In My Time (69 page)

AFTER SPENDING CHRISTMAS IN Wyoming with our family, Lynne and I left the United States again, this time for Krakow, Poland. I led the U.S. delegation to the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. The Polish government had invited a number of world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, to Krakow for the commemoration ceremonies.

As I sat in a meeting with Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski
in Wawel Castle the evening before the ceremonies began, a member of his staff brought in a note. Kwasniewski read it and then translated it for me. President Putin, who was scheduled to meet with Kwasniewski within the hour, had not yet left Moscow. He wouldn’t be making the meeting, it seemed.

Putin’s rudeness was thought by many to be calculated. The Poles were charting an independent course, and Moscow was not happy about it. Among the errors of the Poles, as Moscow saw it, was supporting the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which had come about when the Moscow-backed candidate for the presidency of Ukraine had tried to steal the election. Crowds in Kiev’s Independence Square had forced a new vote, and reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko had emerged triumphant. I had long believed that the United States should play a more active role in integrating Ukraine and other former Soviet states into the West, and I took the opportunity in Krakow to meet privately with Yushchenko, whose face still bore the scars of an assassination attempt, in which someone—rumors were it was the Russians—had poisoned him with dioxin.

The next day, as we gathered in the ornate nineteenth-century Juliusz Slowacki Theater in Krakow’s old town for the first event commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, Putin still had not arrived. He still wasn’t there when his turn came to speak. The Poles gave his slot to Yushchenko, and the program continued, speeches interspersed with memorial readings and music. Forty-five minutes or so into the event, there was a commotion at the side door of the theater. Burly Russian security agents burst in, followed by President Putin, who strode up the side aisle and immediately onto the stage. Ignoring the fact that someone else was speaking, he began delivering his remarks, seemingly intent on showing our Polish hosts how little regard he had for them. Watching his behavior that day reminded me why Russia’s leaders are still so disliked by their neighbors and why we were right to expand NATO and offer membership to former Soviet client states like Poland and Romania.

My ten-year-old granddaughter, Kate, had asked to come with us on this trip. We explained to her that coming face-to-face with the evil of
the Holocaust would be very difficult, but she said she knew that and wanted to come. In the theater that day in Krakow, there were many Holocaust survivors. Kate was one of the few children. Before the ceremony a woman spotted Kate sitting with our daughter Liz. She walked across the theater, introduced herself, and asked Kate how old she was. Then she pulled a black-and-white photo from her purse. It showed young children in the striped pajamas of Auschwitz prisoners. “This little girl is me, when I was ten,” she said, pointing to one of the children in the photo. She wanted to bear witness, to impress the tragedy of the Holocaust on someone young so that it will not be forgotten. And Kate will never forget.

IN THE SUMMER OF 2005, we were at our home in Jackson, Wyoming, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Florida on August 25. Four days later, on the morning of August 29, after picking up steam in the Gulf of Mexico, Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. The eye of the storm passed forty miles east of New Orleans, causing massive destruction along the Gulf coast in Mississippi. First reports suggested that New Orleans had escaped the worst of the storm and the levees were holding. It wasn’t until early on Tuesday, August 30, that we began to hear they weren’t. I participated by secure videoconference in a briefing on the hurricane damage at 6:30 a.m. Wyoming time on August 31 and realized that the situation was much, much worse than we had ever expected. I headed back to Washington the next morning.

Even before Katrina made landfall, the president had signed an emergency declaration. More than four thousand National Guard troops, under the command of state governors, were deployed; the Federal Emergency Management Agency had prepositioned food, water, and rescue teams; the U.S. Coast Guard was calling in reinforcements from around the country and preparing its helicopters for search and rescue. But the failure of the levees meant that more was needed. Eighty percent of New Orleans was under six to twenty feet of water. Thousands of people who did not evacuate before landfall sought refuge in the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center,
where there was insufficient food and water. Looting and violence were breaking out.

