"State of Denial"

"State of Denial"
It was Bush’s decision. But Rumsfeld drove the dynamic on Iraq. How the SecDef blew it. An exclusive excerpt.
By Bob Woodward
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.


Oct. 9, 2006 issue - A movie of the George W. Bush presidency might open in the Oval Office on January 26, 2001, when Donald H. Rumsfeld was sworn in as defense secretary. A White House photographer captured the scene. Rumsfeld wears a pin stripe suit, and rests his left hand on a Bible held by Joyce, his wife of 46 years. His right hand is raised. Bush stands almost at attention, his head forward, his eyes cocked sharply leftward, looking intently at Rumsfeld. Vice President Dick Cheney stands slightly off to the side, his trademark half smile on his face. It is a cold, dry day, and the barren branches of the trees outside can be seen through the Oval Office windows.

Back in the days of the Ford presidency, in the wake of Watergate—the pardon of Nixon, the fall of Saigon—Cheney and Rumsfeld had worked almost daily in the same Oval Office where they once again stood. The new man in the photo, Bush, five years younger than Cheney and nearly 14 years younger than Rumsfeld, had been a student at Harvard Business School. He came to the presidency with less experience and time in government than any incoming president since Woodrow Wilson in 1913.

Well into his seventh decade, many of Rumsfeld’s peers and friends had retired, but he now stood eagerly on the cusp, ready to run the race again. He resembled John le Carre’s fictional Cold War British intelligence chief, George Smiley, a man who “had been given, in late age, a chance to return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them after all.”

“Get it right this time,” Cheney told Rumsfeld.

In his first Pentagon tour, as Ford’s secretary of defense from 1975-1977, Rumsfeld had acquired a disdain for large parts of the system he was to oversee once again. He had found the Pentagon and the vast U.S. military complex unmanageable. One night at a dinner at my house a dozen years after he had left the Pentagon the first time, he said that being secretary was “like having an electric appliance in one hand and the plug in the other and you are running around trying to find a place to put it in.” It was an image that stuck with me—Rumsfeld charging around the Pentagon E-ring, the Man with the Appliance, seeking an elusive electrical socket, trying to make things work and feeling unplugged by the generals and admirals.

“After two months on the job, it is clear that the Defense establishment is tangled in its anchor chain,” Rumsfeld dictated in a four-page memo on March 21, 2001, two months into his second tour. He was already frustrated. Congress required hundreds of reports. It seemed there might be more auditors, investigators, testing groups and monitors looking over their shoulders than there were “front-line troops with weapons.”

“The maze of constraints on the Department force it to operate in a manner that is so slow, so ponderous and so inefficient that whatever it ultimately does will inevitably be a decade or so late.”

This “Anchor Chain” memo, which Rumsfeld revised and added to, became notorious among Rumsfeld’s staff as they watched and tried to help him define the universe of his problems. It sounded like he had almost given up fixing the Pentagon during the George W. Bush presidency. The task was so hard and would take so long, he dictated in a later version, that “our job, therefore, is to work together to sharpen the sword that the next president will wield.”

“I’m the secretary of defense,” Rumsfeld insisted repeatedly in his first months in 2001. “I’m in the chain of command.” He—not the generals, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff—would deal with the White House and the president on operational matters. Rumsfeld micromanaged daily Pentagon life and rode roughshod over people. In one public confrontation at a hearing with Senator Susan Collins, the earnest Maine Republican, Rumsfeld had put her down in a manner that was stunning even for him. Collins’s voice had quivered at one point. Later, Powell A. Moore, Rumsfeld’s assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, suggested that he call her, try to smooth things over.

“Hell,” Rumsfeld said, “she needs to apologize to me.”

On one occasion, he led a delegation from Congress to the funeral in Columbia, South Carolina, for Representative Floyd Spence, a Republican who had been a pro-Pentagon hawk for three decades. Moore had arranged the seating on Rumsfeld’s plane the way everything was done in Congress, by seniority.

