COMMENTARY
The problem with this interview is that there is no connecting of the dots between the money involved and the behavior of Bremer and his staff. Very few people have any idea how much money was wasted in the occupation of Iraq without very much being accomplished of durable value.
Peter Burgess

BRIEF OVERVIEW

L. Paul 'Jerry' Bremer served as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004. In this wide-ranging interview, he addresses the major events and policies of his tenure, including: turf wars in Washington; his controversial orders on de-Baathification and disbanding the Iraqi army -- decisions which some argue fueled the burgeoning insurgency; his repeated requests for additional U.S. troops on the ground; his disagreements with the military; his request to halt the April 2004 Fallujah offensive; his problems with Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi army; and the final handover of sovereignty to Iraqis. Though he admits 'disappointing results' in providing security, Bremer disagrees with the categorization of the CPA's tenure as a 'lost year': '[O]n the whole, the American people can say we did a noble thing,' he tells FRONTLINE. '… We put the Iraqis on the right path, politically, to a better political future, and they now have got, certainly, the right plans to rebuild their economy. All that remains now is to effect a security strategy that defeats the Sunni insurgency.'

Tell me the story of how you get this job.

I was contacted by two people -- Paul Wolfowitz, who is deputy secretary of defense, and Scooter Libby, who was the vice president's chief of staff, both of whom I'd known for decades -- who asked if I would be interested in being considered to go over and run the Coalition Provisional Authority [CPA]. I said, 'Well, I've got to talk to my wife,' who managed to restrain her enthusiasm at this prospect, I have to say, but in the end agreed. …

Off the top, what things were you concerned about when you got the job?

I had two concerns which I raised in my early meetings before I went to Baghdad. The first was that I felt this was going to be a difficult and long, time-consuming job. I told the president that it would be more in the line of a marathon than a sprint, that this was going to be hard. Not that I knew that much about Iraq -- I didn't. But I'm a historian; I had studied postwar conflict, post-conflict situations, so I knew it was going to take time.

I needed to be sure that whatever responsibility I had was aligned with the authority. It's very important not to have a lot of responsibility and not enough authority. Those were my two main concerns.

You talked with the president about all of this?

Yes, I did. The most important conversation I had was at a one-on-one luncheon that he invited me to about 10 days before I went to Baghdad. I had not met the president before. He was very open, and we discussed quite a lot -- China and the Middle East and so forth. I found him very well informed. There was no detail missing.

But then we got to Iraq, and I basically said, 'I'm going to need some help.' He said, 'How can I help you?' I said: 'Two ways. Number one, we're going to need time to make this happen. It's going to be really tough.' … And he said very clearly, 'I'll give you whatever time you need. I'm not going to be dissuaded by the polls or by the pundits or by the election cycle,' because this was, of course, in May of 2003, so about a year and a half before he would have been up for re-election. I said, 'I need to be sure I have adequate authority to carry out the job you're giving me.' … And he said: 'Don't worry. I understand that. We'll fix that.'

You didn't need to take this job. Why did you do it?

Well, I had been involved in the war on terrorism for more than 20 years, from my time in the State Department and from my former position as chairman of the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism. I had served on the president's Homeland Security Advisory Council. I had been on a number of other commissions.

I was deeply concerned about terrorism and homeland security and felt that it was important that we had defeated Saddam Hussein who, as far as we knew, was [the head of] a state which supported terrorism. He had been so identified by administrations of both of our political parties, and I felt that the idea of bringing decent government to the Iraqi people was a good thing.

I came at it with a combination of basically a realistic view of the importance to American security … and a more general view that bringing democracy to countries in the Middle East, particularly an important country like Iraq, was in America's interest.

I thought it was going to be tough. It turned out to be a lot tougher job than I thought it was going to be.

In getting up to speed on Iraq, who was helping you? What were you learning?

I was based in the Defense Department, and they arranged a whole series of briefings by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Treasury, Department of Justice -- a whole series of briefings and briefing papers that were given to me to read.

In general, I was learning about what was the situation as it appeared before the war and as we expected it to be. Since I'm a historian, I was also at night trying to read more about the history of Mesopotamia and Iraq, because although I had lived in this region before -- I lived in Afghanistan for two years -- I had not lived in Iraq. Iraq was not that familiar to me, except in a general way of the history of Mesopotamia. … It was a bit of a kaleidoscope. There were only two and a half weeks there, so it was pretty intense. …

Did you wonder why the mission would reside, at least in some ways, in the Defense Department and not the State Department?

Not really. It seemed to me logical. The last time we had occupied a country was in Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War. In both cases, the occupation was run by the War Department, as the Defense Department was then called.

In fact, there's a strong argument for [why] it is exactly the right place for this kind of a process to be, because this kind of a project, an occupation, involves very intense coordination between the political and military chain of command, if you will. In the American system, the only place, short of the president of the United States, where the civilian and military chain of command can come together is with the secretary of defense. If you put the coalition into the State Department, you are exacerbating what are already always difficulties of coordination. …

[Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld, when you talked to him before you go, does he have a road map, a plan? What does he articulate to you as the mission?

