The Iraq War: Planning

Let's move on to your new book. I want to show our audience the cover again, Cobra II, an impressive rendering of the war and its failures. Let me begin by asking you this: What were the goals of the administration in going to Iraq, and who were the influential players?

There are only three major players on the civilian side: President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Everyone else is a secondary character. Condoleezza Rice was essentially a coordinator as National Security Advisor, not an essential figure in actually formulating the policy. Secretary of State Powell was largely shut out and blindsided by decisions. So, those three, this troika, are the three like-minded and almost joined at the hip, shared many of the same assumptions, reinforced each other's assumptions. They decided the major policy direction, and General Franks was a willing cohort and shared in their vision.

How would you characterize that troika? We just talked about 9/11. What in their backgrounds led them to the direction that they took, before we actually talk about the goals that they had in mind?

They weren't neo-cons -- you know, the much maligned neo-cons. There were neo-cons in the administration but they also were secondary figures. They took different directions.

Vice President Cheney thought at the end of the Gulf War that Saddam would fall of his own weight. I know that because he told me that in an interview I did with him for my previous book, The General's War. We even had a bet on it, which I've yet to collect.

After this book, he may not want to pay.

I tried to collect during the course of writing the book because I thought I could get an interview out of it, but I wasn't able to collect. His expectation was that Saddam would fall of his own weight, and then he didn't.

I think he saw that Iraq was still a problem. American intelligence indicated they were still pursuing WMD, and I think that Cheney, based on his previous experience -- and I'm kind of putting thoughts in his mind, I'm just trying to read how he would've solved the situation -- I think he asked himself the question: What if the Persian Gulf War had occurred and Saddam had a nuclear weapon, and he had taken Kuwait? Would we have kicked him out of Kuwait? I don't think so. So, I think he saw preventing Saddam from acquiring a nuclear weapon as a very important strategic objective. From Cheney's point of view, how close he was to this, whether he was ten years, or five years, or twenty years, almost didn't matter. The Bush administration was in power for those four years, and I think he saw it was up to them to intervene.

You've made an important point which I want to emphasize to our audience, which is that the fear was that if Saddam had a nuclear weapon, he could deter us in our response to some action that he might take in the region; that we would fear starting a nuclear war in the region and then therefore not act to stop whatever he might do.

I can't tell you that Cheney explicitly believed this, but if you read his speeches he was very much concerned with the nuclear issue, and as somebody who was the Defense Secretary for the first war, he had to have asked himself that question. I think he was a little fed up: here was a man who had been defeated in the war and he was still around. Their sense was that the sanctions were eroding, Saddam hadn't given up his ambitions, he was still trying to get back into the WMD game. From Cheney's point of view, enough was enough. He came around: he was one of those people in the first Bush administration who favored ending the war at 100 hours, made the case against going to Baghdad in public debate. I know because I asked him, and he gave me all the reasons not to do it; but [he] changed his view over time.

Secretary Rumsfeld had a different approach. He wasn't in the first administration, but after 9/11 he felt that intervention in Afghanistan was necessary but not sufficient to show that America was back. We had lost all the people who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and now we were taking out the Taliban. "What's the Taliban?" -- A bunch of guys in Toyota pickup trucks who drive around and ... Wes Clark, the former NATO commander, told me he thought they were the most incompetent enemy since the Barbary pirates. So, Rumsfeld's point of view, he said, "Fine, take out the Taliban, but that's not enough. There has to be another step," and it's what they called the global war on terror, "to show that nobody can take America for granted, that we're going to root out threats to our country."

Iraq became a convenient target for this. It was hard to find al Qaeda; the capitol of Baghdad wasn't going anywhere and neither was Saddam. Rumsfeld wanted a demonstration of American power. Also, he had no love for Saddam, and Saddam was a thorn in their side. So that's how he came to it.

President Bush is a very different figure than his father. He is much more attuned to the unilateral use of force, much less respectful of the United Nations and multilateral institutions. An important factor here is their first war was Afghanistan: it worked, more or less. There are some residual problems, but it worked. They didn't use a lot of forces, and they didn't mount a major nation-building effort, and yet they got in, they toppled the regime, a pro-American government took root, and they moved on from there. This colored their experience, and they began to think, "Gee, we did it in Afghanistan and it wasn't that hard. I think we can do this in Iraq."

Coming to this decision at this point, the key element becomes how do we make the war plan and how many troops do we need on the ground to do this. What you're saying in the book is that it comes together in what they see as a plan that will build on the Afghan experience on the one hand, but will also be the way to implement what we have just talked about, namely to make use of the "revolution in military affairs." Talk a little about that plan.

