Imperial Life in the Emerald City (22 page)

When he returned from India in the summer of 2003, he was sixty-four years old. His silver hair was receding and his face had grown doughy, but he remained as feisty as ever. Rice offered him a chance to work for her as the NSC's policy planning coordinator. He'd get to help shape American foreign policy in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other hot spots. When Blackwill started in August, Bush, Rice, and other senior White House officials were on vacation. He began by looking at Iraq and reading everything relevant he could obtain: classified cables, CIA reports, internal memos. The more he read, the more alarmed he became. Bremer's seven-step plan, Blackwill concluded, was untenable. If an election were held to select the drafters, as al-Sistani was demanding, the occupation wouldn't end until 2006. That was too long for Iraq, and it was too long for the White House.

When Rice returned from vacation, Blackwill made his case to her. Bremer's plan needed to be reworked, he said, and the NSC needed to get more involved in coordinating Iraq policy. Rice had not immersed herself in the details of Bremer's strategy. Bremer reported to Don Rumsfeld, whom Rice assumed was delving into the nitty-gritty of the CPA. Bremer had been happy with Rice's hands-off approach. As far as he was concerned, he worked for the president and he answered to Rumsfeld, not to Rice or anyone else in Washington.

Convinced that the rules had to change, Blackwill tried to persuade Rice that the White House needed to take charge. Rice called Powell, who had just returned from Iraq. Powell said he didn't believe that Bremer's plan was viable. Rice then queried Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who were coming to the same conclusion.

Rice went to Bush and lobbied for greater White House control. She was discreet in her characterization of Bremer's performance. She knew that the president had immense respect for Bremer, particularly for the risk he was taking by serving as the viceroy, and even treated him like a cabinet secretary and a friend. They held video teleconferences at least once a week, and during Bremer's first trip back to Washington, in September, the president and the first lady had invited Jerry and Francie to the White House for dinner. But Bush's bond with Rice ran deeper. He agreed to set up an NSC task force called the Iraq Stabilization Group, headed by Rice, that would take charge of key policy decisions and put Bremer on a short leash.

The White House announced the formation of the Iraq Stabilization Group on October 6. In a background briefing to reporters, Rice downplayed suggestions that she was reining in Bremer or cutting out Rumsfeld. “It is to facilitate Bremer,” she said. “It's an effort to make sure Washington is not part of the problem.” Bush said that the group was “aimed at the coordination of interagency efforts.” He explained away reports of violence in Iraq and blamed the media for ignoring good-news stories. “Listen, we're making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it's hard to tell it when you listen to the filter,” the president said. “The situation is improving on a daily basis inside Iraq. People are freer, the security situation is getting better.”

The next day, a testy Rumsfeld told reporters that he had not been consulted by Bush or Rice about the Stabilization Group. It was a rare display of disunity among the president's war cabinet. In Baghdad, Bremer kept his mouth shut, not sure what the changes meant.

He got his answer in late October, when he was summoned to Washington for consultations. When he had made the rounds of the capital in late September, nobody in the upper echelons of the Bush administration questioned Bremer's assertion that Iraq needed a permanent constitution before the occupation could end. They didn't press him on his timetable to hand over sovereignty or for details on how the $18 billion Supplemental would be divvied up. But on this visit, it was evident that the Teflon had worn off. Rice and Blackwill told Bremer that his plan no longer seemed viable. They asked if the open-ended occupation was fueling the insurgency. Bush didn't want American forces to be embroiled in a bloody guerrilla war as Americans headed to the polls the following November. Think about ways to speed up the process, Rice and Blackwill told Bremer.

Bremer got the same message from Powell and Rich Armitage at State. And the Pentagon crew was even more adamant. Rumsfeld's office gave Bremer a memo drafted by Wolfowitz and Feith that proposed a new plan: sovereignty would be handed over to an expanded version of the Governing Council by the following spring. Bremer objected, saying that there needed to be some kind of legal framework before a transfer of power could take place. “I don't think it would be responsible to turn over sovereignty to a nonelected Iraqi body with no constitution in place,” Bremer told Rumsfeld. “We'd risk Iraq falling into disorder or civil war, with no constitution to shape Iraq's political structure and to guarantee individual and minority rights.”

