Contrary to later recriminations, there was a postwar plan for Iraq. It worked. Unfortunately, the plan belonged to the other side. Shortly before American forces launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, one of Paul Wolfowitz’s aides was handed a document courtesy of Indian intelligence. The document was in Arabic but already translated by the Indians, who had obtained it from their own sources in Iraq. In three pages it outlined Iraqi plans for a postinvasion resistance, complete with instructions to organize resistance cells, destroy government infrastructure, collect arms, and target occupation forces. The Indians, via their intermediary, swore it was genuine.
According to a senior Pentagon official familiar with the episode, those who reviewed this blueprint for insurgency—Wolfowitz, Cambone, and Di Rita—were not impressed. “They looked like this was one of those Nigerian e-mails offering to pay $20 million into your bank account,” the official told me. “Their attitude was, ‘These people aren’t capable of putting something like this together.’” The official does not know if the document ever got passed to Rumsfeld, but in light of later events it is unlikely that the secretary would have paid any more attention to it than did his deputy. Neither of them could believe, as Wolfowitz remarked in response to Shinseki’s offhand comment about a postwar requirement for “several hundred thousand” occupation troops, that occupying Iraq might require a bigger force than conquering it in the first place.
As it turned out, Rumsfeld was right about the one thing that would later earn him unending vilification: his insistence that invading Iraq and crushing the regime of Saddam Hussein would not require the enormous force called for in the original war plans. As one of the Kurdish leaders eloquently put it just before the war, Iraq was a “bankrupt emirate with sixty percent of the population on U.N. rations”—a reference to the lifesaving U.N. oil-for-food program. The society had been successively ravaged by the bloody war of attrition with Iran in the 1980s, the brief but destructive war with the United States in 1991, and the crippling economic sanctions imposed and maintained by the victors following that war. Saddam’s military forces were as worn down as every other institution in the country. A small but telling example of their disarray was visible at a 1998 military parade in Baghdad, where the elite unit marching past Saddam wore on their hands not white gloves, but white socks. Perhaps the billion-dollar satellites high above could not discern this detail, but anyone paying close attention could reasonably conclude that a regime unable to find an adequate supply of gloves was unlikely to have a secret nuclear weapons program.1
Nevertheless, the U.S. military planners had done their best to proceed along traditional lines. The air force, for example, insisted on cratering Iraqi airfields to prevent the barely existent Iraqi air force from taking off, as well as pounding “command and control” targets with great determination in unavailing efforts to kill Saddam. The senior ground commanders were mesmerized by Saddam’s Republican Guard, which they expected to put up a staunch and bloody defense of Baghdad. Even so, in the absence of significant opposition, the invading forces did move rapidly northward, at least initially. The 3rd Infantry Division, for example, crossed the Euphrates River two days after the start of the war, and then raced three hundred miles in ninety-six hours to within fifty miles of Baghdad at a cost of two American dead. On the other hand, an ill-advised attempt to use massed Apache helicopters in a night assault behind enemy lines failed dismally, with the battered force beating a hurried retreat in the face of enemy rifle fire. This minor setback to the campaign had a depressive effect on American commanders. As General William Wallace told a reporter at the time, “We’re dealing with a country in which everybody has a weapon, and when they fire them all into the air at the same time, it’s tough.”2 When the 3rd Infantry Division lost all of two tanks and a Bradley fighting vehicle three days later, the mood turned even bleaker, leading to calls to Washington for a halt in the advance while the air force dropped more bombs on the tattered units of Saddam’s army. On what was described as the “worst day of the war,” an ill-trained and ill-equipped American transport unit ran into a rear-area ambush, losing eleven killed, nine wounded, and seven taken prisoner. Tragic as these casualties were for those affected, overall losses remained extraordinarily light, certainly as compared with conflicts in the past. Suicidal attacks on the heavily equipped U.S. forces by lightly armed “fedayeen” partisans, though causing little damage, were entirely unexpected, leading to the first complaints that Rumsfeld’s insistence on a light invasion force had produced disaster.
Doug Macgregor, the military theoretician and combat veteran who made no secret of his contempt for hidebound generals, sent Rumsfeld, via Newt Gingrich, a fiery memo on March 25 pointing out that the “massive” force had taken “almost no casualties” and urging there be no delay in the advance. “Thanks for the Macgregor piece,” Rumsfeld replied to Gingrich a day later. “Nobody up here is thinking like this.” But on the same day he agreed to a temporary halt in the advance north.3 His public response to these rumblings was characteristic. Queried on all too accurate reports that he had mandated a far smaller invasion force than that requested by the military, he quickly shifted responsibility onto the shoulders of his faithful combatant commander, Tommy Franks, roping in the Joint Chiefs and the rest of the senior military for good measure. “Tom Franks and the chairman and I, when the president asked us to prepare a plan, looked at the plan that was on the shelf and to a person agreed it was inappropriate,” he told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week ten days into the war. “Franks then sat down and began planning. The plan we have is his…and it is his plan and it has been approved by the chiefs. Every one of the chiefs has said it’s executable and they support it. It’s been looked at by all the combatant commanders. It’s gone through the National Security Council process.”4
Meanwhile another plan, though categorically discarded by President Bush himself only shortly before, began showing signs of revival. As detailed previously, the neoconservatives had long schemed for Ahmed Chalabi to take power in Iraq. Yet on no less than two occasions, Bush had flatly ruled out the imposition of Chalabi as ruler. Chalabi had moved to northern Iraq, a guest of the Kurds. He had recruited his own militia of a thousand or so men, a motley group, described by journalist Charles Glass as “northerners and southerners, Kurds and Arabs, exiles and those who stayed, veterans of Saddam’s army and veterans of no army.”5 Suddenly, as American forces closed in on Baghdad, Chalabi received a request from Centcom to send his men to help subdue the fedayeen guerrillas in the south. Wolfowitz and Feith made sure that Chalabi himself was allowed to travel with his little army, now christened the Free Iraq Forces. In early April, the entire group, some seven hundred men, was flown south on air force C-17s to a former Iraqi base outside the city of Nasiriyah.
“What was all that about?” a former senior White House official wondered aloud to me later. “George Bush had told them, ‘No, Chalabi is not my man.’ Then Chalabi is introduced almost covertly into Iraq [from Kurdistan]. What were Wolfowitz and company up to? Maybe they thought, ‘Fuck the president. We’re going to do it anyway.’”
The gambit didn’t work. Once in southern Iraq, Chalabi and his men were effectively stranded and isolated by the U.S. military, left with little or no supplies, not even water, in the searing heat of the Iraqi desert.6 Evidently, someone powerful had given the signal that the ambitious exile was not to be given too much encouragement. In media coverage of his move, the press described Chalabi as “a Pentagon favorite”7 and “enjoying the support of Pentagon hawks such as Mr. Rumsfeld.”8 But that was misleading. Rumsfeld himself, encouraged by Cambone, disliked and distrusted the man, even despite his links with Perle.
