It was an almost classic struggle of cultures and will. Both the secretary and the military were making their best efforts to accomplish the mission. Both were right on a number of points. All were good people. Without question, the secretary’s intractability forced the military to be more flexible. But in the process we also experienced a painful period of uncertainty and doubt, which better communication among all the players could have ameliorated.
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One of the actions I was involved with should have given us pause. In the fall of 2002, John Abizaid called me to his office and issued guidance to begin working with selected Rumsfeld staffers to build, train, and ultimately deploy a force of Iraqi expatriates. That force was to assume a role a bit like that of the Free French Army units that led the liberation of Paris.
The concept was straightforward. Iraqi expatriates would be recruited by a network of Iraqis, supported by American money, and transported to a location where they would be organized, equipped, and trained to participate in the liberation of their homeland.
But the expatriate community could not, or would not, produce. In what should not have been a surprise, both the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a main Shiite opposition group exiled in Iran, and the anti-Saddam Kurds refused to contribute to the Free Iraqi Forces. Ultimately, instead of thousands of stalwart freedom fighters, only seventy-four Iraqis volunteered. In Hungary my classmate then–Major General Dave Barno and a team of U.S. Army advisers worked to mold them into a force. Despite great effort and ninety million dollars, little meaningful came from it, and their employment in Iraq proved inconsequential. Over time, I came to believe the inaccuracy of Iraqi expatriates’ claims about their ability to marshal opposition to Saddam should have made us question their overall credibility.
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When hostilities were clearly imminent, I received two unexpected assignments. The first was to conduct briefings to Congress six days each week. The Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate hosted the briefings, about ninety minutes each, but any member of Congress who had sworn a confidentiality oath was invited to attend. Along with Ambassador Ryan Crocker, an experienced diplomat I’d come to admire deeply in the years ahead, and Colonel William Caniano, an army intelligence officer, we’d brief members in a secure room on the latest developments in Iraq.
The briefings were part of an effort to maintain better relations with Congress, keeping it informed and providing a venue to ask questions on request information. I came to admire the way Senator John Warner of Virginia and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan maintained a seemingly bipartisan friendship and a supremely professional environment, despite the fact that Warner had voted for war in Iraq, while Levin had not. I found this relationship helpful later when commanding both in special operations and the war in Afghanistan.
The second task was to periodically perform the role of Pentagon military spokesman for briefings to the Pentagon press corps. I wanted that role about as much as I wanted a root canal. As VDJ3, I was normally up to speed on operational details, but there was every opportunity to misspeak or to appear a buffoon on national television.
I lucked out. The Joint Staff’s public-affairs office assembled a team of young officers with extensive experience who labored to keep me prepared, since I still had my normal duties as VDJ3. I was fortunate enough to be paired with the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, Torie Clarke. Torie’s easygoing manner and mastery of media issues helped me avoid serious damage, and her propensity for colorful clothing sometimes distracted the press from my obvious nervousness.
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From my vantage point in the Joint Staff, I also observed a small sideshow in the march to war. Although we did not know it at the time, at least one actor in that sideshow would soon take center stage in Iraq.
I arrived in the Pentagon to find the military mulling plans to attack a small mountain-bound training camp in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. Fifty-five miles south of the lower limit of the no-fly zone policed by American and British jets, the camp was in a place called Khurmal and run by a little-known Kurdish jihadist group called Ansar al-Islam. The group, with ties to bin Laden, had enacted a mini Talibanized society in its ungoverned enclave in Kurdistan. It forced the men to wear beards and pray at the mosque five times a day; it outlawed music, television, movies, and alcohol. Recently, a small, bedraggled group of Al Qaeda members, who had fled American bombs in Afghanistan and made their way across Iran, sought refuge with Ansar. Most troubling, however, was solid intelligence that at Khurmal, Ansar was manufacturing potent chemical and biological weapons—including ricin—and intended to use them in Europe and perhaps beyond.