The president wanted to deploy immediately tens of thousands of U.S. troops, but if they were to have law enforcement authority, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco would have formally to request that the president federalize the response to Katrina, which she refused to do. That left the president with the option of acting against her wishes and declaring Louisiana in a state of insurrection in order to bring in troops. That is the requirement imposed by posse comitatus, an 1878 law that makes a declaration of insurrection necessary if the U.S. military is to be used for domestic law enforcement. The president was understandably reluctant to take the extreme step of assuming control in a state without the governor’s acquiescence, and he also faced resistance from Pentagon leaders, who were reluctant to send troops trained for combat to restore domestic order. But as Governor Blanco continued to dither, the president decided to send in the troops anyway—though they would not have law enforcement powers. It was a risky decision. One can easily imagine scenarios in which U.S. troops are helpless in the face of violence. But the idea was that National Guardsmen, who are not covered by posse comitatus, could act with state and local authorities to take law enforcement responsibility. And it was an idea that worked.

Shortly after the president’s announcement, Andy Card told me the president was thinking of setting up a senior-level task force to oversee the relief efforts and wanted to know if I would be willing to chair it. I told him I would, but only if the task force had real responsibility. I would need the authority to hire and fire people and to move in and really get things done. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the task force idea had originated with the communications staff and would put me in a role that was primarily symbolic. I would be a figurehead without the ability really to do anything about the performance of the federal agencies involved. This wouldn’t be helping. It would be creating a distraction, and I let Card know that I wasn’t enthusiastic. The matter was dropped.

At the president’s request I traveled to the Gulf coast on September 8 to get a firsthand look at the situation. Lynne and I traveled first to Gulfport, Mississippi, where Michael Chertoff, the extremely competent secretary of homeland security, came on board Air Force Two to brief us, then accompanied us to the National Guard center where the emergency response was being coordinated. We met with state and local officials, including Governor Haley Barbour, then walked through the Second Street Gulf Shore neighborhood. Nothing was left of some of the homes but jumbled piles of lumber. Other homes were still standing, and we talked with the families who were cleaning up the debris and doing their best to try to recover whatever they could. One man took us into his redbrick bungalow. The water had receded but the damage was great. He was nevertheless resolved that he was going to get it fixed and live in his home again. The sense I got in Gulfport was of devastation mixed with a determination to rebuild and get moving again. This sentiment seemed to flow from the top, where a resilient Governor Barbour was handling the disaster with efficiency and competence.

Our next stop was the U.S.S.
Iwo Jima
for a briefing from Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who would soon be in charge of all Katrina relief efforts. He was rightly proud of the performance of the Coast Guard. They were rescuing people stranded in trees, in boats, and on roofs. In the end they would save more than thirty thousand lives.

We flew by helicopter to a levee overlooking New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, where we saw complete devastation. As far as the eye could see, fetid water covered everything, except the tops of houses. We met with Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, a native of Louisiana. The commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, Honoré combined authority and ability with a true compassion for what his fellow Louisianans were going through. And he knew how to get things done. He drove Lynne and me through the center of New Orleans in his Humvee to a site where the Coast Guard was loading huge sandbags—the size of sofas—and transporting them by helicopter in an effort to plug the breaches in the levees.

We in the Bush administration took a severe pounding for our response
to Hurricane Katrina, and no doubt we could have done things better at all levels. President Bush has written that he should have sent in U.S. troops earlier, which may be true, but which to my mind lets state authorities off the hook too easily. To this day I’m not sure why Governor Blanco refused to request a federalized response to Katrina. I did think she made a wise decision when she determined in 2007 not to run for a second term as Louisiana’s governor.

It is also important to recognize that many people—Mike Chertoff, Thad Allen, and Russ Honoré among them—did tremendous work in the aftermath of one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the United States. And among those whose efforts ought to be recognized is President George Bush. In the days, weeks, and months after Katrina, he personally dedicated hundreds of hours not only to ensuring an effective federal response, but to reaching out to people who needed to know that their government cared about them.

