Known and Unknown (56 page)

Myers and I weighed the pros and cons of Clarke's proposal and came to the conclusion that embedding reporters was worth the risk. We believed it would give them a firsthand understanding of the courage and the professionalism of the men and women in our armed forces. Some seven hundred reporters and photographers were embedded with American forces when the war in Iraq began.
¹⁰
The process created new burdens for our forces, since they had to provide the journalists with food, shelter, transport, and, importantly, be responsible for their safety. No single element of the invasion force had the whole picture. But we concluded they could do a better job presenting the reality of the conflict than they would pool reporting from coalition headquarters.

The program posed risks for the journalists. From 2003 to 2009, seven embedded reporters were killed in Iraq, and several others were wounded.
¹¹
The embedded reporters' bravery was a proud chapter in American journalism. Despite the dangers, many journalists acknowledged the success of the embedding experiment. Some of the best reporting from the war and the postwar period came from these reporters. The
New York Times'
John Burns and Dexter Filkins had some of the most compelling coverage from the field with stories that hewed closely to the facts. To my surprise and disappointment, the program eventually became controversial within the press corps. One reporter told me that continuing to embed with U.S. troops meant being ostracized by other reporters who contended that a close linkage with the military could compromise their objectivity.

There was a flip side to the media coverage in Iraq that I also found telling. A month after Saddam's regime was toppled, the chief news executive at CNN, Eason Jordan, wrote an op-ed in the
New York Times
titled “The News We Kept to Ourselves.” He belatedly described some of the horrific crimes committed by Saddam Hussein's regime against Iraqis suspected of being too cooperative with reporters, including an instance in which the secret police beat a woman every day for two months and forced her father to watch. Jordan revealed that the Iraqis smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. CNN knew about these acts of barbarism for over a decade but had reported not a word of it out of fear the Iraqi government might eject them from their Baghdad news bureau.

“I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me,” Jordan confessed. “Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely,” he added.
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D
uring major combat operations in Iraq, the Pentagon adopted what the military calls a “battle rhythm.” For many in the Department, long days grew even longer. Saturdays and Sundays became like any other day of the week. For me, a typical day began at 6:45 a.m. when Powell, Rice, and I talked over the phone. We needed to keep each other apprised of what had occurred overnight (daytime in Iraq and Afghanistan) and what we expected might happen over the coming twenty-four hours. Powell would give diplomatic updates and Rice would pass on any questions or concerns the President might have. That call would typically be followed by a thirty-minute secure videoconference at 7:25 a.m. with General Franks and his senior commanders, as well as the senior civilian and military leaders at the Pentagon, including the Chairman and the Joint Chiefs. Using slides and statistics, Franks would report on the progress of his operations. I would call the President if there was anything I needed to report immediately. And it was not unusual for Bush to call me with a question about a report or a news story he had seen or if he was concerned about some aspect of the campaign. The day would be interspersed with NSC and principal committee meetings at the White House and more operational updates, as well as meetings with members of Congress and our coalition partners.

As the advance on Baghdad resumed after the sandstorm and subsequent pause for resupply, the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions entered the war. Two brigades of the 101st Screaming Eagles, under the command of Major General David Petraeus, were airlifted outside of the holy city of Najaf, the site of the revered Imam Ali Mosque. Block by block, the 101st cleared the city of enemy fighters, and then advanced toward Hillah, where the Hammurabi Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard blocked the way to Baghdad. Hillah was one of the relatively few places where conventional Iraqi forces directly engaged our forces. Petraeus' troops reduced the Hammurabi Division to wreckage. The last obstacle before Baghdad having been cleared, nothing stood between our forces and the southern outskirts of Iraq's capital city.

Media analysis suggested that the battle for Baghdad might be like the brutal siege of Stalingrad during World War II.
¹³
There were reports that Saddam Hussein had seen the movie
Black Hawk Down
, about the ill-fated U.S. involvement in Somalia.
¹⁴
The lesson he and other enemies had taken away was that American forces could be defeated in urban conflict because our tolerance for casualties was judged to be low. Some in the White House also feared that Saddam could turn Baghdad into an urban nightmare for American and coalition troops by using the city neighborhoods as death traps. This was by far the most urgent concern of Rice and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, who, before the war began, had asked for numerous briefings on the subject. Franks grew impatient with the number of times he was asked to brief on Fortress Baghdad at the White House.