“I don’t want this,” Rumsfeld declared, and personally rearranged the seating—putting Representative Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who would soon become the House Armed Services Committee chairman, in the back.

On January 20, 2003, President Bush signed a secret National Security Presidential Directive, NSPD-24. The subject: setting up an “Iraq Postwar Planning Office” within the Defense Department for the expected invasion of Iraq. Rumsfeld picked Jay Garner, a 64-year-old retired three-star general and defense industry executive to head the postwar office. Six weeks later, Garner went to the White House, mid-morning on Friday, February 28, 2003, to meet President Bush for the first time. In the Situation Room, Garner passed around copies of his handout, an 11-point presentation, and dove right in. He said four of the nine tasks his small team was supposed to be in charge of in Iraq under Bush’s NSPD-24 were plainly beyond their capabilities, including dismantling weapons of mass destruction, defeating terrorists, reshaping the Iraqi military and reshaping the other internal Iraqi security institutions.

The president nodded. No one else intervened, though Garner had just told them he couldn’t be responsible for crucial postwar tasks—the ones that had the most to do with the stated reasons for going to war in the first place—because his team couldn’t do them.

The import 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 interagency 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.

One of Garner’s talking points was, “Postwar use of Iraqi Regular Army.” He said, “We’re going to use the army. We need to use them. They have the proper skill sets.”

How many from the army? someone asked.

“I’m going to give you a big range,” Garner answered. “It’ll be between 200,000 and 300,000.”

Garner looked around the room. All the heads were bobbing north to south. Nobody challenged. Nobody had any questions about this plan.

“Thank you very much,” Bush said when Garner was done. National Security Adviser Condoleezza 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.

Shortly after the invasion, while Garner was in Kuwait waiting to move into Iraq, Rumsfeld chose L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protégé of Henry Kissinger, to effectively replace Garner, but as a presidential envoy. On Garner’s first day in Iraq, April 22, he signed on to an agreement to set up an interim Iraqi advisory group, made up of prominent Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, many of them expatriates, to put an Iraqi face on the postwar occupation government. Two days later, Rumsfeld called to tell him Bremer was coming over, and said he wanted Garner to stay on as well.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Garner said. “You can’t have the guy who used to be in charge and the guy who’s now in charge there, because you divide the loyalties of the people. So the best thing for me is just to step out of here.”

Rumsfeld convinced Garner to stay temporarily, and the retired general and Bremer clashed, as Bremer quickly unveiled a plan to ban as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from government employment.

“Hell,” Garner told him, “you won’t be able to run anything if you go this deep.”

The next day, Bremer revealed a second draft order, disbanding the Iraqi ministries of Defense and Interior, the entire Iraqi military, and all of Saddam’s bodyguard and special paramilitary organizations. Garner was stunned. The de-Baathification order was dumb, but this was a disaster.

“We have always made plans to bring the army back,” he insisted. This new plan was just coming out of the blue, subverting months of work.

“Well, the plans have changed,” Bremer replied.

Bremer then met with the Iraqi advisory group Garner had agreed to work with. “One thing you need to realize is you’re not the government,” he told them. “We are. And we’re in charge.”

The next day, the group went home.

Garner came back to the U.S. in June and basically hid out for a couple of weeks, not wanting to see anyone at the Pentagon or talk about his experience in Iraq. Finally, on June 18, 2003, alone with Rumsfeld 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,” Garner said.

“Really?” Rumsfeld said.

“Three terrible mistakes,” Garner said. He cited the extent of the de-Baathification, getting rid of the army, and summarily dumping the Iraqi leadership group. Disbanding the military had been the biggest mistake. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. 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.”

