Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 3

Read now, with the benefit of hindsight, the report the group produced clearly is stunning in its prescience. "The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious," they wrote in a lapel-grabbing tone that was an unusual departure for government experts giving their bosses unwelcome advice. "Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution." That was what the Army War College group had seen happen with Afghanistan-and some members of that group were hearing from friends at Central Command that the same screwup was happening again.

They also delivered a clear warning about the fragile state of the Iraqi economy-something that Bush administration officials would insist after the invasion had been a rude surprise. Iraq had been strained by decades of misrule, wars, and sanctions, they observed. "If the United States a.s.sumes control of Iraq, it will therefore a.s.sume control of a badly battered economy." The writers repeatedly emphasized that Iraq was going to be tougher than the administration thought, or at least was admitting publicly. "Successful occupation will not occur unless the special circ.u.mstances of this unusual country" are heeded, they warned.

They specifically advised against the two major steps that Amba.s.sador L. Paul Bremer III would pursue in 2003 after being named to run the U.S. occupation. The Iraqi army should be kept intact because it could serve as a unifying force in a country that could fall apart under U.S. control: "In a highly diverse and fragmented society like Iraq, the military... is one of the few national inst.i.tutions that stresses national unity as an important principle. To tear apart the army in the war's aftermath could lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society." They likewise were explicit in warning against the sort of top-down "de-Baathification" that Bremer would mandate. Rather, they recommended following the example of the U.S. authorities in post-World War II Germany who used a bottom-up approach by having anti-n.a.z.i Germans in every town review detailed questionnaires filled out by every adult German, and then determining, one by one, who would have their political and economic activities curtailed.

The report received an enthusiastic response from the Army, Crane said later. He believes it also influenced the thinking of some Army generals preparing for the invasion of Iraq. But all that was preaching to the converted. The group heard very little from the office of the secretary of defense or from Central Command. "It was not clear to us until much later how unsuccessful General s.h.i.+nseki and his staff had been in shaping the final plans," Crane said later. Then, in mid-2003, after the occupation had gotten off to a fumbled start and Franks had left Central Command and retired from the Army, Crane was told that John Abizaid, the new commander, was handing the report to everyone he met and telling them to read it. It was small consolation.

What is remarkable is that again and again during the crucial months before the invasion, such warnings from experts weren't heeded-or even welcomed. Almost no Middle Eastern experts inside the military were consulted on the war plan, in part because the plan was produced on a very close hold basis that involved few people, and even then only parts of it were shown to most of those involved.

s.h.i.+nseki and his aides were seeing many of the warnings. In the fall of 2002, when Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs to discuss the planning for Iraq, s.h.i.+nseki brought up his concerns. Centcom's Renuart, who attended the session, recalled the Army chief arguing that "the mission was huge, that you needed a lot of troops to secure all the borders and do all the tasks you needed to do." Franks's response at the time, Renuart added, was that it wasn't known how many Iraqi troops would capitulate and work for the Americans, so it wasn't clear that tens of thousands of additional U.S. soldiers would be required. This essentially was best-case planning, which is as much an error as is planning only for the worst outcome.

Then, as winter approached, s.h.i.+nseki and the other members of the Joint Chiefs met with the president. Gen. Franks, who joined them, recalled the meeting in an interview as "a very, very positive session." Franks recalled s.h.i.+nseki as not so much expressing concern about the overall war plan, but rather pointing out that "the lines of communication and supportability were long__________ I took it, and I think everyone in the room took it, [to mean that] this isn't going to be a cakewalk."

Franks also heard concern from Powell about the war plan. "I've got problems with force size and support of that force, given such long lines of communication," the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs said in a telephone call, according to Franks's autobiography. It was a difficult position for Powell to put Franks in, because Franks had to report to Rumsfeld, not to Powell, and the two secretaries were like old bulls facing each other down. So Franks essentially thanked Powell for his interest and reported the conversation to Rumsfeld.

Ground commanders vs. Franks Franks also was being squeezed from below. In 1991, Gen. Schwarzkopf had made himself both the overall commander and the commander of land forces for the attack into Kuwait. Some in the Army thought that he had been overwhelmed by both tasks-one reason that the Army wasn't able to adjust its operations when the Marines moved into Kuwait faster than expected, and couldn't close the door on the Iraqi army before it escaped northward. Franks took a different course, creating the Coalition Forces Land Component Command. That was the awkward name for the ground forces-the Army, the Marine Corps, and the British army, along with a handful of Poles and other troops-who would ultimately invade Iraq. The CFLCC (which the military took to p.r.o.nouncing "sif-lik") was another element of the war plan that amounted to a repudiation of Schwarzkopf's handling of the 1991 war: This time they were going to go to Baghdad and do it right.

Not all was well at CFLCC. Its senior officers had worked for months to get Franks to stand up to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. Maj. Gen. James Thurman was CFLCC's director for operations, arguably the second most important post in the organization. Neither he nor his commander, Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, was happy with the war plans Franks was bringing back from his meetings with Rumsfeld. The initial plan put on the table had in their view been ridiculous. It called for a tiny force, consisting of one enhanced brigade from the 3rd Infantry Division and a Marine Expeditionary Unit-all in all, fewer than ten thousand combat troops. It was little more than an update of the notions that had been kicked around during the nineties by Iraqi exiles, and that Zinni had nixed as a potential Bay of Goats. Over the course of 2002 the planned size of the force got larger, but hadn't quite reached what McKiernan saw as the minimum.

Rumsfeld had come out of the Afghan war believing that speed could be subst.i.tuted for ma.s.s in military operations. Franks had bought into this, summarizing it in the oft-repeated maxim "Speed kills." McKiernan and Thurman weren't at all sure of that, and disliked the prospect of being Rumsfeld's guinea pigs.

On December 8, 2002, in what Thurman would remember as "a key point in the planning," McKiernan and Thurman flew to Franks's headquarters in Qatar and put their doubts in front of him. McKiernan "laid out to the CinC and showed him that we needed more combat power for the basic stance," Thurman later told an official Army historian. The first troop deployment order had just been issued. The two generals pushed their commander for more, and got some, but never got quite enough, in their view. Even four months later, as the invasion began, Thurman later said, "We wanted more combat power on the ground."

McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging, issue: He couldn't get Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks pa.s.sed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld. "It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Was.h.i.+ngton to OSD and Secretary of Defense________ In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides.... [T]hat is frustrating, because n.o.body wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."

That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld's amateurish approach to war planning. "Here maybe the clearest manifestation of OSD's contempt for the acc.u.mulated wisdom of the military profession and of the a.s.sumption among forward thinkers that technology-above all information technology-has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war," commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armored cavalry regiment. "To imagine that PowerPoint slides can subst.i.tute for such means is really the height of recklessness." It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer's glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine.

The "black hole" of Feith's policy office At the Pentagon, the policy shop run by Douglas Feith was the organization that was in many ways the civilian parallel of Franks's Central Command in formulating the American stance on going to war in Iraq. Centcom was responsible for handling the war, while Feith's office was supposed to oversee the policies guiding the war and its aftermath.

Both Franks's headquarters and Feith's policy office had notably low morale, but a major difference was that Feith's office was managed worse. While Franks was at least effective in getting what he wanted from underlings, the owlish Feith was a management disaster who served as a bottleneck on decision making. "He basically was a glorified gofer for Rumsfeld," said Gary Schmitt, who was hardly an ideological foe-he was the executive director of the Project for a New American Century, a small neoconservative advocacy group that pushed hard for the invasion of Iraq. "He can't manage anything, and he doesn't trust anyone else's judgment."

People working for Feith complained that he would spend hours tweaking their memos, carefully mulling minor points of grammar. A Joint Staff officer recalled angrily that at one point troops sat on a runway for hours, waiting to leave the United States on a mission, while he quibbled about commas in the deployment order. "Policy was a black hole," recalled one four-star general about Feith's operation. "It dropped the ball again and again."

In the summer of 2001, Feith had been confronted on his management flaws by top aides at a large meeting. Lisa Bronson, a veteran specialist on weapons proliferation, stood and said, "This is the worst-run policy office I've ever seen." Another Feith aide agreed, saying later that the decision-making process in Feith's office was the most tangled he'd seen in twenty years of government work.

Feith stood his ground, explaining to subordinates that "I don't treat you any differently than Rumsfeld treats me." He said his fussiness over memos reflected the importance he and Rumsfeld placed on precision in thinking and writing.

Feith amounted to a less impressive version of Wolfowitz, filling the post the older man had held during the 1991 Gulf War. A 1975 graduate of Harvard, he was similar to Wolfowitz in his academic approach. To the military way of thinking, which tends to like orderly discussions that march toward clear decisions, he appeared far too woolly. For Feith, as for Wolfowitz, the Holocaust-and the mistakes the West made appeasing Hitler in the 1930s, rather than stopping him- became a keystone in thinking about policy. Like Wolfowitz, Feith came from a family devastated by the Holocaust. His father lost both parents, three brothers, and four sisters to the n.a.z.is. "My family got wiped out by Hitler, and ... all this stuff about working things out-well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn't make any sense to me," Feith later told Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker New Yorker in discussing how World War II had shaped his views. "The kind of people who put b.u.mper stickers on their car that declare that 'War is not the answer,' are they making a serious comment? What's the answer to Pearl Harbor? What's the answer to the Holocaust?" in discussing how World War II had shaped his views. "The kind of people who put b.u.mper stickers on their car that declare that 'War is not the answer,' are they making a serious comment? What's the answer to Pearl Harbor? What's the answer to the Holocaust?"

"Doug's very smart, almost too smart," said a Bush administration official who has known Feith for decades and generally is sympathetic to his views. "He's a very impressive conceptual thinker, a rapid-fire genius. But. But. Not everyone else is so smart. And once in a while, something very hard comes along, something that requires a lot of deliberate thought." And in such cases, Feith's rapid-fire approach becomes dangerous.

"Doug is a first-generation American, and the son of a Holocaust survivor," a background that has shaped Feith's views and approach. "And the fact that they are minoritarian views, shared by only a few people, makes him believe it all the more. He takes almost as axiomatic some of his views-for example, that weakness invites aggression. Or invoke diplomacy only when you have your adversary cornered."

The personal histories of key players in the Bush administration may have made for an unusual and volatile mix. It was an unusual and powerful combination: The men at the White House were risk takers, while their subordinates and ideological allies at the Pentagon were men counseling that it was unwise to wait to act against evil, no matter what the conventional wisdom was. Add them up, said this unhappy Bush administration official, and you get an unusual mix: "These people are brinksmen."

Rumsfeld, who rarely seems to go out of his way to praise his subordinates, did so with Feith, later defending him as "without question one of the most brilliant individuals in government... just a rare talent. And from my standpoint, working with him is always interesting. He's been one of the really intellectual leaders in the administration in defense policy aspects of our work here."

Not everyone was so impressed. Senior military officers especially seemed to be rubbed the wrong way by him. Franks, the Central Command chief, called Feith "the dumbest f.u.c.king guy on the planet." Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general who reported to Feith for five months as the Bush administration's first head of the postwar mission in Iraq, came to a similar conclusion. "I think he's incredibly dangerous," Garner said later. "He's a very smart guy whose electrons aren't connected, so he arc lights all the time. He can't organize anything." Remarkably, Feith was the person in charge of day-to-day postwar Iraq policy in Was.h.i.+ngton-the official that Franks was told would handle the postwar end of things. A man who couldn't run his own office very well, by many accounts, was going to oversee the rebuilding of an occupied nation on the other side of the planet.

Incoherent planning for the aftermath The U.S. invasion of Iraq, Army Lt. Col. James Scudieri wrote later, "may be the most planned operation since D-Day on 6 June 1944 and Desert Storm in 1991." The irony is that in eighteen months of planning, the key question was left substantially unaddressed: What to do after getting to Baghdad. Franks, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and other top officials spent well over a year preparing to attack Iraq, but treated almost casually what would come after that. "I think people are overly pessimistic about the aftermath," Wolfowitz flatly stated in an interview in December 2002.

At first, in the summer of 2002, the ball was tossed to the exhausted planning staff at Central Command, which had just finished invading Afghanistan and then written two versions of a plan to invade Iraq. "End of July, we've just finished the second plan, and we get an order from Joint Staff saying, 'You're in charge of the postwar plan,'" recalled Col. John Agoglia. They were flabbergasted. At that point they thought the invasion would be launched in just six months. "We said, 'Oh, s.h.i.+t,' did a mission a.n.a.lysis, and focused on humanitarian issues," such as minimizing the displacement of people, stockpiling food to stave off famine, and protecting the infrastructure of the oil fields, he said.