After pushing through the Karbala Gap on the outskirts of Baghdad and securing the river crossings into the capital, U.S. forces were poised to take the city. Some of the fiercest fighting took place around Baghdad International Airport.
^*
Intelligence was reporting that Fedayeen, regular army and Republican Guard units had massed in central Baghdad. U.S. troops launched what became known as thunder runs into the heart of the city to test the strength of the resistance.

As columns of U.S. tanks and armored vehicles sped through Baghdad, the world was introduced to an unconventional celebrity. He was a figure who not only provided comic relief in a time of war, but also offered a disturbing insight into the delusional world that was the Saddam Hussein regime. The Iraqi minister of information, Muhammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, popularly known as Baghdad Bob, had a special talent for either ignoring unwelcome facts or lying about them shamelessly.

After U.S. forces seized the Baghdad airport, he claimed: “We butchered the forces present at the airport. We have retaken the airport! There are no Americans there!” But as Baghdad Bob was making his wild pronouncements on television, just around the corner American forces seized Saddam's parade ground downtown. Confronted with this evidence, he was impressively undaunted. “There you can see,” Baghdad Bob said. “There is nothing going on.”
¹⁵

Despite Baghdad Bob's protestations to the contrary, the U.S. military's thunder runs into Baghdad damaged the Iraqi forces' morale and killed large numbers of Iraqi and foreign fighters. U.S. forces encountered not the Special Republican Guard divisions they expected but instead legions of jihadists on the streets of Baghdad. Saddam knew his Republican Guard tank divisions were no match for the American military, but the fanatics armed with small weapons and craving martyrdom proved to be formidable foes.

On April 9, 2003, the Marines reached Firdos Square in the heart of Baghdad. “The midget Bush and that Rumsfeld deserve only to be beaten with shoes by freedom-loving people everywhere,” Baghdad Bob declared, as American troops fixed a rope around the neck of the larger than life statue of Saddam that dominated the square, much as his likeness populated the rest of the capital city and the entire country.
¹⁶

Our forces were understandably exhilarated by the prospects of the liberation of Baghdad they had made possible. As the statue of Saddam was pulled down by Iraqis and Marines, one Marine draped an American flag over the statue's head. I remember General Myers expressing concern and calling someone at CENTCOM to fix the problem. Whether Myers' message got through or not, the American flag was removed. As the statue came down, a crowd of Iraqis began to beat Saddam's likeness with their shoes—an Arab expression of disrespect. Critics of the war would belittle those who claimed the Iraqis would greet the Americans as liberators—and to be sure not all Iraqis did—but in Firdos Square that day, the sentiment was clearly one of liberation.

Saddam's regime collapsed twenty-one days after the war began. The invasion was accomplished with skill, precision, and speed—and a minimum of casualties—by Franks, his team at CENTCOM, and the men and women volunteers in uniform. It was a heady moment. Less than two years after 9/11, the U.S. military had changed the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, two of the world's leading sponsors of terrorism.

APRIL 9, 2003

A
s cheering Iraqis in the heart of the capital brought down the over life-sized statue of Saddam Hussein, a scene decidedly less euphoric was occurring in a Sunni neighborhood just across the Euphrates. More than one hundred armed Iraqi soldiers, many wearing civilian clothing, entered the National Museum of Iraq. They took up sniper positions to contest the final advance of American soldiers and Marines into Baghdad and tried to turn the museum into a fortress.

A custodian of Iraq's long and rich history, the Iraqi National Museum housed a peerless collection that illuminated the beginnings of civilization. The importance of this heritage was lost on no one, least of all the American military. CENTCOM planners had put the National Museum of Iraq high on the coalition's “no-strike” list.
^*

Immediately after the regime collapsed in early April 2003, Iraqis across the country released pent-up grievances against the tyranny that had smothered them and impoverished their country for over thirty years by looting from government buildings. Looters ransacked and stripped Saddam's palaces bare of furniture and decorations. Faucets and toilets in many public buildings disappeared, and wires were pulled from walls to salvage the copper. Stealing back property that was considered stolen from the Iraqi people struck them, evidently, as justified.

