PART X
Washington, D.C.
JANUARY 16, 1991
In a televised address from the Oval Office, President Bush announced the start of military operations in Iraq. He set forth the reasons for his decision to go to war. It was a long list. He and the national security officials in his administration—Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz among them—believed that the United States and its allies had exhausted all reasonable diplomatic efforts to force Saddam Hussein’s regime to comply with its obligations to the UN Security Council and, further, the UN’s economic sanctions were not accomplishing their objectives. According to American intelligence officials, Saddam was working to add a nuclear bomb to Iraq’s arsenal, which the CIA judged already contained chemical weapons.1 “Saddam Hussein started this cruel war,” the President said. “Tonight, the battle has been joined.”2
The date was January 16, 1991. And the president was George Herbert Walker Bush.
During that first Gulf War, I had been out of government for nearly fifteen years and living back home in Chicago. I watched the war from afar. I was impressed with the combination of air power and tank warfare in the southern Iraqi desert that decimated Saddam’s army. Television images showed the wreckage of Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, and trucks littering what became known as the highway of death.
With Saddam’s forces on the run, the Bush team faced a crucial decision, one that would have lasting consequences. The war’s initial goal had been achieved: Saddam’s forces had been driven from Kuwait. The question then was whether the United States should end the conflict or move to Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“I remember very clearly Colin Powell saying that this thing was turning into a massacre,” Robert Gates, then the deputy national security adviser, later recalled. “And that to continue it beyond a certain point would be un-American, and he even used the word unchivalrous.”3Others in the administration, including Secretary of State James Baker, said they believed Saddam had suffered such a thorough defeat that he would not be able to retain power.4 Bush agreed, and drew the war to a quick close. After the war ended, President Bush urged Iraqis to “take matters into their own hands” when it came to the supposedly defeated dictator. With the administration’s encouragement, pro-democracy elements in Iraq twice rose up in an effort to topple Saddam’s regime.*
As part of the U.S.-Iraqi cease-fire agreement, General Norman Schwarzkopf allowed the Iraqis to operate helicopters, supposedly for the purpose of withdrawing their troops. Saddam proceeded to use his helicopter gunships to put down both of the revolts against his regime, massacring tens of thousands of Shia in the south and Kurdish Iraqis in the north. In Washington, some in the administration, including Wolfowitz, urged the Bush national security team to intervene and stop the massacres. The President decided otherwise. “[I]t was not clear what purpose would have been achieved by getting ourselves mixed up in the middle of that,” said Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.5 The rebels were quickly crushed by Saddam’s forces in the spring of 1991, creating among many Iraqi dissidents a lasting sense of betrayal and distrust.
For his part, Saddam Hussein came to believe that the United States lacked the commitment to follow through on its rhetoric. He saw America as unwilling to take the risks necessary for an invasion of Iraq. As he would explain to his interrogators after his capture in December 2003, Saddam had concluded that America was a paper tiger. He interpreted the first Bush administration’s decision not to march into Baghdad as proof that he had triumphed in what he called the “mother of all battles” against the mightiest military power in world history. Looking back, an opportunity to take care of the problem before it turned into a larger crisis was missed and the tyrant was emboldened.
By 1992, a U.S. presidential election year, Bill Clinton, the politically astute young governor of Arkansas, accused President George H. W. Bush and his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, of being “soft” on Iraq. I was interested in this debate, as I had played a role in the drama when I met with Saddam Hussein as President Ronald Reagan’s Middle East envoy. Clinton may have been looking to burnish his national security credentials by trying to appear tougher in foreign policy than the Bush administration. Clinton’s running mate, Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Jr., went even further than Clinton, accusing President George H. W. Bush of deliberately concealing the extent of Saddam’s ties to terrorism, his attacks on U.S. interests, and his efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.6 Clinton and Gore pledged that their administration would be under no illusions when it came to dealing with Saddam. Supporters of the 1992 Democratic presidential ticket exploited the poor economic news of the day by distributing a bumper sticker that read: saddam hussein still has his job. do you?
A campaign to take Baghdad and oust Saddam was a daunting notion. Saddam had options if U.S. forces had marched to Baghdad in 1991, including the use of chemical or biological weapons against our forces. The senior Bush also pointed out that regime change in Baghdad had not been among the U.S. goals when the pledge to liberate Kuwait was first made. The administration felt it would not have full coalition support if it decided to continue on to Baghdad.
