Iraq War: Source Book
A list of books, docs, and lectures for those interested in going down the Iraq War rabbit hole.
Here are some items that I have found particularly engrossing for those interested in learning more about the Iraq War. I’m sure there are some items I’m forgetting, but I’ll update this list if I think of something else. The links to these items are contained in the underlined headers. And if you’re someone who feels very new to the subject and wants to know what the standard narrative of the Iraq War is first, check the docs under this footnote.1
This American Life: “Why We Fight” (Dec 2002)
If you want to start from the beginning, this episode of This American Life is an amazing time capsule (it was released three months before the war started) to put yourself back in the moment as the nation was still debating the decision to go to war. You can hear in the commentary of Ira Glass that there was a sort of universal acceptance that going to war with Iraq was clearly not an outlandish notion for the average American in a post 9/11 world (something that is very hard to convey to people 20 years later), and yet there is still something about it all that just didn't make sense to many of us.
PS: Even though this is not going to be a list of sources on 9/11, I will still give an honorable mention to this C-Span clip from their “Open Phones” show that aired the first morning after 9/11 happened. The caller is a man who was caught in the thick of the World Trade Center attacks and ends up breaking down while talking about it. Again, it’s an amazing time capsule for anyone who wants to understand the immense trauma of living through 9/11 in the moment. It really captures the sheer enormity of the imprint those attacks left on our psyche.
Anthony Shadid: Night Draws Near (2005)
This is my favorite Iraq War book, and it benefits from being written by a reporter who can speak Arabic and mingle with the Iraqis on the ground (which many American reporters obviously could not). You can click the header link if you want to listen to Shadid discussing his book on Fresh Air in 2010. Anthony Shadid died in 2012 while reporting on the war in Syria. I was such a fan of his reporting that I remember being at work and clicking on an NPR story that only said “'Times' Reporter Dies After Asthma Attack In Syria,” and when it started playing and I heard the name “Anthony Shadid” I got so emotional I had to step outside.
Anthony Shadid, Kayla Williams, et al: “What We Saw: Americans in Iraq” (2005)
This panel discussion which included Anthony Shadid and U.S. Army veteran Kayla Williams (among others) was phenomenal and I highly recommend it for a nuanced look at the war and the Iraqis. There’s even a moment when Shadid seems to foreshadow the later conflict in Syria.
Laura Colbert: “Combat in Iraq: One Woman’s Perspective” (2023)
Thinking of Kayla Williams (as well as figures such as Senator Tammy Duckworth), made me think about this great talk I recently heard with Laura Colbert. Because even though there is still technically an ongoing debate about whether the military should allow women to serve in combat — we keep forgetting that they already do.
Evan Wright: Generation Kill (2004)
Okay, now that we talked about the chicks in combat, let’s talk about the duuuudes! For many, Generation Kill needs no introduction — but if you want one, you can read this Military Times article about the legacy of these Marines. It was originally a great book, but it was then made into a fantastic HBO miniseries from David Simon & Ed Burns (the creators of The Wire). When I recommended this series to a younger friend of mine (who was only about six years old when the war started), I had to warn her: “Now, the dialogue in this is from a bygone era. Keep that in mind. You will hear the words ‘f***ot’ and ‘r***rd’ a lot. Like seriously… a lot. But yes, I won’t deny that everyone absolutely did talk like that at the time.”
Lieutenant Fick (the real-life platoon leader portrayed in the book/series) noted this uncomfortably in this interview (where he also gives some great insights to keep in mind when reading/watching the story). I think it’s also important to keep in mind that Generation Kill only covers the very first phase of the war, and this war was (along with Afghanistan) our longest war in history and had many different chapters to it. As Eric Kocher (another real-life Marine from the book/series) said, “My fourth and fifth tours were totally different than what you see in Generation Kill… I kind of look back at my first multiple tours and it’s like, ‘Wow, if I knew what I know now — we could have done such a better job back then.’”
I also put together this YouTube playlist that has some follow-up interviews with the guys from First Recon. The “where are they now” of the Generation Kill soldiers only reinforces my point about how every veteran (and Iraqi) over there had a wholly different experience that led them all to different places and different viewpoints.