The looting made it appear that postwar Iraq was descending into chaos. A camera caught an Iraqi taking a vase out of a building in Baghdad—and that scene was replayed over and over across the world. This was accompanied by images of coalition troops standing by in tanks. The implication? America was fiddling while Baghdad burned.

A flood of disaster stories gushed forth. News organizations wildly asserted that nearly all of the museum's collection had been looted.
¹
“[I]t took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed,” the
New York Times
reported, “with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters.”
²
But the news stories tended not to blame the Iraqi fighters for breaking into the museum, turning it into a combat zone, and putting its collections at risk. “American troops were but a few hundred yards away as the country's heritage was stripped bare,” National Public Radio claimed.
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Some even accused American servicemen of participating in the reported heists.
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“You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad of 1258, to find looting on this scale,” said one British archaeologist.
⁵

Across the world, officials, especially those opposed to the war, made a great complaint. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan piled on, issuing a statement “deplor[ing] the catastrophic losses.”
⁶
French President Jacques Chirac, a man of bottomless cynicism whose anti-Americanism had become reflexive, called the alleged museum looting “a veritable crime against humanity.”
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As if the ill-grounded comments of foreign officials were not enough, I then had the experience of turning on the television and seeing my colleague, Secretary of State Powell, in Washington issuing what was in essence a public apology on behalf of the U.S. government about the museum looting, with a promise to recover what was lost.
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Iraq and Afghanistan were the first wars of the twenty-first century—the first where operations were reported in real time on blogs, talk radio, and twenty-four-hour news channels. The public was hearing all kinds of allegations and one-sided, sensational reports. It took a while for the facts to catch up. Contrary to early reports, coalition forces had moved rapidly toward the museum to secure it. When American troops arrived, there were no visible looters. The advance on the building was halted, however, when our troops came under a barrage of sniper fire and rocket-propelled grenades from inside. The American commander on the ground faced a vexing choice. If his troops engaged further with the enemy forces in the museum, he risked destroying portions of the building, including whatever artifacts were within.
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Because the rest of Baghdad was rapidly falling under coalition control, the commander decided to hold back, expecting that enemy forces in the building soon would disperse.

I thought the looting being reported was tragic, but I did not fault our troops. Iraq is the size of the state of California. Unfortunately, it would have been impossible to gather a force large enough to stop it all. In addition, General Franks had a long list of priorities for his troops that were as important, if not more so. They had to defeat remaining enemy units. They had to search the suspected WMD sites identified by the CIA. They had to secure large caches of weapons that had been placed all over the country. They had to locate, seize, and secure government documents that Iraqi officials were no doubt busily shredding. They had to find Saddam Hussein and other senior Iraqi officials, to bring an earlier end to the war. They had to act as local police, since the Iraqi army and police force had unexpectedly disappeared.
^*

It had been only days since coalition forces had ended Saddam Hussein's regime in a military campaign prosecuted faster and more successfully than most had predicted. Meanwhile, critics of the administration had made error after error—calling the campaign in Afghanistan a quagmire just days before the overthrow of the Taliban government, calling the advance on Baghdad a quagmire just days before American forces overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime—yet they never seemed to lose credibility. Now critics were once again selling the public and the world a bill of goods about the alleged looting of the national museum and the alleged indifference of American forces to this supposed rape of Iraq's cultural heritage, which also proved not to be the case. The irresponsible reporting was harmful to our troops just as they were trying to build relationships with Iraqi citizens.

At the same time these unsettling allegations were being made, my family was undergoing a personal crisis. In the first week of April, Joyce became extremely ill. It was increasingly clear something was terribly wrong. It turned out that she was suffering from a ruptured appendix. The problem had gone undiagnosed for some days. Our daughter Valerie flew in to be with Joyce at the hospital. At the time, I was spending more than fifteen hours a day at the Pentagon. I would visit Joyce in the hospital in the early morning and then again in the late evening hours. At one point she looked so pale and weak that she reminded me of how her wonderful mother, Marion, looked just before she died at age ninety.

