Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [285]
One week later, after a principals meeting on October 14, 2003, Rice asked to see me privately. She apologized for the flap over Iraq and said that she was doing everything to correct it.
I interjected, “You’re failing. You could have said something in the NSC meeting in front of the President and the principals.”
“Don, you’ve made mistakes in your long career,” she replied.
“Yes, but I’ve tried to clean them up.”14
Over the first four years of the administration, I had repeated discussions with Rice and Card suggesting a series of reforms to the NSC process. Mindful of my own admonitions that complaints without tangible recommendations for solutions were generally unhelpful, I had sent a number of memos to Rice and Card proposing that they institute changes to improve the President’s most important national security body. But there had been little or no improvement.15 It was not pleasant to see these problems up close, knowing how they undermined our nation’s policies.
On December 6, 2003, I went to Iraq to assess the situation on the ground and made another attempt to clarify Bremer’s chain of authority. Meeting him at the Baghdad airport, we moved into the lounge, where I took him aside. “Jerry,” I began, “it is clear to me now that you are reporting to the President and to Condi.” My view was that he should report to Powell at the State Department, not to Rice at the NSC, and that State should take on the responsibility for the civilian aspects of reconstruction in Iraq.
“I will keep my hand in on security,” I said, “and I will try to be as helpful to you as I can, but I don’t want four hands on the steering wheel.”
I also said I didn’t think the NSC was doing its job well, and that Rice’s taking on an operational role in Iraq was a grievous mistake. When the NSC staff engaged in operations abroad in the Reagan administration, I noted, they wound up overseeing a trade of arms for hostages in Iran and brought the Iran-Contra scandal down on the President’s head.
Bremer told me that he shared my concerns about the NSC, and that he didn’t disagree with or object to anything I said. I wished him well. At that meeting, as far as I was concerned, any lingering pretense that I oversaw his activities came to an end.16
By the time I arrived in Baghdad that December, military officials told me they were beginning to believe they might finally have Saddam—officially dubbed High Value Target Number One—in their sights. But reports of Saddam sightings were as frequent as they were unreliable. Even as a deposed dictator, he remained skillfully elusive. He had a number of hideouts and body doubles. He reportedly slept in a different place every night.
I put a high priority on Saddam’s capture and considered it a critical step in giving Iraqis confidence that the old tyranny was gone and would never come back. Even after Saddam’s overthrow, many Iraqis feared that the war was not over—and that the Baathists might be heard from again. They had lived in terror of the midnight knock on the door from regime agents for so long that they had difficulty moving past the worry that conceivably one day Saddam Hussein might return to power. Saddam had worked for decades to build his cult of personality. Suddenly turning himself into an amateur genealogist, he even declared he was a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammed. His picture was in all public buildings, on billboards, in homes, and in restaurants, reinforcing the idea in Iraqis’ minds that he was everywhere and everything. Saddam had survived several wars, an earlier U.S. invasion, coups, and uprisings. Iraqis asked themselves, with justification, whether he might pull off such a feat again.
Even the death that July of Saddam’s vicious sons, Uday and Qusay, had not been enough to overcome the fear that a Hussein regime could return in some form. Active participants in the regime’s crimes, Saddam’s sons long had been his heirs apparent and were rumored to