Rumsfeld and Garner went to the White House to see Bush. It was Garner’s second time with the president. “Mr. President, let me tell you a couple of stories,” Garner said. Describing meetings with Iraqis, Garner painted a positive picture. “I’d get ready to leave,” Garner said, “and this is true—as I leave they’re all thumbs-up and they’d say, ‘God bless Mr. George Bush and Mr. Tony Blair. Thank you for taking away Saddam Hussein.’ That was in 70 meetings. That always was the final response.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Bush said.

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. Once again the aura of the presidency had shut out the most important news—the bad news.

It was only one example of a visitor to the Oval Office not telling the president the whole story or the truth. Likewise, in these moments where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him, he did not press, did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court, with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good news, and a good time had by all.

Soon Rumsfeld was distancing himself from Bremer, who, on paper, was to report to the president through the secretary of defense. Rumsfeld later confirmed to me in an interview that he felt that Bremer had only “technically but not really” reported to him.

“He didn’t call home much,” Rumsfeld said of Bremer.

Rumsfeld also stepped away from the hunt for Saddam’s alleged WMD. CIA Director George Tenet proposed to Rumsfeld that the person in charge of the WMD hunt report to both of them.

“Absolutely not,” Rumsfeld said.

After Bush’s re-election in November 2004, the biggest question mark at the White House was Rumsfeld. Should he stay? White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had to approach the issue with delicacy. The biggest voice for change was outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell. In one conversation, Powell had told Card, “If I go, Don should go.” Bush had decided to replace Powell with Rice, but it was unclear who he wanted at Defense.

Card got out his “hit-by-the-bus” book, an 8½-by-11-inch spiral notebook, a half-inch thick with a blue cover. On separate pages he had lists of possible replacements for all the major administration posts, including his own. The names were listed in no particular order. Card kept the notebook in his desk at the White House and periodically added or deleted names. He had intentionally used a student notebook, something he had bought himself, so it wouldn’t be considered a government document or a presidential record that might someday be opened to history. It was private and personal.

His list of 11 possible Rumsfeld replacements included Senator Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who had been Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, and Republican Arizona Senator John McCain.

But Card had what he thought was a great idea—a sleeper candidate. The best replacement for Rumsfeld would be James A. Baker III. “Everyone would say, ‘Phew,’” Card said. “No learning curve. Great. Interesting.” Baker was 74, only two years older than Rumsfeld. He had served in the Marine Corps. He had been the best modern White House chief of staff, Card thought. He had successfully handled the 2000 Florida recount for Bush. Mr. President, this is my quiet counsel, Card said. Put a diplomat in the Defense Department.

The president seemed genuinely intrigued. You don’t have to rush to make a decision, Card advised. But the president would not even authorize Card to send out feelers or to enter into any discussion with Baker.

Card spoke with Rumsfeld, who talked as if he presumed there would be no change. Rumsfeld wanted to stay. Soon Karl Rove weighed in. A contentious session with Congress was coming up. As he saw it, the Democrats were in no mood for a honeymoon. With Rice’s confirmation hearing and with the expected nomination of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, would another Senate confirmation overload the system? And, clearly, the conduct of the war in Iraq would be the subject of confirmation hearings for anyone Bush nominated to be the new secretary of defense. Rove agreed they did not want to do anything that would prompt hearings on the war. Jesus, no.

In mid-December the president made his final decision. Rumsfeld would stay, he indicated to Cheney and Card. He couldn’t change Rumsfeld.

“That didn’t mean he didn’t want to,” Card later said.

Card tried to have a private, candid session with First Lady Laura Bush about every six weeks to hear her concerns. He set aside an hour and a half for each meeting. Sometimes it took 30 minutes, sometimes the full hour and one half and on occasion two hours.

The first lady was distressed about the war, worried that Rumsfeld was hurting her husband, and her perspective seemed to reflect Rice’s concern about Rumsfeld’s over­bearing style and tendency to dominate. Card knew that the first lady and Rice often took long walks together on the Camp David weekends.

