Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [273]
Bremer had a totally different approach. He assumed that he had direct access to President Bush from the start. The President and Rice both not only accepted but facilitated Bremer’s unfiltered contact with them. On the same day that Bush announced Bremer’s appointment, May 6, 2003, they had a private lunch. I made a note to myself at the time: “POTUS had lunch with him alone—shouldn’t have done so. POTUS linked him to the White House instead of to DoD or DoS [State].”29
The President could of course have lunch with whomever he wanted. But in Bremer’s case, such actions contributed to a confused chain of command. This imprecision damaged Washington’s communications with the CPA throughout the period of Bremer’s tenure.
It became clear that Bremer intended to not be exclusively connected to any cabinet official. Bremer later wrote that after one of his private meetings with President Bush, “[Bush’s] message was clear. I was neither Rumsfeld’s nor Powell’s man. I was the president’s man.”30 He quickly established active relationships with Rice, Powell, and, as a career Foreign Service officer, his former colleagues in the State Department. Certainly it was desirable that the CPA have good ties to the political and diplomatic apparatus of the Bush administration, given the nature of its responsibilities in Iraq. I did not discourage that. What developed, though, was something I had not anticipated. Bremer was able to pick and choose the members of the NSC he would deal with on any particular issue, the result often being that the other members were left in the dark. The muddled lines of authority meant that there was no single individual in control of or responsible for Bremer’s work. There were far too many hands on the steering wheel, which, in my view, was a formula for running the truck into a ditch.
CHAPTER 36
Too Many Hands on the Steering Wheel
Upon his arrival in Baghdad on May 11, the press labeled Ambassador Bremer as America’s “viceroy” in Iraq. He seemed to embrace the idea with relish. Bremer believed, as he wrote in his memoir, that his assignment “combine[d] some of the vice-regal responsibilities of General Douglas MacArthur, de facto ruler of Imperial Japan after World War II, and of General Lucius Clay, who led the American occupation of defeated Nazi Germany.” The difference, Bremer contended, was that his job was even more challenging than theirs had been.* I had no idea that he would see himself this way. It certainly was not a mindset conducive to working with proud and wary Iraqis or with the large American military contingent in the country. Perhaps unavoidable but adding to the unfortunate imagery was the fact that Bremer’s offices were in one of Saddam’s grand palaces. Its many marble rooms, filled with opulent murals and statues, offered a grotesque glimpse of the Iraqi dictatorship. Paintings and inscriptions glorified the Iraqi regime. At least one of the sayings etched in Arabic on the ceiling was of dubious provenance: “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country—Saddam Hussein.”2
Though I would have entered Iraq with a notably different mindset had I been in Bremer’s shoes, I wasn’t in his shoes. To his credit, he put his own life on hold to work long days in punishing heat. Every day Coalition Provisional Authority officials went to work on behalf of their country. That took courage and a sense of duty. In later years, Bremer and his team, along with the Department of Defense, would be subjected to criticism for employing young, seemingly underqualified staffers in jobs critical to helping establish a postwar Iraqi society. What is often neglected in those critiques, however, was that the CPA was chronically short of staff. There was not a long line of seasoned volunteers to take on the challenges and frustrations that Bremer and the others withstood.
At the Pentagon, I established a special office, headed by former Wall Street banker Reuben Jeffery and retired Army colonel Jim O’Beirne, to support Bremer and reduce the paperwork