The Endgame E-Book

Bernard Trainor

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The Endgame is the gripping and authoritative account of the secret military and political effort to pull Iraq from the precipice of full-scale civil war. The book fuses unrivalled access to the in-fighting of Washington policymakers with analysis of strategizing by the generals and hard-fought operations on the battlefield. Along with access to classified documents, the authors draw from sources including military commanders, high-level intelligence operatives, White House aides, Iraqi officials and the soldiers who have tested both the Bush and Obama Administrations' strategies to their limits. This is a book that will be discussed in the White House, the Pentagon and the command centres in Baghdad. It will be an enduring account of the most decisive period of this bitterly divisive war. It is the third volume in the Gordon-Trainor collaboration on the United States military involvement in Iraq; magisterial accounts that have stood the test of time.

Leseprobe

THE ENDGAME

ALSO BY MICHAEL GORDON AND GENERAL BERNARD TRAINOR

The Generals’ War Cobra II

First published in the United States in 2012 by Pantheon, a division of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, 2012

The moral right of Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84354-780-8 Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-84354-781-5 eISBN: 978-1-78239-866-0

Designed by M. Kristen Bearse

Printed in Great Britain.

Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To the Iraqis who risked their lives to try to build a democratic Iraq

Authors’ Note

Wesley Morgan, a 2011 graduate of Princeton University, was integral to the research and writing of this book. He conducted interviews in the United States, Iraq, and Afghanistan, drafted chapters, and contributed reported material and fresh ideas throughout. His encyclopedic knowledge of the American military and its wars, along with his dogged reporting, added substantially to the work.

Contents

MapsProloguePART 1Iraqi Freedom The Occupation and Its Discontents, 2003–20061.Desert Crossing2.Politics of the Gun3.“Sovereignty with Limits”4.Vigilant Resolve5.A Lost Cause?6.Our Man in Baghdad7.New Dawn8.The Long Telegram9.Papa Jaafari10.The Red Team11.The Year of Living Dangerously12.Together Forward13.The Perfect Storm14.Out WestPART 2Double Down The Surge and Its Aftermath, 2006–200815.Some Friendly Advice16.Back to the Drawing Board17.League of the Righteous18.Petraeus Takes Command19.The Enemy Within20.The Former-Insurgent Counterinsurgency21.Phantom Thunder22.The USS CENTCOM23.General Petraeus Goes to Washington24.No Plan B25.Charge of the Knights26.March Madness27.Strange JusticePART 3New Dawn Obama, Maliki, and Beyond, 2008–201228.Let’s Make a Deal29.The Home Stretch30.Change at the Top31.The Odd Couple32.Trouble Up North33.Crises of Confidence34.Team of Rivals35.The Numbers Game36.Mission AccomplishedEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

List of Illustrations

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (left) and CPA chief L. Paul Bremer at a 2003 press conference. Although Rumsfeld initially supported Bremer, the two men later held very different philosophies on how to handle the occupation of Iraq. (ROBERT D. WARD/DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE)

Prime Minister Ayad Allawi announces the formation of his cabinet on June 1, 2004. President Ghazi al-Yawar stands in the background. (STAFF SERGEANT ASHLEY S. BROKOP/U.S. AIR FORCE)

L. Paul Bremer and Interim Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih walk on the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport as Bremer prepares to leave the country on June 28, 2004. Before departing, Bremer told Salih, “You are a tough people.” (STAFF SERGEANT D. MYLES CULLEN/U.S. AIR FORCE)

(Left to right) Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, General John Abizaid, and General George W. Casey salute during a change-of-command ceremony at Camp Victory in Baghdad on July 1, 2004. Sanchez transferred the Iraq command to Casey under the supervision of Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander. (MNF-I PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICE)

A member of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army raises his weapon while standing on a burning American tank during the 2004 uprising in Sadr City. (JOÃO SILVA)

A Mahdi Army sniper takes aim at U.S. soldiers during the August 2004 battle of Najaf. (JOÃO SILVA)

Mahdi Army fighters in Sadr City fire a mortar at U.S. positions. (JOÃO SILVA)

A partially torn poster of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Sadrist Trend and Mahdi Army. (BEN LOWY)

Muqtada al-Sadr with his followers. (BEN LOWY)

Marines from Bravo Company, 1/8 Marines, conduct a patrol during Operation New Dawn, the November 2004 second battle of Fallujah. (STAFF SERGEANT JONATHAN KNAUTH/U.S. MARINE CORPS)

Colonel H.R. McMaster, commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, and Major General Kursheed Salim Hussein, commander of the 3rd Iraqi Army Division, near the town of Tal Afar in 2005. (MASTER SERGEANT DONALD SPARKS/3RD ACR)

Colonel H.R. McMaster (second from left) walks with Najem Abdullah al-Jabouri, mayor of Tal Afar during the surge. In 2005, McMaster and Najem had led a successful counterinsurgency operation in the town. (COURTESY OMAR ABDULLAH AL-JABOURI)

Condoleezza Rice holds a press conference with Interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari on May 15, 2005, during her first visit to Iraq as secretary of state. Her primary military adviser, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, and the embassy’s chargé d’affaires James Jeffrey appear in the background. (SERGEANT FERDINAND THOMAS/DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE)

An Iraqi Army Humvee burns after being hit by an improvised explosive device (IED) near the town of Baghdadi in Anbar Province. (JIM WILSON/New York Times)

Colonel Dave Sutherland, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 3rd Brigade, pays his respects at a memorial ceremony for a fallen soldier in Diyala Province. (EROS HOAGLAND)

Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad (right) holds a joint press conference with General George W. Casey in January 2007. Khalilzad had long been involved in Iraq policy: in late 2002 and early 2003, he organized a series of conferences for Iraqi expatriates who would join locals to form the core of the new Iraqi government.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates responds to a question during a press conference in Baghdad on December 22, 2006. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace (left) and General George W. Casey accompany him. Soon after this trip, Casey and Gates proposed a two-brigade surge. (CHERIE A. THURLBY/DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE)

The streets of Baghdad, as seen through the targeting system of a Stryker armored vehicle during Operation Together Forward in 2006. (JIM WILSON/New York Times)