The decision to place the Defense Department-whether at the Pentagon or at the Central Command headquarters-in charge of postwar Iraq may have doomed the American effort from the start. As a subsequent Rand Corporation study put it, "Overall, this approach worked poorly, because the Defense Department lacked the experience, expertise, funding authority, local knowledge, and established contacts with other potential organizations needed to establish, staff, support and oversee a large multiagency civilian mission."

It wasn't that there was no planning. To the contrary, there was a lot, with at least three groups inside the military and one at the State Department working on postwar issues and producing thousands of pages of doc.u.ments. But much of the planning was shoddy, there was no one really in charge of it, and there was little coordination between the various groups. Gen. Franks appeared to believe that planning for the end of the war was someone else's job. The message he sent to Rumsfeld's subordinates, he wrote in his autobiography, was: "You pay attention to the day after and I'll pay to attention to the day of." The result would be that while there was much discussion, and endless PowerPoint briefings, there wouldn't be a real plan for postwar Iraq that could be implemented by commanders and soldiers on the ground.

To handle the stepped-up load of planning for postwar Iraq, Franks created a new office, Joint Task Force IV, under Brig. Gen. Steve Hawkins, an Army engineer. For months Hawkins had scores of staff planners working on Phase IV- that is, the phase that followed Phase Ill's major combat operations-but failed to produce much. "We were told that JTF-IV would be a standing task force," recalled Agoglia. "We thought that it would be the core of planning for a post-conflict headquarters. Instead, it was Steve Hawkins and fifty-five yahoos with shareware who were clueless."

Despite months of work, "they didn't produce a plan," Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Kellogg said. "They may have war-gamed it, but planned it? Nope." That may seem a harsh verdict, but it is borne out by a look at the cla.s.sified PowerPoint briefings JTF-IV produced. It is fas.h.i.+onable to criticize the U.S. military's heavy reliance on PowerPoint, but the thirty-two slides in the JTF-IV summary of planning for postwar Iraq are extreme in their incoherence, with unexplained distinctions between "military success" in Phase III and "strategic success" under "civilian lead" in Phase IV. (Interestingly, another briefing, on reconstruction issues, noted in an aside that the Army experience in Bosnia and Kosovo indicated that the postwar situation in Iraq would require around 470,000 troops, more than triple the number that actually would be deployed.) Maj. Eisenstadt, an intelligence officer in Central Command's headquarters in 2001-2, said that most of Hawkins's work was discarded for reasons that were never clear to him. Another military expert who reviewed the product of the task force said its work was so mediocre that insiders just began ignoring it. "It was a very pedestrian product, and it looked like a war college exercise," he said. "They were not reaching out to real-world people and information."

A V Corps planner agreed with that account. "Centcom set up a cell to do Phase IV planning before the war, but it never produced anything," he said. "It just got tied up in scenarios-like what happens if there are large refugee flows?" It never actually produced a usable blueprint for running postwar Iraq.

But no one appears to have informed other military planners about the flim-siness of Centcom's Phase IV work. A cla.s.sified prewar briefing by the next lower headquarters, the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC), on its own Phase IV plans breezily noted that it was "Working with CJTF-4 to ensure seamless transition."

Calling Gen. Garner By late December, it was clear both at Central Command and at the Pentagon that the JTF-IV effort to plan for postwar Iraq was faltering. "If there was something that as a planner we didn't do so well, it was that we didn't prepare Franks so well for the reconstruction and stabilization piece," Agoglia said. "We didn't do as good a job as we should of walking him through the postconflict piece." And "in January '03 we realized that JTF-IV wouldn't work. It was broken."

In mid-January, just eight weeks before the invasion, the lead in planning for the postwar situation was taken away from Central Command and moved to the Pentagon. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who had led the relief effort in northern Iraq in 1991, was eating in a restaurant in New York when he received a call from Feith's office. Rumsfeld wanted him once more to lead postwar operations in Iraq-a task that was expected to be mainly humanitarian work, likely focused on aiding refugees and perhaps the civilian victims of Iraqi chemical or biological weapons. Garner initially refused, but agreed to go see Rumsfeld. "He can be pretty persuasive, and I said I'd do it if my company agreed and if my wife agreed," he recalled.

Garner told Rumsfeld that he would need some retired generals, senior officers who understood the military and the management of a large organization. "Rumsfeld said, 'OK, anybody but Zinni," he recalled. Garner interpreted this not as a personal grudge on the part of the defense secretary, but rather an a.s.sessment that the White House saw Zinni as an adversary. "It came across to me that we wouldn't be able to sell Zinni, because he already was against the war." Indeed, Garner soon would run into trouble on several lower profile staff members he proposed, especially from the State Department's own planning project, called the Future of Iraq.

On January 20, the White House issued a cla.s.sified National Security Presidential Directive that established the Pentagon postwar planning office, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian a.s.sistance. But the creation of this new office hardly cleared the way for more effective postwar planning. "ORHA stands up, and it's a second ad hoc organization," said Agoglia. "We thought they worked for Franks, they said they worked for Sec Def, and that began some p.i.s.sing contests.... They didn't listen to anyone, because they were a bunch of friggin' know-it-alls."

Conrad Crane, the Army historian who later studied the record of the planning for the war, concluded that the establishment of ORHA just two months before the beginning of fighting simply came too late to be helpful. "It created much more confusion than coherence," he said, because it cut off Centcom's work. "Everybody said, 'I'm working with ORHA now.'"

A bad feeling inside the Army Watching the moves toward war, the Army community fretted, no one more so than Norman Schwarzkopf. Retired generals play a shadowy but important role in the U.S. military establishment, and especially in the Army. They are part Greek chorus and part shadow board of directors, watching and commenting on their successors' work. They tend to be well informed about current operations, because some are hired as consultants and mentors in war games and war college seminars, and others maintain friends.h.i.+ps with former subordinates who have risen to the top.

