My Share of the Task(112)
I’d been in a number of Situation Room meetings during my earlier tour on the Joint Staff, but never with all the principals or the president. Big personalities filled the tight space. To the immediate right of the president sat Vice President Cheney, on his other side was Condoleezza Rice, five months into her tenure as secretary of state. Next to her was Secretary Rumsfeld and, to his left, General Richard Myers. As Rumsfeld’s plus-one, my seat was along the wall, behind his. Across from Rumsfeld sat John Snow, secretary of the treasury. National Security Adviser Steve Hadley and Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend were also present. Notably absent were any members of the National Security Council staff with the Iraq portfolio. This meeting, like those leading up to it, excluded these Iraq officials, drawing a line between the counterterrorist fight and the war in Iraq. This was a division of labor at odds with my thinking about Al Qaeda’s ascendant role in Iraq.
Two days earlier I’d been asked to come down to the White House for this session of President Bush’s National Security Council meeting. I was back in the States for a TF 714 commanders’ conference we were holding at Gettysburg, and when the NSC staff caught wind that I was Stateside, they summoned me. Field commanders rarely attended these meetings in person, but the topic, by the president’s request, was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He and his national security team wanted to know, as Secretary Rumsfeld put in his memorandum, “what [was] being done to get him.” As the commander overseeing that hunt, I was to tell them.
The meeting began and the president directed it at a businesslike clip. John Snow began with an update on his department’s efforts to clamp down on the terrorist funding flowing from Europe and the Middle East. Secretary Rumsfeld followed. After some initial points, he introduced me to the principals around the table.
“Stan’s going to tell you what we are doing to get Zarqawi,” he said to President Bush.
Rumsfeld began to stand up to switch seats with me and to take my spot along the wall, but General Myers demurred. Rumsfeld slid left into General Myers’s chair, and I sat down between him and Secretary Rice. It was an awkward shuffle, moving the big chairs around on their wheels. The monitor to my left, in front of the president, turned to the briefing slides, prepared by the Joint Staff and not TF 714. It was the first time I had seen the brief, but it was straightforward and accurate. The president listened intently and looked me in the eye each time I turned from the screen to him. His interjected questions were not cross-examinations, but he was focused and obviously interested in the mechanics of our hunt. After I finished with the brief, he gave me a half nod. “Thanks, Stan.”
He paused and looked intently at me. “Are you going to get him?”
I had assumed he’d ask this question. On the early-morning helicopter flight down from Gettysburg, over the green fields of southern Pennsylvania, I had thought about how I would answer. I knew I wasn’t just there to read a brief, or even to draw on my ground knowledge of the operations, fresh from the front. In truth, my being there allowed President Bush to size me up, to look me in the eyes, get a straight answer, and assess whether he thought I could deliver.
“We will, Mr. President,” I said. “There is no doubt in my mind.”
There wasn’t. This wasn’t bluster. I saw our force growing, learning, and becoming ever more effective against Zarqawi’s network. And I knew as long as Zarqawi was in Iraq, we would find the leads to him. But in the summer of 2005, after almost two years commanding TF 714, I also appreciated that the mission was larger than one man—he needed to be stopped, but his network had to be destroyed.
As we neared the end of the allotted time, I talked about some operations and the challenges of capturing targets like Zarqawi.
“Do you want to kill him, or capture him?” the president asked.