Known and Unknown (77 page)

Ultimately, the President decided that negotiations were the best way to try to deal with Iran. Every American administration since the Iranian revolution has participated in some form of diplomatic engagement with them; publicly, privately, or both. Beginning with Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in December 2001, the Bush administration also authorized American diplomats to hold discussions of one type or another with representatives from Iran, but nothing as substantial as the policy of engagement the State Department began to pursue in 2006. In an April 2006 memo I wrote of the proposed U.S.-Iran talks with the so-called EU Three (France, Germany, and Britain: “I think they are a disaster. We are stepping on a rake.”
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The negotiations yielded no significant concessions. To the contrary, Tehran seemed to have accelerated its illegal weapons programs, continued to fund Hezbollah in Lebanon, crushed its domestic dissidents, threatened to erase Israel from the map in another Holocaust, and escalated their attacks against American servicemen in Iraq.

 

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or decades, Syria has been considered a prized quarry for optimistic American diplomats. After my efforts to engage the Syrians in the early 1980s, George H. W. Bush's secretary of state, James Baker, traveled to Damascus no fewer than twelve times. Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright made more than forty trips between them during the Clinton administration. American secretaries of state spent hours in the Syrian president's waiting room cooling their heels as they awaited an audience. The Syrian state press played up these meetings with foreign officials, especially from the United States, as signs of Syria's clout in the world. Although for some time After 9/11, President Bush had carefully denied Syria such injections of prestige, the State Department's eagerness for engagement eventually resurfaced, with Powell and Armitage both making trips there, hoping for a diplomatic breakthrough that never came.

That hope was not solely the province of diplomats, however. CENTCOM military commander John Abizaid was a proponent of trying to peel off Syria from Iran, encouraging them to forge a historic peace with israel and thus help to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many in our military as well as in the State Department had long thought the stalemate over the Palestinian territories to be an underlying cause of violence in the region. I was skeptical, and even more skeptical of bringing in Syria from the cold. Nonetheless, I forwarded Abizaid's arguments to the President, thinking it was important that he know his CENTCOM commander's views on the matter.
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Peace with israel and an accommodation with the United States were not high on the priority list of the Syrian regime—not unless there was something major in it for them. Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar (who took the reins After his father's death in June 2000) hailed from a small Muslim sect, the Alawites. To maintain power in a nation with a Sunni majority, they burnished their pan-Arab credentials by working against Israel and making a not too hidden effort to oppose American forces in Iraq; they became the hub for gathering suicide bombers and jihadists to travel south across their border.

Throughout the 1990s, Syria built increasingly close ties with Iran and was heavily reliant on it for arms and funding. This alliance was more than just a marriage of convenience, as some have characterized it. The two nations had fashioned a de facto Hezbollah state in southern Lebanon. In exchange for funding and supplies, the terrorist organization Hezbollah worked to advance Syrian and Iranian policies in the region. With weekly flights from Tehran and Damascus shuttling in thousands of small arms and rockets, Hezbollah had amassed a military force to be reckoned with.

In February 2005, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a massive car bomb in front of the St. George Hotel in Beirut. Hariri was a symbol of Lebanese independence, and as such a threat to the Syria-Hezbollah occupation of his country. Unsurprisingly, evidence that Syria and Hezbollah had their hands in the assassination was abundant, though both denied the claims.
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President Bush announced that America supported an international investigation of the murder and would advocate enforcement of UN resolutions calling for the withdrawal of Syria's nearly fifteen thousand troops from Lebanon, as well as its many hundreds of intelligence officials. He recalled our ambassador to Syria.

Hariri's death helped spark the so-called Cedar Revolution, a Lebanese popular movement against Syrian occupation and meddling, changing the dynamic in the region and at least temporarily stalling the U.S. efforts to win over Syria.
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My old acquaintance, Walid Jumblatt, the wily leader of the Druze community in Lebanon, reversed his longstanding truce with Syria. I asked Jumblatt on one of his later visits to Washington how he had happened to switch sides. Recalling our strained relations during the Reagan administration, I said, “You were firing mortars and artillery at us back in 1984.”