Well, they had done thinking about this in the Pentagon, obviously. They had papers which described, … for example, what should we do about senior Baath Party officials. They had papers and prepared documents on these kinds of things.

I was briefed as well by the military side, as I mentioned, on their plans and what they hoped to accomplish in terms of the American force levels in Iraq. I don't remember all the details, but there were certainly a lot of papers around; that's for sure. …

Much has been made, of course, of the fact that before the war, there was very little postwar planning -- or, it was an optimistic postwar planning.

The answer is somewhat complicated when one thinks about the prewar planning. The prewar planning was based on assumptions about the kinds of problems that the U.S. government expected to find in Iraq after liberation. The planning, as it turns out, was based on the wrong assumptions. …

In some ways, even more importantly, the information that we had about the state of the Iraqi economy was not good. The economy was in much worse shape than I had been led to believe. … Saddam had taken one of the richest countries in the Middle East and driven it into the ground over a period of 25 years. … I'm not even sure, if the assumptions on the planning had been better, [if] we would have still had a plan that would have helped us, because the fundamental situation of the economy was so much worse than we thought.

How would you characterize what Rumsfeld was telling you to do? …

The direction that all of us followed was from the president, and his direction was quite clear: that we were going to try to set the Iraqis on a path to democratic government and help them rebuild their country.

Now, none of us at that time [knew] -- certainly I didn't know -- what that would entail. The general guidance I had from the president and others was, 'Get over there and give us your recommendation.'

Less than three weeks after I had been in Iraq, the president asked me to come to a meeting with him in Qatar in the Gulf, where I was already beginning to be able to give him a general sense of the situation, in particular how bad the economy was.

Did you know you were going to find yourself sort of betwixt and between with the military, whose inclination was to reduce forces as quickly as possible? ...

No. The problems, the tensions with the military inclination to want to cut down quickly and the president's guidance, 'Let's do this right' -- those tensions didn't become apparent to me, really, until September of 2003.

What brought them to the fore was the preparations that by September the military had to start to do for the first big rotation of American units. It was going to come up after everybody had been on the ground a year, so the rotations were going to start in February, March and April of 2004. It was when they started worrying about those rotations that some of these problems really started to come up.

Tell me about your team at the CPA.

I inherited most of the people who were working for me. They had deployed with [head of Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA)] Gen. [Jay] Garner to Kuwait before the war and then had come up to Baghdad right after liberation in April. I think there were about 400 or 500 on his staff. Then I hired maybe a half dozen people to be my personal staff before I went down.

And who were they?

I asked a friend who had been my deputy twice before in the State Department named Ambassador [Clayton] McManaway, who also had served for five years in Vietnam, and knew a lot about the military/civilian component of this kind of operation. He came and was my deputy.

I asked probably the State Department's most senior and respected area expert, Arabist Ambassador Hugh Horan, who had just retired but was willing to come out of retirement, [to] be, in effect, my senior adviser on the Arabic side of it. I hired a friend who had been my executive assistant twice before in the State Department to come run my office. Then the military nominated a couple of military aides to come work with me, and I took them with me. So it was a mix.

What do you see when you first get there?

We flew on a C-130 into Baghdad on May 12. ... The thing that was striking to us as we flew into Baghdad was that a lot of the buildings were on fire. This was the looting that had started almost with the fall of Saddam's statue. It was to me a rather striking thing to see, both from the air and then driving into town, these buildings on fire and looting going on.

When did you know it was a big problem?

I knew it was a big problem the night I got there. I raised the question of the looting at my first staff meeting and said I thought the fact that we were not stopping the looting meant we were not carrying out one of the fundamental roles of any government, which is to provide law and order for its citizens. We were the government of Iraq under international law, and to me it was right from the start clear that this was something you needed to take some steps against.

What did you do?

I did one thing that wasn't very smart, which was suggest to the staff meeting that I thought our military should have authority to shoot the looters, which they did not have at that time. I pointed out that when we had faced a similar kind of a problem of looting in Haiti in the mid-1990s, our forces had shot some looters, and that was the end of the looting.

This wasn't very smart to do, because somebody on the staff immediately told the press that I had suggested shooting the looters, and we had a problem.

More practically, I suggested to Secretary Rumsfeld and [CENTCOM Commander] Gen. [John] Abizaid that we ought to take a look at the rules of engagement that our forces have. What this military calls the 'rules of engagement' are basically their orders, and the military rightly pointed out, 'We don't have orders to shoot unarmed civilians, even if they're stealing something.' I asked Gen. Abizaid if he could send us some more American MPs [military police] to try to bring some order to Baghdad.

People tend to forget that before the war, Saddam had opened up all of his prisons and let all the prisoners out, some of whom were probably political prisoners. But we estimated somewhere between 100,000 to 120,000 prisoners had been let loose, many of them convicted murderers, rapists, arsonists.

Where does the CPA Order No. 1 come from, the de-Baathification decree? What was the thinking? How did it evolve? Did you come with it in mind?

The concept behind the de-Baathification decree was that the Baath Party had been one of the primary instruments of Saddam's control and tyranny over the Iraqi people for decades. Saddam Hussein himself openly acknowledged that he modeled the Baath Party on the Nazi Party because he admired the way in which Hitler was able to use the Nazi Party to control the German people. Just as in our occupation of Germany we had passed what were called 'de-Nazification decrees' and prosecuted senior Nazi officials, the model for the de-Baathification was to look back at that de-Nazification.