Within the retired community, four-star generals play a particularly weighty role. Within that tiny group, none are more influential than four stars who have commanded combat operations. After Colin Powell-who was necessarily muted in his military commentary because of his struggles with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz-the retired four-star general with the most public influence during this period likely was Schwarzkopf. As if that weren't enough, he also was allied with the Bush family. He had hunted with the first president Bush and had campaigned for the second, speaking on military issues at the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia and later stumping in Florida with Cheney, his secretary of defense during the 1991 war.

In the months before the invasion of Iraq, Schwarzkopf was worried. In January 2003 he made it clear in a lengthy interview that he hadn't seen enough evidence to persuade him that his old comrades from twelve years earlier-Cheney, Powell, and Wolfowitz-were correct in moving toward a new war. He thought UN inspections were still the proper course to follow. He also worried about the c.o.c.kiness of the U.S. war plan, and even more about the potential human and financial costs of occupying Iraq. "The thought of Saddam Hussein with a sophisticated nuclear capability is a frightening thought, okay?" he said, sitting in his office in Tampa, overlooking a bland skyline of hotels, bank headquarters, and gla.s.s-sheathed office buildings. "Now, having said that, I don't know what intelligence the U.S. government has. And before I can just stand up and say, 'Beyond a shadow of a doubt, we need to invade Iraq,' I guess I would like to have better information."

He hadn't seen that evidence yet, and so-in sharp contrast to the Bush administration-he supported letting the UN weapons inspectors drive the timetable: "I think it is very important for us to wait and see what the inspectors come up with, and hopefully they come up with something conclusive." He had a far less Manichaean view of the Middle East than Bush and Cheney had developed after the September 11 attacks. "It's obviously not a black-and-white situation over there. I would just think that whatever path we take, we have to take it with a bit of prudence." Had he seen sufficient prudence in the actions of his old friends in the Bush administration? He didn't want to touch that question. "I don't think I can give you an honest answer on that," he said. He also was unhappy with what he was hearing out of the Army about Rumsfeld. "Candidly, I have gotten somewhat nervous at some of the p.r.o.nouncements Rumsfeld has made."

Schwarzkopf was a true son of the Army, where he served from 1956 to 1991, and some of his comments reflected the deepening estrangement between that service and the defense secretary. "The Rumsfeld thing ... that's what comes up," when he calls old Army friends in the Pentagon, he said. "When he makes his comments, it appears that he disregards the Army. He gives the perception when he's on TV that he is the guy driving the train and everybody else better fall in line behind him-or else."

That dismissive posture bothered Schwarzkopf because he thought, like many in the Army, that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and their subordinates lacked the experience or knowledge to make sound military judgments by themselves and were ignoring the better informed advice of senior generals. He said he preferred the way Cheney had operated during the Gulf War. "He didn't put himself in the position of being the decision maker as far as tactics were concerned, as far as troop deployments, as far as missions were concerned."

Rumsfeld, by contrast, worried him. "It's scary, okay?" he said. "Let's face it: There are guys at the Pentagon who have been involved in operational planning for their entire lives, okay?... And for this wisdom, acquired during many operations, wars, schools, for that just to be ignored, and in its place have somebody who doesn't have any of that training, is of concern."

So, said Schwarzkopf, he doubted that an invasion of Iraq would be as fast and simple as some seemed to think. "I have picked up vibes that... you're going to have this ma.s.sive strike with ma.s.sed weaponry, and basically that's going to be it, and we just clean up the battlefield after that." Like many in the Army, he expressed even more concern about the task the U.S. military might face after a victory. "What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the s.h.i.+tes? That's a huge question, to my mind. It really should be part of the overall campaign plan."

The administration may have been discussing the issue behind closed doors, but he hadn't seen it explained to the world, especially its a.s.sessment of the time, people, and money needed. "I would hope that we have in place the adequate resources to become an army of occupation," he warned, "because you're going to walk into chaos."

Col. Spain's prewar gutting The first time that Col. Teddy Spain got a bad feeling about the Iraq war was two months before it actually started. In late January the military police commander partic.i.p.ated in Victory Scrimmage, a big preparatory exercise for the war held at Grafenwoehr, Germany, at the U.S. training base there, in the cold hills near the Czech border. At one point during the exercise, after some notional troops had been "killed," Spain, who would lead an MP brigade into Iraq, turned to some Army chaplains sitting nearby and ordered them to plan a memorial service. They thought he was joking, he recalled. "No, this is serious business," he emphatically responded.

Even as the exercise was held, the size of the U.S.-led invasion force was being whittled down. "First AD and First Cav were there," he said, referring to two of the Army's big armored divisions, the 1st Armored Division and the 1st Cavalry Division. "Then they got knocked out of the plan." He chuckled, years later, at the memory. "They call themselves 'America's First Team,'" referring to the 1st Cavalry's motto, "and we said, 'Yeah, the first team to go home.'"

But it was less amusing when the planners then turned to Spain and informed him that his brigade was being kept in the plan, but with a major reduction in its troop numbers. "They just gutted my a.s.sets." Rather than lead twenty companies into Iraq, he was told, he would begin the war with less than three. It was a decision that Spain, a tall, drawling southerner with a pa.s.sing resemblance to television journalist Tom Brokaw, would think back on repeatedly in the coming months and years, as he dwelled on how he could have done better securing Baghdad in the spring and summer of 2003. He could have done it, he believed, if only he'd had those missing companies of MPs.

Others felt the same way. Van Riper, the retired Marine general who was an old friend of Zinni's, had seen the war plan in October 2002, and noted that it included a division west of the 3rd Infantry Division to control much of Anbar Province. But in January 2003, he was told, that division was dropped from the plan. Instead, Anbar would be treated as an "economy of force" area, with a relatively small number of Special Forces sent in, with the mission of preventing Scud missile launches westward against Israel. This last-minute change was crucial, because it left open the door northwest of Baghdad for Baathists and intelligence officials to flee to the sanctuary of Syria, taking money, weapons, and records with them with which to establish a safe headquarters for the insurgency that would emerge that summer. (Some of this movement occurred before the war began, when, according to retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, the head of the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency, satellite imagery showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria.) The Army division deleted from the plan "would have blocked much of the movement to the Syrian border," Van Riper said.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

JANUARY-MARCH 2003.

In previous wars, Congress had been populated by hawks and doves. But as war in Iraq loomed it seemed to consist mainly of lambs who hardly made a peep. There were many failures in the American system that led to the war, but the failures in Congress were at once perhaps the most important and the least noticed.