“Yes,” Jumblatt replied, “but I'm with you now.” These encouraging signs proved fleeting.

I thought the administration's early policy of pressure and isolation, despite occasionally mixed signals from State Department representatives, had worked reasonably well in making the Syrian regime uneasy and willing to make important concessions, such as withdrawing its military from Lebanon. In Bush's second term, however, there was a change of course and the administration reengaged with Syria. The Department of State proposed relieving Syria's diplomatic isolation and reverting to the practice of sending high-level U.S. officials to Damascus for meetings.

This policy of engagement, combined with our worsening difficulties in Iraq that were at least partly the result of Syria's actions, sent a signal of weakness to Assad that he was quick to exploit. He reverted to his earlier policies of greater hostility toward America and our interests. Yet even in 2007, the State Department invited Syria back to the negotiating table in pursuit of Middle East peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Seeing that the United States was again the supplicant, and with the ill feelings about their assassination of a democratic Lebanese leader seemingly having been forgotten, if not forgiven, the Syrians reverted to their tried-and-true ways: obfuscation and delay at the negotiating table and active support for terrorism and covert pursuit of illegal weapons programs. Proof enough of their true intentions came with the discovery—and later destruction by Israeli aircraft—of a curious facility in eastern Syria: an illegal nuclear reactor nearly identical to one in North Korea. Regrettably, U.S. diplomatic efforts may have emboldened, rather than deterred, one of the world's most dangerous regimes.

 

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y July 2006, well over a decade of U.S. negotiations with North Korea and its erratic leadership had yielded little of benefit to the United States. North Korea continued to test and launch ballistic missiles, bluster about attacking South Korea, and develop nuclear weapons, detonating what intelligence professionals believed was a low-yield bomb in October 2006. We had confronted North Korean officials in 2002 with the fact that we knew about their clandestine uranium-enrichment effort, in violation of the Clinton administration's “Agreed Framework.” As I wrote at the time in a memo to the NSC principals,

As long as Kim Jong Il was in power, I thought we had little prospect of inducing his regime to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Every day Kim and his officials focused on ways to consolidate and protect their dictatorship. Their disastrous policies spawned famine, torture, and oppression. The inhumane leadership of North Korea seemed to believe that the surest hold on power was the pursuit of weapons programs.

I thought it worthwhile to try to get China to work diplomatically to persuade North Korea to change its nuclear weapons policy, based on the view that our countries shared an interest in keeping the Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, China seemed more interested in blocking U.S. efforts against North Korea than in keeping the Korean peninsula nuclear weapons–free.
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The outcome the Chinese seemed to fear most was a collapse of their neighbor.
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Then they would be forced to deal with refugees and a failed Korean state on their border. As long as Kim Jong Il had China as a patron of sorts, I was not optimistic that the negotiations with North Korea involving the Chinese, known as the six-party talks, would succeed.

Instead of offering inducements of financial aid and heating oil, I thought there might be a remote possibility that if we put enough diplomatic and financial pressure on the country, some of its senior generals might overthrow Kim Jong Il. By 2006, Rice and the State Department envoy to North Korea, Christopher Hill, made clear that North Korea was the State Department's issue alone, and that the views of the Defense Department would carry little weight. Rice and Hill seemed to believe they could obtain an agreement with North Korea to end its WMD programs. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Lawless, a veteran expert on the region with years in the CIA, was no longer included in discussions.

On my desk at the Pentagon I kept a satellite picture of the Korean Peninsula taken at night to remind me of all the Americans who were fighting for the freedom of Iraqis, Afghans, and, most important, for the safety and freedom of our own citizens. The photo shows that south of a distinct line—the demilitarized zone—is a free nation illuminated by the countless bright lights of a successful economy, the world's thirteenth largest. To the norThis virtually total darkness, in which only one small pinprick of light shows, marking the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. The two countries have the same people and the same resources, and yet one country is full of light, and the other is dark, hungry, and poor.