American soldiers stand guard as the father of Latif Abd al-Kathum Hilal al-Janabi weeps outside of a morgue in Baghdad while waiting to collect his son’s body. Latif, a Sunni, was killed by assailants, and his family was afraid to go to the Shiite-controlled hospital without an American military escort. (JIM WILSON/New York Times)

An explosive ordance disposal robot begins a mission in Baghdad. The Academy Award–winning film The Hurt Locker portrayed EOD technicians as cowboys who would walk up to a bomb to disarm it wearing only a heavy suit. Far more often, they used robots to place explosive charges on a bomb and detonate it from a safe distance. (JIM WILSON/New York Times)

Colonel Shaban Barzan al-Ubaydi, the police chief of the Anbari town of Baghdadi, walks with his men during the summer of 2006. (JIM WILSON/New York Times)

General David Petraeus talks with Anbar Awakening leader Sheikh Abd al-Sattar al-Rishawi in Ramadi in February 2007. Sterling Jensen, a civilian interpreter with the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division is between them. (COURTESY STERLING JENSEN)

1st Cavalry Division commander Major General Joseph Fil (left) talks with Ambassador Ryan Crocker in Bagdad during the early months of the 2007 surge. (MAJOR STEPHEN LAMB/MND-B PUBLIC AFFAIRS)

Sheikh Ali Majid al-Dulaimi, a tribal leader and former insurgent, uses a U.S. Army megaphone to speak to the residents of Hawr Rajab. Sheikh Ali explained that the soldiers had come to the town center to conduct a humanitarian mission. (BEN LOWY)

1-40 Cavalry commander Lieutenant Colonel Mark Odom (left) and two Awakening leaders—Sheikh Mahir Sarhan Morab al-Muini and Sheikh Ali Majid al-Dulaimi—discuss plans for a night raid, as Captain Chad Klascius looks on. (BEN LOWY)

As a medevac helicopter lands, medics treat Specialist Jose Collazo for injuries sustained when his Husky mine-clearing vehicle was destroyed by an IED on August 4, 2007, in Hawr Rajab. Collazo was evacuated to Texas, where he recovered from his injuries. (BEN LOWY)

Sheikh Abd al-Sattar al-Rishawi (right) gestures to Mamun Sami Rashid, governor of Anbar Province, during the Anbar Forum on September 6, 2007. The two men were at the heart of Iraq’s Sunni Awakening, and Abd al-Sattar would be killed seven days later. (LANCE CORPORAL JULIAN BILLMAIR/U.S. MARINE CORPS)

Admirals Mike Mullen (left) and William “Fox” Fallon held two of the most important positions in the American armed forces at a time when the military was embroiled in two land wars. Mullen was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from August 2007 until September 2011; Fallon commanded CENTCOM during 2007 and early 2008, where he clashed with Petraeus over Iraq strategy. (MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 1ST CLASS CHAD J. MCNEELEY, U.S. NAVY/DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE)

Iraqi national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie took General David Petraeus outside in the middle of a March 21, 2008, planning dinner to give him some news: Prime Minister Maliki had decided to launch Operation Charge of the Knights in Basra the next day. “You’re kidding,” Petraeus replied. (COURTESY LIEUTENANT GENERAL JIM DUBIK, RETIRED)

A gaggle of photographers surround Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General David Petraeus during a break in their testimony to Congress on April 7, 2008.

American Soldiers run from a building to their vehicles under the cover of a smoke grenade during the May 2008 battle for Route Gold in Sadr City. (ROBERT NICKELSBERG/New York Times)

General David Petraeus accompanies then-senator Barack Obama on a helicopter tour of Baghdad in July 2008. The presidential candidate took a whirlwind trip to Afghanistan and Iraq before the Democratic Convention. (STAFF SERGEANT LORIE JEWELL/MNF-I PUBLIC AFFAIRS)

Iraqi president Jalal Talabani walks with President George W. Bush on December 14, 2008. (PETTY OFFICER 1ST CLASS KRISTIN FITZSIMMONS/U.S. NAVY)

President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sign the status of forces agreement between the United States and Iraq on December 14, 2008. To the left, General Ray Odierno (seated) watches. The agreement mandated that American forces leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

This card was issued to all U.S. soldiers in Iraq after the SOFA was signed. In theory, the agreement subjected American troops to Iraqi law. But American negotiators worked in a provision stipulating that American troops who were “on duty” would be immune from arrest. Whenever a soldier left the confines of a base, he would carry the card, which bore an Arabic translation on the back.

The Obama-era Iraq team meets in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department office on February 19, 2010. From left: General Ray Odierno, Ambassador Christopher Hill, and Secretary Clinton. (STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL PHOTO)

President Barack Obama talks on the phone with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani on November 4, 2010, from the Oval Office. He is accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden (looking out window), Tony Blinken (seated, facing camera), and Puneet Talwar. During this phone call, Obama asked Talabani to give up the presidency so that Ayad Allawi could fill the post and Iraq’s government-formation process could move forward. Talabani demurred. (PETE SOUZA/OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO)

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy sits next to Marine General James “Hoss” Cartwright during a December 2010 press conference. Flournoy was criticized by National Security Adviser Tom Donilon for failing to head off a letter from Admiral Mike Mullen arguing that 16,000 troops should remain in Iraq; Cartwright was embraced by the Obama administration for advocating much lower troop numbers. (CHERIE A. CULLEN/DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE)

On October 21, 2011, President Barack Obama and his national security team informed Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki that the SOFA talks had come to an end and that the United States would complete the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq. From left, the insiders delivering the decision: Tony Blinken, Tom Donilon, Puneet Talwar, Denis McDonough, and Bill Daley. Pictured on-screen are (left to right) Prime Minister Maliki, Vice President Joe Biden, General Lloyd Austin, and Ambassador James Jeffrey. (PETE SOUZA/OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO)

Iraqi soldiers stand at attention in front of a poster of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki during a December 2006 ceremony in which Najaf Province was transferred to Iraqi control. (MATT SHERMAN)

General Lloyd Austin greets Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (right) as Ambassador James Jeffrey looks on at the ceremony on December 15, 2011, commemorating the American troop withdrawal. (STAFF SERGEANT CALEB BARRIEAU/DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE)

Seats were reserved for Iraqi VIPs at the ceremony. Security threats loomed over the event—each dignitary was assigned a bunker in case of rocket or mortar attack. (GREGG CARLSTROM)

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki shake hands during a December 12, 2011, White House visit. (LAWRENCE JACKSON/OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO)

U.S. and Kuwaiti soldiers close the gate at the Khabari Crossing on the Iraq-Kuwait border just after the final American convoy left Iraq on December 18, 2011. (MASTER SERGEANT MONTIGO WHITE/U.S. ARMY)

Prologue

No one book can capture an event as complex as a war, especially a nine-year war in a distant nation that from its outset was permeated by tribal, religious, ethnic, local, and regional politics. Nonetheless, this volume seeks to provide the most comprehensive account to date of the United States’ involvement in Iraq.