“I agree with you,” Card said. On one level he was trying to educate and explain, but he was also lobbying. So he outlined his problems with Rumsfeld and how he believed it was time for a change. He said, however, so far his advice on the Rumsfeld situation had been considered and rejected.

“He’s happy with this,” the first lady said, “but I’m not.” Another time she said, “I don’t know why he’s not upset with this.”

As the new secretary of state, Rice hired Philip Zelikow, an old friend, as the counselor to the State Department, a powerful but little known top post that would leave him free to undertake special assignments for her, and quickly dispatched him and a small team to Iraq. On February 10, Rice’s 14th day as secretary, Zelikow presented her with a 15-page, single-spaced memo classified SECRET/NODIS, meaning “no distribution” to anyone else. “At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change,” Rice read. This was a shocking notion—“a failed state,” after two years, thousands of lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars.

In midsummer 2005, General Jim Jones, the NATO commander, paid a call on his old friend General Pete Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It was virtually certain that Pace was going to move up to become chairman, the number one military position. he two Marine generals had been friends for more than three decades. They had been in Vietnam at about the same time, a searing and formative experience for both, and then served side-by-side as first lieutenants in 1970 at the Marine barracks in southeast Washington.

Jones expressed chagrin that Pace would even want to be chairman. “You’re going to face a debacle and be part of the debacle in Iraq,” he said. U.S. prestige was at a 50- or 75-year low in the world. He said he was so worried about Iraq and the way Rumsfeld ran things that he wondered if he himself should not resign in protest. “How do you have the stomach for eight years in the Pentagon?” he finally asked.

Pace said that someone had to be chairman. Who else would do it?

Jones did not have an answer. “Military advice is being influenced on a political level,” he said. The JCS had improperly “surrendered” to Rumsfeld. “You should not be the parrot on the secretary’s shoulder.”

His concern was complete. When Senators John Warner and Carl Levin, the chairman and ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, visited him at his headquarters in Belgium, Jones told them about all the problems. He said they needed new legislationto re-empower the service chiefs or make some kind of sense of the crazy system.

“The Joint Chiefs have been systematically emasculated by Rumsfeld,” Jones said.

Pace soon became chairman. In an interview, he flatly denied that Jones had told him that Iraq was a debacle or that Rumsfeld had systematically emasculated the Joint Chiefs. “He’s a good friend. He was in my wedding,” Pace said, noting they had known each other for 36 years. “If Jim felt that way he would tell me.”

I called Jones at NATO headquarters in Belgium. He said that he had made all those comments to Pace in their meeting in 2005. “That’s what I told him,” Jones said.

In March 2006, Rumsfeld invited six of the Pentagon’s regular outside advisers in to be briefed and ask questions. One was Ken Adelman, a longtime Rumsfeld friend and vehement early supporter of the war who had become entirely disillusioned over the administration’s handling of the postwar. His relationship with Rumsfeld was almost over.

“What metrics would you use for success in Iraq?” Adelman asked Rumsfeld. “You know, for winning the war?”

“Oh, there are hundreds,” Rumsfeld replied. “It’s just so complicated that there are hundreds.”

“Wait a minute,” Adelman insisted. “A former boss of mine always said identify three or four things, then always ask about, get measurements and you’ll get progress or else you’ll never get any progress.” The former boss was Rumsfeld himself, who had driven the point home to Adelman 35 years ago, when he worked for Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity. What are they? Adelman insisted.

Rumsfeld said it was so complicated that he could not give a list. “Hundreds,” he insisted.

Adelman believed that meant there was a total lack of accountability. If Rumsfeld didn’t agree to any criteria, he couldn’t be said to have failed on any criteria.

“Then you don’t have anything,” Adelman said. He left as dis turbed as ever. There was no accountability.