Others I respected had a different view. While still British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had famously warned President George H. W. Bush not to “go wobbly” after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But the formidable Thatcher had been voted out of office before the war was concluded. She seemed unhappy with the result in Iraq. “There is the aggressor, Saddam Hussein, still in power,” she later observed. Contrasting his fate to Bush’s and hers, she noted, “There is the President of the United States, no longer in power. There is the Prime Minister of Britain, who did quite a lot to get things there, no longer in power. I wonder who won?”7
Colin Powell, who had played such a prominent role in the decision not to attempt regime change, responded to the criticism. “[I]n due course, Saddam Hussein will not be there,” he predicted. “And when that happens, all this interesting second-guessing will seem quite irrelevant.”8
CHAPTER 30
In the first Gulf War’s aftermath, Iraq remained a festering problem. Though its army had been defeated in Kuwait, the regime remained intact. In an attempt to keep Saddam Hussein in check, and to pressure him to comply with demands by the United Nations, the Security Council imposed economic sanctions banning trade with Iraq, including in oil. The United States, Britain, and France imposed UN-sanctioned no-fly zones over the Kurdish-populated areas in northern Iraq and the Shiite-populated region in southern Iraq. American, British, and—initially—French aircraft patrolled the zones regularly.*
Undeterred, Saddam continued to use brutality on a massive scale. After suppressing the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings in 1991, Saddam drained the marshlands of southern Iraq, turning the region into a salt-encrusted desert. His purpose was to punish the “marsh Arabs” for their support of the rebellion against him. He drove some 150,000 Iraqis from their homes. His intelligence services were merciless in torturing suspected opponents. Arbitrary arrests and unexplained disappearances were commonplace. He built rape rooms to bring “dishonor” to the female members of families suspected of opposition to him.* And before long the Iraqi military began a near daily routine of firing on coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones.
Saddam’s regime claimed it had destroyed its arsenals of proscribed weapons, but the United Nations weapons inspectors were skeptical. Iraqi officials spied on the inspectors, sanitized suspect sites before the teams arrived, and barred them from examining Saddam’s vast palace complexes. He reorganized his biological weapons program creatively by closing his military-run weapons facilities while creating dual-use plants capable of making products for both civilian and military use.2 Facilities that produced fertilizer and antibiotics, for example, could be retooled quickly to create chemical and biological weapons. By 1998, Saddam had stopped cooperating with the UN inspectors altogether, effectively forcing them out of the country and ending even a pretense of complying with the UN Security Council’s demands. In response, the UN adopted still more resolutions expressing outrage at Saddam’s “totally unacceptable” actions.3 But few nations, other than the United States and Great Britain, appeared willing to do much, if anything, to enforce the UN resolutions.
In January 1998, I joined a group of former national security officials in signing a letter to President Clinton that called for stronger action against Saddam’s regime.4 “The only acceptable strategy,” our letter read, “is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.” For the short term, we endorsed military strikes on suspected weapons facilities. For the long term, we called for removing Saddam and his regime.5
Later in 1998, large bipartisan majorities in each house of the U.S. Congress generally endorsed the policies recommended in our letter to Clinton. The Iraq Liberation Act declared that the goal of U.S. policy should be “to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power.” The U.S. House of Representatives approved that legislation by a vote of 360 to 38.† It passed the Senate without a single dissenting vote. Clinton signed the legislation into law. Regime change in Iraq was now the official policy of the United States.
Even as Clinton endorsed regime change, some administration officials contended that the existing UN economic sanctions had kept Saddam reasonably under control—“in a box,” as Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, put it.6 However, the sanctions administered through the UN’s Oil-for-Food program had loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. The UN was generating billions of dollars in illicit, unrestricted funds for Saddam Hussein, who used the cash to finance, among other things, his dual-use weapons facilities.7 The so-called Oil-for-Food program became one of the greatest scams perpetrated in the six decades of the United Nation’s existence.8 When the second Bush administration came into office in January 2001, the Iraqi “containment” policy was in tatters.
Various commentators asserted that Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, was intent on “fixing” his father’s error of leaving Saddam in power.9 From what I saw, that was not the case. Before his inauguration, when I met with the President-elect in Austin, Texas to discuss defense policy, the subject of Iraq did not even come up. The first person I remember mentioning the issue to me in 2001 was Clinton’s outgoing Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen. He and the senior military officers in the Clinton administration were fully aware of the dangers our aircraft crews faced in the skies over Iraq. Despite the risks, Cohen believed that discontinuing our patrols of the no-fly zones was not an option. It would be a victory for Saddam and further erode an already fraying coalition of nations committed to containment of his brutal regime.