Once Upon A Time In Iraq (2020)
This fantastic PBS documentary was originally a 5-part BBC series that included both American and Iraqi perspectives. This PBS version narrowed it down to just telling the story of the Iraqis, and I think it actually worked better that way.
Control Room (Dir. Jehane Noujaim, 2004)
This is another great documentary that examined Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the initial invasion in 2003 from CENTCOM in Qatar (back during the era when the Bush administration was accusing their network of being Al-Qaeda propaganda). It focuses on the Al-Jazeera reporters, but the “star” of the documentary unintentionally became a young Marine Lieutenant named Josh Rushing who was the public affairs officer for the U.S. Marines (in charge of “selling the war”). Rushing was a fascinating character because he started to struggle with the job he was tasked to do, and that led him to later leave the Marines and become an Al-Jazeera reporter himself.
LTC Will Selber: “Moral Injuries” (Mar 2023)
This short piece for The Bulwark was written for the 20th anniversary, and it fucking destroyed me. The author served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this article focused primarily on his tour in Baghdad during the “Summer of Death” in 2006. I admired how brutally honest (and just plain brutal) Selber was willing to be in this piece, and it is definitely worth your time.
“Home/Front” from NPR’s Rough Translation (2021)
I recently discovered this series and there were two particular sections that I felt I had to recommend because they really got in my head. The first section was Episodes 2-4 entitled Battle Rattle, Battle Lines, and Battle Borne, which discussed the troubled (and troubling) relationship between a triple-amputee vet and his wife. I went on a rollercoaster of emotions with this story, and I still find myself trying to figure out how to feel about it. In that way, it’s kind of the perfect story to remind people that helping traumatized people is not at all a romantic story like it’s portrayed in movies. In fact, it can be downright ugly. It really makes you wonder just how far redemption and salvation can actually take us.
The second part was the last two episodes about Marla Ruzicka entitled Marla’s War and Marla’s List. I got to give it up to the producers of this show — they got my ass. At the start, when Marla was a young protester with groups like Code Pink I was just rolling my eyes and wondering why I was listening to a story like this in a podcast that was supposed to be about veterans… And then by the end, I was literally balling in my car.
“The U.S. Army in the Iraq War” (by the U.S. Army War College & Strategic Studies Institute): Volume I, 2003-2006 and Volume II, 2007-2011
This a two-part report is basically a whole-ass book that is a very well-done military history of the Iraq War that breaks down all the different phases of it. If you want a primer to see if this is your cup of tea, you can also view some panel lectures on C-Span with the authors of the report: Here is panel 1 and here is panel 2.
The Rest Is Politics: Part 1 “The Iraq War” and Part 2 “Iraq: The Legacy” (Mar 2023)
This was just one of many podcasts I ran across during the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, but it was the one that drew me in the most. It is a British politics podcast with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart. Alastair Campbell played a major (and very controversial) role in Tony Blair’s cabinet in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, while Rory Stewart was appointed to the Coalition Provisional Authority during the early years of the occupation (and came to be a vocal opponent against the war). The two of them had a sometimes tense, but still respectful and productive debate on their divergent views of the war. I particularly enjoyed hearing Campbell’s outsider perspective on the Americans (as a British official who got to see the Bush adminstration’s divisions up close during 2002-2003).
Seth Center, Melvyn Leffler, Charles Duelfer, David Palkki: “Origins of the Iraq War” (2013)
I very much enjoyed this academic panel on the origins of the war, even though it tended to give me more questions than answers. But I do think that this segement of it from Seth Center is still one of the best brief summations of how we will never have a truly satisfying answer to what were the reasons for the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.
I should admit that I tend to find much of the discussion over the “case for war” (about the debate over intelligence and WMD and so on) to ultimately be rather disappointing. It is probably the most discussed, the most obsessed over, and the most endlessly dissected part of the whole story — and yet every telling of it just never feels “finished.” It always feels like something is missing, or that too many folks have an agenda when giving their version of the story. That being said, it is obviously a very important part of the story, so I’ll mention some other sources that you might consider:
Melvyn Leffler (from the above panel) also just finished a book called Confronting Saddam Hussein (here’s an interview with him about it). You can also check out Robert Draper’s book To Start A War (here’s an interview with him about it). Season 5 of the podcast series Slow Burn is also well known on the topic; but something about it felt a bit underwhelming to me, even though I still enjoyed it. Just note that the more “leftist” anti-war crowd had a podcast beef with Slow Burn, because they preferred the series Blowback instead — which I found to be shockingly bad (even though I had several friends who recommended it to me).