From the start, our goal was to cover Iraq’s halting political development as well as the military battles. We gave attention to decisions in Baghdad as well as Washington. And we covered the clashes and political maneuvering from the early days of the American-led occupation, through the descent into sectarian violence, the surge that pulled Iraq back from the brink of civil war, and the vexing aftermath.

This was an ambitious project, but we have been covering the Iraq War from the start. Through two American presidents, a succession of Iraqi prime ministers, and a variety of United States commanders, we tracked events on the ground in Iraq and in Washington. We were present for many of the ferocious battles in Anbar, Diyala, Mosul, and Sadr City, and we covered the nation’s political development. We saw American and Iraqi blood spilled, and we interacted with the generals, diplomats, and politicians on whose shoulders the decisions of the war rested.

Too many American accounts of the war in Iraq have left out the Iraqis, or cast them as little more than a backdrop for dramas that were played out in Washington or among American commanders in Baghdad. But they are essential actors in their own nation’s drama. For this reason, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and rivals like Ayad Allawi, Massoud Barzani, and Adil Abd al-Mahdi share the list of the hundreds of interviews we conducted along with Iraqi generals, police commanders, tribal sheikhs, and student protesters. We also interviewed myriad American and British generals, as well as officers and enlisted troops down to the platoon level.

The objective was to weave together battles fought by the troops with closed-door Green Zone and White House meetings from the conflict’s earlier days through the military withdrawal in December 2011. More than that, we have sought to explain not just what happened when and where, but why.

We have been aided in our task by unprecedented access to classified documents that chronicle the war as it was seen from the American embassy in Baghdad, from the White House, from military headquarters across Iraq, and from the command posts of special operations and intelligence units. The troves of secret documents on which we were able to draw shed light on corners of the Iraq story that would otherwise have remained dark for years.

Internal military and State Department reports have provided glimpses of roads not taken and opportunities missed. Firsthand after-action reports and cumulative briefings chart and bring to life the nighttime campaign waged in Iraq by the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters overseeing America’s most elite and secretive commando units, both against Sunni insurgents and later against Shiite militias and even the Quds Force, Iran’s operations and intelligence arm in Iraq. Still-classified oral histories show the war as commanders recounted it. CIA and other intelligence reports helped complete the mosaic.

In painting a picture of America’s complicated struggle with Iran in Iraq, for instance, we have been able to draw on General David Petraeus’s classified updates to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, an unauthorized disclosure that opens a window into the inner workings of the war and describes Petraeus’s own third-party interactions with the leader of that force, Qasim Suleimani.

Other documents provide rare glimpses of the war through the eyes of those who fought against the United States and the Iraqi government. Detailed reports on the interrogations of Qais and Laith al-Khazali, two Iraqi Shiite militants captured by the British Special Air Service in 2007, offer an inside view of Iraq’s Sadrist political movement and militias and its ties to Iran. Transcripts of the interrogations of Sunni insurgents captured by American troops, along with internal reports by insurgent commanders recovered from hard drives and flash drives, have helped us understand the activities of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the local franchise of the global terrorist group that was the United States’ main antagonist for much of the war.

Heavily classified embassy cables, internal Red Team analyses organized by the American military command, notes of critical meetings in Washington and Baghdad, and classified assessments and war plans commissioned by the generals who prosecuted the war round out our account. We have protected the intelligence community’s sources and methods. By combining extensive interviews with this documentary history, we have sought to convey a full and rich history of a tumultuous period that has put its stamp on the American military, has decisively altered the history of Iraq, and that will influence events in the broader Middle East for decades to come.

PART 1

Iraqi Freedom

The Occupation and Its Discontents, 2003–2006

CHAPTER 1

Desert Crossing

On a stone gray December morning in 2011, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki arrived at the White House for a meeting with President Barack Obama. The Iraqi prime minister had maintained his grip on power atop a government that was more an ongoing collision of ambitions than a well-oiled machine. The furious sectarian bloodletting in Baghdad that had come close to pushing the country into civil war; the belated American military surge that had tamped down the violence; the Iranian-sponsored attacks; uprisings by rival Shiite parties; the Al-Qaeda bombings: Maliki had maneuvered through it all.

But now the Iraqi prime minister and the American president were about to enter uncharted waters, more than eight years after the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. To shore up Iraq’s still-shaky military and maintain a modicum of stability, American diplomats had spent much of the summer pursuing an agreement that would have enabled the United States to keep several thousand American troops in the country to train Iraq’s armed forces, protect its skies, and conduct joint counterterrorism operations, only to have the negotiations sputter to a halt. The collapsed talks had been a casualty of rising Iraqi nationalism, backroom machinations by Iraqi politicians, and a deep ambivalence about continued American military involvement in Iraq on the part of President Obama and his inner circle as they approached the election season at home.

The result was that for the first time since the March 2003 invasion Iraq would be without U.S. troops. The departure of the last of them was just days away. While American and Iraqi military officers nervously eyed the risks ahead, both leaders had pronounced themselves to be satisfied with the outcome. Maliki’s visit to Washington, in fact, had been cast by the White House as a celebration of the new normal: a sovereign Iraq that was putatively on the path to democracy and capable of providing for itself.