On March 16, General John Abizaid, the commander of CENTCOM and thus the top military officer for the Middle East, was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq. Afterward, he went over to see Congressman John Murtha, the 73-year old former Marine who had introduced a resolution the previous November calling for the redeployment of troops from Iraq as soon as practicable. Sitting at the round, dark wood table in the congressman’s office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis and held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, “We’re that far apart.”

Rumsfeld circulated a six-page SECRET memo on May 1, proposing some fixes, entitled “Illustrative New 21st Century Institutions and Approaches.”

It was almost the latest version of the “Anchor Chain” memos he had written in his first months as secretary in 2001—a cry from his bureaucratic and managerial heart. Not only was the Defense Department tangled in its anchor chain but so was the rest of the U.S. government, and the world.

He dictated, “The charge of incompetence against the U.S. government should be easy to rebut if the American people understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible.”

On Wednesday, May 24, 2006, the intelligence division of the Joint Staff, the J-2, circulated an intelligence assessment, classified SECRET, that showed that the forces of terror in Iraq were not in retreat. It put hard numbers on trends that had been reported to Bush all year. Terrorist attacks had been steadily increasing. The insurgency was gaining. Attacks were now averaging 700 to 800 a week. Every IED that was discovered—whether it detonated and caused damage or casualties or was identified and disarmed before it could do any damage—was still counted as an attack. A graph measuring attacks from May 2003 to May 2006 showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks was as high as they had ever been—exceeding 3,500 a month.

I told Rumsfeld that I understood the number of attacks was going up.

“That’s probably true,” he said. “It is also probably true that our data’s better, and we’re categorizing more things as attacks. A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you’ve got a whole fruit bowl of different things—a banana and an apple and an orange.”

I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a “fruit bowl,” a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion. The official categories in the classified reports that Rumsfeld regularly received were the lethal IEDs, standoff attacks with mortars, and close-engagements such as ambushes—as far from bananas, apples and oranges as possible.

During one week in May 2006, enemy-initiated attacks soared to 900, a new record. In June, attacks went down to about 825 one week but then spiked up again. By July it was over 1,000 a week, again a new record. It was even worse considering the level of violence existed after two years spent training, equipping and funding 263,000 Iraqi soldiers and police. The cost had been $10 billion, and American teams had been embedded with most of the Iraqi units for over a year. At an equivalent time in 1971, after several years of Vietnamization, the trend lines of insurgent violence had been down, not up.

In July 2006, I interviewed Rumsfeld on two successive afternoons. I asked him about troop levels—a key issue and point of contention. The record showed that the plan for invading Iraq had a top number of 275,000 ground combat forces, including about 90,000 who were scheduled to flow into Iraq in the weeks and months after March 19, 2003, when the war began. Rumsfeld said it is one of the great “canards” that he had decided or unduly influenced the decision to not bring in the 90,000. It was all on General Franks’s recommendation, he said. But by the summer of 2006, Rumsfeld had softened his position on the issue of whether there were enough troops. “It’s entirely possible there were too many at some point and too few at some point, because no one’s perfect,” he said. “In retrospect I have not seen or heard anything from the other opiners that suggests to me that they have any reason to believe that they were right and we were wrong. Nor can I prove we were right and they were wrong. The only thing I can say is they seem to have a lot more certainty than my assessment of the facts would permit me to have.”

Asked about the battle with the Iraq insurgency, he said, “It could take eight to 10 years. Insurgencies have a tendency to do that.” Overall he said, “Our exit strategy is to have the Iraqis’ government and security forces capable of managing a lower-level insurgency and ultimately achieving victory over it and repressing it over time. But it would be a period after we may very well not have large numbers of people there.”

I said I understood that General George W. Casey Jr., the top commander of forces on the ground in Iraq, had reported that the insurgency had not been neutralized—key goal of his campaign plan—but only contained. After some typical verbal jousting, I was able to ask directly, “Do you agree it has not been neutralized?”

“Oh clearly not,” Rumsfeld answered.

“Only contained?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Thus far.”

