Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [118]
After the press conference I went to the State Department to meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell. We discussed Abu Ghraib again, and Powell said the pictures hurt the image of the United States all over the world, and even at home. He said these images created a major problem that the president knew he needed to deal with and do more about than just appear on Arab networks. This implicit criticism was only the most visible sign of the infighting that had begun to break out in the Bush administration.
On one side were the neocons—Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Elliott Abrams—and on the other the moderates, led by Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage. Although I typically would not meet with Wolfowitz and the others in person, my senior staff in Washington, who did, told me that they were dogmatic and inflexible. Like many politicians who are ideologically driven, they had little time for compromises. If you are dealing with a pragmatic decision-maker, there is scope for give-and-take. But if you are dealing with an ideologue, it can be very hard to find common ground.
My staff said Feith and Abrams were impossible to deal with. The minute they walked into the room there was a feeling that this would be yet another awful meeting. They acted as if they were superior to everyone else. They had a plan, and they would see it implemented—no matter what.
The next month, after a year in existence, the much-hated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was finally dissolved, and Bremer handed over power to an Iraqi government headed by Ayad Allawi, a prominent Iraqi Shia politician, in anticipation of national elections scheduled for January 2005. Allawi was a strong leader who had a chance to succeed in Iraq. Educated, worldly, and well rounded, he believed in a unified Iraq, but because some people in Washington were still backing Ahmad Chalabi, he did not get the undivided support of the American government.
The know-it-all attitude among some in Washington was perfectly illustrated during a visit I made to the United States in September of the following year. While in New York to attend the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting, I was invited to a dinner given by Lally Weymouth, a senior editor at Newsweek magazine and the daughter of the late Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. One of the other guests, as I recall it, a female American news anchor, asked whether I thought women’s rights were better or worse in Iraq since the war. “They’re ten times worse,” I said. “When you had a secular regime under Saddam, men and women were pretty much equal.” Liz Cheney, the vice president’s daughter, who was also present, leaned over to Bassem Awadallah, my chief of the Royal Court, and told him that I should not say those kinds of things in public. She had a smile on her face, so he was not sure how serious she was.
The next day Bassem received an unexpected follow-up call from Liz Cheney, saying that she had discussed my comment with Paul Wolfowitz, who had recently become president of the World Bank, and they had both agreed that I should not be expressing such opinions. When Bassem told me about the conversation, I suggested that he tell Wolfowitz to get stuffed. What I had said over dinner was true. I was shocked that some members of the administration and their supporters seemed to feel that there could be no dissent on Iraq—and that in America, a country that prides itself on opinionated self-expression, they would try to muzzle inconvenient news.
I had been warned by others in Washington, including a prominent journalist who had covered the Middle East for years, to tread with caution. “You’ve got to be really careful with some in this administration, because they’re vindictive,” he told me.
Thankfully, there were still