Iraq’s repeated efforts to shoot down our aircraft weighed heavily on my mind. Iraq was the only nation in the world that was attacking the U.S. military on a daily basis—in fact, more than two thousand times from January 2000 to September 2002.10 I was concerned, as were the CENTCOM commander and the Joint Chiefs, that one of our aircraft would soon be shot down and its crew killed or captured.* In my first months back at the Pentagon, I asked General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to brief me on CENTCOM’s plans in the event Iraq successfully brought down one of our planes. The plan, code-named Desert Badger, was seriously limited. Its goal was to rescue the crew of a downed aircraft—but it had no component to inflict any damage or to send any kind of message to Saddam Hussein that such provocations were unacceptable. Our friends in the region had criticized previous American responses to Iraqi aggression as weak and indecisive and had advised us that our enemies had taken comfort from America’s timidity. The Desert Badger plan was clear evidence of that problem. I asked Shelton and General Franks to have their planners come up with a range of other options the President could consider. If an aircraft was downed, I wanted to be sure we had ideas for the President that would enable him to inflict a memorable cost. The new proposals I ordered included attacks on Iraq’s air defense systems and their command-and-control facilities to enable us to cripple the regime’s abilities to attack our planes.
Several weeks into the administration we had reason to signal to Baghdad that the days of mild and ineffective U.S. responses to their repeated provocations were coming to a close. Iraq was working to strengthen its air defense and radar capabilities in the no-fly zones by installing fixing-optic cables to make it more difficult for us to monitor their communications. The network was a direct challenge to the UN no-fly zones. On February 16, 2001, after Iraqi ground units had again targeted our aircraft, twenty-four American and British aircraft launched a coordinated attack on five Iraqi air defense sites, destroying them.*
Though Iraq was discussed occasionally at the senior levels of the administration, by the summer of 2001, U.S. policy remained essentially what it had been at the end of the Clinton administration—adrift. I decided to bring my questions about our inherited Iraq strategy to the members of the National Security Council to seek some clarity and presidential guidance.
In July, I sent a memo to Cheney, Powell, and Rice asking that we hold a principals committee meeting to discuss Iraq. In the document I raised two scenarios that could have the effect of forcing the President to make a decision on Iraq under unfavorable circumstances. The first involved its neighbor Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, which would dramatically change the balance in the region and possibly spark a regionwide arms buildup. Second was the possibility that “Somebody, whether Iran, Iraq, or Usama Bin Laden, could take out the royal family in one or more of the Gulf states and change the regime and the balance, perhaps inviting Iranian or Iraqi troops in to protect them.” I also noted that some event totally unforeseen by us and out of our control could force a U.S. decision on Iraq. I argued that we would be better off developing a policy well ahead of events that could overtake us. On the broader subject of Iraq, I outlined a range of possibilities for consideration:
We can publicly acknowledge that sanctions don’t work over extended periods and stop the pretense of having a policy that is keeping Saddam “in the box ...”
A second option would be to go to our moderate Arab friends, have a reappraisal and see whether they are willing to engage in a more robust policy. We would have to assert strong leadership and convince them that we will see the project through and not leave them later to face a provoked, but still incumbent, Saddam. The risks of a serious regime-change policy must be weighed against the certainty of the danger of an increasingly bold and nuclear-armed Saddam in the near future.
A third possibility perhaps is to take a crack at initiating contact with Saddam Hussein. He has his own interests. It may be that, for whatever reason, at his stage in life he might prefer to not have the hostility of the United States and the West and might be willing to make some accommodation. Opening a dialogue with Saddam would be an astonishing departure for the USG, [U.S. government] although I did it for President Reagan [in] the mid-1980s. It would win praise from certain quarters, but might cause friends, especially those in the region, to question our strength, steadiness and judgment. And the likelihood of Saddam making and respecting an acceptable accommodation of our interests over a long period may be small.12
I thought a diplomatic overture on Iraq from the Bush administration—a “Nixon goes to China” approach—was worth suggesting to the President. As I wrote in my memo to the NSC principals, echoing my thoughts of some twenty years earlier when I visited Baghdad, “There ought to be a way for the U.S. to not be at loggerheads with both of the two most powerful nations in the Gulf—Iran and Iraq.” Though the Iran-Iraq War had ended more than a decade earlier, the regimes in Tehran and Baghdad still viewed each other with hostility. Despite that animosity, both still had poor relations with the United States. I wondered if the right combination of blandishments and pressures might lead or compel Saddam Hussein toward an improved arrangement with America.*While a long shot, it was not out of the question.
