Excerpt: Tenet Strikes Back

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3. A Mysterious Obsession with Chalabi

Both the Pentagon and the Vice Presidents office backed exiled Iraqi Ahmed Chalabi as a possible Iraqi leader afte the invasion. Tenet compares aides in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's office to schoolgirls in love.

By mid-November 2003, it was clear in the minds of many that something was going to have to change in Iraq. Condi Rice asked Ambassador Robert Blackwill of the NSC staff to go to Baghdad just before Thanksgiving. Blackwill asked [CIA Iraq mission Manager Robert] Grenier to accompany him. On the way out, Grenier asked him, "What is your mandate?" Blackwill said that Rice had charged him with trying to bring about some changes and that he was going to have a "Socratic dialogue" with Bremer. Nobody wanted to give Bremer specific marching orders. According to Blackwill, Rice felt she could not order changes, but she wanted Blackwill to lead Bremer in the direction they thought they needed to go.

On the way back, Blackwill and Grenier agreed that CPA was essentially hopeless; as currently constituted, it would be neither willing nor capable of doing what was necessary. Blackwill summed up his feelings to Grenier: "The only hope we have is you, CIA, and the deployed military. So it is over to you guys, to figure this thing out and do what you can."

Equally futile, or so it seemed, were our efforts to form a credible and durable Iraqi governing body. In Afghanistan, we had started from the ground up, allowing the various political groups to legitimize themselves, then building toward a central, representational government. In Iraq, the process couldn't have been more different. We never had a conference comparable to the Afghan Loya Jirga that produced a leader, Hamid Karzai, around whom the country could coalesce. We had won the war; we had the guns, the tanks, the soldiers, and the air power. We were in charge, and by God, we knew what was best. Alas, what too many people in the U.S. government were convinced would be best was an Iraqi government headed up by Ahmed Chalabi.

Sometimes Chalabi's name would be strangely absent from the discussion, although he was obviously on everyone's mind. We would sit around these White House meetings expressing the hope that a strong, unifying Iraqi leader would emerge, and while you could tell that one name was on the minds of many in the room, no one would utter it. You had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi's name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush. At other times, so persistent was the cheer- leading for Chalabi, and so consistent was our own opposition to imposing him on Iraq, that I finally had to tell our people to lay off the subject.

During President Bush's State of the Union speech on January 20, 2004, Chalabi was given a seat of honor in the gallery near the First Lady. In March he appeared on CBS's 60 Minutes blaming U.S. intelligence for not doing a good enough job checking out the fl awed information his organization was peddling.

"What the hell is going on with Chalabi?" the president asked me at a White House meeting that spring. "Is he working for you?" [Senior CIA officer] Rob Richer, who was with me at the meeting, piped up, "No sir, I believe he is working for DOD." All eyes shifted to Don Rumsfeld. "I'll have to check what his status is," Rumsfeld said. His undersecretary for intelligence, Steve Cambone, sat there mute. "I don't think he ought to be working for us," the president dryly observed.

A few weeks later the president again raised the issue. "What's up with Chalabi?" he asked. Paul Wolfowitz said, "Chalabi has a relationship with DIA and is providing information that is saving American lives. CIA can confirm that." The president turned to us. "I know of no such information, Mr. President," Richer said. The president looked to Condi Rice and said, "I want Chalabi off the payroll."

At a subsequent meeting, chaired by Condi Rice, DIA confirmed that they were paying the INC $350,000 a month for its ser vices in Baghdad. We knew that the INC's armed militia had seized tens of thousands of Saddam regime documents and was slowly doling them out to the U.S. government. Beyond that it was unclear to me what the Pentagon was getting for its money. Somehow the president's direction to pull the plug on the arrangement continued to be ignored.

4. Was Condi Overmatched?

Without using her name, Tenet alleges that then-National Security Adviser Condi Rice did not exert the kind of scrutiny of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's ideas as she did of the CIA and the State Department. Tenet says the lack of clear White House oversight of reconstruction efforts in Iraq meant US policy was "almost guaranteed" to fail.

The true tragedy of Iraq is that it didn't have to be this way. I can't begin to say with absolute clarity how things might have worked out, but I have to believe that if we had been more adept at not alienating entire sectors of the Iraqi population and elites; if we had been smarter at the front end; if we had thought about reconstruction from the perspective of how much money we could put in people's hands so that they would know they had a steady stream of income; if we had figured out a way to let Iraqis know that they actually did have a role in their future that went beyond words, a role they could see being implemented in practice on the ground—we would be far better off today.

Whenever you decide to take the country to war, you have to know not only that you can defeat the enemy militarily but that you have a very clear game plan that will allow you to keep the peace. There was never any doubt that we would defeat the Iraqi military. What we did not have was an integrated and open process in Washington that was organized to keep the peace, nor did we have unity of purpose and resources on the ground. Quite simply, the NSC did not do its job.

Despite the consequences of decisions regarding de-Ba'athification or disbanding of the army, and the inability to use the billions of dollars at our disposal to implement a political strategy that might have succeeded, not much was done to change course. The National Security Council was created in 1947 to force important policy decisions to be fully discussed, developed, and decided on. In this case, however, the NSC did not fulfill its role. The NSC avoided slamming on the brakes to force the discussions with the Pentagon and everyone else that was required in the face of a deteriorating situation. By sending Bob Blackwill out to chat with Bremer, NSC substituted a time-tested process for one almost guaranteed to fail.

The critical missing element was an Iraqi government that could have helped us. We decided instead to have Americans administer Iraq. It may have worked in World War II, after the entire world fought against Nazi Germany for many years. But in the context of the Middle East, it was not going to work any more than the French occupation of Algeria. To Arabs it looked as though this was all about occupation as opposed to liberation. We were dismissive about the capacity of Iraqis to control their own future. We have struggled ever since.

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