Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [269]
Bush often expressed his belief that freedom was the gift of the Almighty. He seemed to feel almost duty-bound to help expand the frontiers of freedom in the Middle East. I certainly sympathized with his desire to see free systems of government spread around the globe. I had met and greatly admired Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident, whose ideas on democracy had deeply influenced Bush. As much as I agreed with both Sharansky and Bush that we would all be better off if the world had more democracies, I thought we needed to be careful about how we pursued it. I believed in expanding the frontiers of freedom where possible, but that goal had to be tempered by our limited ability to achieve it.
As the unsuccessful search for WMD stockpiles dragged on, the administration’s communications strategy seemed to shift further toward democracy as a reason for America’s presence in Iraq. This intensified during the 2004 presidential campaign. Instead of explaining the WMD failure within the context of imperfect intelligence, and emphasizing Saddam’s intent and ability to restart his WMD programs if given the chance, as the Iraq Survey Group, led by former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, had definitively concluded, the shift to democracy seemed to some as a way to change the subject.16
My concerns about the military’s management of Iraq in the first days of the critical postwar period were abated somewhat when I learned that there finally would be a full-time military commander. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez assumed command of ground forces in June 2003. The child of a Mexican American family, Sanchez had grown up along the Texas side of the Rio Grande in a one-bedroom house without plumbing. The future three-star Army general earned his commission in the early 1970s through ROTC. Sanchez had an admirable record of performance in the 1990s in the Balkans, where he had demonstrated the blend of military professionalism and political sensitivity that is needed when commanding coalition forces in another country. He had glowing recommendations from the Army leadership, particularly Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who had taken an interest in Sanchez’s advancement. Sanchez had been serving in Germany as a two-star division commander and had deployed into Iraq with his division after most major combat operations were over. His was an important assignment, involving command of some fifteen thousand troops. However, as commander of all coalition forces in Iraq, Sanchez would have to lead a force more than ten times that size, work with numerous coalition nations, and command a headquarters that he had never been trained or prepared to assume.
The reality—which should have been clear to the senior Army leadership, CENTCOM, and to the Joint Chiefs of Staff—was that Sanchez was not only the most junior three-star general in Iraq, but the most junior three-star in the entire U.S. Army. I can only speculate that part of the logic behind an otherwise inexplicable selection was that CENTCOM and the Army staff believed that with the emergence of an Iraqi Interim Authority and a reconstitution of Iraqi security forces, we could begin a drawdown of coalition forces. This would have left Sanchez commanding significantly fewer than the 170,000 coalition troops there in mid-2003. It may also have been assumed that Sanchez would be operating in a postwar environment, in which an international peacekeeping force could maintain security if needed.
Whatever the rationale behind the decision,