The decree itself I saw actually the day before I left for Baghdad. It was shown to me. I guess it had been being worked [on] in the Pentagon. I don't know all the details of who looked at it, ... but the lawyers and everybody had been at it. I suggested that the decree not be issued right away, that it be held until I got to Baghdad so that I could [get] a sense of what we were going to do and how we were going to do it.

Now, in his freedom message in April, before I got there, the Baath Party had already been outlawed by [then-CENTCOM Commander] Gen. [Tommy] Franks. So the question then was, what do we do about officials in the Baath Party? ...

Garner sees it and takes it to the CIA station chief or whatever, and they come roaring into you. Do you remember that?

No, I don't remember hearing from them. I knew that the agency estimated -- and I double-checked it after I got there -- that it would affect about 1 percent of the Baath Party members, [roughly 20,000] people.

You don't remember these guys coming in and saying, 'Thirty thousand to 50,000 people -- my God, what are you doing?'

It doesn't mean it didn't happen. I was working 20 hours a day in that period as well, and this wasn't the only thing on my list of things to do the first five days I was there. I had a lot of other things to do.

But this is a big one, right?

There were a lot of big things that first five days. There were a lot of big things the first 48 hours. I don't say it didn't happen. I knew there were concerns. I knew the agency made the assessment that there were about 20,000 people to be thrown out of work, and I judged in the end that that was a risk that we were willing to take. ...

He may have come in and spoken to me at great length about it. I just don't remember it, honestly don't remember it. But I was under no illusions it was going to be difficult. I'm not trying to dust off his concerns; I'm just saying I don't remember the meeting.

Did you feel like you were rolling the dice a little bit, though? I mean, it kind of intuitively makes sense that you don't want to let too many of them go. You want infrastructure.

I had to keep my eye on the broader strategic picture here, too, which was that we had sent an American Army halfway around the world to throw out this hated regime. American men and women had lost their lives in that process. The Iraqi people had a promise of a better life from this process of getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and the promise of better government.

In my view, one had to weigh the potential negative consequences of some people being unhappy against the broader goals and what we were trying to accomplish in Iraq. To me, it was the right thing to do.

It was, in historical terms, compared to de-Nazification in Germany on which it was modeled, much, much milder than what we did in Germany.

Just so that I understand, was or wasn't this your plan?

No, it wasn't my plan. It was a plan that had been discussed and worked on, I suppose, with some intensity in the government. As I said, I was shown this draft decree the day before I left, so it was well-developed long before I was even in the government. I might add one thing on this de-Baathification, which is important to remember: The State Department, a year before the war, had called together a group of Iraqi exiles to talk about what a post-Saddam Iraq would look like. The resulting study, which was a 2,000-to-3,000-page study called the Future of Iraq Project, was all over the lot in terms of what postwar Iraq should look like, except on one subject: De-Baathification absolutely had to happen; the senior members of the Baath Party had to be got rid of, and the Baath ideology should be got rid of. The impetus for this was not some idea that sprung full blown from somebody's head in the United States government. This was based on the recommendation of Iraqis who were in exile. ... How do you feel about [Iraqi National Congress founder Ahmad] Chalabi? Chalabi is a complex figure, very smart, extremely articulate, very media-wise, savvy in how to use the media, and one of the very few Iraqis whom I met in my time there, in government or outside, who actually understands a modern economy and what it took to open Iraq's economy. He was very helpful in a number of the major economic steps we took while we were there. But he's obviously controversial. He has a reputation for being a bit slippery. He's been accused of crimes in other countries and in Iraq and so forth and so on. I found that on the economic stuff, he was very helpful to us. Many people point a finger at you and say you gave Chalabi de-Baathification. ... Well, I didn't give it to Chalabi. I did make a mistake. The de-Baathification policy was the right policy -- absolutely satisfied with that. It was based very much like the de-Nazification after World War II, because the Baath Party, as Saddam himself said publicly and often, was modeled on the Nazi Party, including having children spies. … The implementation is where I went wrong. I knew that we, the foreigners --- whether it was Americans or British or Australians or Romanians or Poles -- we were going to have a hard time making the kind of fine distinctions that de-Baathification policy required. Did [a person] join the party because he was a real believer, or did he join it because he wanted to be a teacher, and to be a teacher you had to join the party? I said: 'We're not going to be able to make those distinctions. I need to turn it over to Iraqis.' The mistake I made was turning it over to the Governing Council. I should have turned it over instead to a judicial body of some kind. The Governing Council, in turn, turned it over to Chalabi. I did not turn it over to Chalabi. It is true that once the Governing Council took it over, they started interpreting the policy, implementing the policy much more broadly, and we had to walk the cat back in the spring of 2004. ... The decision to undo the Iraq army and the police, where does that come from? First of all, there's a difference between the army and the police, and it's an interesting difference. In the case of the police, we asked the police to come back on duty. They had left. The looting going on in Baghdad was, to some degree, because there were no police on duty in the city. So we called the police back, and we tried to basically rebuild the police. That was a different approach than the approach dealing with Saddam's army. … Recalling [the army] had both political and practical problems, [a] practical problem being that more than 300,000 of the enlisted men were basically Shi'a draftees. They had gone home. They went back to their homes and their villages, their farms. They hated the army because they were brutalized and hazed by their mostly Sunni officers. Recalling them would have meant, in effect, sending American soldiers into the Shi'a homes and villages and farms and forcing them at gunpoint back into an army they hated. The political problem was that because the army had been instrumental in genocide against the 20 percent of the [population who were] Kurds and killing fields against the 60 percent [of the population], of the Shi'a, to recall the army would have been a clear signal to Iraqi people that while we got rid of one terrible man, Saddam Hussein, we were prepared to see the Sunni elite come back in the form of the officer corps. Therefore, the recommendation that I made to my government was that we not do that, that we effectively build a new army from the ground up, always allowing that anybody from the old army who wanted to come and apply for enlisted men in the new army was able to do that. Anybody in the officer corps up to the level of colonel was able to apply for those positions. So that's what we did. ...