Bush’s Final Press Conference (2008)
Not all of this is press conference was about Iraq, but this was Bush’s “exit interview” with the White House press corps as his presidency was about to end, and I think it’s a super interesting listen. Would recommend. It’s surprisingly casual and honest, and I’m not endorsing Bush’s positions here — I just think it gives one a lot more insight into where he was by the end of his presidency. It also feels like it’s from a now long-lost era when presidents were still graceful to their successors (Obama) when they left office.
OTHER AUTHOR TALKS:
Here are also some talks with authors whose books I have not gotten around to reading yet, but who were very enjoyable to listen to in interviews and articles. Emma Sky, who wrote the book The Unravelling, went from being an anti-war activist to an advisor for the U.S. military during The Surge. NPR correspondent Quil Lawrence used his time reporting in Iraq to inform his book Invisible Nation, about the history of the Kurds in Iraq and the unique position they hold in that country. In the recent anniversary talks, I have also found the Iraqi commentator Marsin Alshamary to be really insightful on the current state of Iraq, so you might want to look her up and scope some of her previous writings and talks as well (as I have been doing).
THE SADDAM ARCHIVES:
There were many archives on Saddam’s regime captured by the U.S. forces after we invaded Iraq, which have since been repatriated (sometimes controversially) to the Iraqi government. That’s a long story, but I think it is unfortunate that scholars may end up losing a lot of access to these archives, even though the intent behind returning them to the Iraqis was a noble one.
Some historians did get to research the Saddam archives before they left us, and they gave a new window into the previously opaque Saddam regime. The books related to this research (that I am familiar with) include Kevin Woods’ The Saddam Tapes (2011), Lisa Blaydes’ State of Repression (2015), and Joseph Sassoon’s Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party (2011). I have not read all of these books front-to-back, but have read through parts of them while doing research. The link under the names of these authors will take you to a lecture / paper with them if you want to get a sampling of their work before digging into their books.
A friend of mine also recommended the work of Michael Brill, which I have very much enjoyed (Brill also co-wrote the first linked-to article which details the history of what happened to the Saddam archives). Hal Brands and David Palkki have also written an interesting analysis of Saddam’s evolving view of the U.S. based on these archives, and Kevin Woods authored another earlier report on the view of the 2003 invasion from Saddam’s senior leadership.
I should note that I worry sometimes that most of the writing on the Saddam archives has only come from more “establishment” or conservative foreign policy writers. Not that it bothers me personally too much, but you never want just one type of perspective on any topic (especially if you can’t read the primary sources in Arabic for yourself). After all, if you are “in the know” then you might have noticed that I often recommend items from various figures that would not get along if they were in the same room together. For instance, I just recently heard Andrew Bacevich of the Quincy Institute (which hosted the talk with Marsin Alshamary I linked to above) discussing his personal feud with Hal Brands (whose paper I just linked to as well) over their opposing views of American foreign policy. So, it’s important never to take any one view as “gospel,” otherwise you fall into the trap of just looking for a scholar that gives you the story you want to hear and then just sticking with it.
ROBERT GATES EXCERPTS:
I’m usually pretty underwhelmed by White House memoirs, but I really enjoyed Robert Gates’ book Duty for for its foreign policy insights into the Bush-43 and Obama administrations. Gates was tasked with replacing Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense when Rummy was let go in 2006, and he was so well-respected that Obama even kept him on as Secretary of Defense when he became president.
Now, keep in mind that Gates only covers the last years of Bush-43’s administration and the first years of Obama’s. I personally believe that Bush-43 got much wiser in his last three years as president than he was in his first five, and it makes me wonder sometimes what could have been. I have always said that strategies like The Surge were not too little — but they were too late.