One of the rules of thumb in military operations is that disasters occur not when one or perhaps two things go wrong-which almost any competent leader can handle-but when three or four go wrong at once. Overcoming such a combination of negative events is a true test of command. Similarly, the Iraq fiasco occurred not just because the Bush administration engaged in sustained self-deception over the threat presented by Iraq and the difficulty of occupying the country, but also because of other major lapses in several major American inst.i.tutions, from the military establishment and the intelligence community to the media. In each arena, the problems generally were sins of commission-bad planning, bad leaders.h.i.+p, bad a.n.a.lysis, or in the case of journalism, bad reporting and editing. The role of Congress in this systemic failure was different, because its mistakes were mainly sins of omission. In the months of the run-up to war, Congress asked very few questions, and didn't offer any challenge to the administration on the lack of postwar planning.

Congress takes no for an answer The last chance was offered by hearings on Iraq held in February 2003, but this was not an opportunity that Congress would take. It had made its choice the previous October when it gave the president a blank check to go to war. As a body it was willing to ask questions, but that was little more than a pose, because it didn't object when it didn't get responses that spoke to the issue. It was a Congress that would take no, or something close to it, for an answer.

Douglas Feith's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at its major prewar hearing on Iraq was a memorable demonstration of testimony as tap dancing. He couldn't say how many troops might be required, or what a war might cost, or even what other countries might join the U.S.-led effort. "Senator, it's hard to answer a lot of these what-ifs because a lot depends on, you know, future events that we don't know," Feith told Sen. Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat who was the ranking minority member on the panel. "There are enormous uncertainties." As for the key question of the duration of the occupation, Feith deferred answering. "I don't think I want to venture into the prediction business," he parried.

The senators knew they weren't getting straight answers. "There's a kind of disconnect between the rhetoric we're hearing and all the rosy scenarios," noted Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. "Why aren't we hearing some more about a worse case, and what are we prepared for in that instance?"

Sen. Russell Feingold also expressed puzzlement. "Why do we give the president a blank check to go ahead with this before we had the answers to these questions?" he asked.

"You're not giving us much," added Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat. And that was pretty much it-a hearing with many questions and few answers.

"The American people have no notion of what we are about to undertake," Biden concluded that day. It was an important observation about a democracy about to launch a war in a distant land, alien culture, and hostile region. But it was made in a tone of pa.s.sive resignation.

Zinni, waiting to testify, sat in the room and grew increasingly uneasy as he listened to Feith and other administration officials. "They were nowhere near capable" of transforming first Iraq and then the Middle East, he thought to himself. They didn't know what they were getting into. They were unprepared. His private conclusion that day, listening to Feith and the other administration witnesses was, "These guys don't have a clue."

When it came his turn to move to the witness chair, Zinni came close to lecturing the Foreign Relations Committee on how they might better have handled the administration's witnesses. First of all, he said, you all need to abandon the idea of an "exit strategy," because there isn't going to be one: "There's things in this part of the world that are too important for us to think that this is a 'go in, do the job as best we can, and pull out.'" Also, you could have pinned them down on their goals. Is it really "a magnificent democracy" they're aiming for? he asked. "I mean, is it truly this transformed Iraq that we've heard about, or are we just going to get rid of Saddam Hussein and hope for the best?... What is it that you want?"

Zinni decided that day that the neoconservatives in the administration really were consciously rolling the dice. "I think-and this is just my opinion-that the neocons didn't really give a s.h.i.+t what happened in Iraq and the aftermath," he said much later. "I don't think they thought it would be this bad. But they said: Look, if it works out, let's say we get Chalabi in, he's our boy, great. We don't and maybe there's some half-a.s.s government in there, maybe some strongman emerges, it fractures, and there's basically a loose federation and there's really a Kurdish state. Who cares? There's some bloodshed, and it's messy. Who cares? I mean, we've taken out Saddam. We've a.s.serted our strength in the Middle East. We're changing the dynamic. We're now off the peace process as the centerpiece and we're not putting any pressure on Israel.'"

After the hearings, Zinni asked an old comrade at Centcom what he thought of Desert Crossing, the plans he had drawn up after Desert Fox for dealing with the end of Saddam Hussein's regime. What do you guys think of it, and was it useful, and how have you changed it? This senior officer looked at Zinni blankly: Desert What? What? He had never heard of it. Years of in-depth planning had been discarded. He had never heard of it. Years of in-depth planning had been discarded.

In the following weeks, as he listened to Wolfowitz and other administration officials talk about Iraq, Zinni became ever more convinced that interventionist neoconservative ideologues were plunging the nation into a war in a part of the world they didn't understand. "The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who didn't understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Was.h.i.+ngton think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground." He dwelled on the fact that U.S. soldiers would wind up paying for the mistakes of Was.h.i.+ngton policy makers. And that took him back to that b.l.o.o.d.y day in the sodden Que Son mountains of Vietnam. That war remained painful for him. "I only went to the Wall once, and it was very difficult," he said, talking about his sole visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the black V-shaped slab that cuts into the Mall in downtown Was.h.i.+ngton. "I was just walking down past the names of my men. My buddies, my troops-just walking down that Wall was hard, and I couldn't go back."

As one national security official in the Bush administration put it, the pa.s.sivity of Congress during this period made it far easier to go to war: "Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are saying, 'We can't tell you how long it will take, or what it will cost, that's unknowable.' Why did Congress accept that?"

Sen. Byrd took to the Senate floor five weeks before the war began and puzzled over why Congress had gone AWOL. "This chamber is, for the most part, silent- ominously, dreadfully silent," he admonished his colleagues. "There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand pa.s.sively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events." It was just one in a series of speeches Byrd gave on the prospect of war in Iraq, and like the others it had no perceptible effect on his colleagues. "What is happening to this country?" he would ask in a plaintive speech the day before war began. "War appears inevitable."

Congress as a whole became unusually unimportant during this period, especially the Senate and House Armed Services committees, the two panels that oversee the military establishment and so held the keys to airing Pentagon dissent and other concerns about going to war in Iraq. The Republicans didn't want to question the Bush administration. The Democrats couldn't or wouldn't, so Congress didn't produce the witnesses who in hearings would give voice and structure to opposition. Lacking hearings to write about, and the data such sessions would yield, the media didn't delve deeply enough into the issues surrounding the war, most notably whether the administration was correctly a.s.sessing the threat presented by Iraq and the cost of occupying and remaking the country.