Many military people we've talked to said [they were] stunned, shocked, amazed that a, they hadn't been consulted, so they remember; and b, that this fundamentally cuts away the force that they were hoping to rely on. ... Garner says: 'I had a lot of guys lined up who were ready to come back to work on the 15th of May. ... Bremer wouldn't even listen to me about this; that this was really, of all the things, the most fundamental error the guy made during that time.'

When you make a decision like that, or issue Order No. 1, how much is Rumsfeld involved in that? Is it back and forth between the two of you?

Was he as impatient with you as he was with Franks and others?

Help me understand Garner's situation in this. What were you told about why you were going to Baghdad?

Gen. Garner, when we interviewed him, says his goal was to push the Iraqis toward an interim government, elections and a constitution quickly. What was Washington's problem? ..

What did it tell you about Garner and about Washington?

How flawed was ORHA? What happened?

Was the Dobbins report, the RAND study, important?

My very able staff was able to locate an unmarked U.S. government plane in a different part of the airport so that when I got to the airport to leave, I got onto a C-130 and waved goodbye to the Iraqi deputy prime minister. I got on with my security detail and we pulled up the stairs, and we just sat in the C-130, which was not comfortable, by the way. The temperature was about 120 that day in the airport. We sat there for about 15 minutes while the press and everybody went away, and then we went off out over the cargo -- it was in the C-130 in the back -- and flew on a helicopter to another part of the airport, and instead of going out on a C-130, went out on a smaller government plane to Jordan safely. ...

Jim Dobbins says: 'We went to Iraq with an overly ambitious agenda of social engineering. Expectations led to resistance, and we didn't have military or economic assistance to make it happen.'

I felt I had two major goals. First of all, it was to provide security for the Iraqi people. It's the fundamental goal of any government. It was my number one priority from the day I arrived virtually to the day I left. And secondly, [it was] to help the Iraqis rebuild their country, reclaim their country, rebuild it economically, put them on a path to political democracy. It was clear to me you couldn't do the second goal without achieving the first goal. Right from the start, I had put a very high emphasis on security. It was an ambitious undertaking to help Iraq reclaim its country, rebuild it economically, put it on a path to political freedom. ... Now, it is true, I think, that we didn't have sufficient resources, military and economic, to accomplish all of that in the 14 months of the occupation. By the time I left Iraq 14 months later, the American people had voted $18 billion to help reconstruct Iraq. By the time I left, less than 1 percent of that had actually been spent on Iraq reconstruction, and that's a problem I had with the bureaucracy in Washington. But it shows you that we were not bringing the resources quickly to bear on one of our major goals, which was to show improvement in the daily life of the Iraqis. Ambassador Dobbins is right that we had insufficient resources, military and economic. I do not believe it was an overly ambitious program. It was ambitious, no question. ... One of the things we noticed as we were talking to everybody is this idea of chain of command problems, or lack of boots on the ground and chain of command as an issue, the idea that you could be viceroy. Do you take umbrage at that term? Yeah. I call myself the administrator. ... We hear stories of you not knowing about military things that happened. ... Tell me a little bit about that. Well, this question of chain of command is complicated. [It] really, in a way, goes back to our Constitution, which established the military chain of command from the president now running down through the secretary of defense to the military commanders. It's quite clear that a civilian, which is what I was, was not going to be in the chain of command. I was not going to have authority to order troops around, nor would I have asked for that. I'm not a military expert. I wouldn't want to tell a general how to patrol with tanks. It's beyond my capability. We tried to resolve this difficulty by an order from the secretary of defense to the military commanders, asking them to coordinate and support my objectives, which by and large they tried to do. Obviously there are going to be always tensions between the military and political objectives of an occupation, and there were. You have to sort those out as best you can. There isn't a solution, a bureaucratic solution to it. ...

Rajiv Chandrasekaran has an impression that you wanted to have a kind of grand plan when you went in. ... Is he right about that?

We had an ambitious goal in Iraq set by the president, not by me, which I agreed with, which was to try to bring better government to Iraq and help them rebuild their economy, their country. That was the grand idea.