I’ve often sent friends some of my favorite excerpts from the Robert Gates book to help illuminate the story of Iraq, so I thought I’d include some of those excerpts here where he discusses the two presidents. Although, I’ll admit to having some ambivalence on this subject. Because even though I do agree with a lot of Gates’ commentary, and I understand that both Bush and Obama are at their core moral people who were trying to do what they thought best — the more I get back into revisiting this war, the more I find myself seething with a lot of anger at both Bush and Obama for still to this day showing no contrition or willingness to accept responsibility for the part they played in the suffering of the people of both Iraq and Afghanistan (at least not publicly). At the same time, I also realize that they do this not because they are monsters, but because they are human.
On Vice President Dick Cheney:
In my opinion, one cannot understand Cheney without having been in the White House during the Ford years. It was the nadir of the modern American presidency, the president reaping the whirlwind of both Vietnam and Watergate. The War Powers Act, the denial of promised weapons to South Vietnam, cutting off help to the anti-Soviet, anti-Cuban resistance in Angola — Congress took one action after another to whittle down the power of the presidency. Cheney saw it all from the Oval Office. I believe his broad assertion of the powers of the presidency after 9/11 was attributable, in no small part, to his experience during the Ford years and a determination to recapture from Congress powers lost fifteen years before and more.
Because Dick is a calm, fairly quiet-spoken man, I think a lot of people never fully appreciated how conservative he always was. In 1990, in the run-up to the Gulf War, the question arose as to whether to seek both congressional and UN Security Council approval for going to war with Saddam Hussein. Cheney, then secretary of defense, argued that neither was necessary but went along with the president’s contrary decisions. And when the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.
Cheney never wavered in his support for “enhanced interrogation techniques” or for the ongoing importance and value of the prison at Guantánamo. On these and other issues, he was increasingly isolated inside the senior ranks of the Bush administration, a reality he conceded with some humor and grace. He got to the point where he would often open his remarks with “I know I’m going to lose this argument” or “I know I’m alone in this.”
Cheney, as he wrote in his memoir, had opposed the president’s decision to replace Rumsfeld, who was an old friend, colleague, and mentor. I suspected as much at the time and was relieved when [Joshua] Bolten passed along to me that Secretary of State Condi Rice had been enthusiastic about my nomination and that the vice president had said I was “a good man.” As Bolten said, coming from Cheney, that was high praise.
On Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:
Gates did not actually have any interactions with Rumsfeld, but there is one passage that struck me. It was Gates recalling one of the last times he got together with Bush before his presidency ended:
Then [Bush] shocked me as the breakfast ended by saying that he wished he’d made the change in secretary of defense “a couple of years earlier.” It was the only thing I ever heard him say even indirectly critical of Rumsfeld.
I think this is an interesting admission by Bush, and it tends to validate my feeling that he felt he was rather misguided by Cheney and Rumsfeld in the early years of his presidency, even though that never led him to hate them personally. I also appreciated that Bush extended the courtesy of not publically trash-talking people to Obama. One interview in 2012, I remember Bush was responding to a reporter that was trying to coax him into giving them a juicy quote. He said (paraphrasing), “I can’t make any headlines unless I’m willing to trash the president or my own party. And I’m not interested in doing either.”
On President George W. Bush:
I thought about how strange it would be to join this administration. I had never had a conversation with the president [although Gates was close to his father]. I had played no role in the 2000 campaign and was never asked to do so. I had virtually no contact with anyone in the administration during Bush’s first term and was dismayed when my closest friend and mentor, Brent Scowcroft, wound up in a public dispute with the administration over his opposition to going to war in Iraq. While I had known [Condeleezza] Rice, [Stephen] Hadley, Dick Cheney, and others for years, I was joining a group of people who had been through 9/11 together, who had been fighting two wars, and who had six years of being on the same team. I would be the outsider.
I kept my wife, Becky, informed of all this — I didn’t dare do otherwise — and expressed only one misgiving to her as that Sunday ended. The Bush administration by then was held in pretty low esteem across the nation. I told her, “I have to do this, but I just hope I can get out of this administration with my reputation intact.”
