Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [265]
chapter 35
Mission Accomplished?
In the weeks after Iraq’s liberation, the Department of Defense was still pushing for an Iraqi Interim Authority with some independence. With Saddam’s forces defeated, the Iraqi people were wondering what would come next. Given the region’s pathologies and the propaganda aired on Al-Jazeera, I was concerned that people across the Muslim world would believe that the United States sought to establish a colonial-type occupation for the purpose of taking Iraq’s oil. We needed to put forward a group of Iraqis as the core of a new interim government in order to avoid that perception. We were losing valuable time.
On April 1, I sent a memorandum to the President and the members of the National Security Council saying that the time for trying to craft “the perfect plan” was over. “We have got to get moving on this,” I wrote. “This is now a matter of operational importance—it is not too much to say that time can cost lives.”1 It wasn’t often that I wrote the President in such unequivocal terms, but I felt interagency deliberation needed to come to an end. Absent “a fundamental objection,” I wrote, I was going to have General Franks announce the first steps to create the Iraqi Interim Authority as soon as possible.2
State Department officials again objected. They argued that establishing the IIA so soon after the war would complicate things. They also contended that the situation in Iraq was different from Afghanistan, which is a poor country with little infrastructure in place, and therefore a new government could be established more readily. They believed that we needed to take some time to ensure we did it the right way.
An unequivocal order from the President resolving the differences was not forthcoming, so those of us in the Defense Department resigned ourselves to what we thought might be a delay of a month or two. Rice was pushing for a senior diplomat to head up the reconstruction effort, so I understood that it might make sense to wait until he was chosen and had a chance to assess the situation. As I would learn, a delay of a month or two was not what Powell and his colleagues had in mind.
At the end of April I traveled to the Gulf region. As I wrote to the President in a report summarizing my meetings, the leaders I met with unanimously believed that a quick transition to Iraqis would “help ease the apprehension of their people of a long-term U.S. occupation.” It was, I added, a good reason for us to move forward on the Interim Authority.3 I noted the remarkable consensus among our Arab partners of the threats posed by that perennial irritant in the Middle East, Syria. That regime’s behavior had not changed since I met with Syrian leaders in the 1980s. They were still aiding terrorists and still causing trouble.
The liberation of Iraq engendered a feeling uncharacteristic for the Syrian regime—fear. Their leaders appeared to be rattled by America’s ouster of Saddam Hussein. They might have been wondering if they would be next. When I arrived in Kuwait, the foreign minister said that a Syrian official had asked him to pass word to me that they were not harboring terrorists or facilitating the entry of jihadists into Iraq—the very things we knew they were doing. “We need to keep up the pressure,” I wrote the President.4
On April 28, I took off from Kuwait International Airport and in fifteen minutes was over newly liberated Iraq. Only eighty miles of arid desert and some of the densest oil fields in the world separate Kuwait City from the southern Iraqi city of Basra. But in another sense the two countries seemed a universe apart. Moving from Kuwait to Iraq reminded me of leaving democratic West Germany and entering totalitarian Eastern Europe back in the 1970s. The modern Kuwaiti cityscape gave way to dusty, one-story buildings