Though few paid attention at the time or since, Rumsfeld made his feelings clear in a press briefing on April 7, the day after the famous exile landed in southern Iraq. Asked whether he was supporting Ahmed Chalabi, or endorsing him for any role in a postwar Iraq, Rumsfeld replied, “Of course not. I just said that the Iraqi people are going to make these decisions. Clearly, the United States is not going to impose a government on Iraq.” He was, of course, echoing the words and sentiments of George Bush, a fact unknown to the journalists, but certainly familiar to Wolfowitz and Feith.
The shipment of Chalabi and his cohort to southern Iraq came not only as a surprise to the outside world, it was also news to the rest of the administration, including the CIA (who had long had their private feud with him), but it was by no means the only Pentagon action kept secret from other parts of the government. More than most men of power, Rumsfeld treated information as a weapon, to be hoarded as much as possible and shared only when necessary. At National Security Council meetings, when he was not ejecting lower-ranking staff from the room while he conferred with the president, he would often forbid the taking of notes, on security grounds, by such people as Frank Miller, who for decades had overseen the darkest secrets of American nuclear targeting policy. This passion for secrecy extended to even the most customary interactions between the Pentagon and other agencies, including the White House itself. The details of the Iraq invasion plan, for example, were a process closely held even within the Pentagon, and absolutely withheld even from the military staff at the NSC, let alone the State Department.
Such behavior clearly came easily to a secretary who refused to tell his deputy what had happened at White House meetings. But there was a deeper and more crafty logic behind Rumsfeld’s policy of secrecy. He was determined at all costs to protect and maintain the chain of command that made Rumsfeld, and only Rumsfeld, the link between the Pentagon and George Bush. Hence his petty theatrics over the fighter escort for Air Force One three days after 9/11. In the months of apparent crisis after 9/11, he instituted the practice of going to see the president every single day. Most of the time there would be high-level White House aides sitting in on the meetings, National Security Adviser Rice, or Chief of Staff Andrew Card. But he also managed to garner the holy grail of Washington’s imperial court: regular meetings alone with the president. These private conferences, usually once a week, were themselves deeply secret. Rumsfeld, I was told, “would literally sneak over to the White House,” making every effort to be unobserved. According to one former high-ranking official, it was a full year before Powell found out they were happening.
However, skillful operators on the other side were loath to tolerate the defense secretary’s control of information. Miller, for example, the former nuclear targeteer who carried the title of senior director for defense policy on the NSC staff, had spent almost three decades in the Pentagon before coming to the White House, and not only knew how the building worked but also enjoyed a huge range of contacts within the military high command. In addition, he had a number of capable military officers assigned to his own staff, and he deployed them to winkle out the defense secretary’s secrets. To carry out their mission they not only turned to friends and associates working on the inside who could be persuaded to hand over an envelope containing the latest version of the war plan, they also resorted to cyberwar.
Alongside the Internet we all use, there exists a secret Internet known as Siprnet, available only to those with special clearances and equipment. Siprnet, which stands for Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, is the Pentagon’s Internet, and is always kept carefully physically separated from its civilian counterpart. Access to it is severely restricted to special well-guarded terminals. Users must have a password, and all transmissions are highly encrypted. Furthermore, the system is internally compartmentalized, so access to one part does not automatically permit the user to get into a joint staff website, for example, still less Rumsfeld’s videoconferences with his combatant commanders, which were transmitted over Siprnet. The officers on Miller’s staff had clearance to access the Siprnet; their special skill was in knowing where to look, which secret Pentagon websites to scrutinize, thereby monitoring Rumsfeld’s moves in real time. This operation enabled Miller to inform not only Rice, his direct superior, of the latest developments, but also Rumsfeld’s detested rivals, Powell and Armitage, at the State Department. Amazingly, this was the only way these high-ranking officers were able to discover, for example, which reserve units the secretary had decided to mobilize, and when. Even more strangely, the bizarre system continued once the war had started, with the president’s staff, as well as his senior diplomats, forced to spy on their colleague to find out how America’s forces were faring.
Just as Rumsfeld strove for what Torie Clarke called information dominance over the rest of the government, he was at the center of efforts to control the picture that the American public was getting of the war. Part of his contribution came in the form of frequent public appearances, either at Pentagon press conferences or in TV studios, in which he displayed the bluff, confident style he had been perfecting since 9/11. (Wolfowitz was also very much in the public eye, thanks in part to the persistent efforts of his own public affairs staff, which he insisted should remain independent of Clarke.)
There were no subtleties in Rumsfeld’s depiction of the war. “War is the last choice,” he declared on the opening night. “The American people can take comfort in knowing that their country has done everything humanly possible to avoid war and to secure Iraq’s peaceful disarmament.” However, he had a less direct but possibly even more effective way of delivering the official message. The proliferation of cable news channels had created a sellers’ market for former military officers, preferably high-ranking, who could comment with at least the appearance of expertise on the unfolding drama. For regulars who could deliver pearls of inside information not yet generally available, the rewards could be attractive in the form of lucrative exclusive contracts. Months before the war, therefore, Clarke’s team had begun seeking out not only military retirees who were already regular TV guests, but also those who might serve as suitable candidates in the future and offered them an attractive proposition. “We would have them in for regular briefings from the secretary or the chairman,” one of Clarke’s former staff explained to me. “There was no requirement that they be absolutely uncritical of what we [the U.S. military] were doing; in fact, we welcomed mild criticism. But if they really crossed the line, attacked us strongly, then they were out.” For a retired colonel or general who was getting used to regular TV exposure, admission to these briefings was a significant bonus, not to be given up lightly.
At the time of the invasion, the public affairs office on the second floor of the Pentagon had a row of TV monitors constantly tuned to all the news shows. At one point in the early days, one official looked up and saw “every single one had a retired officer on the screen discussing the campaign. Every single one of them was our guy.”
Some were more reliable conduits of Rumsfeld’s message than others. Retired army colonel Robert Maginnis, for example, was forthright in passing on the secretary’s confident assertions regarding Saddam’s alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological facilities, and remained a trusted member of the analysts’ group almost to the end.9 Others, notably Barry McCaffrey, a former four-star general with sensitive political antennae, began expressing criticism of Rumsfeld’s troop deployment record with the first reports that the invasion force had run into difficulties, and was notified forthwith that he was no longer welcome at the Pentagon background briefings.10 “He wasn’t very happy about it,” one of the staff in the public affairs office recalled later, “and asked if he could come back, but we thought he had crossed the line.”