After a brief photo op in the Oval Office, which Obama appeared to enjoy and Maliki to endure, the two sides engaged in a closed-door discussion about the way ahead. The president urged the prime minister not to release a notorious Hezbollah militant whom the Americans had captured in Iraq and handed over to Iraq’s wobbly judicial system. The question of how to respond to the violent crackdown in Syria was a point of contention, but the two leaders affirmed Iraq’s plan to proceed with a multibillion-dollar purchase of American F-16s.1

After the discussions were done, Maliki and Obama jointly faced the press. Maliki led Iraq’s most inclusive government, Obama asserted. His country’s economy was projected to grow faster than China’s and the violence that had once wracked the country was at a record low. In an event that would symbolize Iraq’s reemergence in the club of Middle East nations, Baghdad, for the first time in two decades, would host a summit of the Arab League in March. “People throughout the region will see a new Iraq that’s determining its own destiny—a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process,” Obama added. “A new day is upon us.”2

Within a week, Iraqi tanks were parked near the residences of the nation’s leading Sunni politicians, the government’s lone Sunni vice president had dodged arrest by taking refuge in Kurdistan, and American officials were working overtime to try to head off more detentions, the collapse of the cross-sectarian coalition, and perhaps even another bloody round of sectarian strife. Was this just another bump in the road, a political uproar that could be contained, if not defused, with a few high-level phone calls from Washington? Or was it the start of a new chapter of authoritarian rule that the United States had inadvertently put into place?

The United States had stormed into Iraq in 2003 with extravagant hopes but little understanding. Four years later, it had pulled Iraq back from the precipice of civil war at enormous cost. Generals had been fired and hired. The American military had rediscovered counterinsurgency. Struggling to decipher the labyrinth of sect, religion, and tribe, American commanders and diplomats had cut deals with an assortment of politicians, clerics, militia leaders, and even insurgents. But after the loss of nearly 4,500 American troops and many more Iraqi lives, and the expenditure of more than $800 billion, just what sort of Iraq was the United States military leaving behind?

In the United States’ tangled involvement in the Middle East, Iraq had morphed from an expedient partner to an adversary, and, finally, a titanic project to establish a democratic beachhead in Mesopotamia.

Seized with the mission of containing the new theocracy in Tehran, President Ronald Reagan had seen Iraq primarily as a means of containing Iranian power, so much so that during the Iran-Iraq War, he dispatched an envoy—Donald Rumsfeld—to nurture ties with Saddam Hussein, a partnership which eventually included sharing American intelligence on Iranian military positions. Reagan’s successor as president, George H. W. Bush, had expanded the policy, calculating that an Iraq weary from eight years of war with Iran would see enough advantage in a pragmatic relationship with Washington to temper its regional ambitions. Even when his strategy collapsed ignominiously with Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, the White House had envisioned nothing so bold as the democratization of Iraq. The goal of the Gulf War, the president confided to Turkey’s ambassador in a declassified transcript, was to loosen Saddam’s grip on power in the hope that the Sunni-dominated Baath Party and the Iraqi military would topple the Iraqi dictator. The empowerment of Iraq’s Shiite majority, an impoverished and long-suppressed group about whom the American government knew little, was decidedly not part of the plan.3

Bill Clinton’s election had signaled more of the same. In early 1993, Clinton suggested that he was prepared for a fresh start with Baghdad, expounding famously that even a dictator like Saddam was capable of a “deathbed conversion.” Under pressure from the right and following an intelligence assessment that Saddam’s regime had conspired to assassinate his predecessor, however, Clinton stiffened his stance. On October 31, 1998, as a weakened Bill Clinton faced the threat of impeachment as a result of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he signed the Iraq Liberation Act, a Republican-inspired piece of legislation that formally committed the United States to a policy of regime change and the emergence of a democratic government in Iraq, a measure the White House saw no profit in vetoing but had little intention of fully implementing.4

One of the most telling explorations of the challenges involved in remaking Iraq was carried out during Clinton’s tenure by the Central Command, or CENTCOM, the United States military headquarters that had responsibility for the Middle East. After Saddam rescinded his fitful cooperation with United Nations weapons inspectors in December 1998, Clinton ordered four days of air strikes on suspected weapons of mass destruction sites. (Only after the 2003 invasion did a CIA-sponsored investigation establish that Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear programs had been shelved by late 1998, making the raid the first major American military operation conducted against Iraq on the basis of erroneous intelligence. The intelligence failure would be repeated in gargantuan proportions by Clinton’s Republican successor more than four years later.)5

After picking up reports through the Polish embassy in Baghdad that the strikes might have shaken Saddam’s regime, General Anthony Zinni, who led CENTCOM, began to worry what he would do if the despot’s government collapsed and he was saddled with the mission of occupying the country and advancing the Liberation Act’s democratic agenda. Zinni did not think there would be much left to work with if the United States military had to go in. Saddam’s regime and the governmental apparatus it controlled, Zinni confided to Laurence Pope, his foreign policy adviser, would likely fall apart like a cheap suit.6

To examine the problem, Zinni convened a classified exercise in the McLean, Virginia, office of Booz Allen, a Pentagon contractor. The war game, which was held in June 1999, involved more than seventy officials from the National Security Council, the Defense Department, the CIA, and other agencies. Saddam had often employed the metaphor of a river crossing to extol Iraq’s supposed march toward a better future and to celebrate his own revolutionary exploits, which, lore had it, included a dramatic swim across the Tigris. So the command’s intelligence experts recommended that the war game be dubbed “Desert Crossing,” calculating somewhat naively that the name would unnerve Saddam if news of the secret exercise somehow leaked.

But it was the Desert Crossing participants themselves who were unnerved by the magnitude of the task before them. The refashioning of Iraq presented daunting challenges at every turn. If a new group of Iraqis grabbed power—the exercise described this as the “inside-out” approach—policymakers in Washington would be confronted with the fact that they might know precious little about the new leadership, let alone how the United States might attempt to influence it. American officials knew some of the exiles who had taken up residence in London but hardly the Iranian-based or Syrian-based contingents. And any new government that was likely to rise out of the ashes was bound to include Iraqis who had endured Saddam’s rule as well. When it came to the welter of Iraq’s tribes, underground parties, and mid-level bureaucrats the country was a virtual black hole. The “inside-out” strategy would relieve the United States of the burden of trying to secure and reorganize Iraq, but Washington could not be sure just which Iraqis would push their way to the top of the heap.