I then read from the May 24, 2006, assessment that said the “Sunni Arab insurgency is gaining strength and increasing capacity.” I asked him, “Does that sound right to you?”

Here was one of the central questions in any war. Was the other side “gaining strength and increasing capacity?” General Casey the Joint Chiefs’ intelligence staff, and the CIA had all categorically said the insurgency was gaining. Certainly Rumsfeld knew that. I had also quoted from the assessment on a list of 29 sample questions I had submitted in advance, and I know he had spent at least one hour the day before preparing for the interview.

“When was this?” Rumsfeld asked.

Six weeks ago, I answered. The question on the table was whether he agreed or not that the insurgency in the Iraq War was gaining. I was ready for a pure Rumsfeldian moment, and I was not disappointed.

“Gosh, I don’t know,” the secretary of defense replied. “I don’t want to comment on it. I read so many of those intelligence reports”—I had never said it was an intelligence report—“and they are all over the lot. In a given day you can see one from one agency, and one from another agency, and then I’ll ask Casey or Abizaid what they think about it, or Pete Pace, ‘Is that your view?’ And try and triangulate and see what people think. But it changes from month to month. I’m not going to go back and say I agree or don’t agree with something like that.”

He was right that there might be some changes month to month, but, as he knew, the overall assessment and trend was visibly, measurably and dramatically worse.

I asked Rumsfeld what was the best, most optimistic scenario for a positive outcome in Iraq.

“This business is ugly,” he replied. “It’s tough. There isn’t any best. A long, hard slog, I think I wrote years ago. We’re facing a set of challenges that are different than our country understands … They’re different than our Congress understands. They’re different than our government, much of our government, probably understands and is organized or trained or equipped to cope with and deal with. We’re dealing with enemies that can turn inside our decision circles.” The enemy can move swiftly, he said. “They don’t have parliaments and bureaucracies and real estate to defend and interact with or deal with or cope with. They can do what they want. They aren’t held accountable for lying or for killing innocent men, women and children.

“There’s something about the body politic in the United States that they can accept the enemy killing innocent men, women and children and cutting off people’s heads, but have zero tolerance for some soldier who does something he shouldn’t do.”

“Are you optimistic?” I asked.

Rumsfeld looked through me and continued. Three of his aides who were sitting with us at the table in his office could not help but register surprise as Rumsfeld plowed on without answering.

“We’re fighting the first war in history in the new century,” he continued, “and with all these new realities, with an industrial-age organization in an environment that has not adapted and adjusted, a public environment that has not adapted and adjusted.”

At the end of the second of two interviews, I quoted former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: “Any military commander who is honest with you will say he’s made mistakes that have cost lives.”

“Um hmm,” Rumsfeld said.

“Is that correct?”

“I don’t know. I suppose that a military commander ...”

“Which you are,” I interrupted.

“No I’m not,” the secretary of defense said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“No, no. Well … ”

“Yes. Yes,” I said, raising my hand in the air and ticking off the hierarchy. “It’s commander in chief, secretary of defense, combatant commander.”

“I can see a military commander in a uniform who is engaged in a conflict having to make decisions that result in people living or dying and that that would be a truth. And certainly if you go up the chain to the civilian side to the president and to me, you could by indirection, two or three steps removed, make the case.”

Indirection? Two or three steps removed? It was inexplicable. Rumsfeld had spent so much time insisting on the chain of command. He was in control—not the Joint Chiefs, not the uniformed military, not the National Security Council or the NSC staff, not the critics or the opiners. How could he not see his role and responsibility?

I could think of nothing more to say.

Bill Murphy Jr. and Christine Parthemore contributed to this article.

Adapted from "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward. Published by Simon & Shuster. © 2006 Bob Woodward. Author's Note: Nearly all the information in "State of Denial" comes from interviews with President Bush's national security team, their deputies and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy and the intelligence on the Iraq war.