In all the books and articles I have read on the Bush administration, I have seen few that give adequate weight to the personal impact of 9/11 on the president and his senior advisers. I’m not about to put Bush or anyone else “on the couch” in terms of analyzing their feelings or reactions, but my views are based on many private conversations with key figures after joining the administration, and on direct observation.
Beyond the traumatic effect of the attack itself, I think there was a huge sense among senior members of the administration of having let the country down, of having allowed a devastating attack on America take place on their watch. They also had no idea after 9/11 whether further attacks were imminent, though they expected the worst.
Because the senior leadership was worried there might be warning signs in the vast collection apparatus of American intelligence, nearly all of the filters that sifted intelligence reporting based on reliability or confidence levels were removed, with the result that in the days and weeks after 9/11, the White House was flooded with countless reports of imminent attacks, among them the planned use of nuclear weapons by terrorists in New York and Washington. All that fed the fear and urgency. That, in turn, was fed by the paucity of information on, or understanding of, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups in terms of numbers, capabilities, leadership, or anything else. Quickly filling those information gaps and protecting the country from another attack became the sole preoccupation of the president and his senior team. Any obstacle — legal, bureaucratic, financial, or international — to accomplishing those objectives had to be overcome.
Those who years later would criticize some of those actions, including the detention center at Guantánamo and interrogation techniques, could have benefited from greater perspective on both the fear and the urgency to protect the country — the same kind of fear for national survival that had led Lincoln to suspend habeas corpus and Franklin D. Roosevelt to intern Japanese Americans. The key question for me was why, several years after 9/11 and after so many of those information gaps had been filled and the country’s defenses had dramatically improved, there was not a top-to-bottom review of policies and authorities with an eye to culling out those that were most at odds with our traditions, culture, and history, such as renditions and “enhanced interrogations.” I once asked Condi that question, and she acknowledged they probably should have done such a review, perhaps after the 2004 election, but it just never happened. Hadley later told me, though, that there had been a review after the election, some of the more controversial interrogation techniques had been dropped, and Congress had been briefed on the changes. Like most Americans, I was unaware.
Most of the members of the Bush team I joined have been demonized in one way or another in ways that I either disagree with or believe are too simplistic. As for President Bush, I found him at ease with himself and comfortable in the decisions he had made. He knew he was beyond changing contemporary views of his presidency, and that he had long since made his presidential bed and would have to sleep in it historically. He had no second thoughts about Iraq, including the decision to invade. He believed deeply in the importance of our “winning” in Iraq and often spoke publicly about the war. He saw Iraq as central to his legacy, but less so Afghanistan, and he resented any suggestion that the war in Iraq had deprived our effort in Afghanistan of adequate resources. Bush relied a lot on his own instincts. The days of funny little nicknames for people and quizzing people about their exercise routines and so on were mostly long over when I came on board. This was a mature leader who had walked a supremely difficult path for five years.
Bush was much more intellectually curious than his public image. He was an avid reader, always talking about his current fare and asking others what they were reading. Even in his last two years as president, he would regularly hold what he called “deep dives” — in-depth briefings and discussions — with intelligence analysts and others on a multitude of national security issues and challenges. It was a very rare analyst or briefer who got more than a few sentences into a briefing before Bush would begin peppering him or her with questions. They were tough questions, forcefully expressed, and I can see how some might have seen the experience as intimidating. Others found the give-and-take with the president exhilarating. At the same time, the president had strong convictions about certain issues, such as Iraq, and trying to persuade him otherwise was a fool’s errand. He had a very low threshold for boredom and not much patience with structured (or long) briefings. He wanted people to get to the point. He was not one for broad, philosophical, or hypothetical discussions. After six years as president, he knew what he knew and rarely questioned his own thinking.
My only real problem with the Bush White House involved its communications/ public relations advisers. They were always trying to get me to go on the Sunday TV talk shows, write op-eds, and grant interviews. I considered their perspective — and that of Obama’s advisers too — to be highly tactical, usually having to do with some hot-button issue of the moment and usually highly partisan. I believe that when it comes to the media, often less is more, in the sense that if one appears infrequently, then people pay more attention when you do appear. Bush’s advisers occasionally would try to rope me into participating in White House attacks on critics of the president, and I would have none of that. When the president gave a speech to the Israeli Knesset in the summer of 2008 in which he came close to calling his critics appeasers, the White House press folks wanted me to endorse the speech. I directed my staff to tell them to go to hell. (The staff told them more politely.) In terms of picking fights, I intended to make those decisions for myself, not cede the role to some staffer at the White House.