If on the other hand the American military moved in and occupied Iraq—the “outside-in” approach, modeled after the American experience administering postwar Japan under General Douglas MacArthur—the United States could determine what political institutions should be established, who should run them, and arrange for elections to be held, according to democratic principles imported from Washington. But the price would be the deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops, the commitment of billions of dollars, and, perhaps more importantly, the will to see the project through some difficult days. “A change in regime does not guarantee stability,” the after-action report of the exercise dryly noted.

Nor would the establishment of a democracy necessarily bring stability to the region. There would be threats galore—to the east, theocratic Iran; to the south, the Saudi kingdom and other autocratic Arab states, not to mention Islamist terrorist groups—who would be eager to snuff out the democratic experiment before the contagion spread. “The presence of a government that may be more representative (i.e. democratic) in its decision-making functions than any of its neighbors may invite the conduct of subversive activities in Iraq,” the report added. “Neighboring regimes will also be concerned with all catalyzing effect on their own pro-democracy movements. In a sense, a western-style democracy may not engender long-term stability without considerable stabilization, preparation, and long-term sustainment.”7

Since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the American desideratum had, implicitly or explicitly, been regime change. Yet if the moment finally came, Washington would face a choice between a speedy process the United States would be at pains to control and an externally imposed solution that would require extraordinary patience and resources, and which even then would not be assured of success. The removal of Saddam would surely open the door to political change in Iraq, but with unprotected borders, the possibility of looting, sectarian strife, and bare-knuckled power struggles, Iraq might also become a veritable Pandora’s box. If push came to shove, Martin Indyk, the assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs during the Clinton administration and a participant in the Desert Crossing exercise, concluded that the wisest approach would be to opt for minimal American commitment in a region of the world that appeared to offer more peril than promise. “We had very little intelligence on what exactly was going on in Iraq,” he recalled. “So the idea was to take what you had in there and build on it, the inside-out model. There was no discussion about democratization or elections. That was simply not on the agenda. We were not democratic crusaders in the Clinton administration, especially when it came to the Middle East.”8

George W. Bush saw things differently. While his predecessors considered the occupation of Iraq to be a debilitating snare, Bush viewed it as a strategic opportunity and even a moral crusade. The president and his aides had been caught short by the September 11 terrorist attacks. Missile defense, military competition with China, the pursuit of high-tech weaponry, and the nation’s defense overall—these had been the pressing security issues in the early months of his administration.

But after the terrorist strikes in New York and Washington and the administration’s improvised campaign in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban for their role in harboring Al-Qaeda, Bush had searched for a doctrine that would confer a larger meaning on the fight against terrorists. Iraq would be the second phase in the administration’s self-described “War on Terror.” Washington would resolve, once and for all, its anxiety over Iraq’s suspected WMD programs and frustration with Saddam’s persistent efforts to punch a hole in the economic sanctions. The demonstration of American power would strengthen the United States’ position in the Middle East, recruit a new Iraqi ally in the fight against extremism, and send a message to Iran, Syria, and other miscreants in the region about the risks of pursuing WMD.

Reflecting a new “freedom agenda,” the United States would join the ideological struggle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world by implanting a democracy in the heart of the Middle East. The bold vision was outlined in August 2002 in a classified document that Bush had signed six months before the invasion. Blandly titled “Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy,” the document proclaimed that the United States would midwife a new Iraq whose society would be “based on moderation, pluralism, and democracy.”9 With his reversal of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the president’s father had vowed to preserve international norms against the forces of chaos; this new president would upset the established order to spread the gospel of freedom.

The philosophical differences between the two Bush administrations emerged when Condoleezza Rice, the younger Bush’s national security adviser, sat down with Brent Scowcroft, her former mentor and counter-part in the administration of the elder Bush. Over dinner at 1789, a swank Georgetown restaurant, Rice revealed her goal of bringing democracy to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “I said, ‘Condi, it’s just not going to happen,’” Scowcroft recalled. “‘You can’t build democracy that way.’ She said, ‘Oh yes you can.’”10

As the clock ticked down on the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley convened a meeting of the Deputies Committee, a panel of sub-cabinet-level officials, to ponder the vexing question of how the United States might respond if a band of Iraqi generals took matters into their own hands. “The question came up: What if a group of generals sent us a message that they were willing to topple Saddam if we promised to support them?” recalled Hadley. “Would it be sufficient if they said they would not do anything that troubled the U.S.?” The answer the officials settled on, and which Hadley dutifully reported to his boss, was that the United States would be content to let the generals do the dirty work of disposing of Saddam on two conditions: the United States would be allowed to retrieve the presumed stocks of WMD and the United Nations would be allowed to supervise elections and the transition to a democratic government. Absent those steps American forces would still march in.11

Zinni, who had conducted the Desert Crossing exercise and had retired from the military in 2000, publicly opposed the invasion. But, concluding that the war was all but inevitable, Zinni was prepared to fly to Tampa to advise his successor at CENTCOM, Tommy Franks, about the need to face up to the challenges of dealing with the failed state that might well follow the American invasion. That plan was thwarted when the Pentagon blocked the trip.12 The Bush administration never studied Desert Crossing. Yet more than any other president, Bush keenly experienced the vicissitudes of the “inside-out” and “outside-in” options.

“There were two conflicting concepts at play for some time for what we would do after liberation,” recalled Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born senior NSC staff member for Iraq and the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush administration. “One idea was that we could form a government very quickly, à la Afghanistan. The competing narrative was ‘No, we will govern ourselves for a while and transition ministries to the Iraqis as they get ready to take over responsibility. The Iraqi political exiles and some from inside will be appointed as advisers to us.’”

Khalilzad was very much in the first camp, as was, initially, the president himself. Bush had campaigned for the White House as a skeptic of the sort of nation-building the Clinton administration had undertaken in the Balkans, and the Bush administration’s early months in Afghanistan had reinforced its belief that regime change could be carried out without a major commitment to reconstruction or lingering deployments. “He repeatedly said in meetings, ‘We need to give this to the Iraqis as quickly as possible to form a government,’ ” said Khalilzad, who was responsible for taking the official notes of the president’s meetings on Iraq. Rice, Bush’s loyal national security adviser, was also fully on board.13

The American-led invasion force would pry Saddam’s followers from the levers of power, snap enlightened technocrats into place, and quickly hand over responsibility to the new Iraqi authorities, who would be made up of exiles and internal players recruited after Saddam’s fall. The changes in Iraq (and eventually the broader Middle East) that followed would be more like the sweeping transformation of Eastern Europe in 1989 than the prolonged and costly rebuilding of Germany after the Second World War. An oppressive, authoritarian regime would be removed, the liberated masses would breathe a sigh of relief, and new officials would grab hold of the levers of power and administer the new state.