AS 2005 DREW TO a close, the American military and our partners in the multinational coalition had accomplished a great deal. We had removed one of the world’s worst dictators. We had captured Saddam. We had handed responsibility for Iraq back to the Iraqis, and over the next twelve months they would hold three national elections, produce a constitution, and elect a parliament and prime minister. Our forces had captured and killed many of the leaders of the insurgency and provided security for the Iraqi people when they cast their votes and began to build a democracy.

In our prewar planning for the postwar period, we had anticipated a number of dangerous contingencies that failed to materialize. Saddam did not use weapons of mass destruction. The Republican Guard did not make a stand at Baghdad and force our troops into a siege or house-by-house fighting. Saddam was not able to set his oil fields ablaze or launch missiles into Israel.

There were also some things we failed to anticipate. Based on intelligence reports, we believed we would be able to rely on the Iraqi police to keep the peace and provide security. That turned out not to be true.
The Iraqi police were among the least trusted, most infiltrated institutions in Iraqi society. We also thought that once we removed the top Baathist leaders from Saddam’s government, we’d be able to get things up and running relatively quickly, but we discovered that many people were so accustomed to acting only on orders from the top that they were paralyzed without them. I was told of a shoe factory that had not been damaged by the fighting. It still had plenty of basic materials and supplies to operate and people eager and willing to go to work. Yet it continued to sit idle. When the owner of the factory was asked why it wasn’t operating, he said that no one had told him he could start it. Worse, however, was the fact that the society had been completely and totally brutalized for thirty years. It is fair to say that we underestimated the difficulty of rebuilding a traumatized and shattered society.

We also underestimated the extent to which the Shia felt betrayed by the United States after Desert Storm. In 1991 we had encouraged them to rise up against Saddam. When they did, Saddam slaughtered thousands of them and we did not, for the most part, come to their aid. They were understandably fearful that we would abandon them again.

Much has been written about the internal debates we had in the period when the Coalition Provisional Authority was running Iraq. I tend to think that hindsight in this area is twenty-twenty. We had tremendously talented people working hard in Baghdad—military and civilian—to accomplish an exceedingly difficult task. They didn’t always get it right. And we didn’t always get it right in Washington. It is possible, for example, that we could have avoided the impression of an American occupation had we established a provisional Iraqi government from the outset.

Once we had turned over sovereignty in June 2004, we looked toward political milestones, such as elections and the adoption of a constitution, in the belief that they would be followed by reduced levels of violence. As the Iraqis took control of their own country, we believed the terrorists and insurgents would have difficulty continuing to fight. They would be seen as attacking Iraqis who were simply trying to run their own country. When violence increased, we thought the enemy was lashing out in final acts of desperation, last efforts to terrorize and
destroy before a self-governing Iraq made such attacks futile, even counterproductive. That was the context of my comment in May 2005 that the insurgents were “in the last throes.” I believed they were.

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that the ultimate blame for the violence and bloodshed in Iraq after liberation lies with those who created it—the terrorists and those who were supporting them, primarily al Qaeda and Iran. They were a determined and ruthless enemy, committed to causing mass casualties among Iraqi civilians and American soldiers. They wanted to create chaos, break our will, and force us to leave. In January 2004 American forces had captured an al Qaeda courier who was carrying a letter from Abu Musab al Zarqawi to al Qaeda leaders. The letter detailed Zarqawi’s plan to foment sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni in Iraq by “targeting and striking [Shiite] religious, political, and military symbols” and “dragging them into a sectarian war.” He went on to declare that “fighting the Shia is the way to take the nation to battle.” He also made clear how much al Qaeda feared democracy, writing that when “the sons of this land will be the authority . . . we will have no pretext. We can pack up and leave and look for another land.”