Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [289]
The President decided that extending or canceling the cease-fire was an operational decision—one that belonged to the senior officials on the ground. Directly countermanding the recommendations of the two most senior commanders responsible, Abizaid and Sanchez, in addition to Bremer, was not in the cards. The Commander in Chief made the call to let them proceed as they saw fit.
There was logic in deferring to Bremer and Abizaid in that they had made some real progress elsewhere in Iraq. The military’s efforts and arrests of senior members of the regime gave the Iraqi people an opportunity to close the book on their recent past and bring the criminals to account. By October 2003 the country’s electricity generation was higher than prewar levels, though in the years that followed it would ebb and flow with the pace of attacks.* With help from Undersecretary of the Treasury John Taylor, they rapidly created and distributed new Iraqi currency and curbed inflation. Real Iraqi GDP growth during the CPA period was 46.5 percent.22 The stock market opened, as did schools and hospitals across the country. In March 2004, Bremer and CPA officials drafted an interim constitution known as the Transitional Administrative Law that protected human rights, asserted the freedom of religion, and established the basic structure of a representative Iraqi government.23 It left a lasting imprint on Iraqi society. These were important signs of progress that received relatively little recognition.
The first battle of Fallujah, in April 2004, however, was not among the triumphs of that period. The cease-fire the momentum the Marines had gained. The Iraqi Governing Council again said they would resign if our forces pressed on. Eventually our coalition allies began to urge us to call off the attack. They were seeing the same images as many across the Arab world: wounded Iraqis, damaged mosques, and interviews with Fallujans describing supposed crimes by Marines targeting schools and hospitals. The widely disseminated propaganda increased the sense that the situation was one misstep away from a total, nationwide revolt against coalition forces. The Iraqi Governing Council tried to persuade the insurgents to lay down their arms and abandon the city. Bush was unhappy with the situation as was I. It was doubtful that a cease-fire would be productive.24 I knew that sooner or later, we would have to return to the enemy’s stronghold.
Given a growing insurgency and the existence of sanctuaries like Fallujah where insurgents received support from the local population, it was clear that we needed to find a way to involve the Sunnis in the new Iraq. Only a small percentage of them were directly engaged in the insurgency or linked to groups like al-Qaida, but many others sympathized with the resistance and the sense that their country was being occupied by forces hostile to them. It was easy to appreciate why many Sunnis—who were once accorded all of the privileges in Iraqi society—might see the future without Saddam and his largesse as bleak. Around the time of the Fallujah standoff, General Abizaid and I were discussing a Sunni outreach strategy. He thought there could be a way to peel off the disaffected Sunnis from the Islamist extremists and hard-core Baathists. There were intelligence reports about former Iraqi generals and other senior Baathists who had fled Iraq but had connections with insurgents who were ready to negotiate.* A large payment of cash by us could buy a change of allegiance, they informed us. We needed to determine if their offers were in good faith. Abizaid persuaded me of the merits of a determined outreach effort.25
In April 2004, I suggested to Bremer that he put together a strategy designed to “change the mindset of disenfranchisement and hopelessness” among the Sunnis.26 Senior military officers and I had been concerned for over a year that the Sunni tribes were being neglected, but we had found a less than receptive ear in the CPA.27 The Sunni outreach I outlined included easing up on de-Baathification efforts by moving