Before he left, Blackwill pulled Bremer aside. The two men had known each other for thirty years, since the days when Bremer was a special assistant to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Blackwill the chief aide to State Department counselor Helmut Sonnenfeldt. Bremer and Blackwill had mediated between their bosses, both strong-willed Central European intellectuals. They became friends, although they eventually drifted apart as their assignments took them to different countries.

“Jerry, I don't think this is going to work,” Blackwill said.

Bremer told Blackwill and everyone else that he wanted to talk to the Governing Council one more time. He held out hope that they would finally agree to appoint drafters.

When he got back to Baghdad, Bremer met with Meghan O'Sullivan and Roman Martinez, two of his three top political advisers. The third, Scott Carpenter, the head of the CPA's “governance team,” was on holiday in New Hampshire at the time. Although the CPA lacked a stable of veteran Middle East specialists from the State Department—Bremer hadn't asked for many of them and Powell hadn't sent many—there were a handful at the viceroy's service: Hume Horan, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia who spoke Arabic better than anyone else at State; Chris Ross, a former ambassador to Syria and Algeria; Ron Neumann, a former ambassador to Bahrain; and Ron Schlicher and Tom Krajeski, two Arab-world experts who had run State's Iraq desk. But Bremer kept all of them at a distance. He limited his inner circle to O'Sullivan, Martinez, and Carpenter—none of whom had any prior experience in Arab affairs or any knowledge of Arabic.

Martinez, a handsome young Cuban American with wavy brown hair, was twenty-four years old. He had graduated from Harvard in 2001 and then spent a year studying at Cambridge, where he wrote a thesis on Winston Churchill's anticommunist philosophy. In the fall of 2002 he joined Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon unit that touted Ahmed Chalabi as Iraq's savior. I first met Martinez in April 2003 at one of Chalabi's homes in Baghdad. Although we ate dinner at the same table, Martinez never told me what he did. I thought he was a spy.

O'Sullivan was a tall, slender, thirty-four-year-old redhead. After receiving her doctorate from Oxford, she had joined the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, where she advocated a leaner-but-smarter regime of sanctions on Iraq. In 2001, when her Brookings colleague Richard Haass became the State Department's director of policy planning, she told him that if the United States went to war in Iraq, “I want to be a part of the effort to rebuild the country.” The following year, as the prospect of war became a near certainty, O'Sullivan joined Haass at State, and when ORHA was assembled, Powell asked her to go to Iraq with Jay Garner. But her stance on sanctions had angered many neoconservative Iraq hawks, who complained to Cheney, who, in turn, told Rumsfeld to remove her from ORHA. When Powell heard that she had been black-balled, he called Rumsfeld and demanded that the order be rescinded. O'Sullivan was allowed to rejoin ORHA, but her role was supposed to be limited to humanitarian relief. When Bremer arrived, she deftly shifted herself onto the governance team. Her tenacity and tirelessness impressed Bremer, who assigned her to vet candidates for the Governing Council. Pleased with her work, he increased her responsibilities and included her in high-level decision making.

Scott Carpenter was a former legislative assistant to Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. He had worked for the International Republican Institute on democratization projects in Eastern Europe before joining the State Department as a political appointee in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He was sent to ORHA after Garner asked Rumsfeld for “the best minds in the nation” to draw up a political transition plan for Iraq. Rumsfeld passed the request to Liz Cheney, the vice president's daughter, who was an assistant secretary at State. She dispatched Carpenter, who had not been involved in the Future of Iraq Project or in the department's other initiatives with Iraqi exiles but, unlike some of his State colleagues, was a firm believer in Bush's effort to promote democracy in Iraq and the broader Arab world. Carpenter “really wasn't what I wanted,” Garner said later.