The lesson can sometimes be lost on any who take their freedom for granted. I found that younger South Koreans, in particular, needed to be reminded that the reason they weren't locked in the prison state of North Korea was because so many young Americans and allied forces had fought in the so-called forgotten war of the 1950s. Indeed, younger generations of South Koreans seemed to forget that the regime in the north still sought to unify all of the Korean Peninsula under its totalitarian rule.

In November 2003, I encountered this historical amnesia on a visit to Seoul. At an event on the top floor of a skyscraper downtown, a young Korean reporter approached me. The South Korean parliament was then debating whether or not to send troops to assist our coalition forces in Iraq, which had been liberated seven months earlier.

“Why should Koreans send their young men and women halfway around the globe to be killed or wounded in Iraq?” she asked me.

The question struck a deep chord. My close friend Dick O'Keefe had served in the Korean War fifty years earlier. He had been a wrestling teammate of mine at New Trier High School and had gone to Korea during the last year of the war. For the three weeks that cease-fire negotiations sought to bring the war to an end, both sides engaged in bloody battles as they tried to claim more land before an armistice was finally signed. In the twenty days the negotiations took place, U.S. and allied forces suffered 17,000 casualties, with 3,333 killed.
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On the last day of the war, O'Keefe was killed.

I had seen O'Keefe's name earlier that day on a wall with the names of all Americans killed in the conflict. I placed a wreath at the war memorial. The legacy of his sacrifice, and the other 36,500 Americans who lost their lives on the battlefields of the Korean peninsula, is that some fifty million Koreans are free today—including that young reporter who asked me her question.

I thought of Dick O'Keefe as I answered her question. “Why,” I countered, “should Americans have sent their young men and women halfway around the world to Korea some fifty years ago?”

We stood overlooking Seoul's skyline of bright and tall skyscrapers, a testament to the skills and industriousness of the free Korean people. This had come to the people of South Korea through the courage and sacrifice of others.

Pointing out the window at the lively, free, and prosperous city, I said, “There's the answer.”

A
t Camp Buehring, a staging area in Kuwait for U.S. troops headed into Iraq, I held a meeting for some who would soon be deploying northward into a difficult fight against Iraqi insurgents. As I did dozens of times during my six years as secretary of defense, I gave the troops a chance to ask me any question they wished with the media there. After two questions from the audience, a soldier from the Tennessee National Guard raised his hand to ask the next one.

“Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years,” he began. “A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon. Our vehicles are not armored. We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that's already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.”
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He was raising a serious issue, one that was of concern to the troops and the Army—as evidenced when some of the members of the audience applauded.
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I thought the question deserved a careful explanation, and I saw it as an opportunity to provide an overview of the steps the Army was taking to correct the problems they were experiencing. I responded at length:

 

Lieutenant General Steven Whitcomb, commander of Army forces in the Persian Gulf, came forward to follow my answer by explaining that any delays were “not a matter of money or desire.” He added, “It is a matter of the logistics, of being able to produce [the armor].”
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The exchange might have seemed straightforward to most of the people at the base. It seemed that way to me. But unfortunately only a few words of my extensive answer—“As you know, you go to war with the Army you have—not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time”—ended up being isolated in print and as a seemingly endless loop on cable television. The comment was characterized by some critics, and particularly their contacts in the press, as an example of insensitivity.
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I did not see my remarks that way, and I still don't. My statement carefully laid out the reality of the armed forces that existed when President Bush took office. Any president and any secretary of defense has available the military that their predecessors bequeath to them. The B-1 bomber I approved as secretary of defense in 1976 was being used in Afghanistan in 2001, just as the M-1 Abrams tank I had approved back then was the mainstay of the U.S. Army when I returned to the Pentagon a quarter of a century later. In turn, the number of up-armored vehicles available in 2004 were the consequences of decisions made years before President Bush or I took office in 2001.

