Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [287]
Shortly after his capture, Iraqi officials displayed Saddam on television. The Iraqi people needed to see him for themselves, so they could be convinced that their resilient and elusive former leader was really in hand. As I saw this bedraggled figure, my mind flashed back to my meeting with him, the grand potentate. Twenty years later, Saddam Hussein was under arrest. The capture led to jubilation throughout much of Baghdad. There was a noticeable uptick in Iraqis’ interest in cooperating with coalition authorities, and, it seemed, an increasing optimism.
It was tempting for me to meet with Saddam in jail, as Bremer and members of the Iraqi leadership had done. However, I was actually more interested in seeing Tariq Aziz, who had been captured months before. I knew that nice guys didn’t last long in criminal regimes, but he lacked the obvious hard edges that many of his fellow Baathist bigwigs displayed. He had a manner that could obscure the underlying evil of the regime he represented—a paradox I had always found interesting whenever I sat across from him and engaged in the friendly conversations we had. I would have been interested in hearing Tariq Aziz’s version of events—how things had gone so wrong for him since our visits together in Iraq and in Washington in the 1980s. I wanted to know why Saddam had refused to comply with seventeen UN resolutions, and why they didn’t leave the country when President Bush had given them a chance in the days before the war. I wanted to understand the tortured logic behind the regime’s serial deception on its WMD programs and why their warped bluff had invited the very thing they hoped to deter. Ultimately, I decided there was no way to talk with my old acquaintance without creating a spectacle.
It was a mistake not to make the separation between the Department of Defense and Bremer official and publicly visible. Had I successfully done so, the Department might have been spared some of the criticism for another of the CPA’s decisions, relating to a violent event in the city of Fallujah.
Known as the “City of Mosques,” Fallujah by the spring of 2004 had become a haven for militants operating against the coalition. Baathists, al-Qaida terrorists, marginalized Sunnis, and criminals looking to make easy money planting roadside bombs had turned the city into a nest of killers. Car bomb factories and terrorist safe houses were scattered throughout the area. Many of the city’s two hundred mosques had become nodes of the disparate resistance movements.
On March 31, 2004, Iraqi insurgents ambushed four Blackwater contractors. They were pulled from their convoy and dragged through the city streets. Their murdered bodies were hanged over a Euphrates River bridge. Photographs and videos of the carnage promptly flashed around the world.
These crimes were monstrous—everyone understood that. But what many also did not seem to realize was that this act had a sinister and calculated purpose. The insurgents knew that they couldn’t hold off an American assault with arms alone. Instead, they had a sophisticated propaganda effort designed to intimidate and make Americans question whether their effort was worth the cost. The shocking images of bloodied and charred American corpses dangling from a bridge was a public relations victory for them. Increasingly, people questioned why Iraq seemed to be chaotic, violent, and out of control after its liberation.
All of us on the National Security Council recognized that we could not allow an Iraqi city to become a sanctuary for murderers and terrorists. My impulse was not only to find the enemies who had committed the atrocity, but also to send a message