Texas Monthly Talks
Ricardo Sanchez
(Page 2 of 2)
I’m talking about this president. In the meetings I participated in, he was absolutely supportive. He was very aware of the challenges we were facing. He was asking the right questions. Probably the one thing I would fault him on is that he didn’t impose his will, even though he knew what needed to be done.
Give me an example.
The engagement of the Sunnis. When we went in there, the concept for developing democracy was very idealistic. It was very Western. We were looking to establish a U.S. type of democracy, but we recognized quickly that the tribes had to be engaged because they were big players in that society. And yet there was a refusal or an unwillingness to engage in any kinds of talks with the tribes. The military—[Franks’ successor, John] Abizaid and I—established an engagement strategy, and we communicated that back to Washington. History showed, as we looked at the experience of the Brits in the 1920’s, that engagement of the tribes was going to be crucial. The president understood it, and throughout the occupation period, he questioned how we were doing with the engagement strategy. Finally, in January of 2004, he was told we had an initiative: two people who had been assigned to engage with the Sunnis. Which was a totally inadequate solution, though he had been asking about it repeatedly.
Let me ask you about Abu Ghraib, which obviously you were in the middle of—
Probably responsible for that.
People have said, point-blank, that it was a failure of leadership on your part. It must be difficult to have your entire career summed up in that one horrifying incident.
Well, it has been. Let’s not mistake for a second that it was anything other than grotesque and unacceptable. But I think we need to look at the facts that tell us how our nation started down a slippery slope in 2002, when the lifting of the Geneva Conventions occurred. The military issued that guidance almost verbatim to our fighting forces in the field. More importantly, we failed to convey the instructions and safeguards and training that might have kept us from going down that slippery slope to abuse and torture. We failed to respond to pleas for guidance from soldiers and leaders in the field, when it was crystal clear to everybody, because of the investigations that were conducted in November and December of 2002, that we had significant problems in detention and interrogation. Then we compounded things by bringing into Iraq units that had been in Afghanistan, operating in a totally unconstrained interrogation world. In a conventional force, that creates significant confusion.
I imagine so.
When I identified that we had this unprecedented problem—we knew by May 2003 that it was way beyond anything we had ever faced—and we began to ask for help, there was no one within the Army or the Department of Defense who had any understanding of how to solve it. So we struggled and floundered and began to come up with solutions internally. Every time we got a notification of an abuse, we conducted an investigation. But there were well-known abuses that the whole world knew about—the one in which a warrant officer killed a general while he was interrogating him or the case of Iceman, as he was known, who died in the course of an investigation by the CIA and was dumped on my soldiers at Abu Ghraib. So there were two different agencies operating that were not under my command.
One was the CIA.
And the other one was the Special Operations Forces. To describe a little better what happened in Abu Ghraib, you had a coming together of my interrogators with the CIA—which came in and did what they do with no constraints on their rules—and the Special Operations Forces, who were operating under global-war-on-terror rules that were different from the rules that the Geneva Conventions applied to.
There wasn’t a common standard among the three.
No, absolutely not. The problem is that you had three different chains of command. Mine covered only the conventional forces. The Special Operations Forces reported back to Central Command. The CIA reported back to the CIA.
So you feel like you were unfairly held responsible for the actions of people not in your command?
What happened to me is that everything was seen as the responsibility of the commander on the ground. In fact, when one looks at the reality, it is very clear that incidents that occurred and abuses and allegations were outside of my command authority.
But to the extent that you’re responsible only for your folks, it was indeed folks in your command, like Lynndie England, who also committed pretty horrific abuses. That’s been documented.
Yeah, clearly. There were some abuses that occurred as we fought the war. But they were not condoned. We actually charged and court-martialed soldiers. We were very aggressive in investigating instances of abuse and taking actions against those people responsible.
And yet, in the end, you were relieved of your command.
I wasn’t relieved of my command. I rotated out of there after fourteen months. But there was an effort to make it appear that I was being relieved. That’s correct.
The implication was you were paying a price for the embarrassment that the U.S. suffered over Abu Ghraib.
Yes, no question.
You believe that it was an unfair assessment of your tenure in that position.
When you get to those levels of command, you have to look at what our leadership does in light of all the factors they’re considering. It becomes almost untenable for the administration to do anything else, to do anything other than tell me to retire, because it is in the best interest of the Department of Defense and the Army.
But this is your career! Surely this can’t be something you look back on and say, “Oh, well, that’s life.”
No, no. It’s a very disappointing time in my life.
Who do you blame?
I’m not sure. Do I blame a single individual? Do I blame the nation for the mistakes we made that led us to Abu Ghraib and the abuses that occurred as a result of the actions we took? Do I blame the military or the Department of Defense for trying to contain this extremely embarrassing period in our history? I think when you look at it, what happened to me is that I got caught in a perfect storm.
Let’s look ahead to what happens next in Iraq. You have the luxury of having watched the war from up close and from afar. If the next president, Democrat or Republican, called on you to offer your point of view on what we should do, what would you say?
The thing that we have to do is sustain the capability of our military forces there while we’re applying and surging our political, economic, and diplomatic power. This is where, in fact, we have struggled as a nation. It has never been about surging military forces, because our military has repeatedly, over the past few years, provided windows of opportunity for these other elements to bring about progress.
And it hasn’t happened.
And it hasn’t happened. The difficulty we have today is that we are dealing with a sovereign country.
We’ve been talking about—to borrow the president’s phrase—the Iraqi government standing up so that we can stand down for so many years now that it no longer seems possible that they’ll do it.
Exactly. That’s a result of our having handed off these problems on June 28, 2004, when we transferred sovereignty.
So would you support some kind of a phased withdrawal? Or are you in the camp that believes, as Colin Powell said, “We broke it, we bought it”?
Because we were occupiers, we have a moral and a legal obligation to ensure that Iraq is a stable and secure country that can provide for its own internal and external security and can be a productive, friendly nation within the region and the world. That is a responsibility that we carry with us, and it’s one that we can’t walk away from.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