Khalilzad, who had played an important behind-the-scenes role in the deliberations that elevated Hamid Karzai to power in Afghanistan after the Taliban were toppled, served as Bush’s envoy to the Iraqi opposition. With one regime change already under his belt, Khalilzad would oversee the caucusing over the sort of government that should take over after Saddam was ousted, which began in London before the dictator was toppled.14

The closest Khalilzad would come to fulfilling his vision involved a helter-skelter episode during the early days of the American-led invasion in 2003, when American troops, to their surprise, encountered stiff opposition from the Fedayeen Saddam and the dictator’s other paramilitary forces. The White House had dispatched Khalilzad to Ankara to keep the pressure on the Turks not to intervene in northern Iraq. Late one night, as he was holed up in a hotel in Ankara, he was woken up by a phone call from an agitated John Abizaid, the deputy head of CENTCOM, who wanted Khalilzad to slam his political plan into fast-forward.

Abizaid, an American general of Lebanese descent, had been convinced from the start that American troops would be an “antibody” in Iraqi society and had been looking for a way to put an Iraqi face on the American military campaign since its inception. Barking instructions, Abizaid told Khalilzad that he needed to round up the Iraqi exiles and bring them straightaway to Umm Qasr, the ramshackle port city at the southern tip of Iraq, so they could immediately stand up a new government. The Iraqi resistance to the American liberators was greater than anticipated and Abizaid was convinced that it was because they did not want to surrender to the Americans.

Khalilzad said that he needed to be sure the new government included not only exiles but also Iraqis in the country, and he was uncertain as to whom among them to invite. Abizaid brushed this consideration aside. “Those are goddamn details,” the general bellowed. “It’s about American lives. Today, this morning, it was discussed at an NSC meeting. The president has asked me to tell you this.” Several days later, the American military juggernaut resumed its advance to Baghdad and White House interest in an Umm Qasr–based government vanished as quickly as it had materialized. Still, Khalilzad believed his strategy to quickly stand up a new Iraqi authority was on track and convened meetings with Iraqi exiles, sheikhs, and other leaders near Nasiriyah and, after Saddam was toppled, in Baghdad.15

Khalilzad’s partner in those early meetings was Jay Garner, a retired three-star Army general with a background in air defense whose formative experience in Iraq was a humanitarian effort to help the Kurds in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. As the head of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), Garner expected mainly more of the same. The mission was to cope with the expected flood of refugees and the oil field fires the Americans feared Saddam’s henchmen would set, avert famine, and, in general, deal with the short-term dislocations that would be endured by what was presumed to be a largely grateful population. In keeping with his mandate, Garner planned to administer the country by assigning advisers to the government’s ministries, which he projected would be intact; remove only senior members of the Baath Party; and quickly recall the Iraqi Army, which had dispersed in the face of the American-led onslaught, to help rebuild and secure the country—an approach endorsed by Bush himself in a March 12 National Security Council meeting and energetically supported by David McKiernan, the three-star general who led the land war command that oversaw the invasion.

Soon after American forces reached Baghdad, there were intimations that the White House thought the hardest part of the mission had been accomplished. During the first weeks of the occupation, Richard Armitage, the powerfully built deputy secretary of state and confidant of Secretary of State Colin Powell, received a call on the Red Phone that connected him to the White House. Stephen Hadley, Bush’s assiduous deputy national security adviser who was known for always being prepared for anything the president might ask of him, wanted to know how the Pentagon had organized the victory parade for American forces following the 1991 Desert Storm campaign to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Armitage discussed the call with Powell, who thought the question was odd and never got back to the White House.16

The civilians were not alone in thinking the main fight was over. On April 16, just a week after Baghdad fell, General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander, told his subordinates that some form of Iraqi government would be functioning in thirty to sixty days. Franks’s position was evident a few days later when General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Franks at his forward headquarters in Qatar, to let him know that he might need to defer his retirement from the military while the Pentagon sorted out some important personnel decisions, including who would serve as the next head of the Army and who would look after Iraq. “More than out of the question,” Franks shouted, according to notes of the conversation taken by a military aide. “Not going home? Butt-fuck me.” It was not necessary, Franks added, to have the CENTCOM chief “doing three-star work.” As far as Franks was concerned, the heavy lifting had been done. When it came to finding a new Army chief of staff, Franks said that the only way he would consider such a post was if Rumsfeld promoted him to five stars and made him General of the Army, a rank that had not existed since Omar Bradley. Myers rode out the outburst—he would later observe that Franks had “taken his pack off”—and by early July, John Abizaid had taken the reins from Franks at CENTCOM.17

It had always been envisaged that a former governor or ambassador would assume the lead role for the American mission in Iraq after Garner’s ORHA had several months to address the country’s humanitarian problems. But Iraq’s infrastructure was in shambles after years of mismanagement and United Nations sanctions. Much of the middle class was gone. With the looting of Baghdad’s ministries and the collapse of the fragile electrical grid after the toppling of the regime, the once seemingly all-powerful state had, much as Zinni forecast, fallen apart like a cheap suit. Seeking to bring order to the chaos of the occupation, the Bush administration decided to expedite the transition. On April 30, just two weeks after he arrived in Baghdad, Garner learned that he and his team were to be supplanted. L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III was to take over the civilian mission.

Bremer had an impressive set of Washington credentials. During the span of his State Department career, he had worked for Henry Kissinger, led the department’s counterterrorism bureau, and lately overseen a blue-ribbon commission on fighting terrorism. He was an amateur chef, a serious jogger, a faithful convert to Roman Catholicism, and looked a decade younger than his sixty-two years, but he had never served in the Middle East. For a White House wary of old Middle East hands—shades of Desert Crossing—who saw nothing but difficulties in carrying out Bush’s project to bring democracy to Mesopotamia, that was not a minus. When Bremer was first interviewed by Bush for his Iraq post, he passed on a message from his wife, Francine, her favorite passage from the president’s State of the Union address: “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world. It is God’s gift to mankind.”18 Bush smiled and shook Bremer’s hand, convinced that he had the right man.