What's striking is the offensive planning begins in earnest, I would say, around December 2001. Bin Laden's still running around in his caves in Tora Bora or across the border in Afghanistan, and they're already beginning to put together a concept for how to do the Iraq war.

General Franks has written about this in his book. He went down to Crawford and talked to the president about this. The plan they had on the shelf, which General Zinni had left behind, called for 380,000 troops. The reason it called for so many troops is General Zinni wanted to lock down the entire country and control it. General Franks' initial submissions to Secretary Rumsfeld were sort of sons of this plan, not quite as many but consistent with the spirit of that plan. Rumsfeld was very unhappy with this, this was "old-think" as far as he was concerned, and what ensued was a process that Rumsfeld calls iterative planning, but Newt Gingrich, who was an advisor to Rumsfeld, calls a negotiation, where Rumsfeld was constantly pressing: it's got to be smaller, it's got to be faster.

By the way, the president did that too. He wanted something to deploy more quickly. The military was coming back with saying, okay, it can be smaller but it can't be too small, we still have all these tasks to perform. This back-and-forth went on for easily a year, and it was like an accordion, it got bigger, it got smaller, it got bigger again ...

Not the number of troops, the troops kept going down, right?

No, actually. What happened was, interestingly enough (I know all these plans inside out), they started out with something called the generated start, which is about five-plus divisions, and that was too big for Rumsfeld. They came up with a variant called the running start, where you begin maybe with a division or so, and then the reinforcements would flow behind it. So, you start small but you just keep sending more of what you need.

Then General McKiernan, who was a land war commander, came in and he took over his assignment in September, 2002, and he looked at this thing and said, "Wait a second, this is too small. Here, small is not beautiful." He lobbied to make it bigger again, and he did. It wasn't General Franks who wrote the war plan, it was General McKiernan, in my judgment, who was the principal architect. He said, "I just can't live with this." As small as the plan was, it would've been smaller still without the intervention of General McKiernan. And so, that went on until December, 2002. So, it was this constant pulling back and forth.

What's really striking is while there's well over a year of offensive planning, the postwar planning didn't begin in earnest until, I would say, January, February '03. So, you're planning the offensive campaign, the invasion -- Phase Three [is] what they called it, the march to Baghdad, Phase Three, major combat operations -- some of the early [planning] was done in October, 2001: eighteen months. But Phase Four, the post-war operations, two months. It was exactly the opposite of what ought to have been done, because you could have attacked Iraq from the north, south, east, west; the United States military is going to beat the Iraqi military, it's not going to be a serious contest. The part that's difficult is the day-after problem.

And that was the reason that so many of these different plans -- and it wasn't just one plan or one person -- were saying we needed 300,000-plus troops. There were several such arguments out there, and plans. Zinni, and I think you mentioned the NSC also had some papers that recommended this [number], but those plans took into account the need for post-conflict stabilization. That was a big reason for the numbers that were desired in those alternative plans.

We had enough troops to get to Baghdad and to take down the regime, although there were a few hairy moments along the way, but the number of forces was sufficient, they were able to take advantage of technology and American air superiority and the superior training of U.S. troops. The big issue was a principle that's well understood in the U.S. Army: you need more people to control the country afterwards than you need to take down the enemy regime. It's the troop-to-task ratio, as they call it.

Iraq is the size of California, the borders are porous, you might want to close them -- either to stop WMD from going out, since that's what they thought they had, or to stop jihadists from coming in, because they could disrupt your efforts -- just to control the place and provide security. When General Shinseki was asked by the Congress he said "several hundreds of thousands." The point he was making was, you don't need them to win the war, you need them to control the country afterwards. When the RAND Corporation looked at these sorts of things they came up with similar numbers, and there's a study done by the NSC staff, by a young Marine, Jeff Kojak. He can't make recommendations to the president, so what he said was, "Here are the different postwar situations, and if you use the Balkans as a model, how many troops we had in the Balkans, what the population was, what the size of the territory was, and you applied those sorts of ratios to Iraq, you'd get troop requirements on the order of three to four hundred thousand." But the administration said, "We don't want to look at the Balkans. That was the Clinton administration. We don't agree with that anyway. We want to look at Afghanistan. That was our early experience." Well, the problem is, Afghanistan and Iraq are such different strategic cases that if you look at Afghanistan you say, well, we hardly put anything in there and that place held together. That's true, but that has no relevance whatsoever for the situation in Iraq. So, there were people who were cautioning them.

Even Paul Wolfowitz publicly disputed the notion that you would require more forces to pacify a country than to defeat the regime. You ask any army officer. Everybody understands that.

Next page: The Iraq War: Implementation