President Bush was always supportive of my recommendations and decisions, including on those occasions when I told him I wanted to fire some of his senior-most appointees in the Defense Department. He gave me private time whenever I asked for it, and we were in lockstep on strategy with respect to Iraq, Iran, and other important issues where some in the administration, the press, and Congress sometimes thought I was freelancing. I kept him well informed about everything I was doing and what I intended to say publicly.
I enjoyed working for and with President Bush. He was a man of character, a man of convictions, and a man of action. As he himself has said, only time will tell how successful he was as president. But the fact that the United States was not successfully attacked by violent extremists for the last seven years of his presidency, and beyond, ought to count for something.
On President Barack Obama:
Interviewers would persistently ask me to compare working for Bush and Obama, and how I could work for two men who were so different. I would remind people that Obama was the eighth president I had worked for, each very different from the others. Career officials, at least those lacking a partisan agenda, learn to adapt to different presidential styles and personalities. I did not have a problem making the transition from Bush to Obama.
Although Obama to my mind is a liberal Democrat and I consider myself a moderately conservative Republican, for the first two years, on national security matters, we largely saw eye to eye. As with most presidential transitions, there was considerable continuity in this area between the last years of the Bush administration and the first years of Obama’s presidency, as loath as partisans on both sides were (and are) to admit it [this was written before Trump]. The path forward in Iraq had been mostly settled by the 2008 Strategic Framework Agreement with the Iraqis, and Obama essentially followed the path Bush had agreed to in December 2008, ending the war “responsibly,” as he put it. Obama had campaigned on the need for more resources in Afghanistan, and he clearly was prepared to go after al-Qaeda aggressively. For the first year we worked together, he was supportive of robust funding for Defense. We had a strong foundation for a productive partnership. On some lower priority issues, as I will examine later, while I might disagree, I was willing to acquiesce or be supportive — as I had been in the Bush administration. Nobody in Washington wins on every issue, and as long as I was comfortable on the big stuff, I would be a team player on other matters. I don’t recall Obama and I ever discussing his domestic policies, and that was probably just as well. I found the president quite pragmatic on national security and open to compromise on most issues — or, to put it more crassly, to cutting a deal.
One quality I missed in Obama was passion, especially when it came to the two wars. In my presence, Bush — very unlike his father — was pretty unsentimental. But he was passionate about the war in Iraq; on occasion, at a Medal of Honor ceremony or the like, I would see his eyes well up with tears. I worked for Obama longer than Bush, and I never saw his eyes well up. Obama could, and did, express anger (I rarely heard him swear; it was very effective when he did), but the only military matter, apart from leaks, about which I ever sensed deep passion on his part was “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” For him, changing that law seemed to be the inevitable next step in the civil rights movement. He presumably was also passionate about health care reform, but I wasn’t present for those discussions.
Where this lack of passion mattered most for me was Afghanistan. When soldiers put their lives on the line, they need to know that the commander in chief who sent them in harm’s way believes in their mission. They need him to talk often to them and to the country, not just to express gratitude for their service and sacrifice but also to explain and affirm why that sacrifice is necessary, why their fight is noble, why their cause is just, and why they must prevail. President Obama never did that. He rarely spoke about the war in Afghanistan except when he was making an announcement about troop increases or troop drawdowns or announcing a change in strategy. White House references to “exit paths,” “drawdowns,” and “responsibly ending the wars” vastly outnumbered references to “success” or even “accomplishing the mission.” Given his campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan, I think I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him.
Having said that, I believe the president cared deeply about the troops and their families. He and Mrs. Obama, from the moment he was elected, were committed to helping our men and women in uniform. Michelle in particular, along with Jill Biden, the vice president’s wife, devoted enormous time and effort to helping returning soldiers find jobs and to helping their families. The president visited military hospitals, encouraged the wounded, empathized with their families, and consoled those who had lost a child or a spouse in combat. And he would ensure that significant additional resources flowed to the Veterans Affairs Department and that it was protected from budget cuts. I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission.
