident the Iraqis would lead American troops to the weapons stockpiles soon after the war began. ”They're playing a giant sh.e.l.l game right now. That sh.e.l.l game, with forces on the ground, would come to a halt.” At that point, ”people will come forward and say, 'Here's where this is, here's where that is.'”

That, the nation's top military officer said, was what the war would be all about. ”The ultimate objective isn't Saddam Hussein,” he explained. ”The ultimate objective is to ensure that Iraq doesn't have chemical or biological weapons.”

Rumsfeld was similarly emphatic when interviewed by Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television news channel. ”I would like to put it to you straight away,” began Al Jazeera's Jamil Azer. ”The issue between you, the Bush administration, and Iraq is not weapons of ma.s.s destruction. It is for you, how to get rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime.”

The defense secretary could not have been clearer in his response. ”Well, wrong,” he said. ”It is about weapons of ma.s.s destruction. It is unquestionably about that.”

And on that issue, the Bush administration would go to war with rock-hard certainty. The last word on the issue on the eve of hostilities would be the president's: ”Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

The planning for postwar Iraq stumbles On February 21 and 22, 2003, Garner convened experts from across the U.S. government to discuss postwar Iraq. The session was notable because, according to partic.i.p.ants, it was the sole occasion before the war when all the warring factions within the U.S. government met. The official attendance list carries 154 names, but attendees remember many more. ”This was the only time the interagency really sat down at the operator level with policy presence and discussed in detail the activities each of the pillar teams had planned,” recalled Col. Hughes, now retired but then on active duty. ”Folks were seated on windowsills and standing in the aisles.”

Among those present, according to the official attendance list, were Bill Luti and Abram Shulsky from Feith's policy office in the Pentagon, Elliot Abrams from the National Security Council, Eric Edelman and others from Cheney's office, and, in the Central Command contingent, Brig. Gen. Steve Hawkins, the chief of Phase IV planning for that headquarters. There also were representatives from the CIA and DIA, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the British and Australian governments. At twenty-five members, the group from State was nearly the equal of the Pentagon delegation, which came from a variety of civilian and military offices.

The problems were clear. The group had been set up ”far too late,” according to exhaustive notes taken by one official at the meeting. There weren't enough troops in the war plan ”for the first step of securing all the major urban areas, let alone for providing an interim police function.” Without sufficient troops ”we risk letting much of the country descend into civil unrest, chaos whose magnitude may defeat our national strategy of a stable new Iraq, and more immediately, we place our own troops, fully engaged in the forward fight, in greater jeopardy.” The meeting concluded that security ”is far and away the greatest challenge, and the greatest shortfall. If we do not get it right, we may change the regime, but our national strategy likely will fall apart.” This issue of having sufficient troops to meet minimum requirements had been brought to Rumsfeld, ”who has yet to be convinced.”

What's more, the note taker wrote, ”The humanitarian, reconstruction and civil affairs efforts will be tremendously expensive.” That conclusion stood in direct contrast to the public statements of the Bush administration.

Of all those speaking those two days, one person in particular caught Garner's attention. Scrambling to catch up with the best thinking, Garner was looking for someone who had a.s.sembled the facts and who knew all the players in the U.S. government, the Iraqi exile community, and international organizations, and had considered the second- and third-order consequences of possible actions. While everyone else was fumbling for the facts, this man had a dozen binders, tabbed and indexed, on every aspect of Iraqi society, from how electricity was generated to how the port of Basra operated, recalled another partic.i.p.ant.

”They had better stuff in those binders than the 'eyes only' stuff I eventually got from CIA,” said a military expert who attended.

”There was this one guy who knew everything, everybody, and he kept on talking,” Garner recalled. At lunch, Garner took him aside. Who are you? the old general asked. Tom Warrick, the man answered.

”How come you know all this?” Garner asked.

”I've been working on it for a year,” Warrick said. He said he was at the State Department, where he headed a project called the Future of Iraq, a sprawling effort that relied heavily on the expertise of Iraqi exiles.

”Come to work for me on Monday,” Garner said. Warrick did.

But it wouldn't be as easy to keep him. Garner, a straightforward old soldier, didn't realize that he had walked into the middle of a running feud between the State Department and the Defense Department. There were multiple points of friction. Powell and Rumsfeld didn't seem to get along, or even be able to address their differences. There were deep disagreements between them over Iraq, and those ran down into their departments. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, came to believe that one reason Rumsfeld's office wanted to invade Iraq with a relatively small force was ”because they wanted to disavow the Powell doctrine” of using overwhelming or decisive force in military operations.

Aides at each department used the media to take potshots at the other. ”A country that has its own major agencies at war is not going to fight a war well,” said Dov Zakheim, who was a Vulcan-one of Bush's advisers on national security policy during the 2000 presidential campaign-and later the Pentagon's top financial officer. ”And State and Defense were at war-don't let anyone tell you different. Within policy circles, it was knee-jerk venom, on both sides. Neither side was prepared to give the other a break. It began in 2001, got exacerbated during the buildup to Iraq, and stayed on.” The split began at the top, but extended down to the ”working level,” Zakheim said, of ”people who had to work with, and trust, each other-and they didn't.”

So while the task and stakes facing Garner were huge-certainly the future of Iraq, possibly the future of the Mideast, perhaps that of U.S. foreign policy in the region, perhaps the future of the Bush administration-he found himself focused instead on sniping inside the Bush administration, at Warrick and others he was recruiting. Apparently there was some sort of ideological test they had failed, but it was all very mysterious to Garner, even to the extent of exactly who was administering the exam.

