Garner found himself being hired by Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, to take over the post-war humanitarian mission after the imminent invasion of Iraq. He had been picked because in 1991 he had run Operation Provide Comfort, coming to the rescue of thousands of ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq after the Gulf war.
Garner thought he’d been recruited to play the role of a glorified chief of staff; but when he read the presidential directive setting up his new office, it took his breath away. It gave him responsibility for all the tasks normally run by national, state and local governments.
He found himself waking up at 2am, dictating to-do lists. He realised he had been given an impossible task, but the military man’s can-do attitude prevailed over doubt. “I thought this was going to be superhard,” he told me later. But, he added: “I never failed at anything.”
Six weeks into his new assignment Garner went to the White House to meet President Bush for the first time. Waiting outside the Situation Room, where the president and the war cabinet were meeting, Garner recognized the attorney-general, John Ashcroft.
“Looks like we’re both out of the loop,” Garner said, trying to break the ice. Ashcroft responded with what Garner thought was a “go to hell” look.
In the Situation Room, Garner took a seat at the far end of a small well-polished table. The president was at the other end, with the principals seated alongside, including Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and George Tenet, director of the CIA.
General Tommy Franks, commander of US Central Command, was there, and Vice-President Dick Cheney was on the secure video teleconference screen.
Frank Miller, director of the National Security Council staff for defence, was in the middle of a briefing. Garner was nervous. He could see the president had no idea who the hell he was.
As Miller talked, Bush shifted his attention between him and Garner, staring intently at Miller and then glancing quickly at Garner before turning back to Miller. Then again, a quick look at Garner before turning back to Miller. Then a third time. This is going to be a long day, Garner thought.
Out of the blue, Bush flashed a high-in-the-air thumbs-up sign at Garner. Garner instantly felt better. He thought the president sensed his discomfort and was trying to put him at ease.
“Okay, what’s next?” the president asked when Miller finished.
“General Garner’s in the post-war planning group,” Rice said, “and he’s going to brief you on that.”
“Before you do that,” the president said, “tell me about yourself.”
“No, I’m going to tell you about him,” Rumsfeld interrupted, and summarised Garner’s army service and his success in Operation Provide Comfort.
“That’s fine,” Bush said. And then to Garner: “Go ahead.”
Garner passed around copies of his handout, an 11-point presentation, and dived right in. Addressing the nine basic assignments he had been given in the presidential directive, Garner said essentially that four of them shouldn’t be his because they were plainly beyond the capabilities of his small team. The four tasks included dismantling weapons of mass destruction, defeating terrorists, reshaping the Iraqi military and reshaping the other internal Iraqi security institutions. In other words, four of the really hard ones. Those would have to be handled by the military, Garner said.
The president nodded. No one else intervened, though Garner had just told them he couldn’t be responsible for crucial post-war tasks — the ones that had the most to do with the stated reasons for going to war in the first place.
No one asked the follow-up question of exactly who would be responsible if Garner wasn’t. Were the issues going to be left hanging in the air? Were they important? Maybe Garner was wrong. Maybe he could or should have those issues. The importance of what he had said seemed to sail over everyone’s heads.
Garner next described how he intended to divide the country into regional groups, and moved on to the inter-agency plans.
“Just a minute,” the president interrupted. “Where are you from?”
“Florida, sir.”
“Why do you talk like that?” he asked, apparently trying to place Garner’s accent.
“Because I was born and raised on a ranch in Florida. My daddy was a rancher.”
“You’re in,” the First Rancher said approvingly. His brother Jeb was governor of the state, and the president visited regularly.
Garner went on, explaining that each department and agency had to “operationalise” its plan and have a “vision” about its end state, particularly for the first 30 days to one year.
He raised his notion of Show Stoppers, problems that might jeopardise or even stop the mission in its tracks. They were struggling for money, he said. The president listened.