But McCaffrey was not alone. “Shock, awe, overconfidence,” wrote Colonel Ralph Peters, a retired military intelligence officer, in the Washington Post five days into the war. “Military planners have argued for months that more and heavier ground forces were needed…. In [Rumsfeld’s] vision of the future, one shaped by technocrats and the defense industry, ground forces can be cut drastically. But those who want to wage antiseptic wars for political purposes should not start wars in the first place.”11
The criticism was wounding, and Rumsfeld did not take it well. Asked in a press conference if he was deliberately withholding reports of U.S. casualties, he angrily pounded the podium with his fist.12 But the barrage of protest died down as the generals in Iraq recovered their nerve and the advance on Baghdad resumed. Nevertheless, a pattern had been set. If things went seriously wrong in Iraq, the blame would eventually land on Rumsfeld. To make matters worse, at this moment his old ally Richard Perle had to resign as chairman of the defense policy advisory board in the face of questions about his business dealings, notably his recent negotiations with an infamous Saudi arms dealer and his $725,000 contract with a communications company looking for Pentagon clearance for its sale to a Hong Kong billionaire. Rumsfeld issued a statement praising Perle as having “a deep understanding of our national security process.”13
The furor over the stalled advance and the supposed lack of troops obscured a more fundamental problem, one that could not be explained away with carefully briefed retired officers or hopeful predictions: the total absence of weapons of mass destruction. No nuclear facilities of any kind, no biological weapons stocks, not even a few stray chemical artillery rounds that could have been exhibited as proof that the accusations had been true. All the intelligence deployed before the war to indicate the contrary had either been wishful thinking, or straightforward lies. Hussein Kamel had been telling the truth.
Rumsfeld took the news badly. As the U.S. forces rolled northward, a dedicated unit searched for evidence of the weapons, and found none. At his morning briefings on the progress of the war the secretary grew increasingly angry when one site after another that had previously been confidently predicted as a weapons site turned out to be a “dry hole.” One officer attending these daily meetings later reported Rumsfeld as exclaiming, “They must be there.” On another occasion he picked up the paper briefing charts and threw them at the briefers.14 Reality was beginning to intrude, and there was nothing he could do about it, except to move as expeditiously as possible to devolve responsibility for the WMD hunt onto the CIA.
Ahmed Chalabi, who had done so much to popularize the concept of Saddam’s WMD arsenal, later blithely conceded that he had been totally wrong, but felt there was nothing of which he need be ashamed. “We are heroes in error,” he told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.”15 Had Saddam’s undeniably vicious regime been succeeded by something clearly and immediately better, Rumsfeld and his colleagues might have been able to take the same tack. Unfortunately for the hundreds of thousands of people who were going to die over the next few years, that was not to be.
Iraqi society had been fraying at the edges for years before the invasion. I recall the astonished horror of Baghdadis in 1991 as a crime wave swept across the Iraq capital, spurred by the U.N. sanctions strangling the economy. Along with the spreading plague of violent robberies, previously incorruptible bureaucrats whose salaries were being vaporized by inflation began accepting and then demanding bribes for any and all services. More ominously, during the bloody uprising and far bloodier suppression of the Shia uprising that followed the 1991 war, all museums across the south were looted. By the time the American invasion army reached Baghdad twelve years later, the Iraqi state had itself withered to a degree that could surprise only those who knew little and cared less about the society they had just conquered.
Looting broke out in Baghdad on April 9 at almost the moment that the last vestiges of the old regime’s presence disappeared from the capital. People stormed out of the poorer areas of east Baghdad intent on stripping anything and everything of value from public buildings. The same thing happened in cities across Iraq. Notoriously, the National Museum in the heart of Baghdad was stormed and looted of artifacts dating back to the dawn of civilization. The tears of deputy museum director Nabhal Amin as she gazed in shock at the destruction became a symbol of the overall disaster that had suddenly descended on Iraq.16
Rumsfeld reacted to the compelling images of chaos and destruction beamed from Baghdad with both irritation and denial. In an April 11 press conference, where his remarks were interspersed with slides of cheerful GIs in company with happy Iraqis, he infamously exclaimed, “Stuff happens,” citing the American urban riots of the 1960s as precedent. The main fault, he made clear, lay with the media. “In terms of what’s going on in that country, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to see those images over, and over, and over again of some boy walking out with a vase and say, ‘Oh, my goodness, you didn’t have a plan.’ That’s nonsense. They [the U.S. military on the ground] know what they’re doing, and they’re doing a terrific job.”
It was far from the truth. There was no plan for dealing with the situation. (However, Rumsfeld’s complaints about misleading reporting would have their effect, as Baghdad news bureaus came under pressure from their headquarters to emphasize more of the good news in their reporting.) Rumsfeld had seized responsibility for postwar Iraq away from the State Department, and had seemingly then lost interest. One former official, who worked closely with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon at this time, suggested that having proved his point that a slimmed-down force moving quickly could defeat Saddam, Rumsfeld would have been happy to wash his hands of the country and leave its problems for someone else to deal with. “That was clearly his style,” he laughed.
A former White House official who had ample opportunity to monitor Rumsfeld during his years of power preferred to explain Rumsfeld’s actions in terms of idle vanity: “The man had to be acknowledged to be in control. Once people gave him that acknowledgment, he didn’t seem to care. They could more or less do what they wanted.”
Mostly what the military appeared to want to do was nothing. No one had told the ground commanders what they should do once organized enemy resistance came to an end. These commanders themselves neglected to plan for “Phase IV,” as the postconflict era was officially termed. General Mike Hagee, for example, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, later described how he repeatedly asked his superiors to whom he should hand over the towns he captured. The answer was always “someone” whose identity was “undetermined,” he said.17 Accordingly, without orders, nothing was done to impede the looting. No one had the initiative to move an M-1 Abrams tank, already parked just a few yards away, in front of the museum—a move that might have stopped the looting. Even more damning, when looting first broke out on April 9, there were indeed tanks stationed on the bridges over the river Tigris, which divides east and west Baghdad. As a result, potential looters were confined to the eastern side for that day, and the next. West Baghdad remained relatively peaceful and secure. On April 11, however, someone ordered the tanks moved from the bridges. Unconstrained, the mob streamed across the river and west Baghdad was soon in the same state of anarchic mayhem as the rest of the city.18 General David McKiernan, a cautious commander to say the least, refused to intervene in any way to stop the looting. “This is not my job,” he reportedly snapped when urged to do something to arrest the destruction of Baghdad.19
Rumsfeld’s flippant reaction to the total breakdown of law and order suggested that his knowledge of the people he now ruled was superficial at best. But this degree of ignorance was widespread among the occupiers. I myself had a small insight into this condition when I learned that I possessed the only copy available in Washington of The Revolt in Mesopotamia, a lucid account by Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Haldane, the commander of British forces in Iraq in 1920, of the widespread and bloody popular uprising by the recently conquered Iraqis. I was asked to lend my copy for Xeroxing, to be distributed to some of the U.S. generals who were following in Haldane’s footsteps. Subsequent events indicated little sign that any of them read it.
