Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [454]
* More than a year before the war began, in January 2002, Pentagon officials were pushing for a U.S. government-sponsored conference for all the external groups to show a united front against the Saddam regime. Deputy Secretary of State Armitage generated a series of bureaucratic impediments to stop or delay the meeting. Eventually, in December 2002, the administration organized a conference in London. By then, nearly a year had passed, to the detriment of our country’s planning efforts. Even then, State and CIA remained skeptical of the Iraqi externals, and voiced doubts about the Iraqis’ ability to come together to build a new country.
* I recommended to President Bush that Garner be appointed ambassador to Afghanistan soon after he returned to the United States, but without success. I believed he could inject a sense of urgency into the State Department mission in Kabul.18
* The failure to take responsibility for leaks that threatened to damage the administration ultimately belonged to the White House. In April 2003, a few weeks after my phone conversation with Powell, I assembled a package of news articles quoting officials from the State Department, including Armitage, that revealed damaging assertions against the administration, and sent the memo to Card. The articles, I noted, “reflect a hemorrhaging in the administration. It is clearly not disciplined.” Though it was seldom noted, Armitage also leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name to the press, causing further damage.22
* After a brief talk with Bremer, I told Card that “I think he is the man” to head the CPA. Tenet said he had heard good things about Bremer, and Powell said he thought well of Bremer but wanted to “run a couple of traps” before he could say he was comfortable. I later learned a slightly different version of the story of the Bremer selection. Apparently when I mentioned Bremer, Powell was delighted, because Bremer had close links to the State Department.27
* Bremer quotes himself as saying, “I’d settle for MacArthur’s problems.”1
* When I met with the two of them on my visits to Iraq, their body language signaled a lack of rapport. By the end of their tours in mid-2004, I received reports that they were barely speaking.
* A subtle but important semantic misstep was that the administration allowed the United Nations to label the United States “an occupying power” in Security Council Resolution 1483. The unanimous May 2003 resolution signaled broad international approval for the coalition’s efforts in a liberated Iraq, but it gave credence to the propaganda of our enemies that we were “occupying” Iraq.
* It’s difficult to penetrate the fog of war even after the fact, but in the years that followed, some senior military officers who were on the ground now believe there were at least some Iraqi units that might have been called back to duty. Some believe that as many as three Iraqi divisions might have been available for use. “The idea,” Lieutenant General McKiernan later said, “was to bring in the Iraqi soldiers and their officers, put them on a roster, and sort out the bad guys as we went.” If McKiernan had been acting as the senior commander in Iraq on the ground, as I believed he was supposed to be, his view might have prevailed.31
* The CPA called the proposed new army the New Iraqi Corps. Though it had been done unwittingly, the acronym NIC was a particularly foul word in Arabic.
* In 2004, after the fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report could highlight only one small section at the end of a thirty-eight-page National Intelligence Council document suggesting that the CIA cautioned of an insurgency: “[R]ogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations