In My Time - Dick Cheney [204]
At the end of my visit to the CDC I spoke to staff members gathered in the auditorium. I thanked them for the tremendous contribution they were making in defending the nation. I wanted to make sure they knew they had an advocate in the White House.
ON AUGUST 5 WE had a National Security Council meeting to review the latest iteration of the war plan. Tommy Franks was refining and modifying the plan in order to shorten lead times. We were all more comfortable with a plan that gave Saddam less time to plan and prepare counterattacks. In a discussion about postwar planning, there was a brief exchange about the military requirements for postwar security operations. The president looked at CIA Director Tenet and asked him point-blank what the Iraqi people’s reaction would be to an American military overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Tenet didn’t skip a beat: “Most Iraqis will rejoice when Saddam is gone,” the CIA director responded.
I WORKED OUT OF Wyoming for a good part of August, attending meetings back in Washington by SVTS, with the equipment set up in my upstairs office. On August 10 I was scheduled to confer via SVTS with a visiting delegation of Iraqi exiles opposed to Saddam Hussein. They had gathered in the ornate Cordell Hull Conference Room in the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. All of them had taken their places and were waiting for me to appear on the screen, when, unbeknownst to me, my four-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth, wandered into my office. The Iraqis were treated to images of Elizabeth jumping around in a pink princess outfit and making faces at herself as she watched her performance reflected back on the two-way video hookup. She was hustled off by my personal aide, Brian McCormack, before I arrived on the scene. I sat down in front of the camera and Scooter Libby sat down just outside of view. Unaware of the performance that had just taken place, I said to the delegation: “Greetings from Wyoming. I’m here with my chief of staff.” It was only after the meeting that someone explained why the Iraqis found that so funny.
Since January 2002 Scooter had been urging the State Department to get the major Iraqi opposition groups together for an international conference to begin planning for a post-Saddam government, but a conference had been repeatedly delayed while Secretary Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage warned about too much engagement with Saddam’s opponents. They were “externals,” or so the argument went, who had left Iraq during Saddam’s reign and would not have credibility with Iraqis who had stayed. Therefore, the State Department argued, they should not be actively involved in our postwar planning. I’ve reflected on this assessment and its consequences many times in the years since as I have watched so-called externals play a crucial role in Iraq’s democratic government. The prime minister of Iraq today, Nouri al Maliki, lived in exile until 2003, as did Ayad Allawi, whom Maliki narrowly defeated in the 2010 national elections.
The idea that we shouldn’t work closely with opponents of Saddam who were living in exile slowed us down. I think we would have done a better job in the wake of Saddam’s ouster if we had had a provisional government, made up of externals and internals, ready to take over as soon as Saddam fell. This would have put Iraqis in charge of Iraq and helped avoid the taint of occupation that we began to experience under the Coalition Provisional Authority.
A question that came up early and often in our discussions of a government to follow Saddam was whether we were committed to establishing a democracy in Iraq. I believed we had no alternative. Any provisional government would have to agree