Behind that, in the president's mind, I think, lay the idea that bringing democracy to countries in the Middle East would improve the security of the United States, because it would take away the kind of brutal regime that Saddam had been. We'd been at war with all of his neighbors, after all.

So I agreed with the grand strategy, which is to try to bring democracy to these countries. But in terms of Iraq, my guidance was quite clear: Let's see if we can get the Iraqis on a path to democracy, to representative government, and help them rebuild their economy, help them reconstitute their economy. ...

One of the things that you'll read in Rajiv's book [Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone] is that the hiring process that you had was dysfunctional, that jobs went not to the best and the brightest, but to the loyal and the willing.

We had a lot of trouble with personnel, and there were two aspects. One, and the most important, was I never got enough people. Even as late as March of 2004, the inspector general reported that only 56 percent of our billets had been filled. We always had that problem right to the end.

I had very little control over the actual assignment of people there, other than my own staff. Frankly, I didn't have very much time anyway. What would I have done if I'd have [had] more control? Maybe I would have paid more attention; maybe I would have gotten better people. But that was basically taken care of by offices in Washington. ... I might see a biography, or one of my staff might, and we'd say yes or no, but we really didn't have, frankly, very much time to vet all of the people coming out there. That's true.

He talks about a group he calls the 'brat pack.' Does this sound familiar to you?

No. ... I don't know who they're referring to. I had 3,000 people working for me. ...

A lot of pundits and outside observers, and even some inside observers, have said ... that the Green Zone became very insular, that as it became harder and harder to travel around, to get out and about -- ...

There's no question that we had to pay a lot of attention to security, particularly after the rocket attack on the al-Rashid [Hotel]. And indeed it was because my security people said they can't move back in that I said to the staff, 'We're not moving back in there.'

It's true that as the insurgency picked up, it became more difficult for people to move around outside of the Green Zone. There's no question it became more difficult. It became more dangerous for me to travel, but I continued to travel, and I traveled to all the provinces throughout the 14 months, and I continued to travel. ... But I had a lot of protection. For my staff it was more difficult. There's no question it became harder.

On the other hand, it was also at this time, in the fall of 2003, that we finally got out provincial offices established in 15 different cities outside of Baghdad, where we had a very substantial number of American and other coalition diplomats, most of them Arabic-speaking, who were able to stay in touch.

People, particularly the journalists who were based in Baghdad, tended to think that the only information we had was [from] the people in the Green Zone, because they're the only people they saw, because the journalists didn't travel out to the provinces. But we had regular people reporting from Basra, Diwaniyah, from Qadisiyah Province, from Nineveh, from all over the country, really starting in the fall of 2003. Certainly it was harder for the people in Baghdad, no question. And it was dangerous for the people in the province[s].

... In Thomas Ricks' book [Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq], maybe even in Michael Gordon's book [Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq], there are stories about military guys coming into meetings at the Green Zone and finding it like an oasis, with discos and bars and pools and young people. There's a brothel [according to] one book. They kept saying, 'There's this weird civilian disconnect.' ... What about that?

Well, look, I traveled and visited military units all over the country, and they were living in very difficult and dangerous circumstances. It was hot; they didn't have running water; they were sleeping on cots, many times under canvas. It was tough. I suppose there's never been a war fought anywhere in history where the guys out in the field didn't look askance at the guys back at headquarters who are living it up and having a nice life.

Some of this, one must simply say, 'Well, tell me something new.' It is certainly the case that guys who are out there on the pointy end of the stick, putting their lives at risk every day in a very difficult circumstance, are going to see the headquarters through different eyes. I understand that.

It's not the Emerald City, though?

No. Well, I don't know where the term 'Emerald City' comes from. ... Just to be clear, we also had daily, or usually nightly, rocket and mortar attacks on the Green Zone. It was not a picnic there, either. It certainly wasn't as dangerous as being out at a forward operating base someplace, but we spent a lot of times in the bomb shelter in the Green Zone, too. ...

... When do you feel the presence of Blackwill at the National Security Council?

I didn't have any contact with him, or any substantive contact with him, until after Dr. Rice established this Iraq support group, which was in early October. ...

Blackwill told us he reads the traffic. ... He says: 'You know what? I don't like the way things are going over there. I don't like the political vibration. I don't like this idea of occupation. I don't know how long we can sustain it.' ... And then your op-ed piece appears in The Washington Post. And for him, the way he remembers the narrative, an alarm bell goes off. He says: 'We've got to do something about this. This is not going to work.' Sound familiar?

No.

... What do you remember him coming out to Iraq for?

By the time he came, but indeed by the time Dr. Rice set up her Iraqi support group, we knew full well that we were not going to be able to carry out the long-term program that I had laid out. We were not able to carry it out, not because Blackwill said we couldn't carry it out, but because Sistani said we couldn't carry it out.

Indeed, when I came back to Baghdad at the end of September, Sept. 30, I said to my staff, 'We're getting ourselves in a corner here, because Sistani has made it impossible for the Shi'a Islamists in the Iraqi government to get out of a corner to forgo following Sistani's guidance, which was that elections have to happen as the very first step.' As the U.N. had told us, as independent electoral experts had told us, if we made elections the first step in returning sovereignty, we would delay the return of sovereignty by two full years. I said, 'We can't wait two years.'