Jay Garner, a retired army general who had been designated as the civilian overseer for occupied Iraq, did not secure permission from Franks to move to Baghdad until ten days after the fall of the old regime. Long before that, Rumsfeld was already planning to replace him with someone with a higher profile, a special presidential envoy who would head up a colonial administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, under his overall supervision. Steve Herbits, charged with reviewing possible candidates to rule Iraq, opted for Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz was very happy with this idea. Chalabi must have been equally thrilled, assuming he knew about it. The proposal was taken seriously at high levels, allegedly endorsed by Cheney.20
Sending a passionate Israel supporter to rule a large Arab country would certainly have had the merit of novelty. However, it has not previously been reported that there might have been not one but two of them, for that was what Herbits, later secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, had in mind. Well aware of Wolfowitz’s managerial deficiencies, he included in his endorsement of the deputy secretary for the position a proposal that he himself go along as well, a de facto prime minister to Wolfowitz the viceroy. “Steve would have been the manager,” chuckled one of the few individuals aware of this plan within the plan. “He knew perfectly well that Paul couldn’t run the place.” Wolfowitz is reported as suspecting that he was ruled out for the job because he was Jewish, but his relationship with Chalabi, who had already received specific nonendorsements from Bush and, by implication, Rumsfeld, may have been enough to put him out of the running.
Herbits’s next recommendation appeared less contentious: L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, a former diplomat and State Department official with no Middle East experience whatsoever. Acceptable to Rumsfeld, endorsed by Wolfowitz, and liked by Bush, Bremer seemed the perfect choice. After two weeks of preparation and briefings he arrived in Baghdad on May 13, primed with an agenda that probably did more than anything to ensure the ultimate doom of the American adventure in Iraq.
On May 14, Bremer unveiled a draft “De-Baathification of Iraqi Society” decree to U.S. officials in Baghdad that mandated the immediate dismissal of all full members of the Baath Party, which had ruled Iraq since 1968. It had been handed to him by Feith before he left Washington. Since party membership was mandatory for all government officials with any degree of responsibility under the old regime, this move deprived up to fifty thousand people of their livelihood and was guaranteed to cripple whatever remained of the administration of Iraq.
On May 15, Bremer showed his staff a draft of a second order. This one abolished the Iraqi army, thereby ensuring that some 400,000 men, all of them with military training and most having access to weapons and explosives, were suddenly on the street with nothing to lose and a very strong grudge against the occupation. Not surprisingly, the origins of this edict are somewhat murky. In his memoir of his year in Iraq, Bremer wrote that this decree had also been under discussion by Feith and others before he left Washington.21
The assertion is strange, because just ten days before the war, on March 10, there had been a full dress briefing for President Bush at the White House to discuss the plan for postwar Iraq. Most of the presentation was prepared and delivered by Frank Miller, the senior NSC defense aide. But when it came to the section dealing with the future of the Iraqi military, Rumsfeld had insisted beforehand that such matters were the prerogative of the Defense Department and should therefore be briefed by someone from the Pentagon. Accordingly, Feith took the slides already prepared by Miller, had them stamped with the Pentagon logo, and read them to the president at the briefing. They laid out in precise detail how the Iraqi army would be kept intact and be used to provide security after the war.
“So what happened?” wondered an official who had been present at that meeting. “Everything in that briefing had been reviewed and approved at the different agencies by the deputies and principals. It was absolutely clear that we intended to keep the army. Then two months later, Bremer arrives and abolishes it. The strange thing is that if [the neocons] were going to put Chalabi in power, they needed stability—there had to be some sort of government functioning for him to take over—but abolishing the army guaranteed that there would be no stability. Maybe by that point they had given up. Chalabi had been Plan A, but there was no Plan B.” (On the other hand, Chalabi had a vested interest in the dissolution of the army, since it was thought to be a stronghold of support for the rival exile politician, Iyad Allawi.)
Anthony Zinni, the former commanding general of Centcom, has suggested that there was indeed a neocon Plan B, which was to let Iraq sink into chaos. Well before the first American soldier crossed the border, he concluded, “the neocons didn’t really give a shit what happened in Iraq and the aftermath.” He believed that though they may have hoped Chalabi would take power, an alternative scenario in which Iraq fell apart in chaos was entirely acceptable and they would welcome a “messy” outcome that diverted attention from the Israel-Palestine peace process, whatever the degree of bloodshed in Iraq itself.22 Zinni based this depressing conclusion, as he told me, on his “observations of the neocons in action” rather than any direct evidence.
However, a month before the invasion, an important Shi’ite cleric, Majid al-Khoei, flew to Washington from London, where he had lived since fleeing Iraq in 1991. Al-Khoei was the son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed al-Khoei, the most revered and influential cleric in the Shi’ite world until his death in 1992. The younger al-Khoei was himself a respected figure among Iraqi Shi’ites both outside and inside Iraq, and therefore of interest to officials and others involved in invasion planning. On his return to London he told friends that he had spoken with some “American Jews,” which was how he might have described neocons, who had informed him that “preserving the unity of Iraq” was no longer a priority of American policy, and therefore the emergence of a separate Shi’ite state in southern Iraq would be entirely acceptable. This meant, as al-Khoei observed, that “there would be a Shia state in the south with lots of oil, a Kurdish state in the north with lots of oil, and a Sunni state in the middle with no oil at all!”23
Early in April 2006, the CIA flew al-Khoei to Iraq and escorted him to his native city of Najaf. A few days after his arrival, he was hacked to death by a mob with the apparent complicity or even encouragement of a younger and then relatively unknown cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr.
This evidence, though circumstantial, at least supplies some explanation for the curious decisions emanating from Washington at that time, including the abrupt abandonment of the prewar commitment to preserve the Iraqi army. Apologists for the abolition, including Bremer, argued later that the decree was purely pro forma, as the army had in any case dispersed and gone home at the end of the war, effectively abolishing itself. This was entirely untrue. American officers had been talking to army representatives, who were eager to cooperate. When the decision was announced, large numbers of former soldiers demonstrated angrily. Three days after the announcement the first U.S. soldier to die in an IED (improvised explosive device) attack was killed on the road to the Baghdad airport. American military intelligence officers assumed as a matter of course that it had been planted by newly unemployed and angry soldiers.
Meanwhile, documents similar to the directive passed on to the Pentagon by Indian intelligence weeks earlier were starting to turn up in Baghdad. Dated from before the war, they commanded members of Saddam’s secret service, the Mukhabarat, to promote chaos by burning public buildings and records and discouraging collaboration.24 Over the following months, further evidence emerged that there was a brain at work behind at least part, but only part, of the resistance to the occupation. Someone had apparently been studying the Western military occupation of Bosnia and Kosovo, noting the importance of helpful regional allies, NGOs (nongovernment organizations), and the United Nations to the comparative success of those undertakings. On August 7, a huge bomb tore apart the Baghdad embassy of Jordan, whose government then became rather less helpful to the United States. On August 17, an ever bigger blast ripped the U.N. office, killing the senior U.N. official in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. The United Nations sharply reduced its presence in Iraq. In October, another bomb exploded outside the Red Cross compound in Baghdad, with predictable effects on the enthusiasm of NGOs for working in the country. If the United States was going to reconstruct Iraq, it would be doing so almost on its own. Contrary to the initial reaction to the Indian intelligence gift at the time of the invasion, it seemed that Iraqis were perfectly capable of “putting something like this together.”
