That same day I told some journalists that the critics of the war were moving the goalposts on the president: they had asked for a troop drawdown, and now that was happening; they had asked for a date for the drawdown to begin, and now they had one; they had wanted a timetable for continued drawdowns, and Petraeus had provided one; and they had wanted a change of mission, and the president had announced one. I said that I thought it was in the interest of the critics to let the president get the situation in Iraq in the best possible shape so the new president would not be handed a mess there. I didn’t make much of an impact.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited me to breakfast on the eighteenth. Five days before, she had issued a news release saying, “The president’s strategy in Iraq has failed,” and “The choice is between a Democratic plan for responsible redeployment and the president’s plan for an endless war in Iraq.” With those comments as backdrop, at the breakfast I urged her to pass the defense appropriations bill before October and to pass the War Supplemental in total, not to mete it out a few weeks or months at a time. I reminded her that the president had approved Petraeus’s recommendation for a change of mission in December and told her that Petraeus and Crocker had recommended a sustainable path forward that deserved broad bipartisan support. She politely made clear she wasn’t interested. I wasn’t surprised. After all, one wouldn’t want facts and reality—not to mention the national interest—to intrude upon partisan politics, would one?
I had just concluded a very hard eight-month fight with Congress, “improvising on the edge of catastrophe,” to paraphrase the historian Joseph Ellis. But I had gotten what I wanted. On September 21, Congress failed to pass a single one of the amendments to change our strategy.
Pace and I were to testify together one last time on September 26 before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Before the hearing that afternoon, I had breakfast with the Democratic majority leader in the House, Steny Hoyer, and a number of Democratic members. I then had lunch with the Senate Democratic Policy Group, led by Majority Leader Harry Reid. Both sessions were friendly, serious, and thoughtful.
The contrast with the hearing that afternoon could not have been more dramatic: it was the wildest hearing I experienced in my entire professional life. The Pink Ladies and others were out in force, and the huge hearing room was rowdy and noisy. An ancient and frail Senator Robert Byrd was in the chair. The hearing, supposedly about the defense budget, was basically one more opportunity for the Democrats to vent on Iraq. Byrd took it to a whole new level. Like an evangelical tent preacher, he played to the crowd, engaged them, and enraged them, virtually encouraging the protesters to heckle Pete and me. Byrd would shout rhetorical questions at us, like “Are we really seeking progress toward a stable, secure Iraq?” The crowd would respond in unison, “No!” When he referred to the “nefarious, infernal war in Iraq,” the protesters shouted back, “Thank you. Thank you.” He strung out his words for dramatic effect—the war had cost a “trillllunnn” dollars, and so on.
The Democrats on the committee grew uncomfortable about the lack of decorum. A couple of them spoke out about the need for order in the room. Then Senator Tom Harkin asked Pete about his “hurtful” views on gays in the military. (Pete had given an interview the previous March expressing his personal view that homosexual conduct was immoral.) Pace repeated his views—it was, after all, his last hearing, and he had nothing to lose. That did it. The room went berserk. Byrd had completely lost control of the hearing and realized it. He pounded the gavel so hard, I thought he might collapse. He then said the hearing was adjourned, was quickly reminded by aides to “suspend” it, and then ordered the room cleared of all spectators. As the Capitol police went about their work, Republican Senator Judd Gregg walked out, saying to Harkin, “You should be ashamed.” Harkin jumped up out of his chair and shouted back, “I don’t need any lectures from you.”
I thought the whole thing had been comical—Saturday Night Live meets Congress. I didn’t dare turn around to look at the crowd, or I would have burst out laughing. Politically, it was so over the top, it had been the Senate version of MoveOn.org’s newspaper ad. I told my staff the next day that it had been “a civil hearing… aside from the riot.” The hearing seemed a fitting culmination to my 2007 battle with Congress over the Iraq War. Sadly, one of the political casualties of both of those wars was sitting next to me at the witness table for the last time.
CHAPTER 3
Mending Fences, Finding Allies
I could not make headway on implementing the Iraq strategy without extinguishing—or at least controlling—a number of political and bureaucratic brushfires: with the senior military, Congress, the media, and other agencies, including the State Department and the intelligence community. Figuring out how to do this required a lot of time and energy during my first months as secretary. As you can imagine, I was also determined to establish a special bond with our troops, especially those on the front lines. How could I communicate to them and give them confidence that the secretary of defense personally had their backs and would be their advocate and protector in the Pentagon and in Washington?
In Washington, nearly every day began with a conference call at 6:45 a.m. with Hadley and Rice. Then I would usually spend endless time in meetings. In the White House, there were meetings with just Steve and Condi; meetings with the two of them and Cheney; meetings with that cast plus the director of national intelligence, the director of CIA, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs; “principals” meetings with a cast of thousands, all of them taking notes (I was usually pretty quiet in those meetings); and meetings with the president. All those dealt just with routine business. If there was a crisis, more meetings were added. It was frustrating how often we would cover the same ground on the same issue, huge quantities of time consumed in striving to establish a consensus view. Some of the sessions were a waste of time; moreover, they often failed to highlight for the president that under a veneer of agreement, there were significant differences of view. As I would often say, sometimes we chewed the cud so long that it lost any taste whatsoever. I drank a huge amount of coffee, and the only saving grace of late-afternoon meetings at the White House was homemade tortilla chips with cheese and salsa dips. Still, all too often I found myself bored and impatient.