I had exactly the same perception that people in Washington had, which was we were worked into a corner, and we had to find our way out. It took us another [few] months to work our way out of that, which we did by Nov. 15. ...

[Tell me about your frustrations with Moqtada al-Sadr and the Mehdi army.]

My concern about Moqtada al-Sadr ... was that the Iraqi Justice Department, an Iraqi judge had issued an arrest warrant for him for killing a very highly respected ayatollah right after liberation, and one of our primary goals in Iraq was to establish the rule of law. Now, here's an Iraqi judge who has issued an arrest warrant, and he wants to go arrest this guy.

About the third week of July, Moqtada al-Sadr, in his newspaper, published a list of what he called '124 traitors,' people who were cooperating in some fashion with the coalition, translators. Two of those people, after that list had been published, were killed. In the article, he had said these traitors should get what they deserve.

He not only was subject to an arrest warrant issued by an Iraqi judge for the murder of a respected ayatollah, but his paper incited the actual continued murder of Iraqis who were cooperating with the coalition. I felt this was a very dangerous man, and I thought we should move against him before he got stronger.

I was unable to persuade our government to let this happen. ... The Iraqi police did not feel that they had sufficient force to be able to carry out the arrest unless they were backed up by coalition forces. ... My first effort to get him arrested by the Iraqis was in early August of 2003. ... Just as I thought we were getting to a point where we might persuade Washington to let the Iraqi police do this, we had the first major terrorist attack, the bombing of the U.N. building on Aug. 19, and the whole thing got pushed off into the future because there was a lot of concern there. Then we had a major attack in Najaf, another bombing two weeks later, that killed almost 200 people. It sort of went off the front burner for a couple of months. It came again in October; it came up again in March.

As time went on, it became clearer and clearer that this man was not only dangerous; he was really dangerous and effectively had learned everything he knew from Saddam Hussein. His Mehdi army, as he subsequently began to call them, went into towns in Qadisiyah Province in the south and conducted ethnic cleansing, basically killed and chased away gypsies.

He set up what he called 'courts,' which were extralegal courts just like Saddam Hussein had, kangaroo courts, which dragged people in and found them guilty and then put them in his own prisons. We had people who were escaped from the prisons who gave us eyewitness reports of their being tortured there. We then had eyewitnesses, women, who had been raped in his prisons. ...

I can't say that I had the foreknowledge when I first was anxious to crack down on him that he would be as bad as he was. I did believe that we should have moved while he only had a couple of hundred followers. By the time I left, he had thousands of followers.

Who were you talking to in Washington? Is this straight to Rumsfeld?

Yes, the secretary of defense.

And what would he say when you'd say, 'We've got to get this guy'?

Well, the first and most intense interaction that I remember was in this period of early August 2003, when I think, actually, most of the discussions were between my deputy ambassador and the undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, not directly between me and Rumsfeld. I may have had a conversation with Rumsfeld. I frankly don't remember.

But I know there were memos back and forth between McManaway and Feith, asking various questions about it. There were indications that some people in our military, who were reluctant to let the Iraqi police carry out this arrest, understandably worried that this would be politically controversial. That's true. It would have been difficult. It would have been a lot easier to do it in August, however, than it came to be later.

And did you ever have a sense that Rumsfeld understood ... that it was important to do?

No. ... There was another event in October when Moqtada's people killed a number of American soldiers in Karbala, the holy city in the south. I mean, he had actually killed them -- I mean, shot them.

At that point, it became clearer to some people in Washington that we had to move on him. At that point, then, there were problems about how we'd actually carry out the operation. ... Again, I think there were people in our military who were very reluctant to move against him. Again, I can understand it. This was not an easy decision. …

... Gen. Sanchez, gathering up, arresting across the country, taking people out of Abu Ghraib and other places -- how big a mistake were those sweeps?

I think the sweeps were justified. The problem wasn't that. The problem was that we had no effective system of triage, of deciding who we needed to keep. I began raising my concerns about these large numbers of detainees sometime at the end of the summer. I don't remember if it was in July or August, because at that point, we had about 10,000 Iraqis in a number of places.

It came home very clearly to me once, when a highly respected Iraqi judge came to me and said: 'Your forces have arrested a former member of the Iraqi Supreme Court, and he's a good man, even though he was a member of the Supreme Court. He's 76 years old, and I understand,' the Iraqi told me, 'he's being hold in Umm Qasr,' which is in the south. In August in Umm Qasr, you're talking about daytime temperatures in the 140s. He said, 'I will give you my personal word that he will not leave if you want to interrogate him again, but he really should, for health reasons, be got out of there.'

It took the military three weeks to find this guy to confirm they, in fact, had him. And then I asked. I said, 'Look, I've got the parole of a very senior Iraqi judge here who's willing to give his personal word on this guy.' It took another two weeks to get him released.

It was pretty clear to me that we had a really big problem managing this large number of detainees. I could understand that we would sweep them up. You're running a small platoon in through a neighborhood. You're fired on from a house, you go in, you arrest all of the men over 16 or 17 in the house. You take them in; you don't have time to interrogate them right there, because there's fire coming from the next building. ... I could understand that.