Though Joyce would eventually and thankfully make a full recovery, all of this weighed heavily on my mind when I was preparing for a Pentagon press briefing on April 11, 2003 as the looting furor continued. I intended to remind the press and the American people about the success our forces had just achieved. I wanted to put events in context and defend our troops. I thought I could tamp down the controversy. Unintentionally, I wound up fueling it. A reporter asked me if I thought the words “anarchy” and “lawlessness” were ill chosen to describe the situation in Iraq. “Absolutely,” I responded. I expressed my frustration that reporters insisted on highlighting the negative aspects of Saddam's ouster, which was a positive, albeit complex event.

“Given how predictable the lack of law and order was, as you said, from past conflicts,” another queried, “was there part of General Franks' plan to deal with it?”

In fact, military planners had expected a difficult transition period. CENTCOM had prepared plans to institute martial law if the commanders thought it necessary.
¹¹
CENTCOM's public order plan hinged on a key intelligence assumption that proved to be inaccurate: The existing Iraqi police could be helpful in keeping order.
^*
The military had experienced what Generals Myers and Franks and I ironically called “catastrophic success.” Because Saddam's forces had crumbled so rapidly, our troops were able to liberate Baghdad even faster than anticipated. “Freedom's untidy,” I said. “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that's what's going to happen here.”
¹³
Then I vented some annoyance by uttering a few ill-chosen words: “Think what's happened in our cities when we've had riots, and problems, and looting. Stuff happens!” I was thinking back to the riots in American cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., when whole blocks of Washington, D.C. were set aflame.

I had uttered more than a thousand words at that press conference before I said “stuff happens,” but they were the only two words that seemed to matter. My point was that in all wars, bad things happen. During World War II, cities across Germany suffered from looting and chaos soon after Allied troops entered. The northern city of Bremen was, as one shocked onlooker described it, “probably among the most debauched places on the face of God's earth” as liberated Germans looted stores, museums, and government buildings.
¹⁴
Liberated Iraqis were doing the same thing, filling the temporary vacuum that existed between the old order and the new. What I said was characterized as callous and indifferent. Once I saw how my comments were being interpreted in the media, I realized I had made a mistake.

As it happened, most of what the media had reported about the museum looting—that monstrous “crime against humanity”—turned out to be false. After reports about the looting of the Iraq National Museum first surfaced, CENTCOM's director of operations, Major General Gene Renuart, dispatched Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos to Baghdad to investigate. Though press reports commonly reported 170,000 items stolen, Bogdanos discovered that only a tiny fraction of that was actually looted.
¹⁵
Somewhere between 3,000 and 15,000 items were later proved missing from the museum collections.
¹⁶
Those numbers included the state-sanctioned looting, theft, and forgery that Saddam Hussein's regime had used as a source of revenue for some years.
¹⁷
The press claims that had become an international sensation, Bogdanos concluded, were “intentionally false, a fiction perpetuated first by some museum staff, and then repeated by the press.”
¹⁸

I also received firsthand information about the museum from an unusual source. Our informant was a spy who had been in Baghdad prior to the invasion. Days before coalition bombs began falling on regime targets in the capital, he had visited the already closed national museum. He peered through the museum's windows and found none of the museum's antiquities on display. Well before the war started, it appeared, the museum curators had put tens of thousands of pieces in safe vaults or taken them out of Baghdad.
^*
This same plan had been used in the Iran-Iraq War and during the first Gulf War. The museum staff also left doors unlocked, which suggested that the director, a Baathist and Saddam ally, intended for the fighters and looters to move about freely in the compound.

A few media outlets belatedly issued some corrections, but not with anything approaching the prominence of their original false reports of extensive looting.
^†
“Officials at the National Museum of Iraq have blamed shoddy reporting amid the ‘fog of war' for creating the impression that the majority of the institution's 170,000 items were looted in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad,” noted the
Daily Telegraph
one month later.
²⁰
One museum official tried to explain the confusion: “I said there were 170,000 pieces in the entire museum collection ... not 170,000 pieces stolen... . No, no, no. That would be every single object we have!”
²¹

Those in the press who created and spread the grossly false and harmful stories about the museum looting took no responsibility for the negative pall that quickly engulfed the coalition's efforts. It was as if the news media had shrugged its collective shoulders and said “stuff happens.”