Rumsfeld did not see it that way, at least not for a very long time. On April 30, 2003, as the smoke of burning buildings clouded the sky above Baghdad, the secretary of defense told those Iraqis fortunate enough to have electricity to power their TVs: “Coalition forces are working in close partnership with Iraqi citizens to restore order and basic services. Each day that goes by, conditions in Iraq are improving.”25
In the streets outside, U.S. troops on patrol were not only taking fire, they were also being stoned by gangs of youths emulating familiar scenes of Palestinians throwing stones at their Israeli occupiers.26 The previous day, in Fallujah, a quiet city on the main highway to Jordan, hundreds of mourners chanted, “We will sacrifice our souls and our blood to you martyrs,” as they followed coffins of some of the thirteen townspeople killed when soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division, based in a schoolhouse, opened fire on a crowd outside. The crowd had been demonstrating to get their school back.27
The following day, May 1, Centcom announced that major combat operations were officially over, and President Bush dressed up in a flight suit to land on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The White House had arranged for the ship to sport a banner with the words “Mission Accomplished” over the flight deck. Rumsfeld later asserted that he had been opposed to claiming that the mission was accomplished.
In the following six weeks, about fifty American soldiers died in Iraq due to attacks and accidents. Rumsfeld sought to put these casualties in perspective. “If Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad,” he told a Pentagon press briefing, “we would be having something like 215 murders a month.” In any event, resistance was coming merely from “small elements” of ten to twenty people, “dead-enders.”28
A month later, the number of American dead since May 1 had risen to eighty-one, still mostly from accidents, but plans for a major withdrawal of troops—nine thousand men from the army’s 3rd Division—were put on hold for an indefinite time. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld defended as “imperfect but good” the intelligence the Bush administration had used to build its case for a war to disarm Saddam of weapons of mass destruction.
“I think the intelligence was correct in general,” he said. “And you will always find out precisely what it was once you get on the ground and have a chance to talk to people and explore it.” On the day the 3rd Division got the bad news, someone threw a grenade at the American occupation headquarters, Saddam’s former Republican Palace. Jay Garner had selected the site to set up shop, apparently oblivious to the implications for ordinary Iraqis of the new rulers simply moving into the same quarters as the old.
This was one decision by the departed Garner left unchanged by Bremer, who was attempting to rule Iraq with the help of a drove of eager young Republicans, many recruited through the website of the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Senior Pentagon officials bridled at derisive criticism of these youths, some of whom were as ignorant as they were arrogant, claiming that due to a malign lack of cooperation from the diplomats, they had no other source of recruits. “When Rumsfeld got control of postwar Iraq,” one former Pentagon official grumbled to me, “Powell said, ‘Screw them, let the fuckers stew.’ At that point the State Department began a determined rearguard action against us, discouraging their staff from working for the CPA.”
By July, no one was pretending that Baghdad was a safe environment for the occupation authority staff. The entire sprawling city of 5.5 million people was designated as a “Red Zone” by the American military, the only exception being the increasingly fortified enclave around the Republican Palace, the “Green Zone.” Inside the Green Zone, members of Iraq’s new ruling class were assured of constant electric power, air-conditioning, clean water, and a lively social life. One visitor from Washington in July, invited to the Green Zone for a poolside buffet dinner, was surprised to find the Iraqi staff decked out in period costumes from the era of 1001 Nights.
Out in the Red Zone, resentment of the occupiers was increasing day by day. The Kurds in their northern mountains remained comparatively friendly toward Americans, not only because the invasion had destroyed the genocidal regime of Saddam Hussein, but also because they were not under foreign occupation. The Shi’ites, though also happy that the United States had rescued them from the Baathist yoke, had no affection for the foreigners, and within a year they would be fighting them. But in Baghdad, even by June, the killing of American soldiers was already sparking local celebrations in places where it occurred. In July, Richard Wild, a young British freelance journalist, was murdered in the street, almost certainly because his dress and close-cropped hair caused him to resemble someone from the CPA.29
Back on the E Ring of the Pentagon, “We were still high-fiving each other” in July 2003, one member of the inner circle told me. That month, Rumsfeld invited in the graying “formers”—former secretaries of defense. Henry Kissinger came as well. As was his custom, he stood while they sat down for lunch. “A little show of dominance,” said one of his staff. The formers were treated to a briefing on progress in Iraq, but the skeptical old gentlemen persisted in quizzing Rumsfeld on what lay ahead. “What’s your plan?” they pressed. Rumsfeld fudged. “I’m not in a position to show you what we’re doing,” he told them. “Everything’s fluid.”
Despite the ongoing upbeat mood along the wide Pentagon corridors, the small but steady trickle of casualties was an awkward reminder that Iraq was far from being at peace. This was a touchy subject. Though “dead-ender” was acceptable in Rumsfeld’s company as a description for those mounting attacks on the occupation forces, his preferred term was “Former Saddam Loyalist,” which quickly and inevitably became the acronym FSL. Other words that were beginning to come into use in the world outside, such as “insurgent” or “resistance,” were completely out of bounds. Even Cambone thought this rule was silly, but Rumsfeld was adamant that the United States was not facing “anything like a guerrilla war, or an organized resistance.” He took particular exception to a reporter’s use of the word “quagmire,” an unwelcome reminder of Vietnam. “It’s a different time,” he said. “It’s a different era. It’s a different place.”30
On the other hand, the U.S. military in Iraq was definitely evoking memories of a different time that summer, launching massive Vietnam-style “sweeps” with pretentious code names—Ivy Lightning, Desert Scorpion, Peninsula—aimed at rounding up the FSLs who were giving Operation Iraqi Freedom a bad name. As they crashed through the countryside, these operations tended to have one significant effect, which was to increase the level of hostility between both sides. That summer I heard the GI’s refrain “They hate us and we hate them” for the first time. To the soldiers, all Iraqis were now “hajis,” as all Vietnamese a generation before had been “gooks.”
There is no reason to believe that the several hundred thousand troops trimmed by Rumsfeld from the invasion force would have had any different attitudes. Their presence was therefore as likely to have hastened the insurgency as prevented it.
The Geneva conventions, tossed aside almost casually in Afghanistan, were supposedly fully in effect in Iraq. But in reality, they were equally unwelcome and unobserved. Civilians picked up in the sweeps as suspected FSLs were “persons under confinement,” or PUCs. A statement given by “Sergeant A” of the 82nd Airborne to Human Rights Watch in 2005 provides a chilling illustration of the consequences of this officially sanctioned policy at the farther end of the chain of command. From August 2003, the sergeant was stationed at Camp Mercury, a “forward operating base” close to the town of Fallujah, due west of Baghdad. As he explained, “To ‘fuck a PUC’ meant to beat him up. We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs, and stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day. To ‘smoke’ someone is to put them in stress positions until they get muscle fatigue and pass out. That happened every day…. On their day off, people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the fucking cook. He shouldn’t be in with no PUCs…. People would just volunteer just to get their frustrations out. We had guys from all over the base just come to guard PUCs so they could fuck them up. Broken bones didn’t happen too often, maybe every other week.”31
Following this experience, PUCs and prisoners collected by other units were sent on to Abu Ghraib, the sinister prison just outside Baghdad where Saddam had held the bulk of his prisoners. His successors in the Republican Palace had deemed it too useful to discard. No one in the Green Zone, or in Washington, appears to have reflected on the symbolism of this decision.