My response also told a simple truth about warfare: As a conflict evolves, both sides adapt to the reality of the battlefield. The emergence of improvised explosive devices as the Iraq conflict wore on necessitated a shift to more armored vehicles that the Army had not acquired. It also necessitated a change by the commanders on the ground in their tactics, techniques, and procedures to make the troops less vulnerable. It took time to put up-armored vehicles in the field, and the Army, which has the responsibility to organize, train, and equip the troops, had not been arranged in an optimal way to accomplish that.

Commanders had been grappling with the problem of lethal improvised explosive devices since 2003, when they first began appearing. The favored IED was the roadside bomb. Made with garage door openers, egg timers, toy car radio controls, or washing machine parts, the bombs were inexpensive to assemble and crude in design. They were, however, remarkably effective in killing American and coalition troops.
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Among the most vulnerable to the roadside bombs were the thousands of humvees—lightly armored trucks—that were often used by our forces to move around in Iraq.

Once ground commanders experienced the first attacks by IEDs in the summer of 2003, they began to adjust. But so did the enemy. Our troops began using jammers to block the signal of remote-controlled bombs—until the enemy shifted to using wires, pressure plates, and heat sensors to activate the bombs. Once our troops became adept at deciphering the telltale signs of IEDs buried under roads, the enemy put explosives in piles of trash, the carcasses of animals, and, most savagely, in the corpses of murdered Iraqis. Our commanders changed their operating tactics as well, and began stopping three hundred yards before suspected roadside bombs. This led the enemy to plant second bombs at places where the convoys were likely to stop. Next, commanders began to position snipers on frequently bombed routes to kill those who planted IEDs, with the result that the enemy began planting IEDs elsewhere. The bombs themselves became increasingly sophisticated.
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Houses were rigged to explode when Iraqi or coalition troops entered to search them. In Fallujah and other cities, factories churned out massive car bombs that could take out a city block.

By 2004, IED attacks had risen to nearly one hundred per week, becoming the most deadly weapon our troops faced.
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General Abizaid and I regularly discussed the severity of the problem with General Casey. Abizaid urged that we mount a Manhattan Project–style effort to find a solution to IEDs, and in June 2004 we created the Joint IED Defeat Task Force with a budget of $1. 3 billion and a mandate to find ways to counter the threat.
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I urged that anything and everything be tried. I was told that the task force we assembled had even tried using honeybees to detect IEDs with their keen sense of smell. Hair dryers were mounted on the fronts of vehicles to trigger the bombs' heat sensors.
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Coalition troops were increasingly coming under attack from explosively formed penetrators. EFPs use a copper disc that becomes a semimolten slug capable of piercing even the strongest armor. The first EFPs in Iraq were in Shia areas not far from the Iranian border. The chemical composition of their explosive charges had telltale signs of Iranian weapons manufacturers.
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We weren't moving fast enough. In December 2004, I again expressed my continued frustration in a note to Myers and Pace. “I am very uncomfortable with the pace at which this is going. We know that vehicles are vulnerable and we know they are less vulnerable with armor. We have known it for some time.”
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And then, “My suggestion is this: until the Services can organize, [train] and equip the forces in a way that fits the tactics and strategies being used by the Combatant Commanders, the Combatant Commanders need to call a halt to what they are doing.”
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If the U.S. Army could not provide enough armor for humvees, the commanders in theater would have to change the ways they fought. I ordered Abizaid and Casey to forbid all vehicles that had not been up-armored from leaving protected bases in Iraq.
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I told them we would fly in welders with armor and take as many airplanes as needed to get them and the required armor into Iraq. Within a matter of weeks, no unarmored vehicles were allowed outside of protected compounds.

