Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [383]
CHAPTER 50
After Tides and Hurricanes
“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.”
—Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission
On December 30, 2006, fifteen days after I left the Department of Defense, the Iraqi government executed Saddam Hussein. As he approached the noose, the former strongman struggled for a moment with his guards before regaining his composure. He had kept the salt-and-pepper beard he had favored since his capture, but his hair was again jet black, as I remembered it from our meeting in 1983. The country he had ruled had once been one of the most advanced and hopeful Arab nations in the Middle East, even a potential American ally. As Saddam met the judgment of his people for crimes against humanity, I could not help but reflect on the tragic waste he had made of his country during his long years in power. After the thick rope was placed around his neck, the vanquished dictator said only a few words. The small door below his feet snapped open.
The execution was greeted by dancing in the streets and guns fired into the air in most of Iraq. Along with euphoria and celebration, there was relief. Saddam had lingered in a cell far longer than suited many Iraqis. Some feared American forces might have been keeping Saddam alive as a bargaining chip with the Sunni insurgents, or that he might even be released if major groups agreed to lay down their arms. Many had bitter memories of an earlier Bush administration that had encouraged Iraqis to rise up against the Baathist regime in 1991 but then stood by as Saddam regained his power and massacred those who rose up. Now the man who had dominated and darkened their lives for decades, whose portrait had been in schools and restaurants, on television screens and buildings, was truly, finally gone. Though not all of Iraq’s demons were exorcised, Saddam’s death offered his oppressed people a psychological release that is impossible for outsiders to fully gauge.
The U.S. military involvement in Iraq has come at a high price. Combat took the lives of thousands of American servicemen and-women and left many more wounded. The U.S. Treasury spent hundreds of billions of dollars. The prolonged war also poisoned our politics at home. Political campaigns used the war as a bludgeon against President Bush, his administration, and his party.
Since Saddam Hussein’s statue was brought down in Firdos Square in March 2003, the United States’ goals—replacing Saddam’s government with one that did not attack its neighbors, or develop WMDs, and was respectful of the country’s diverse ethnic and religious minorities—had migrated into a more ambitious effort. Bush administration officials increasingly spoke about the imperative of creating a democracy, particularly after it was discovered that Saddam Hussein didn’t have the ready stockpiles of WMD our intelligence community believed we would uncover. This shift in emphasis suggested that Iraq’s intentions and capability for building WMD had somehow not been threatening. Many Americans and others around the world accordingly came to believe that the war had been unnecessary.
The Bush administration should have pointed out that, while Saddam Hussein did not have WMD stockpiles, he did in fact maintain dual-use facilities that could produce chemical and biological weapons. Given Saddam’s record of using chemical weapons against his own people, those facilities were effectively as dangerous as stockpiles. The Duelfer Report, the product of the Iraq Survey Group that examined Saddam’s WMD programs after the war, carefully documents the scope of his ambitions. Saddam wanted to “[preserve] the capability to reconstitute his