Quite apart from the violence routinely meted out to “hajis,” Iraqis had other reasons to feel disillusioned with the occupation. Traveling around the country a few months after the invasion, I was struck by the fact that every Iraqi I met, in Sunni and Shi’ite areas, was utterly convinced that the occupation was intrinsically corrupt. Many had concrete examples to back up their accusations. Businessmen complained that bribes were solicited in exchange for reconstruction work; ordinary citizens insisted that they were routinely robbed by military patrols searching their houses or cars at checkpoints. Thanks to a well-founded distrust of the banking system under Saddam, ordinary people often kept their entire life savings at home, often in the form of dollars, troves that occupation search parties all too often confiscated on the grounds that the money signified some connection to the dead-enders. “I keep hearing rumors about our attached infantry company. Apparently they are under investigation for a few ‘incidents,’” a young infantry captain based in Baiji, a grim city in the northern Sunni Triangle, wrote home to his family that first August. “It seems that whenever they get the chance, they steal money from the locals. I’m not talking about small amounts of cash, I’m talking about a nice, fat bankroll. They take the money during raids, while searching cars, while detaining locals.”
The immorality, as well as the practical consequences, of such behavior toward the local population was clearly apparent to many officers and men. “I really don’t care for the Iraqi people, I don’t care about helping them get back on their feet,” the captain continued in his letter, which was later forwarded to me by his father, a decorated Vietnam veteran distraught at his son’s involvement in this repetition of history. “However, I don’t condone stealing from them, hurting them unnecessarily or threatening them with violence if it is not needed. We will never win hearts and minds here, but what these guys are doing is wrong. I am positive that this isn’t happening in my company, and that’s all I can really affect.” Such determination to maintain the honor and standards of his profession was, unfortunately, all too rare.
Far away in Washington, oblivious to the ground truths of life under occupation, not to mention the everyday barbarism of the PUC tents, Rumsfeld was growing increasingly frustrated at the constant talk of “guerrilla war” and “resistance,” which was infecting even the higher echelons of Centcom and the army staff. In August, for example, he arranged for a briefing for senior civilian and military staff that had been prepared by an officer at JFCOM (Paul Van Riper’s bête noire) on “lessons learned” in the invasion of Iraq. Rumsfeld highly approved of the presentation, which had some very positive things to say about the “transformational” aspects of the campaign. But his mood was spoiled by some unexpectedly frank comments from General Jack Keane, the acting chief of staff of the army. (Shinseki had finally left in April; neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz had been invited to his leaving ceremony.) “You never told us we’d be facing this insurgency,” one attendee recalls Keane saying to Rumsfeld. “You never told us there would be resistance.” Neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz, who was also present, reacted to this outburst. “They both just sat there.”
Sometime in mid-August, however, Rumsfeld took action to deal with the question of “insurgency” once and for all. During an intelligence briefing in his office he reportedly expressed outrage at the quality of intelligence he was receiving from Iraq, which he loudly and angrily referred to as “shit,” banging the table with his fist “so hard we thought he might break it,” according to one report. His principal complaint was that the reports were failing to confirm what he knew to be true—that hostile acts against U.S. forces in Iraq were entirely the work of FSLs and dead-enders. Scathingly, he compared the quality of the Iraqi information with the excellent intelligence that was now, in his view, being extracted from prisoners being held at Guantánamo, or “Gitmo,” as the military termed it, under the able supervision of prison commander Major General Geoffrey Miller.32 Rumsfeld concluded his diatribe with a forthright instruction to Cambone that Miller be ordered immediately to the Abu Ghraib prison and “Gitmoize it.” Cambone, in turn, dispatched the deputy under-secretary of defense for intelligence, Lieutenant General William Boykin, a fervent Christian fundamentalist given to deriding the Muslims’ Allah as “an idol,” to Cuba to brief Miller on his mission.33
Boykin must have given Miller careful instructions, for he arrived in Iraq fully prepared, bringing with him experts such as a female interrogator practiced in the art of sexually taunting prisoners, as well as useful tips on the use of dogs as a means of intimidating interviewees. First on his list of appointments was Lieutenant Ricardo Sanchez, who had succeeded McKiernan as the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq. It must have been an instructive conversation. Within thirty-six hours Sanchez issued instructions on detainee interrogation that mirrored those authorized by Rumsfeld for use at Guantánamo in December the previous year, which gave cover to techniques including hooding, nudity, stress positions, “fear of dogs,” and “mild” physical contact with prisoners. There were, however, some innovations in Sanchez’s instructions, such as sleep and dietary manipulation. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the overall commander of the U.S. military prison system in Iraq at that time, later insisted that she did not know what was being done to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, though she did recall Miller remarking that “at Guantánamo Bay we learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing that they have” and “if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you’ve lost control of them.”
The techniques were apparently fully absorbed by the Abu Ghraib interrogators and attendant military police, as became apparent when photographs snapped by the MPs finally began to surface, initially on CBS News’s 60 Minutes in late April 2004. When Rumsfeld first learned that there were pictures extant of naked, humiliated, and terrified prisoners being abused by cheerful Americans, he said, according to an official who was present, “I didn’t know you were allowed to bring cameras into a prison!”
It is not clear when Rumsfeld first saw the actual photographs. He himself testified under oath to Congress that he first saw them in expurgated form when they were published in the press, and only got to look at the originals nine days later after his office had been “trying to get one of the disks for days and days.”34
The army’s criminal investigation division began a probe on January 16, 2004, after Joseph Darby, a soldier not involved in the abuse, slipped them a CD containing some of the photos. As the CID investigation set to work, Karpinski, according to her later testimony, asked a sergeant at the prison “What’s this about photographs?” The sergeant replied, “Ma’am, we’ve heard something about photographs, but I have no idea. Nobody has any details, and ma’am, if anybody knows, nobody is talking.” When she asked to see the log-books kept by the military intelligence personnel, she was told that the CID had cleared everything up. However, when she went to look for herself, she found they had missed a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators. “It was a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe six or eight techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of food; keeping the lights on—those kinds of things,” Karpinski said. Over to the side of the paper was a line of handwriting, which to her appeared to be in the same hand and with the same ink as the secretary’s signature. The line read: “Make sure this happens!!”