Garner explained how they planned to maintain stability in Iraq after combat. He said they were going to use 200-300,000 soldiers from the defeated Iraqi army. “We need to use them. They have the proper skill sets.”
Garner looked around the room. All the heads were bobbing north to south. Nobody challenged. Nobody had any questions about this plan.
Next, Garner said he wanted to internationalise the post-war effort. Immediately, he noticed some discomfort in the room. Not from Powell but from most of the others. He thought there was a lot of squirming going on, and Garner figured most of the others were thinking, “Don’t you get it? We’re not trying to internationalise this thing. It’s a US operation.”
He continued, saying that he would send his advance party to the region in about 10 days, with the rest to follow 10 days later. The president didn’t say anything. No one indicated when the war might start, but it was obvious it was coming soon.
“Thank you very much,” Bush said when Garner was done. Rice started talking about something else, so Garner figured he was dismissed. As he started to walk out of the room, the president caught his eye.
“Kick ass, Jay,” Bush said.
Garner waited for Rumsfeld outside. Soon, Bush and Rice came out and walked three or four steps past Garner. Suddenly Bush turned back.
“Hey, if you have any problem with that governor down in Florida, just let me know,” he said.
Garner’s tenure as head of the post-war planning office for Iraq turned out to be both brief and frustrating. Throughout the invasion and the early days of the war he struggled just to get his team into Iraq.
Two days after he arrived, Rumsfeld called to tell him that Paul “Jerry” Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protégé of Henry Kissinger, would be coming over as the presidential envoy, effectively replacing him.
After clashing repeatedly with Bremer, particularly over the new envoy’s decision to disband the Iraqi army — which dashed Garner’s plan, approved by the president, to use it for reconstruction — he returned to the US in the beginning of June. He hid out for a couple of weeks, not wanting to see anyone at the Pentagon or talk about his experience in Iraq. Eventually he agreed to see Rumsfeld.
When they were alone around the small table in the secretary’s office, Garner felt he had an obligation to state the depths of his concerns.
“We’ve made three tragic decisions,” he said.
“Really?” Rumsfeld asked.
“Three terrible mistakes,” Garner said.
He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, disbanding the Iraqi military and banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party from government jobs — effectively sending them underground. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganised, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.
Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. “Jerry Bremer can’t be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You’ve got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people.”
Garner made his final point: “There’s still time to rectify this. There’s still time to turn it around.”
Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.”
He thinks I’ve lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I’m absolutely wrong. Garner didn’t want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts.
“They’re all reversible,” Garner said again.
“We’re not going to go back,” Rumsfeld said emphatically.
I asked Rumsfeld this year if he recalled Garner’s warning about the three mistakes. “Vaguely,” Rumsfeld answered.
After their discussion, Rumsfeld and Garner walked into the large conference room where most of Rumsfeld’s top people were assembled. In a small ceremony, Rumsfeld pinned the Defence Department medal for distinguished public service on Garner, who didn’t want it.
They then held a press conference at which Garner completely contradicted what he had privately told Rumsfeld, saying of Bremer: “I think all the things he’s doing are absolutely the right things.”
Later that day they went to the White House to meet Bush.
“Mr Secretary, who’s that famous man you have with you?” the president called out, coming through the doorway from the Oval Office. He reached out his hand. “Hi, Jay.”
“Mr President,” Garner said, “you’ve got more important things to do for this nation today than take time out to talk to me, so all I want to do is shake your hand and thank you for the chance to serve.”
Bush took Garner’s hand and, in one of his trademark moves, pulled Garner in close physically.
“I do have time for you,” Bush said, “and I’m going to take time. I want to be with you.”
He put his arm around Garner and propelled him into the Oval Office, stopping by one of the windows. “Look out here, Jay. Look out here on the lawn. If I wasn’t spending this time with you, I’d probably be out there with the press corps or somebody, kissing their ass. Or if I weren’t with the press corps I’d probably be up there on Capitol Hill with a bunch of congressmen kissing their asses.”