A few days later Garner briefed Rumsfeld on the state of his planning. The briefing slide on the Iraqi army stated that it would be ”necessary to keep Iraqi army intact for a specified period of time. Serves as ready resource pool for labor-intensive civil works projects.” As the meeting was breaking up and aides were leaving, Rumsfeld took Garner aside and said he had an issue he needed to discuss privately. He walked over to his desk and took out some notes, which he reviewed for a moment, Garner recalled. He then looked up and said, according to Garner, ”You've got two people working for you-Warrick and [Meghan] O'Sullivan- that you need to get rid of.”

”I can't, they are smart, really good, knowledgeable,” Garner protested.

Rumsfeld said it was out of his hands. ”This comes from such a level that I can't do anything about it,” he said, according to Garner. That could mean only one thing: The purge had been ordered by someone at the White House, and not just from some underling on the staff of the National Security Council. Garner felt his group, just getting off the ground, was being hamstrung. Worried and upset, he went to see Stephen Hadley, the low-key deputy to Condoleeza Rice at the NSC. Again he was faced with a senior official telling him it was out of his hands. ”I can't do anything about it,” Hadley told Garner.

Garner then had one of his staffers call around national security circles in the government to find out what was going on. ”He was told the word had come from Cheney,” he recalled.

When Powell got word of the ouster of Warrick and O'Sullivan, he called Rumsfeld and asked, ”What the h.e.l.l is going on?” Rumsfeld responded that the work of postwar planning had to be done by people devoted to the task who supported the policy The tug-of-war over Garner's personnel picks never really ended. ”Anybody that knows anything” was removed, Armitage said later. ”They didn't like Warrick and Meghan [O'Sullivan], because they were both inconvenient-you know, wanted the facts to get into the equation. These were not people who stood up for the party line, that we'd be welcomed with garlands. We b.i.t.c.hed about it, and all Rumsfeld said was, 'I got the higher authority.' And he didn't say whom. Well, not many higher.”

Garner to Feith: ”Shut the f.u.c.k up or fire me”

On March 11, Garner met the media at the Pentagon for a backgrounder, which meant he spoke under ground rules that allowed reporters to identify him at the time only as a senior defense official. Among the principles he laid down for postwar Iraq was that an obtrusive U.S. role would be short and the Iraqi army would continue to exist. ”We intend to immediately start turning some things over, and every day, we'll turn over more things,” Garner said. ”I believe that's our plan.” As for the Iraqi military, ”a good portion” would be useful to work in the reconstruction of the country. ”We'd continue to pay them. Using army allows us not to demobilize it immediately and put a lot of unemployed people on the street.” The overall duration of the U.S. presence, he said, would be short. ”I'll probably come back to hate this answer, but I'm talking months.”

Each and every one of these statements was destined to be reversed just eight weeks later, when Garner would be succeeded in mid-May by Amba.s.sador L. Paul Bremer. But the comment that got Garner in trouble that day in the Pentagon wasn't any of those. Rather, it was his repeated denial of any intention to give a role to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. When specifically asked about working with the group the Iraqi exile had formed as the putative core of a new government, Garner was dismissive. ”I think you're going to see a lot of people putting forth groups,” he said. Nor, he said, was he seeking to hire INC members for his humanitarian operations.

The undersecretary of defense for policy was livid with him afterward for his att.i.tude toward Chalabi, Garner recalled. ”Feith loved him.” One day during planning sessions, ”Feith spent an afternoon extolling the virtues of Ahmed Chalabi. He said, trying to show how good Chalabi was, 'You know, Jay, when you get there, we could just make Chalabi president.'” (Many in the uniformed military had a different view of Chalabi. ”I never liked him, and none of my a.n.a.lysts ever trusted him,” said a military intelligence official.) After the briefing Feith summoned Garner and shouted at him over the disrespect shown Chalabi. ”You've ruined everything, how could you say this?” Feith said, according to Garner.

”Doug, you've got two choices,” Garner remembers responding. ”You can shut the f.u.c.k up, or you can fire me.” Garner thought afterward that Feith had settled for the first of the two options. But he also was told that he wasn't allowed to speak to the media, even on background. One result was that over the next several weeks, relations between his group and a frustrated press corps worsened notably. And then, by mid-May, he would find out that Feith and others at the Pentagon essentially had settled on option two.

The next day Garner took his whole staff out to Fort Meade, a sprawling Army base in the Maryland suburbs of Was.h.i.+ngton, for training in the use of pistols, maps, and other military basics. Two days later, as the training was ending, Rumsfeld called and asked for a final briefing. It was a Friday, and the Garner group was leaving for Kuwait on Sunday.

Garner went down to the Pentagon on Sat.u.r.day, March 15. ”What are you going to do for de-Baathification?” Rumsfeld asked, according to Garner.

Garner saw two possibilities. Either the locals will have killed the most offensive Baathists, or over time, the locals will point them out. So, Garner said, his plan was to remove just two people in each ministry and major government office-the top Baathist and the chief personnel officer. ”Well, that sounds fine with me until we get you a policy,” Rumsfeld responded.

Garner also reviewed with the defense secretary his plans for dealing with famines, epidemics, and oil fires-the problems he expected to face upon arrival in Iraq. At the end, Rumsfeld appeared uneasy, Garner recalled. ”I'm very uncomfortable with this,” the defense secretary told Garner.

Garner was almost speechless. ”This is a h.e.l.l of a time to tell me,” he said. ”I'm leaving tomorrow.”

No, said Rumsfeld, I'm not objecting to your perspective on the likely problems. ”It's not the plans, it's the people,” he said, according to Garner. There were too many outsiders, too many State Department types. ”I think we should have Defense Department people.”