Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [292]
After several of these bombings, doubts resurfaced within and outside of the U.S. government about whether the Iraqis truly were ready to govern themselves. Reporters frequently asked Bremer and others if the date for the transfer was still on track. Bremer defended the plan steadily.37 I did as well. I had no doubt that the turnover was the right thing to do.
As June 30 approached, intelligence reports warned that enemy fighters were planning an ugly reception for the new government, in the form of massive attacks across the country. Bremer wisely decided to outmaneuver them by moving the date of the handover forward by two days.
At the time, I was in Istanbul with President Bush at a historic NATO summit meeting. The alliance was going to admit seven new members, all formerly part of the Warsaw Pact. Three were former republics of the Soviet Union. The alliance had fifteen members when I served as U.S. ambassador there in the early 1970s. It would now have twenty-six. The meeting in Istanbul, in fact, would be the largest gathering of NATO heads of state ever assembled. I felt a great sense of satisfaction seeing the leaders of those once communist nations free to chart their own courses and voluntarily, indeed eagerly, join the NATO alliance. It was a vindication of the tough, nerveracking, long-sustained, costly, and high-minded half-century struggle by the allied countries, with bipartisan U.S. leadership, to contain and eventually defeat Soviet communism.
As I surveyed the large, circular table and the representatives of our alliance partners, I thought about Iraq. I wondered if decades from now Americans might look back on the liberation of those long repressed Iraqis with the same kind of satisfaction that we felt about our liberation of Europe from Nazism and Soviet communism.
I was sitting with the U.S. delegation when an aide passed a cable from Iraq to Condi Rice. In a ceremony with little fanfare—certainly less than when he had arrived in Iraq a year earlier—Bremer presented Prime Minister Allawi with a letter from President Bush affirming the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority.38 Rice penned a note on the cable and passed it to me.
“Mr. President, Iraq is sovereign,” the note read, marking the historic day of June 28, 2004. “Letter was passed from Bremer at 10:26AM, Iraq time.” I handed the note to the President. He had been concentrating on the NATO discussion but looked down long enough to read it. He then took out his pen and wrote “Let Freedom Reign!” before turning to the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, seated to his right, and whispering the good news. The two leaders smiled at one another and shook hands.
The U.S. and coalition occupation was over. Not a moment too soon, I said to myself. For me the question was whether it was too late. We were still trying to regain the trust of the Iraqi people—a task that had been made more difficult not only by a long and heavy-handed occupation but by the crimes of a few military guards at a prison called Abu Ghraib.
PART XII
Wartime Detention
Washington, D.C.
APRIL 28, 2004
Two months before Iraqis assumed control of their country, the world was shocked by images of U.S. soldiers taunting naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The digital photos, taken by the soldiers in acts of pornographic self-indulgence, documented the sadistic abuse and torment they were inflicting on prisoners in their charge. The acts were inexcusable. The photographs threatened to weaken public support and call into question the legitimacy of our ongoing efforts on the eve of the transition to Iraqi sovereignty.
Prior to the public release of the images, I was shown a portion of them. Many depicted military guards performing humiliating acts on Iraqi prisoners—forcing them into what appeared to be a human pyramid, with naked detainees piled on top of one another. In some photos, the guards were shown pointing, laughing, or giving a thumbs-up.
A number of other photographs were not released to the public