By late 2005, the several billion dollars we had invested in the IED problem had resulted in progress. Casualties were down, even though the number of attacks had spiraled upward. Still, I wanted a more focused senior Army leadership, so I called another general out of retirement and back to duty: four-star General Montgomery C. Meigs. Meigs focused the Joint IED Defeat Organization on the people making the bombs and the enemy networks that sustained them. Armor continued to arrive in the theater, including the first prototypes of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) V-hulled vehicles that afforded more protection to the troops. Increased local cooperation and better intelligence about the insurgent networks led to more coalition operations against those who were making the weapons. The IED challenge—and the amount of time it took to equip the force and adjust to the enemy's tactics—highlighted again the need to accelerate the transformation of our military.

 

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steadily pushed each service to become more agile, more deployable, and better prepared to confront new, previously unanticipated threats.
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We redirected the Air Force's energies and resources toward fielding more unmanned aerial vehicles, which by 2008 numbered over five thousand—a twenty-fivefold increase since 9/11.
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Under the leadership of Admiral Vern Clark, the Navy developed a new Fleet Response Plan to double its efficiency and the number of carrier strike groups available for global deployment at any given time. I encouraged the Marines to develop a special operations contingent.

The Army faced the biggest challenges. It has a proud and storied history dating back to the Continental Army of 1775. Under such legendary generals as Grant and Sherman, it preserved the Union in a tough-fought civil war. Under Pershing and Eisenhower it liberated Europe in two world wars. The Army manned the front lines of the Cold War flashpoints, its heavy tanks and artillery acting as a deterrent against a Soviet ground advance in Central Europe. For decades the Army had been organized for large land battles between sovereign states, symbolized by the service's prized seventy-ton M-1 Abrams tank. The immediate challenges we confronted by 2001 though were not from massed enemy forces. By then our adversaries had learned that confronting the United States in a conventional war of massed force was a bad idea. As a result, America was unlikely to soon face the major land, sea, and air battles for which our military had organized, trained, and equipped over many decades. Instead, we needed a military that could quickly deploy in enough numbers to bring decisive lethality to bear, could leverage our country's technological advantages, such as precision, communications, and stealth, and most important—could quickly adapt to changing circumstances in a given conflict and prevail.

Despite the unquestionable improvements made over the years—in many cases as the result of the lessons learned from the unconventional conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s—the Army was the most resistant to adapting to the new challenges and accelerating its transformation away from its Cold War posture of large, difficult to deploy, heavy divisions.

The small-scale unconventional conflicts of the Cold War, in Panama, El Salvador, Grenada, Lebanon, and elsewhere, were seen almost as distractions and diversions from what the Army was supposed to do and how it was supposed to do it. In fact, the painful experience in Lebanon had led Cap Weinberger, Reagan's secretary of defense, to codify the aversion to smaller-scale conflicts as a matter of doctrine—what became known as the Weinberger Doctrine (his senior military assistant, General Colin Powell, would later adopt a version of it as the Powell Doctrine). The idea was that U.S. troops should only be committed as a “last resort” in support of clearly defined goals, with a clear “exit strategy” and “overwhelming force” to get in and get out.
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In the twenty-first century, however, the task was not to “overwhelm” nations and people who were not our enemies. The enemy was not the local population but the terrorists and insurgents living, training, and fighting among them. This came to be the case in the post-9/11 conflicts we were fighting, including the counterinsurgency campaigns that evolved in Iraq and Afghanistan. These required measured application of military power to minimize civilian casualties and encourage local cooperation.

It also struck me that the new realities of warfare meant that our military should be prepared to be used earlier in order to avoid full-scale conflicts altogether. Merely by their presence abroad or the ability to deploy rapidly, our troops could reassure allies and, in some instances, deter aggression from hostile nations or nonstate actors. They could train foreign forces, as they have in Colombia, Georgia, Jordan, and Kenya, so that the militaries of our friends and allies would be better able to take up the fight against mutual threats—instead of leaving it to our men and women in uniform, who carry more than their share of the burden. They could provide critical intelligence to stop terrorist attacks. They could lend a hand in natural disasters around the world, earning valuable goodwill for the United States by their actions, as we did in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami and the Pakistan earthquakes.