In preparation for his post, Bremer pored over a RAND Corporation study of classic nation-building efforts, including those in Japan and Germany. The report had been given to him by his friend James Dobbins, a former State Department troubleshooter in Afghanistan, the Balkans, and other failed states. It encouraged Bremer’s view that Iraq needed a dramatic reassertion of the American role and a substantial increase in American troops.19 Before Bremer’s selection was formally announced, Bush invited him to a one-on-one lunch at the White House. Bremer knew that Bush was a fitness buff, so, employing a sports metaphor, he told the president that Iraq was not going to be a hundred-yard sprint but a marathon, and alluded to the RAND report. Putting his trust in his newly appointed envoy, Bush told Bremer to take whatever time he needed. “We’ll stay until the job is done,” the president said, an assurance Bremer intended to take literally. As for more troops, the president was noncommittal but noted that his aides were soliciting troop contributions from allied nations.20

Khalilzad had planned to go to Baghdad with Bremer to introduce him to the Iraqi leaders with whom he had been meeting and to attend a conference he had already arranged for May 15 to form the new interim Iraqi government. But Bremer had no use for Khalilzad’s conference or for Khalilzad himself. The intricate wheeling and dealing that Khalilzad had done in London, Kurdistan, Nasiriyah, and Baghdad to quickly stand up a new Iraqi authority was over. Bremer was not interested in presiding over the Iraqi equivalent of an Afghan Loya Jirga. Instead, like General MacArthur in Japan, Bremer would run Iraq as the head of an occupation authority while nurturing a Western-style government. So Bremer used his lunch with the president to stake out his position: the new Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), as it was to be called, needed clean lines of authority with a single master. Khalilzad was not needed. Less than an hour before the White House announcement of Bremer’s appointment, Khalilzad learned to his amazement that he would not be joining Bremer in Baghdad.

At the State Department, Colin Powell was just as taken aback. Before Bremer was picked, Powell had met with him in his seventh-floor office at the State Department and come away with the impression that he merely intended to be a more dynamic and articulate steward of the American project than the rumpled Garner. There was nothing in Bremer’s presentation that suggested to the secretary of state that he was planning a radical departure from Khalilzad’s mission or was planning to make himself the de facto, if provisional, government of Iraq. Powell called Rice and told her it was a mistake to exclude Khalilzad, one of the few American officials who knew the Iraqi players. But Rice responded that Bremer had set this as a condition for taking the job.21 This was more than a personnel matter. A new phase in Iraq’s governance had begun: the pendulum had radically swung to “outside-in.”

Few diplomats had been given an opportunity to shape history on so grand a scale. Bremer’s office in the Republican Palace, his new headquarters, featured a carved wooden sign: “Success Has a Thousand Fathers.” But the organizational chart of his CPA was steeply vertical. Stomping around Iraq in a business suit and hiking boots, he was consumed by a sense of mission. There was an enormous amount to do, and those who challenged first principles were either sidestepped or rebuffed.

In an effort to raze the old political structures and clear the ground for the new state he was determined to erect, Bremer issued a decree just ten days after arriving in Iraq that barred officials who served in the top four ranks of the Baath Party from serving in the new Iraqi government. To the consternation of Abizaid and American commanders in Iraq, he followed that up with an edict to formally disband the Iraqi military and methodically build a new and considerably smaller force from scratch. Only three divisions, or some forty thousand troops, were to be recruited and trained during the first two years of the occupation, and they were to focus only on defending the nation from external enemies, not on putting down troublemakers at home.

Operating on the assumption that he had Bush’s full support for an “outside-in” approach, Bremer also elaborated a seven-step, 540-day strategy to organize the drafting of a new Iraqi constitution, conduct a referendum on the final text, arrange for the Iraqis to lay down an election law, and, ultimately, hold national, regional, and local elections to seat a sovereign Iraqi government. The goal was nothing less than a representative and democratic state that would feature political parties, an independent media, an active civil society, including women’s organizations, an impartial judicial system, and respect for human rights.22

In his first report to the White House, the CPA chief wrote that he had “re-launched” a political dialogue with Iraqi politicians, but on a new basis: there could be no hasty handover. “My message is that full sovereignty under an Iraqi government can come after democratic elections, which themselves must be based on a constitution agreed by all the people,” Bremer wrote the president. “This process will take time.”

“You have my full support and confidence,” Bush wrote back. “We will fend off the impatient.”23 At the start, Bush gave Bremer enormous latitude to pursue his vision—so much so that neither the president nor his closest aides balked when Bremer told the president and his National Security Council in a videoconference that he was on the verge of issuing the decree to formally disband the army and security ministries, a move that stood the president’s initial decision to vet and retain much of Iraq’s armed forces on its head and that all but shut the door on the original scheme to quickly hand over control to the Iraqis. “I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’” recalled Powell, who was attending an international meeting in Paris when the May 22 NSC meeting was held. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised, too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”24

Some of the United States’ closest allies, however, were concerned by the unyielding nature of Bremer’s vision and the inflexibility of his tactics. Jeremy Greenstock, who as the British ambassador to the United Nations had helped the Bush administration shepherd the Iraq issue through the Security Council, got a taste of that when he arrived in Iraq in September to serve as Britain’s top representative. Greenstock had met Bremer three decades before when Bremer was an aide to Kissinger and Greenstock was the private secretary of the British ambassador in Washington. But in Baghdad, Greenstock later told the official British government inquiry on the war, he found a changed man: an American envoy who was more conservative politically, more religious, less humorous, and more impatient.25

