Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [284]
The news stories surrounding Rice’s announcement reported that she had established something called the “Iraqi Stabilization Group,” with undetermined responsibilities. CNN reported that it “will be responsible for handling the day-to-day administration of Iraq.”7 One newspaper ran a cartoon of Rice pulling down a statue of me in front of the Pentagon, as Saddam’s statue had been pulled down in Firdos Square.
I thought it would have been terrific if Rice and her staff had the interest and skill to manage all U.S. efforts in Iraq and improve the situation. But they did not. In fact, the lack of resolution on issues relating to the administration’s Iraq strategy at the NSC level had been a major contributing factor to the problems in the first place. Years later I learned that Bremer had been having a daily phone call with Rice at 6:00 a.m., Washington time. She had had ample opportunity to offer Bremer and the CPA management advice. After the press began speculating about the new powers of Rice’s group—and the supposed coup against the Pentagon—Rice tried to clarify the situation. Publicly she said she had consulted on the establishment of the group with various officials, including me. That was not the case. I was informed of the new group’s existence as a fait accompli, but not consulted about whether it was desirable, necessary, or appropriate.
I sent the cartoon to Rice with a note saying she should keep it for her scrapbook.8
The news stories about Rice’s new management plan also repeated the widely believed canard that the State Department had been cut out of postwar planning.9 The stories bore the unmistakable fingerprints of Powell’s top aides.
I had been eager for the State Department to accept more responsibility in Iraq and would have been the last person to shut them out. When we asked the State Department to send experts to Iraq, they failed to meet their quotas.10 When we asked for support for reconstruction teams in Afghanistan and Iraq, they struggled to fill them. When the State Department was in charge of training the Iraqi police, it did not get the job done. Powell was in National Security Council meetings and principals meetings on Iraq and shared in every major decision. It was a mystery as to what these State Department officials felt they were not involved in. I was skeptical that either the National Security Council or the State Department truly wanted to be accountable for the administration’s Iraq policy, and I was all too aware that Rice and the NSC were not able to manage it.
On October 6, 2003, I sent a memo to the President with copies to Cheney and Andy Card. “In Monday’s paper,” I wrote, “Condi, in effect, announced that the President is concerned about the post-war Iraq stabilization efforts and that, as a result, he has asked Condi Rice and the National Security Council to assume responsibility for post-war Iraq.”11 I recommended that Bremer’s reporting relationship be formally moved from Defense to the NSC or to State:
At this point there is a certain logic to [the] transfer. We all understand and agreed that at some point the stabilization responsibilities would move out of DoD.
Next, increasingly, Jerry Bremer has been reporting directly to Colin, Condi and you, as well as to DoD, so the effect of the change should not be major.
Third, the responsibilities that Jerry is currently wrestling with are increasingly non-DoD type activities—they are increasingly political and economic.
Finally, Condi, in effect has ... announced that that is the case. To not make the transfer now will cause confusion as to where the responsibility resides.12
I further noted that I had told Bremer months earlier that I would prefer to have him report to the President, Rice, or Powell. “[H]e is fully aware of my willingness to have this reporting relationship adjusted now that the circumstances there have matured,” I wrote.13 No one took up my offer. In fact, Rice shortly thereafter reversed herself, apparently at the President’s insistence, and informed the press