Obama was the most deliberative president I worked for. His approach to problem solving reminded me of Lincoln’s comment on his approach to decision making: “I am never easy when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and bounded it east, and bounded it west.” As Obama would tell me on more than one occasion, “I can’t defend it unless I understand it.” I rarely saw him rush to a decision when circumstances allowed him time to gather information, analyze, and reflect. He would sometimes be criticized for his “dilatory” decision making, but I found it refreshing and reassuring, especially since so many pundits and critics seem to think a problem discovered in the morning should be solved by evening. As a participant in that decision-making process, I always felt more confident about the outcome after thorough deliberation. When the occasion demanded it, though, Obama could make a big decision — a life-and-death decision — very fast. He once told me that one reason he ran for president was because he was so bored in the Senate. I never saw anyone who had not previously been an executive — and especially someone who had been a legislator — take so quickly and easily to making decisions and so relish exercising authority. And like Bush, once Obama made a tough decision, I never knew him to have a second thought or look back.
I always thought Obama was “presidential.” He treated the office of the presidency with respect. I rarely saw him in the Oval Office without a coat and tie, and he always conducted himself with dignity. He was a man of personal integrity, and in his personal behavior — at least to the extent I could observe it — he was an excellent role model. We had a relaxed relationship, and frequently, in private, I would tease him, occasionally asking him, when he was beset by big problems, “Tell me again why you wanted this job?” His broad smile is well known, and I saw it often; what is less well known is how fast it can disappear, giving way to a glacial look. It dawned on me one day that the only other person I had worked with who changed expressions so dramatically and quickly had been Margaret Thatcher. It was no fun to be on the receiving end of such a change from either of them. (Like everyone else, I saw more glacial looks than smiles from Thatcher.) I often wished both Bush and Obama would be less partisan, but clearly the political world had changed since I retired the first time in 1993. I thought Obama was first-rate in both intellect and temperament. You didn’t have to agree with all of his policies to acknowledge that.
Less than two weeks after the inaugural, at the end of his weekly meeting with [Admiral Mike] Mullen and me, the president asked me to remain behind for a private conversation. He asked me whether everything was going okay. I told him I thought the team was off to a good start, the chemistry was good, and the principals were working well together. (The problems I described earlier had not yet surfaced.) As Obama had done before on several occasions with all the principals, he encouraged me always to speak up and to be sure to give him bad news or to express disagreement (as if I needed encouragement). He concluded with what I thought was a very insightful observation twelve days into his presidency: “What I know concerns me. What I don’t know concerns me even more. What people aren’t telling me worries me the most.” It takes many officials in Washington years to figure that out; some never do.
My most awkward moment in my early days working for President Obama occurred about three weeks after the inaugural. I called Bush 43 to tell him that we had had a significant success in a covert program he cared about a lot. There was so much anti-Bush feeling in the administration, I figured no one else would let him know. During our brief conversation, he asked how things were going, and I said just fine. Bush concluded by saying, “It is important that [Obama] be successful.” I said, “Amen.”
To my chagrin and deep embarrassment, the next day Obama told me he was going to call Bush and tell him about the covert success. My heart in my mouth, I told him that was a great idea. As soon as I hung up the phone with Obama, I called [Bush-]43 to tell him 44 [Obama] was going to call and that I hoped Bush wouldn’t mention that I had called. I knew I should have given 44 the chance to call. I never talked to Bush again about government business.
It is difficult to imagine two more different men than George W. Bush and Barack Obama. We have a long tradition in America of electing a president, celebrating him for a few days, and then spending four or eight years demonizing him, reviling him, or blindly defending him. From George Washington on, there has scarcely been a president of any consequence — including those we consider our greatest — who has not faced the most scurrilous attacks on his policies, patriotism, morals, character, and conduct in office. So it has been with both Bush and Obama.