There were some early indications that the lengthy nation-building exercise Bremer intended might meet resistance from some of the Iraqis. A new Governing Council was being established to give the Iraqis a voice, but not a veto, in the decision making. In July, Bremer’s chief of staff, Pat Kennedy, grabbed a rail-thin, newly arrived young American staffer from Houston named Ali Khedery and drove him to a compound that had previously been home to Saddam’s vaunted Ministry of Military Industrialization in the Green Zone, the fortified international enclave that housed the CPA and the Iraqi government. Khedery, who was of Iraqi descent and was one of the handful of CPA aides who spoke fluent Arabic, was given two weeks to evict a U.S. Army colonel and his troops from the building, remove the dozens of murals of the omnipresent Saddam, have a twenty-five-person conference table custom-built, landscape the ruined grounds, and locate and install a generator in time for the first televised Governing Council meeting—all while Baghdad was wracked by looting, an emerging insurgency, and had no electricity.26

Over the coming year, the relations between Bremer’s occupation authority and the Governing Council would prove tumultuous. While Khedery and his colleagues furnished Iraqi council members with offices, weapons, villas, cars, cell phones, and the highly prized Green Zone access badges, the Iraqis grew resentful of the foreigners’ authority. On July 13, the day of the Governing Council’s inaugural session, Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who had helped beat the drums for war and had emerged as a major political player in postwar Iraq, was nearly prevented from attending the session by Kennedy, who insisted that there was no room inside the new compound for Chalabi’s twenty-car convoy. More importantly, for some senior Iraqi politicians, providing advice to an American proconsul was not the sort of relationship they were looking for. “When he came he asked all of us, the political leaders, to see him in Baghdad,” Massoud Barzani said of his first meeting with Bremer. As Barzani, who would later emerge as the president of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, recalled the encounter, Bremer told the Iraqis that he had come with the full support of the U.N. Security Council, was the legitimate authority in Iraq in the eyes of the international community under the law of occupation, and was considering uniting them in a consultative committee. As much as they did not like the concept of occupation, they should try to accept it. “We were all looking at each other like, ‘What is he saying?’” Barzani said. “And then afterwards, I told him, ‘I will be going back to [Kurdistan], I have nothing to do here. This is where my headquarters is, I am not based in Baghdad. If you need me, I’m there.’” With that, the Kurdish leader gathered up his retinue and left in a convoy of SUVs.27

Bremer flew north a few weeks later to coax the Kurdish leader back. Upon arriving at Barzani’s guesthouse, which had been the site of numerous plots to topple Saddam during the 1990s, Bremer asked Barzani, “Who is that guy in the painting?” Barzani remained silent and there was an awkward pause until an aide blurted out: “That’s the late Mullah Mustafa Barzani, Massoud’s father and the founding father of modern Iraqi Kurdistan. The U.S. government worked with him for decades.”28

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the preeminent Shiite cleric in Iraq, was also concerned about the new governing arrangements. In July, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian diplomat and veteran United Nations official who was dispatched to run the first U.N. mission in Iraq, and his deputy, Jamal Benomar, met with Sistani. Vieira de Mello began the meeting by talking about the advisory body Bremer had established to give the Iraqis a voice in the CPA’s decisions, which following the U.N. envoy’s recommendation, had been given an important-sounding name, the “Governing Council.” Sistani, however, was focused on a much more fundamental issue. He did not trust the Americans and their anointed representatives to draft the nation’s constitution, a central provision of Bremer’s plan, and insisted that only Iraqis who were elected could play that role. Bremer would need to back away from that element of his plan, Sistani suggested, and if he did not, the cleric implied he might issue a fatwa against it.

Sistani’s arguments were conveyed to Bremer, who thought he would find a way to mollify the ayatollah. But they made more of an impression on Greenstock, who had previously served in Saudi Arabia and Dubai and was more inclined to give weight to the views of prominent clerics. When Powell visited Baghdad in September and met with Bremer and Greenstock, the British diplomat used the occasion to argue that the seven-step plan the CPA had hatched should not be considered sacrosanct. “Bremer brought up, under Powell’s questioning, the political process, and I said, because I wanted to get the point across to Powell, we must also think about how we handle Iraqi resistance to this, particularly with Sistani, we may need some alternative approaches,” Greenstock told the British inquiry. “And Bremer shouted at me in front of Powell, ‘the President has decided on the seven steps. This is our approach. Either you give me loyalty—I don’t want to hear talk about alternative approaches—or we find some other way of working together,’ and Powell changed the subject. He was quite surprised.”29

Powell, indeed, was struck by the session. He found it distasteful that Bremer had dressed down a diplomat from the United States’ most loyal ally and compounded the indignity by doing so in front of a visiting secretary of state. It was not just the substance of the issue that bothered Powell. The tone suggested that the mission was not under control.

The switch from the strategy of a speedy transition to a prolonged and intensive rebuilding of the Iraqi state caught the commanders in the field by surprise and laid the groundwork for persistent friction between the military and Bremer’s CPA. Major General Ricardo “Rick” Sanchez had entered Iraq as commander of the last-arriving division, but after Rumsfeld soured on overall ground commander Lieutenant General Dave McKiernan, Sanchez was promoted to three-star rank and took the helm of a new Iraq headquarters, Combined Joint Task Force 7. The most junior three-star general in the Army was now running its largest combat operation. Abizaid advised Sanchez to stand “shoulder-to-shoulder” with the hard-charging Bremer. But it took months for Sanchez’s military command to figure out that their vision and Bremer’s differed profoundly.

In July, Sanchez’s aides put together a six-month plan, which was more of a series of PowerPoint slides than a detailed counterinsurgency campaign. The United States was to “defeat internal armed threats,” disarm the militias running around Iraq, and find the supposed caches of WMD that military and intelligence experts still thought might exist. By February 2004, the main responsibility for securing the country was to be transferred to the Iraqis. Sanchez figured that he would probably leave Iraq by then. The word was that he would be tapped to serve as the first Hispanic head of SOUTHCOM, the four-star command that oversaw Central America. In effect, the military command’s policy remained “inside-out” even as the civilian viceroy’s had changed to “outside-in.”30

“[Sanchez] was supposedly going to be a caretaker commander,” Lieutenant Colonel Bjarne “Mike” Iverson, Sanchez’s political-military adviser, later told a military historian in a classified interview. “When we did those plans in July of ’03, they were thinking that six months later, things would be back to normal and we would be moving out of there,” he added. “How they thought that the Iraqis would be ready to take over those institutions, all of their ministries, and the defense and security of the country, when we had just disbanded the very apparatus that had been running it for the past thirty-five years is beyond me, but that’s what we did.”31