The problem was what we did with them then afterwards. We never really got an effective system for identifying [individuals], and doing effective triage on these detainees was very, very difficult. ...

What happened with Fallujah? You were a big supporter of getting in there. Blackwill says he's with you on this; that between the two of you, you'll force some action. Tell me that story.

I felt pretty strongly about a broad problem that the problems in Fallujah showed us, which was that we seemed not to have a strategy for affecting a real change of control of some of these cities. Our forces had been in and out of Fallujah I think four or five times by the time of April 2004. Every time we'd go in, the military would go in, and they'd try to suppress the insurgents and try to capture terrorists. But then, 24 hours or 48 hours later they'd leave, and the city would fall right back again under the control of these people.

There was a long-term concern that I always had that we were not doing what subsequently became our policy: Clear, hold and rebuild. If you just go in and clear and then leave, you haven't really changed the fundamentals for the better for the Iraqi people living in a town like Fallujah. That was the general background.

We had had a situation in Fallujah in, I think, February, where a concerted insurgent attack on the prison … killed a number of the prison guards who were members of the Iraqi police, and freed a whole lot of captured insurgents. We had not responded military to this event. Some months had gone by.

When the Marines came in to take over the area around Fallujah, which was the third week of March, the commander of the Marines, Gen. [James] Conway, told me he didn't think that his predecessors, who were the 82nd Airborne, had been effective in really controlling the city. I said: 'I agree. I think you really need to do something.'

Now, what triggered the event in Fallujah, however, was a vicious attack on some private contractors, security contractors working for an American company, who were not only attacked and killed, but then dismembered and their body parts hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

A number of people, including Gen. Sanchez, thought that this required an immediate and vigorous response by coalition forces, because the Iraqi police in Fallujah did not respond. And indeed, Sanchez ordered -- because he was the commander -- ordered the Marines to go in, find the perpetrators of this terrible attack, and try to bring some order into this city, which is a Wild West kind of a town. So that was the origin of the problem. I certainly supported that. ...

[How did the Governing Council respond?] Does it feel like it's falling apart and about to spin out of control?

This was only half of the crisis at that point, because at the same time, Moqtada al-Sadr … chose this moment to also attack the coalition, and had killed a number of American soldiers, and was attacking our civilian outposts in Najaf, Karbala, all throughout the south, Nasiriyah, Basra.

We had two major crises at the same time, which also very seriously stretched our military capability at that moment. ... The April/May period of 2004 was certainly the fundamental crisis of our occupation. ...

The Iraqi political system was on the brink of flying apart. The Sunni members of the Governing Council were outraged by the nightly broadcasts on Al Jazeera television, which were especially provocative about the civilian deaths in Fallujah. There certainly were civilian deaths, but these were very provocative reports.

The Shi'a were concerned about what was happening with Moqtada al-Sadr because he was a Shi'a. They wanted us to defeat Moqtada al-Sadr, but they were worried about what the consequences would be.

The third dimension of the problem was that the U.N. special representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, who was there helping us put together the political process that would eventually lead to the return of sovereignty, himself a Sunni Arab, was threatening to call off his mission entirely and leave the country.

The confluence of these three things, I felt, put us in the gravest crisis of the coalition period in Iraq, because it was quite possible that the entire process would blow up. We would not be able to leave and return sovereignty to the Iraqis as planned by June 30, which in turn would mean we couldn't carry out the elections, which is what Sistani wanted. And he could speak for the majority of the people, the Shi'a. It was the major crisis of the coalition.

How did it resolve itself? How did you get the military to stop?

I suggested, and in the end the president agreed with, a differentiated policy. Toward Moqtada al-Sadr, we needed to be as vigorous as possible, going after his illegal militia, killing as many as we could. Moqtada himself had quite cleverly barricaded himself in a holy mosque in the town of Kufa, so there was no way we were going to get at him, but we could get at as many of his people as possible. We could retake a number of provincial capitals, which his illegal militia had overrun, capital of Al Kut, Karbala. We could take those over, and we did. We needed to pursue them as vigorously as possible, and we did.

[In] Fallujah, the problem was that our efforts to negotiate with the officials in the town -- they offered to negotiate and said they could control this themselves -- were getting nowhere. In fact, we were sort of being led along into thinking these negotiations would resolve the problem, and they wouldn't.

In the end, ... I felt very badly about it, because I had been encouraging us to do something there. I said, 'You must understand, Mr. President, that the consequences of continuing there are very likely going to be that it's going to blow up this political process, and we're not going to be able to transfer sovereignty, and we're not going to be able to, therefore, get onto the election program for 2005.' And it had to be the commander in chief who had to make that decision. It was a very tough call.

How did he take it when you told him that?

He understood. He understood, and I think with, I would guess, great reluctance, agreed that we had to put a temporary hold on the attack. I also said at that time -- he also agreed -- we know sooner or later we're going to have to go into Fallujah. It's completely outlaw; it's completely beyond the law. We know that there's a lot of insurgents there. We knew that Al Qaeda was active there. But it's better if it can be done first when there's a sovereign Iraqi government that orders the attack on Fallujah. Secondly, better if Iraqi forces can also be involved, because, of course, the Iraqi forces had collapsed in the spring of '04. Those two things will make it more palatable ... and of course, about six months later, that's exactly what we did.