Clearly, I had fewer issues with Bush. Partly, that is because I worked for him in the last two years of his presidency, when, with the exception of the Iraq surge, at least in national security affairs nearly all the big decisions had been made. He would never again run for political office, and neither would his vice president. I don’t recall Bush ever discussing domestic politics — apart from congressional opposition — as a consideration in decisions he made during my time with him, though it should be said that his sharp-elbowed political gurus were nearly all gone by the time I arrived. I encountered an experienced, wiser president beginning the last lap of his political race. By early 2007, Vice President Cheney was the outlier on the team, with Bush, Rice, Hadley, and me in broad agreement on virtually all important issues.
With Obama, however, I joined a new, inexperienced president facing multiple crises and determined to change America’s approach to the world — and the wars we were in — and equally determined from day one to win reelection. Domestic political considerations therefore would be a factor, though I believe never a decisive one, in virtually every major national security problem we tackled. Under these circumstances, the surprise was how little disagreement on national security policy there was among the most senior members of the team, except over Afghanistan — at least until early 2011. On issue after issue — Iraq, Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, the Middle East — the president, vice president, [Hillary] Clinton, [James] Jones, [Tom] Donilon, and I were usually on the same page. And where there were differences, including dealing with the Arab Spring, there was none of the emotion or rancor associated with Afghanistan.
I never confronted Obama directly over what I (as well as Clinton, Panetta, and others) saw as the president’s determination that the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and even operations. His White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost. I had no problem with the White House and the NSS driving policy. As I had witnessed time and again, the big bureaucracies rarely come up with significant new ideas, and almost any meaningful departures from the status quo must be driven by the president and his national security adviser — whether it was Nixon and Kissinger and the openings to the Soviet Union and China, Carter and the Camp David accords, Reagan and his outreach to Gorbachev, or Bush 41 and the liberation of eastern Europe, reunification of Germany, and collapse of the Soviet Union.
Stylistically, the two presidents had much more in common than I expected. Both were most comfortable around a coterie of close aides and friends (like most presidents) and largely shunned the Washington social scene. Both, I believe, detested Congress and resented having to deal with it, including members of their own party. And so, unfortunately, neither devoted much effort to wooing or even reaching out to individual members or trying to establish a network of allies, supporters — or friends. They both had the worst of both worlds on the Hill: they were neither particularly liked nor feared. Accordingly, neither had many allies in Congress who were willing to go beyond party loyalty, self-interest, or policy agreement in supporting them. In this, they had more in common with Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon than with LBJ, Ford, Reagan, and Bush 41. Nor did either work much at establishing close personal relationships with other world leaders. Bush did somewhat more of this than Obama, but neither had anything like the number of friendships cultivated by Ford, Reagan, and Bush 41. (I don’t know about [Bill] Clinton; I wasn’t there.) Both presidents, in short, seemed to me to be very aloof with respect to these two constituencies important to their success in foreign affairs.
I witnessed both of those presidents make decisions they believed to be in the best interest of the country regardless of the domestic political consequences, both thereby earning my highest possible respect and praise. Although, as I’ve said, political considerations were far more a part of national security debates under Obama, time and again I saw him make a decision that was opposed by his political advisers or that would be unpopular with his fellow Democrats and supportive interest groups. I liked and respected both men.
If you’re someone who knows absolutely nothing about the Iraq War, you could watch the 2008 PBS Frontline doc Bush’s War, Parts I & II if you want to hear the narrative of the Iraq War as it stood by the end of Bush’s presidency. There was less covered about the post-Bush years of Iraq (after the Surge), as the Iraq War technically “ended” in 2011 with Obama’s withdrawal. By that point, everyone had shifted their focus to Afghanistan. However, I have found some other Frontline docs that covered elements of that chapter well, including Gangs of Iraq which was also a rough look at the descent into hell of Baghdad in 2005-2006 that led to Bush implementing the Surge strategy in the first place. I feel that a lot of the success of the Surge was subsequently eroded by our misplaced faith in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (by both Bush and Obama), and this doc on The Rise of ISIS from 2014 does a good job of succinctly telling the viewer how that all played out. And this segment of an Al-Jazeera series (which is from a 2-part series on the rise of ISIS as well) gets into how the Camp Bucca prison — which was established as a sort of corrective against the bad press of Abu Ghraib prison — inadvertently became a training ground for jihadis that subsequently joined up with ISIS.