Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [280]
Apparently Bremer felt he was blamed unfairly for the decision, and in truth, it wasn’t all Bremer’s fault. Many shared responsibility for the policy. I was told of Bremer’s decision and possibly could have stopped it.42 Members of the NSC had been informed of his decision before Bremer announced it, and not one participant registered an objection.43 My impression was that President Bush wanted Bremer to have considerable freedom of action. However, it is now clear that the NSC should have deliberated the decision more fully. We should have had more clarity about the critical details of implementation, ensuring that the stipend payments and the size, purpose, and timeline for it were well understood and agreed to beforehand.
There is no mistaking that the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army had consequences, but as time has gone on we may be finding it has had some advantages as well.44 Perhaps because much effort was poured into building a new force from scratch, it is emerging as one of Iraq’s more effective institutions. By way of contrast, its police force suffers from lack of training and discipline, sectarianism, and corruption. As in Afghanistan, the State Department was, by U.S. law, placed in charge of police training in Iraq. However, State sent very few qualified people to either country.45 In the case of Iraq, for reasons still unclear, the training program was delayed for six months. As a result, the country was without any sort of internal security force for a critical period following the war.
Defense officials repeatedly urged State and its representatives at the CPA to improve police training and devote more resources to the task.46 But just as he had with regard to the training of the army, Bremer argued against having the U.S. military take over Iraqi police training. “I do not agree with placing the Iraqi police program under the military command,” Bremer wrote me in February 2004, after I informed him that DoD would be assuming responsibility for police training. He said the transfer would “convey to the Iraqis the opposite of the principle of civilian standards, rules and accountability for the police.”47 This would have been a compelling argument if Iraq were Nebraska. But it wasn’t. It was a war zone that was suffering from a vicious insurgency. We needed a capable police force to bring law and order and gather intelligence to stop the insurgency from metastasizing further, and we needed it fast. Too much time had been wasted already. The whole process had cost us a year—and done incalculable harm to our country’s mission in Iraq in the interim.
The early months of the Iraq occupation—throughout the summer of 2003—saw the stirrings of an Iraqi insurgency. In August, the illustrious United Nations envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed when a flatbed truck filled with explosives barreled into the UN headquarters in Baghdad. Twenty-two other UN officials were also killed. The attack sent a chilling message to nations and organizations that were then considering joining the stabilization and reconstruction efforts. From that point on, our efforts to persuade countries to contribute became considerably more difficult.
Military commanders told me that before the attack they had warned UN officials several times that cement revetments and gates were needed to protect the UN compound. In declining to heed those warnings, they explained to our commanders, “That would make us too much like you.” After the bombing, the United Nations closed its mission and withdrew from Iraq.
When the signs of a resistance movement emerged that summer—grenade attacks, small-arms fire, the occasional suicide bomber, or car bomb—we tried to identify who and what was fueling the movement. At first, the insurgency consisted of former regime figures and common criminals. On the eve of the invasion,