Why did the viceroy surround himself with such unseasoned advisers? Like the president, Bremer valued loyalty above all else. Some of the veteran Arabists, who were at the end of their careers, didn't share his tireless dedication. Others seemed beholden to the State Department, and he worried that they would share internal CPA discussions with their colleagues in Washington. There was also a practical reason: the gray-haired veterans rarely stayed for more than three or four months. The trio of Martinez, O'Sullivan, and Carpenter was there the day Bremer arrived, and they remained in Iraq until the month he left. None of them had been at their previous jobs long enough to develop prior allegiances. And they were all looking to make a name for themselves in Baghdad.

But their lack of experience led to a fundamental miscalculation. They tried to right Saddam's wrongs by engaging in social engineering, favoring the once-oppressed Shiites and Kurds at the expense of the once-ruling Sunnis. It was the easy and obvious strategy, but it was fraught with danger. The Shiites and Kurds had political leaders who were known to the Bush administration; the Sunnis did not. The Shiites and the Kurds had been the victims of the Sunnis, who were willing accessories to Saddam's despotism. The result was a Governing Council that had strict quotas: thirteen Shiite Arabs, five Sunni Arabs, five Sunni Kurds, one Christian, and one Turkmen. To some Iraqis, who placed national identity over religious or ethnic affiliation, it looked like the Americans were adopting a version of the troubled political system in Lebanon that divided government posts among several religious groups. “We never saw each other as Sunnis or Shiites first. We were Iraqis first,” said Saad Jawad, a professor of political science at Baghdad University. “But the Americans changed all that. They made a point of categorizing people as Sunni or Shiite or Kurd.”

To make matters worse, the CPA chose five relatively weak Sunnis to sit on the council. The governance team, at the behest of the Shiites and Kurds, excluded low-level Baath Party members from consideration, further alienating Sunnis who were already reeling from Bremer's decision to fire many Baathists and dissolve the army.

The deference to the Shiites and Kurds also meant that when Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani issued his fatwa, Bremer's trio of young advisers accepted the assurances of Shiite council members that they would get the cleric to change his position. The veteran Arabists in the palace knew better. But Bremer didn't listen to them.

By mid-October, even before Bremer's fateful trip to Washington, Martinez, O'Sullivan, and Carpenter began to realize that the seven-step plan, which they had helped develop, was in trouble. They wrote a memo to Bremer outlining various options to get the Governing Council to appoint drafters. If the council refused, the trio suggested that Bremer consider promulgating an interim constitution and then holding elections. The viceroy bristled.

On November 4, just a few days after Bremer returned to Baghdad, Martinez and O'Sullivan tried again. They knew about the pressure in Washington, and they were worried about the Pentagon plan to hand over power to an expanded Governing Council without an interim constitution. They sent Bremer two memos. The first urged him not to overrule the council if it refused to appoint drafters. The second recommended that he drop his demand for a permanent constitution and settle for an interim document. It also called for the CPA to hand over sovereignty in the summer of 2004 to an interim government selected through national elections. This time, Bremer didn't dismiss the suggestions.

Two days later, Bremer met with the council's nine presidents in his Green Zone villa to make one last attempt to get them to agree on something other than elections to select the drafters. What about caucuses in each province? What about a large national convention? They refused to budge.

Bremer realized that his seven-step plan—conceived in the ambitious, idealistic early months of the CPA—was dead. He asked Martinez and O'Sullivan to flesh out their proposal to draft an interim constitution.

When Blackwill arrived in Baghdad on November 8, he wanted an update. Other than a missive from Bremer criticizing the Pentagon's plan, written in the palace basement during a mortar attack, none of the constitutional strategy memos had been forwarded to Washington. When Blackwill heard that Martinez and O'Sullivan were calling for an interim constitution, he sat down with Bremer and urged him to embrace the new plan. Handing over sovereignty by the middle of 2004, Blackwill said, was very important to the president.

On November 10, Bremer wrote a letter to Rumsfeld, copied to Condi Rice and Colin Powell: “Based on my conversations with the Governing Council last week, I have concluded the time has come to readjust our planned program for Iraq's political transition.” He wrote, “It would be a mistake” to force Shiite members of the council to cross al-Sistani. Instead, the United States should support the creation of an interim constitution, something he had long opposed, which “would ensure an honorable end to the occupation.”