Further indications of Rumsfeld’s close interest in ongoing events at Abu Ghraib emerged in subsequent court proceedings. In May 2006, Sergeant Santos Cardona, an army dog handler, was court-martialed at Fort Meade, Maryland. In stipulated testimony, Major Michael Thompson, who had been assigned to the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion in the relevant period and reported to Colonel Tom Pappas, the battalion commander, stated that he was frequently told by Pappas’s executive assistant that “Mr. Donald Rumsfeld and Mr. Paul Wolfowitz” had called and were “waiting for reports.” The defense also read aloud stipulated testimony from Steve Pescatore, a civilian interrogator employed by CACI, a corporation contracted to assist in interrogations, who recalled being told by military intelligence personnel that Secretary Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz received “nightly briefings.”
Needless to say, the numerous investigations of itself by the military high command concluded that no officer or official above the rank of colonel bore any responsibility for Abu Ghraib. Colonel Pappas was granted immunity in return for his testimony against a dog handler. One of the investigations, conducted by former defense secretary James Schlesinger (who had become a friend of Rumsfeld’s since the distant days of the Ford administration), concluded that the whole affair had been simply “animal house on the night shift,” the acts of the untrained national guard military police unit from Cumberland, Maryland, assigned to Abu Ghraib.
This strategy of deflecting responsibility downward appears to have been crafted in the three desperate weeks that followed the initial call for comment on the photographs from 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes. While General Myers bought time with appeals to the broadcasters’ patriotism, Rumsfeld’s public affairs specialists went into crisis mode under the urgent direction of Larry Di Rita, who had taken on Torie Clarke’s responsibilities following her departure in April 2003. To help in developing tactics to deal with the storm they knew would break once 60 Minutes went ahead with its story, Di Rita’s staff summoned an “echo chamber” of public relations professionals, “all Republicans, of course,” as one official assured me, from big Washington firms to advise them. Naturally, the welloiled system for delivering the official line through the medium of TV military analysts was brought into play. Retired army general David Grange, one of the stars of this system, got the tone exactly right on CNN. Responding to a question from Lou Dobbs that though there were six soldiers facing charges, “their superiors had to know what was going on here,” Grange responded quickly, “Or they didn’t know at all because they lacked the supervision of those soldiers or [were not] inspecting part of their command.” In other words, the higher command’s fault lay not in their encouraging the torture at Abu Ghraib but simply in their failure to notice what the guards were up to. “These soldiers,” continued Grange indignantly, “these few soldiers let down the rest of the force in Iraq and the United States, to include veterans like myself. It is unexcusable.”35
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld accepted full responsibility without taking any blame, a standard response for high officials implicated in scandal. He said he’d had no idea what was going on in his Iraqi prisons until Specialist Darby, whom he commended, alerted investigators in January, though he also claimed that a vague press release on the investigation issued in Baghdad at that time had in fact “broken the story” and alerted “the whole world.” (His very specific identification of Darby rendered the previously anonymous whistle-blower liable to lethal sanctions from his fellow soldiers.) He said he had written not one but two letters of resignation to President Bush, which were rejected. General Myers testified under oath that he never informed Rumsfeld that he was trying to persuade CBS to suppress their report.36 After a leaked internal report by General Antonio Taguba, detailing how “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees” at Abu Ghraib, had been published in the press and even on Fox TV a few days after the original CBS broadcast, Feith sent an urgent memo around the Pentagon warning officials not to read it, or even discuss it with family members.37 What Rumsfeld did not mention in all his public protestations of regret over Abu Ghraib was that in the same month of May 2004, he had on his desk a report prepared by the navy inspector general’s office detailing the interrogation methods, refined in their cruelty, being practiced on José Padilla and other inmates in the South Carolina naval brig.
By the time the Abu Ghraib photographs had ensured, as Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) put it, that “for the next fifty years in the Islamic world and many other parts of the world, the image of the United States will be that of an American soldier dragging a prostrate, naked Iraqi across the floor on a leash,” it had become impossible even for Rumsfeld to blame the FSLs for the problems of Iraq. Casualties had been edging up steadily since the previous fall. In late October an imaginatively planned rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad had almost killed Wolfowitz. Apparently undismayed, he continued his tour of inspection, at one point landing his helicopter in a field near Tikrit to address a group of Iraqi farmers on the subject of De Tocqueville and democracy. A few days later, a shoulder-fired rocket brought down a Chinook helicopter, killing sixteen American servicemen. “In a long, hard war,” said Rumsfeld, “we’re going to have tragic days, as this is. But they are necessary.” Gingrich, who was still in close contact with the secretary, told a friend that “we’re going to use the Shia and the Kurds to go after the Sunni.” Recruitment for the new Iraqi army was stepped up, most of the recruits coming from the Shi’ite and Kurdish communities. Whatever the intent, this had the inevitable effect of exacerbating sectarian tensions. The rebellious Sunni now perceived the Shi’ites as traitors, collaborators with the occupying enemy, and felt free to launch bloody attacks on them, which of course elicited equally bloody reprisals.
By April 2004, while Myers and others in Rumsfeld’s entourage strove to keep Abu Ghraib off the air, all of Iraq was in flames. A team of private security consultants from the Blackwater Corporation were ambushed and killed in Fallujah, the city west of Baghdad that had been a center of resistance ever since U.S. troops had opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators shortly after the invasion. The Blackwater ambush occurred close by the spot where local day laborers customarily waited for employers, and it was these people who dragged the dead Americans from their vehicle and dismembered the bodies.
Contrary to the advice of local marine commanders, orders from Washington directed that “heads roll” in Fallujah, and the marines therefore launched a full-scale attack on the town. Simultaneously, the radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr rose in revolt, seizing control of Najaf, the holiest site in the Shi’ite religion. After heavy fighting, the marines were forced to withdraw from Fallujah while al-Sadr remained in control of Najaf. So critical was the military situation at that point, a year after the triumphant entry into Baghdad, that the sybaritic Green Zone briefly ran short of food. The U.S. military was so caught off guard and oblivious to realities on the ground that they continued to send fuel convoys on roads controlled by insurgents, which were then promptly attacked and destroyed. Scrambling for reinforcements, army commanders were reduced to flying in individual tanks from Germany, at vast expense.
The war had settled into a pattern. U.S. successes, when they occurred, were temporary, or masked a setback elsewhere. In November 2004, for example, the marines launched a renewed assault on the town of Fallujah, reducing much of the city to ruins in the process of occupying it. But meanwhile, unnoticed by most of the outside world, the insurgents captured the far bigger and more important city of Mosul. A renewed effort to “kill or capture” al-Sadr with a heavy attack on his Najaf lair once again ended in a stalemate. In Washington, officials, including Rumsfeld, emphasized and reemphasized that the U.S. strategy was to train a new Iraqi army and police force to take responsibility for security. But despite a flood of statistics to demonstrate progress in this effort, the grimmer statistic of U.S. casualties in Iraq was what attracted the attention of Americans back home. Month by month, the toll of the dead and wounded mounted.