They were joined by Cheney and Rice. Bush led Garner over to the main pair of chairs in the Oval Office.
“You sit here and I’ll sit here,” the president said, taking his usual position and offering the other chair to Garner. “Why wouldn’t I want to be in this comfortable office in these two nice chairs sitting here with you kissing your ass?”
Garner told Bush an uplifting story about a Shi’ite cleric who envisioned an Iraq governed on the principles of Jesus Christ and joining the union as the 51st state. On top of that, he told Bush that everyone on the Iraqi street loved him.
He then added: “Mr President, the one thing I’ll tell you, I’ve had three weeks to work with Ambassador Bremer and he’s one of the hardest-working men I’ve ever seen. He’s a very bright guy. He’s articulate and he’ll get the job done. You made a good choice.”
“I didn’t choose him,” Bush said. “Rumsfeld chose him just like he chose you.”
Garner looked over at Rumsfeld. The secretary of defence had told him explicitly in late April that Bush had selected Bremer, and had added later that even the timing of Bremer’s arrival was not his call. But now Rumsfeld didn’t say a word.
On the way out Bush slapped Garner on the back. “Hey, Jay, you want to do Iran?”
“Sir, the boys and I talked about that and we want to hold out for Cuba. We think the rum and the cigars are a little better . . . The women are prettier.”
Bush laughed. “You got it. You got Cuba.”
Of course, with all the stories, jocularity, buddy-buddy talk, bluster and confidence in the Oval Office, Garner had left out the headline. He had not mentioned the problems he saw, or even hinted at them. He did not tell Bush about the three tragic mistakes he believed that Bremer, supported by Rumsfeld, had made. Once again the aura of the presidency had shut out the most important news — the bad news.
Later I asked Rumsfeld about the obligation to make sure the person at the top knows the bad news. “Oh, I think the president knew that there were big disagreements over de-Ba’athification. And big disagreements over the military. There’s no question that the president was aware of those issues.”
Last year I asked Garner about his decision not to mention the three tragic mistakes. “Didn’t you owe the president that?”
“I didn’t work for the president,” Garner answered. “I worked for Rumsfeld. I’m a military guy . . . my view was I did my job. I told my boss in what I thought were pretty stern terms on the mistakes we’d made.”
“Now suppose you said, ‘Mr President, I just told the secretary the following and I want you to hear it from me, because when he reports it to you I want it to be –’ ”
Garner interrupted. “I’d have no idea how he’d have reacted, but I think he would have said, ‘Well, you know, Rummy’s in charge of that’ or something like that.”
“Three tragic mistakes,” I said.
“Yeah,” Garner said softly, exhaling.
“Because the three tragic mistakes we’re living with now two-plus years later. You realise that?”
“Absolutely,” Garner replied.
“You watch the news.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You don’t feel you should have kind of, particularly at the upper levels there . . .”
“I think Rumsfeld’s the upper level. No, if I had that to do over again I’d probably do that the same way.”
He said that he did not know of anything that Rumsfeld had done that had been overturned by the president. “I’m not the only one who thought that,” he added.
Two months later I again raised the question of what he did not tell the president.
I asked: “Do you wish now that you said, ‘Mr President, as I just told the secretary of defence, in my view, I’ve been there and I need to make sure you understand what I think I understand. We’ve made three tragic mistakes.’ Boom, boom, boom.”
“You know, I don’t know if I had that moment to live over again, I don’t know if I’d do that or not. But if I had done that — and quite frankly, I mean, I wouldn’t have had a problem doing that — but in my thinking, the door’s closed. I mean, there’s nothing I can do to open this door again.
“And I think if I had said that to the president in front of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld in there, the president would have looked at them and they would have rolled their eyes back and he would have thought, Boy, I wonder why we didn’t get rid of this guy sooner?”
© Bob Woodward 2006
Extracted from State of Denial by Bob Woodward, published by Simon & Schuster at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.99 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