The House, the Senate, and the executive branch were in Republican hands. Bush was the first Republican president since the 1920s to hold office while both houses of Congress were in the long-term control of his party, and his fellow Republicans weren't inclined to ask many probing questions. The Democrats in 1994 lost control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years, and essentially lost control of the Senate in the same year, except for a brief interruption several years later. By 2002-3 they were cowed by the post-9/11 atmosphere, in which almost any measure to fight terror seemed to some to be justified. And they still hadn't learned how to operate effectively in the minority position-and a minority that didn't have an executive branch to lean on and help it with research and responses, as the Republican minority frequently had over the previous four decades. So Democrats generally clammed up, especially when faced by an administration that resolutely stuck by its story. "The Congress didn't do it, because the Republicans weren't going to confront their own president, and the Democrats were enfeebled," said one mournful Democratic veteran of Capitol Hill. "The media didn't stand up because they had no one to quote. So, in combination, the two inst.i.tutions didn't work."

On top of that, fewer members of Congress had military experience, or, lacking any time in uniform, had spent time studying the military, as Ike Skelton had done. There was little political incentive to do so. "They don't know what questions to ask, and they're afraid to show their ignorance by asking what to ask," said one dismayed congressional staffer.

Nor did Congress have a separate opening with the military-the old back channel that Sam Nunn, when he was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, used to talk to the generals to help him monitor the Pentagon's civilian leaders.h.i.+p. Instead, Congress faced an unusually strong secretary of defense and an unusually weak chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the nation's top military officer in 2002, seemed an incurious man, and certainly not one to cross a superior. He had ascended to the chairmans.h.i.+p somewhat by accident, having been selected to be the number-two officer on the Joint Chiefs by people who later said they never envisioned him to go on to the top slot. Myers's term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs was characterized by an extraordinary deference to Rumsfeld. He let himself being overruled on issues such as picking his own staffers for the Joint Staff. Inside the military, he was widely regarded as the best kind of uniformed yes-man-smart, hard-working, but wary of independent thought. The vice chairman, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, was seen as even more pliable, especially by fellow Marines. "The most damaging sort of mistakes that Rumsfeld has made have been on senior officer selection," said one Bush administration official involved in defense issues. "You wind up with smiling Pete Pace and smiling Richard Myers."

Myers is said to have told colleagues that he was doing the best job he could with this secretary of defense. "General Myers believed that in order to have an effect, you had to avoid being confrontational, but get the most you could from the man," said another senior officer on the Joint Staff.

Powell pitches a curvehall The first casualty of the Iraq war may have been the reputation of one of Myers's predecessors, Secretary of State Colin Powell. In February 2003 Powell went to the United Nations and staked his personal credibility on going to war. It was the old general's ultimate sacrifice as a good soldier, throwing his good name behind the administration's campaign and using it to clear out some of the remaining opposition to going to war.

"My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources," Powell said early in the speech, as the CIA's Tenet sat behind him, as if literally backing him up. "These are not a.s.sertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." Indeed, Powell appeared to lift the veil on highly cla.s.sified intelligence sources and methods, sharing crown jewel information such as intercepted Iraqi military communications. "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between one hundred and five hundred tons of chemical weapons agent_______ He remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons.... What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network."

Powell didn't know it, but his bravura performance was a huge house of cards. It is now known that almost all of what he said that day wasn't solid, that much of it was deemed doubtful even at the time inside the intelligence community, and that some of it was flatly false. The official, bipartisan conclusion of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's review of the prewar handling of intelligence was, "Much of the information provided or cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency for inclusion in Secretary Powell's speech was overstated, misleading, or incorrect." The a.s.sertion about chemical weapons would be proven flat wrong. The a.s.sertion about the nuclear program was based heavily on the belief that Iraq was seeking aluminum tubes for centrifuge to enrich uranium for a nuclear program. The key question was whether the tubes were of a lower quality alloy suitable for military rockets, or more finely made for nuclear work. "It strikes me as quite odd that these tubes are manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets," Powell said. But the State Department's own intelligence office had contradicted that very a.s.sertion two days earlier in its critique of a draft of Powell's speech. It objected to that statement about manufacture. "In fact," it stated in a memorandum, "the most comparable U.S. system is a tactical rocket-the U.S. Mark-66 air-launched 70 mm rocket-that uses the same, high-grade (7075-T6) aluminum, and that has specifications with similar tolerances." Worst of all, the a.s.sertion about biological weapons was based largely on the statements of one defector, codenamed Curveball, whose testimony already had been discredited. There was a second source for the statements about biological efforts-and that source had been formally declared a fabricator ten months earlier by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was handling him, but no one had told Powell about that.

The saga of the informant codenamed Curveball underscores the shoddiness of the case for going to war. Curveball wasn't actually under U.S. control and hadn't been interviewed by any U.S. officials-he was in the hands of German intelligence, which didn't permit U.S. officials to see him before the war. After the war, it was learned that he was the brother of a top aide of Ahmed Chalabi, the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times reported. (Chalabi would deny this, without explanation.) Investigators in Iraq also would learn that Curveball hadn't even been in Iraq for some of the time during which he claimed to have witnessed key events. In May 2004 the CIA and DIA would issue a cla.s.sified report that recanted everything Curveball had a.s.serted-which had been distributed in 101 separate intelligence agency reports. reported. (Chalabi would deny this, without explanation.) Investigators in Iraq also would learn that Curveball hadn't even been in Iraq for some of the time during which he claimed to have witnessed key events. In May 2004 the CIA and DIA would issue a cla.s.sified report that recanted everything Curveball had a.s.serted-which had been distributed in 101 separate intelligence agency reports.

Some of the doubts about Curveball already were known when Powell headed to New York. David Kay, who would later head the Iraq Survey Group, said that even before the National Intelligence Estimate was published in the fall of 2002, the Germans had warned the CIA that Curveball was a questionable source. The day before Powell delivered the UN speech, a Defense Department employee working at the CIA sent an apprehensive e-mail to the deputy chief of the CIA's Iraq task force. Reviewing a draft of Powell's speech, he was alarmed to see that it leaned heavily on Curveball's a.s.sertions. But the deputy chief of the CIA task force was dismissive of such concerns, because, he responded, he saw war with Iraq as inevitable. "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about," the intelligence officer wrote in the note, which was quoted in the Senate Intelligence Committee report.