Rumsfeld showed every sign of being engrossed in the day-to-day details of the war. His daily schedule revealed hours blocked off for videoconferences with his commanders in Iraq. Yet it was hard to see any practical effects of this hands-on management. For example, though building the new Iraqi army was the highest priority, it emerged in 2005 that corrupt officials in the Iraqi government had stolen all—not a portion, all—of the fledgling force’s budget for new weapons, some $1.3 billion. This enormous robbery had apparently proceeded unnoticed by any of the U.S. command in Baghdad, including General David Petraeus, the media favorite with specific responsibility for training the new army. Nor had Rumsfeld, it seemed, cared to ask after the equipping of the new force supposedly so important to administration plans for Iraq.
The lack of planning could be seen not only in broad terms but also in the most minute detail. While Iraqi soldiers were forced to ride to combat in battered pickup trucks because the money for proper armored vehicles had been stolen, U.S. forces were not that much better off. Although the Iraq war had already cost over $130 billion, $77 billion in 2004 alone,38 families of American soldiers were spending their own money, in some cases going heavily into debt, in order to buy vital equipment such as body armor for their sons, brothers, or husbands in Iraq. In October 2004, 60 Minutes reported that soldiers in Iraq were resorting to making their own makeshift protection for unarmored Humvees, using sandbags and plywood. In addition, they were scouring scrapheaps for discarded armor that they could use for a little extra protection. Asked by the program for comment, an army spokesman complacently replied, “As long as the army has a single vehicle without armor, we expect that our soldiers will continue to find ways to increase their level of protection.”39
Pictures of American soldiers improvising wooden armor were more than just a reflection of the uncaring and incompetent civilian and military high command that sent them. In a literal sense they illustrated the defeat of an idea. Manifestos inspired by the revolution in military affairs, such as the neoconservatives’ Rebuilding America’s Defenses, had given little or no consideration to guerrilla insurgencies, and the techniques they might adopt to counter U.S. military technology. No one seemed to want to reflect on the Vietnam experience, which might have served as a reminder of the devastating effect of home-made mines.
So it was that the appearance of the improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq came as a nasty surprise. The phenomenon can probably be dated from May 26, 2003, when Private First Class Jeremiah D. Smith of Odessa, Missouri, was killed when a bomb in a canvas bag exploded under his Humvee on the Baghdad airport highway. At the time, the Defense Department said he had been killed by “unexploded ordnance.” By July, however, the military were officially listing IED as a cause of death, of which there were four cases that month. The number soon began to climb, as this was a weapon ideally suited to local conditions. Iraq was blessed with an extensive and well-built road system, limitless stocks of freely accessible explosives, many capable engineers, and a huge pool of trained military personnel who had been rendered recently and abruptly unemployed.
Equally necessary for IED utility, from the very beginning the commanders of the occupying army placed a premium on “presence,” a concept that found practical expression in convoys of (lightly) armored vehicles traveling up and down the roads, often in predictable patterns. As a Defense Department analyst who carried out an in-depth study of the IED phenomenon remarked to me, “We have a contract with the insurgents; they bring the bomb, and we bring the target.”
The military were ill equipped to deal with the problem. A combat engineer in a unit assigned to search for IEDs explained that he found an out-of-print Vietnam-era manual useful, and thought it had not been reissued because no one at the top wanted to encourage comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. Combat engineers were trained to clear Soviet minefields with metal detectors, but they were of little use here, as Iraqi roadsides where IEDs were planted customarily doubled as garbage dumps, and were littered with cans and other metal junk.
Fairly speedily, according to the Pentagon specialist on the subject, the manufacture and distribution of IEDs were making a significant contribution to the Iraqi economy, employing upwards of twenty thousand people. The forty or fifty separate resistance groups, though of widely differing ideological persuasions, all tended to be organized in similar fashion. Under a senior commanding figure, four or five organizers would each supply roughly five bomb makers with the necessary finance. Each of the bomb makers would in turn supply bombs to five or so “placers,” who selected the sites for the bomb and put them in place. Finally, the “triggermen” would wait for a suitable target to pass within lethal range of the bomb and detonate it. On average, intelligence collected over the years indicated, one week would elapse between production of a bomb and its detonation. Despite differing political agendas among the groups, technical and tactical information on innovations in bomb-making techniques, and developments in U.S. counter-IED tactics, appeared to flow rapidly from group to group.
The success of the weapon was summed up in the a DoD study in one devastating statistical ratio: seven to one. “We lose seven people for every one bomb planter we kill or capture. Given that thousands of people are engaged in the activity, this means that the risk for an individual in planting a bomb, for which he gets paid $100, is essentially zero.”
Early in 2006, the IED problem, already responsible for roughly half of all U.S. casualties, took on a new urgency. Almost since the beginning of the occupation, units had occasionally been hit by an IED variant known as EFPs, which stood for “explosively formed projectiles,” against which even up-to-date armor, let alone plywood and sandbags, was no defense at all. These were “shaped charge” bombs: high explosives packed around a metal cone, easily manufactured in any machine shop. When detonated, the explosives compress the cone, squeezing it forward, so that it becomes a high-speed jet of molten metal capable of piercing the armor even of an M-1 tank “like butter.” This had far-reaching implications for any occupation force. “EFPs are the reason the Israelis left Lebanon [in 2000]. There comes a point where you simply cannot afford to travel by road,” one specialist told me.
By the spring of 2006, EFP detonations were at one hundred a month and climbing. In April, Rumsfeld came to Baghdad and asked officers he encountered to tell him their biggest concerns. EFPs, he was told, every time. He was in fact already aware of the problem, throwing his weight behind the preferred military solution: money. At Fort Belvoir, Virginia, a few miles south of Washington, a new organization had sprung up endowed with limitless funds and hundreds of engineers. Its one task was summed up in its name: Joint IED Defeat. In 2006, this rapidly expanding enterprise spent $3.32 billion, without practical result. Since the other side often relied on cell phones or car-door openers to detonate their explosives, the engineers did develop a device to jam the signal. It cost $100,000 apiece, the same as the Humvees on which it was mounted, although when it was discovered that one jammer did not cover the full spectrum that could be used by the other side, IED Defeat recommended the use of a second $100,000 jammer on all vehicles. IED makers quickly responded by shifting to nonradio means of detonating their weapons, such as infrared beams, pressure plates, and other mechanisms. “What did that $3.32 billion really buy us?” a former high-ranking Pentagon official said to me. “Zero.”
In December 2004, before the spread of EFPs began to nullify even the thickest armor, Rumsfeld was passing through Kuwait and scheduled one of his “town meetings,” at which he was accustomed to exhort the troops and answer a few deferential questions. Specialist Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee National Guard drew cheers from his comrades when he asked why, after three years of fighting, “do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles, and why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?”
Rumsfeld replied that matters were improving but “as you know, you go to war with the army that you have…not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” He might have added that in his mind the entire invasion of Iraq had been intended as a showcase for the army he wished to have, which was now being defeated. But he didn’t bring up transformation that day in Kuwait. The battle-weary troops might not have understood.