How big a howl from the military was there?

They were pretty unhappy, and I understood that, especially since I had been encouraging them to go in there. Again, this is one of these cases where you have a civilian perspective on the situation, and a military perspective. The military perspective is, look, we've got a job to do here. Give us another week or 10 days or two weeks or whatever, and we'll clean out Fallujah.

I had to say, 'Well, you probably could do that in a week or 10 days or whatever it is, but at the end of that process, there may be no political way forward.' My judgment was, that's a worse outcome than stopping now and dealing with Fallujah when there's a sovereign Iraqi government with Iraqi forces that can complement coalition forces.

We've talked to people who say ... the lost year had a kind of capstone put on it by what happened at Fallujah, that it was just an example of how out of control and unstable the political process and the military --

Well, let's look at the political process. Now, I heard from people, often from military officers, throughout the time I was there, that the key to security in Iraq is to give the Iraqis a political path forward, and then things will be better. The insurgency will dissolve because they'll know that they can have their own way forward.

We gave them that. We gave them a constitution. We gave them a clear political path forward, and the insurgency continued. It turns out that the political path forward was not the key to security. It's the other way around. Security is the key to a stable Iraq.

... Why didn't it happen? Why didn't we have that security?

I don't know. I suppose somebody will eventually write the definitive book. A lot of the decisions on the size of the military and its deployment and rules of engagement were made before the war. That's what happens. Militaries make plans, and those are the plans.

By the time I came into government, the military planning was to cut our forces in half within three months. That was the first plan that was presented to me. We had about 140,000 troops on the ground, and they were going to go down to 60,000 by September of 2003. That was their plan. How did they arrive at that number? I don't know, but that was their plan. I considered it unrealistic, and I said so. In fact, I said, 'I think you'll need more troops.' ...

There's a May 18, 2004, meeting that you have with Rice and [then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley. ... At this point, it's vocalized that the insurgency has created a situation where a coalition has become an ineffective occupier, and it's because of loss of the support of Iraqis. Is that a correct report?

At the end of the double crisis of the spring of 2004 -- the uprising by the Mehdi army and the difficulties in Fallujah -- it became clear to me that we had not provided the most fundamental goal of any government, which is to provide security for the Iraqi people. ...

At that point -- this is in May of 2004 -- I'd been there a year. I had been upset by the fact that looting was going on without any reaction a year ago. Now, here we were a year later, and we were still not providing adequate security to the Iraqi people.

We could tell in the opinion polling we were doing -- we were polling the Iraqi people probably every three weeks. Now, opinion polling in a country that's been through 35 years of repressive government, you have to take with a grain of salt, but you could see a trend, and one of the trends was increasing dissatisfaction among the Iraqis with the coalition, largely because we had not provided adequate security. They also worried about electricity and water and so forth, but security was at the top of the list.

My conclusion from that was, first, that I again reiterated that I thought we needed more troops. It was about this time that I suggested to Secretary Rumsfeld, 'We ought to think about another division or two of coalition forces.' I mentioned to Dr. Rice that we were in risk of being labeled as an occupier, but not a particularly effective one, because we haven't provided security. ...

Some people call the year of the CPA occupation the 'lost year in Iraq.' ... Would you agree with that description?

No, I don't think it was a lost year. We faced three challenges, and we did pretty well on two and not as well on the third. Ones which we did very well on was getting them a political process, a constitution, a path toward elections. They had three elections in 2005, which is remarkable, both for the region and in Iraq's history. They now have a democratically elected government. Those are pretty thin on the ground in that part of the world. So that's a substantial achievement. ...

We had to help the Iraqis rebuild their economy. Here we had some successes, not as much as I would have liked. It was very difficult to get the major amount of money that the American taxpayers have committed to Iraq spent while I was there. Less than 1 percent of the $18 billion had been spent on reconstruction by the time I left, which was very frustrating. But we had spent billions of Iraqi dollars, funds from the Iraqi government, on reconstruction. We had spent almost a billion dollars through very small projects that the military commanders ran. We had some progress there.

Security was the area where we had, I think, the most disappointing results. Did we lose a year? Well, I don't know if we lost a year. The security situation was difficult. We faced an insurgency which was more resilient than we thought. We had not [had] good intelligence on that insurgency, certainly not for the first six months or so.

We had difficulty coming up with a military strategy to defeat the insurgency. There was, perhaps, some wishful thinking on the part of our military about the speed with which we'd be able to substitute Iraqi forces for coalition forces. I think that wishful thinking was pretty much shown to be wishful thinking in the spring of 2004.

But on the whole, the American people can say we did a noble thing throwing over one of the most vicious regimes anywhere in the world at the end of the 20th century. We put the Iraqis on the right path, politically, to a better political future, and they now have got, certainly, the right plans to rebuild their economy. All that remains now is to effect a security strategy that defeats the Sunni insurgency. That's the most important missing ingredient, at this point. ...