When asked by committee investigators why he thought the war was inevitable, the intelligence officer said, "My source of information was the Was.h.i.+ngton Was.h.i.+ngton Post"-an indication of the significant role the media played in paving the road to the Iraq war, and especially in influencing the views of intelligence operatives.

Powell believed what he said. Richard Armitage, who had gone out to the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to help prepare Powell for the speech, recalled the effort that the secretary of state put into it. "He worked for three days, and parts of all those nights," Armitage recalled. "He called me up and said, 'Can you come with me tomorrow? I need your help.' And I went up there, and was there all day. And he went through each point in the speech, every single one, and looked at everybody in the room, and n.o.body dissented. Are we sure of the information? Are we sure of the sourcing? Is there anything wrong with the sourcing? And I don't know what more he could have done." George Tenet, the CIA director, was also there as Powell prepared, and kept coming in and out of the room, ordering his station chiefs to go back and check individual bits of information, Armitage recalled. "George would go out of the room, 'Call this country,' he'd say... . 'Call that country.'"

"They're in the room, and they're nodding, 'Everything's fine,'" Armitage recalled. "What are you going to do? What is he to do? I don't know." Armitage's conclusion, two years later, was that "the agency let him down big time.... The speech clearly didn't turn out to hold water."

In military intelligence circles the speech provoked head shaking at the time. "After Colin Powell's address at the UN, my boss and I looked at each other and said, 'What is going on here?'" recalled a senior military intelligence officer. "There was no doubt in my mind how weak the intel was."

An officer on the Joint Staff, steeped in the war planning, was similarly bothered. As he watched the speech, he thought to himself that the Bush administration, determined to go to war with Iraq, had constructed a trap in which any evidence or lack of it led to the same outcome. "If we find weapons, that means Saddam is cheating and that means we go to war." Conversely, "if we don't find weapons, that means Saddam is cheating, because he is hiding them." Yet this officer's faith in Powell was such that watching the speech persuaded him to put aside such doubts. "If he believes it, I believe it, because I put a lot of stock in what he says," he recalled thinking after the UN speech. "And I figured that people above me had information I didn't have access to."

In fact, the opposite was the case: The people above this officer weren't getting a complete account of the doubts within the intelligence community. As the Senate Intelligence Committee report showed seventeen months later, much of Powell's speech was based on the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, and that doc.u.ment had been mistaken in all its major findings.

Powell had done the job. His performance had the desired effect of calming doubts in two camps of notable skeptics-the U.S. military and the pundits of journalism. The Bush administration's approach to selling a war in Iraq was to say, "Trust us," and Powell was one of the nation's most trusted figures, especially among moderates and liberals. So liberal columnists such as Mary McGrory and William Raspberry, who would be highly skeptical of a.s.sertions by Cheney and Wolfowitz, were more willing to listen to someone like Powell. What persuaded them more than anything was Powell's personal credibility and the cert.i.tude of his style. Indeed, little that Powell said that day in New York was even particularly new. "Almost all of the information in the speech was from intelligence that had previously been in IC [intelligence community] finished intelligence doc.u.ments, in particular from the 2002 NIE on Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Ma.s.s Destruction," the Senate Intelligence Committee noted. "Several of the IC judgments in the NIE were not substantiated by intelligence source reporting." Nonetheless, "he persuaded me," the Post's Mary McGrory wrote immediately after Powell's speech. "Powell took his seat in the United Nations and put his shoulder to the wheel," she wrote. "He was to talk for almost an hour and a half. His voice was strong and unwavering. He made his case without histrionics of any kind, with no verbal embellishments."

From around the country, other editorials were even more glowing. "Impressive," said the San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco Chronicle. "Masterful," said the "Masterful," said the Hartford Courant. Hartford Courant. "Overwhelming," added the "Overwhelming," added the Tampa Tribune. Tampa Tribune. To the Portland To the Portland Oregonian Oregonian it was "devastating." "Marshal Dillon facing down a gunslinger in Dodge City," gushed the it was "devastating." "Marshal Dillon facing down a gunslinger in Dodge City," gushed the Denver Post. Denver Post.

New York Times columnists were more skeptical. While the columnists were more skeptical. While the Was.h.i.+ngton Was.h.i.+ngton Post's news columns were dubious of war and its editorial page was hawkish, the Post's news columns were dubious of war and its editorial page was hawkish, the Times Times was the opposite: Its news coverage had beat the WMD drums for months, especially under the byline of Judith Miller, but those who wrote for its opinion pages generally were not persuaded. To be sure, Bill Keller, not yet the editor of the was the opposite: Its news coverage had beat the WMD drums for months, especially under the byline of Judith Miller, but those who wrote for its opinion pages generally were not persuaded. To be sure, Bill Keller, not yet the editor of the Times, Times, wrote of becoming a member of the "I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club." But Maureen Dowd was perceptively critical. "The case was less persuasive than the presenter," she discerned. "And it was not clear why the presenter had jumped to the warlike side." (A few weeks later, she was even sharper: "They stretched and obscured the truth. First, they hyped CIA intelligence to fit their contention that wrote of becoming a member of the "I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club." But Maureen Dowd was perceptively critical. "The case was less persuasive than the presenter," she discerned. "And it was not clear why the presenter had jumped to the warlike side." (A few weeks later, she was even sharper: "They stretched and obscured the truth. First, they hyped CIA intelligence to fit their contention that Saddam and Al Qaeda were linked. Then they sent Colin Powell out with hyped evidence about Iraq's weapons of ma.s.s destruction.") Voices presenting other dissenting views-and ones that it is now clear had a better factual basis-were drowned out by Powell's performance. In February, Mohammed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a nuclear watchdog office, reported to the United Nations, "We have found to date no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq." Three weeks later, he returned and stated even more emphatically that Iraq's weapons capabilities had deteriorated badly since the time of the Desert Fox raid. "During the past four years," he told the security council, "at the majority of Iraqi sites industrial capacity has deteriorated substantially due to the departure of foreign support that often was present in the late eighties, the departure of large numbers of skilled Iraqi personnel in the past decade and the lack of consistent maintenance by Iraq of sophisticated equipment." He was all but ignored.

Rumsfeld says diplomacy is ending A few days later Rumsfeld flew to the annual Wehrkunde security conference in Munich, where he was even more confrontational than Wolfowitz had been at the previous year's meeting, delivering a bellicose speech and then going head-to-head in an on-stage discussion with German foreign minister Joschka Fischer. His message was that the train was leaving the station, and that the occasion for argument was over, at least among reasonable people. Rumsfeld insisted he had a coalition behind him. "A large number of nations have already said they will be with us in a coalition of the willing-and more are stepping up each day," he told hundreds of European and American defense and foreign policy officials crowded into a hotel ballroom. "Clearly, momentum is building." We are right and you are both wrong and ignorant about the threat presented by Iraq, Rumsfeld a.s.serted. Secretary of State Powell's UN speech, he declared, "presented not opinions, not conjecture, but facts." So, Rumsfeld said, "It is difficult to believe there still could be question in the minds of reasonable people open to the facts before them."

The Bush administration's patience was wearing thin. If the UN didn't back the United States against Iraq, he continued, it would be on "a path of ridicule"- a path, he pointedly noted, that led to the graveyard where the League of Nations had wound up, "discredited." In a lengthy question-and-answer session afterward with the audience, Rumsfeld parried adroitly. Saddam Hussein "wasn't 'in the box.'... He has not been contained," and has been able to obtain pretty much whatever weapons he wanted. "Their programs are maturing every day.... Diplomacy has been exhausted, almost."

Foreign Minister Fischer, whose impa.s.sioned speech immediately followed Rumsfeld's, seemed taken aback by the relentlessness of the U.S. defense secretary's criticism. On the question of attacking Iraq, Fischer asked several times: "Why now?... Are we in a situation where we should resort to violence now?" At one point Fischer faced the U.S. delegation to the conference and, switching from German to English, pointedly said, "Excuse me, I am not convinced."

Fischer also warned the United States against biting off more than it could chew in Afghanistan and the Middle East. "You're going to have to occupy Iraq for years and years," he said. "The idea that democracy will suddenly blossom is something that I can't share.... Are Americans ready for this?"

Wolfowitz says "salaam"

"Salaam alik.u.m," Paul Wolfowitz said later that month, on a wintry Sunday in Dearborn, Michigan. The Arabic phrase means "peace be with you," but he was attending a war party, meeting with about three hundred Iraqi exiles living in the Detroit area. "Surely G.o.d does not change the condition of the people until they change their condition," Wolfowitz said, attributing the quotation to the Koran. The crowd was a rare one, more hawkish than even Wolfowitz, and it greeted him with a standing ovation. Waiting for the speech under a banner that read "Saddam Must Go," Ghazi Shaffo, a native of Baghdad, said, "Every Iraqi wants to change the regime, everyone."

"They should do it soon," added Atheer Karmo, a dentist, also formerly of Baghdad.

Even among this overwhelmingly friendly crowd, there were discordant notes of s.h.i.+te distrust. One exile rose to give a pa.s.sionate summary of recent Iraqi history. Considering that the U.S. government had supported Saddam in the 1980s, he asked, considering that the U.S. had abandoned the s.h.i.+tes to ma.s.sacre in 1991, "why should we here, with all due respect, trust or believe" your new promises?

Wolfowitz knew well that the s.h.i.+tes had been wronged in 1991. "I know there's a lot of history," he said. "This is a time not to look to the past but to the future." And that future, he said, was "one of the most powerful military forces ever a.s.sembled" now on the borders of Iraq. "If we commit those forces, we're not going to commit them for anything less than a free and democratic Iraq." The U.S. government would not settle for removing Saddam Hussein only to put in office someone similar, Wolfowitz rea.s.sured his listeners. "It's not going to be handed over to some junior Saddam Hussein. We're not interested in replacing one dictator with another dictator."

The same day, Wolfowitz was interviewed by the Detroit News. Detroit News. "Our princ.i.p.al target is the psychological one, to convince the Iraqi people that they no longer have to be afraid of Saddam," he said. "And once that happens I think what you're going to find, and this is very important, you're going to find Iraqis out cheering American troops." He was dismissive of the notion that a U.S. intervention might unleash fighting among Sunnis, s.h.i.+tes, and Kurds. "I think the ethnic differences in Iraq are there but they're exaggerated," he said. "Our princ.i.p.al target is the psychological one, to convince the Iraqi people that they no longer have to be afraid of Saddam," he said. "And once that happens I think what you're going to find, and this is very important, you're going to find Iraqis out cheering American troops." He was dismissive of the notion that a U.S. intervention might unleash fighting among Sunnis, s.h.i.+tes, and Kurds. "I think the ethnic differences in Iraq are there but they're exaggerated," he said.

s.h.i.+nseki breaks ranks Gen. s.h.i.+nseki was less optimistic. Worried by the possibility of "a major influx of Islamic fighters" from elsewhere in the Middle East, former Army secretary Thomas White said later, s.h.i.+nseki concluded that it would be necessary "to size the postwar force bigger than the wartime force."

The Army chief of staff prepared carefully for the Capitol Hill appearance at which he would unveil that thought and effectively go into public opposition against the war plan being devised under Rumsfeld's supervision. A series of war games over the previous year had strengthened his sense that the U.S. military would need a larger force than Rumsfeld was contemplating. s.h.i.+nseki had served in Bosnia, and thought the U.S. military would need at least the per capita representation of troops it had deployed there. In Bosnia, said former defense secretary William Perry, the Pentagon had used a formula of one soldier for every fifty Bosnians, which would indicate a force for Iraq of about 300,000, once the relatively peaceful Kurdish area in the north was subtracted. "s.h.i.+nseki knew there would be a tough Phase IV, and who won that would win the second Gulf War," said Johnny Riggs, who is now retired but at the time was a lieutenant general at the Army's headquarters. "He knew, from his experience, that you need to dominate and control the environment. If you're so thin and small that you're predictable in your movements, then you are just treating the symptoms."

Before heading to Capitol Hill on February 25,2003, the Army chief asked historians on the Army's staff to research the number of peacekeepers used in Germany and j.a.pan after World War II and after other conflicts. The data came back from the Army's Center of Military History: In Iraq the postwar peacekeeping force should probably number about