The National Security Council never organized the comprehensive review of U.S.-Iraq policy I requested in the summer of 2001. We can’t know how the Bush administration’s Iraq policy might have evolved if 9/11 had not occurred, but that event compelled our government to make terrorism a focus of intense attention. It demanded that American officials reexamine national security policy comprehensively in light of the vulnerabilities the attack exposed. It forced the still new administration to recognize the special danger posed by nations that both supported terrorist groups and possessed or pursued weapons of mass destruction.
Though intelligence did not report that Saddam was tightly connected to al-Qaida or that he was involved in the 9/11 attack, Iraq was included in almost any analysis of state supporters of terrorism. Iraq had been on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror since 1990. The regime’s links to individual terrorists and terrorist groups earned Iraq its place on the “axis of evil” list.14
When I was queried by reporters on links between Iraq and terrorists, I referred to an unclassified written statement I had requested of George Tenet and that was subsequently prepared by the CIA. The paper was taken directly from Tenet’s unclassified conclusions provided to Congress, which stated:
· We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’ida going back a decade.
· Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qa’ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression.
· Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qa’ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad.
· We have credible reporting that al-Qa’ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qa’ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.15
Tenet, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration were certainly not the only ones thinking about possible linkages. A few hours after the 9/11 attack, James Woolsey, CIA director under President Clinton, raised the question of whether Saddam was involved.16 ABC News, the Guardian newspaper, and other media outlets floated similar questions prominently. Their queries were not unreasonable. At the time Saddam was offering twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonuses to the families of suicide bombers to encourage them to attack Israel. He allowed terrorist groups such as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Palestine Liberation Front, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Arab Liberation Front to operate within Iraq’s borders.17 During the 1990s, terrorists supported by Saddam struck in Rome and Vienna, killing Americans and Israelis. Saddam gave refuge to terrorists on the run, like Abu Nidal, whose group was responsible for some nine hundred deaths and casualties, including a number of Americans, in attacks in more than twenty countries.18 Abu Abbas, who hijacked the cruise liner Achille Lauro and murdered an American citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, was living openly and safely in Baghdad.
Documents discovered after the coalition’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 shed more light on the depth of the regime’s linkages with terrorism. As far back as January 1993, for example, Saddam had ordered the formation of “a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia.”19 Saddam used his paramilitary group, the Fedayeen Saddam, to train thousands of terrorists to be deployed both inside and outside of Iraq’s borders.20 While the idea of Iraq working with al-Qaida to inflict harm on the United States did not seem to be much of a stretch, in my public remarks I stayed close to the CIA’s official assessment.
My concerns about Iraq went beyond Saddam’s support of terrorism or any involvement with al-Qaida. It went beyond his savage oppression and genocidal acts against his own people. My view rested on the fact that previous attempts to reduce the risks Saddam posed had failed. The UN sanctions that had checked Iraqi ambitions in the 1990s were crumbling. Further, the sanctions were punishing the Iraqi people more than they were disadvantaging Saddam Hussein and, as a result, international support for the sanctions had waned. Saddam’s belligerence was one of the main reasons we had kept U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which had fueled bin Laden’s propaganda. Saddam’s long record of aggression and regional ambition were not in doubt, and there were no indications that he had changed. If anything, Saddam seemed emboldened by a decade of UN and American acquiescence. It was increasingly clear that Iraq’s continued defiance of the United Nations would further weaken that institution and encourage other dangerous regimes to follow suit.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and our changed global environment, I wanted updated thinking about U.S. interests and options. I asked Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, to consider the broader principles involved, not just Iraq’s history under Saddam. Among other questions, I asked: What steps should the United States consider taking—when, and with whom? Is it proper to act alone? What about the argument that we should try to obtain approval from the UN Security Council? When is it reasonable to conclude that all means short of war have been tried and have failed? Is preemptive action to forestall the threat then justified?
Feith was the right person for the assignment. He listened carefully to views contrary to his own and could reformulate them and present them respectfully and accurately. He advised that even those friendly to the United States and sensitive to our security interests worried about a world in which the American president could decide to bring about regime change by force in country after country. I understood that concern. The Bush doctrine of preemption, or more precisely, anticipatory self-defense, could not be seen as a license for an American president to exercise unchecked military power on a whim. After all, the Founding Fathers saw unchecked power as the greatest danger to human liberty. Our Constitution created a system of checks and balances in the hope of ensuring that no president, legislative body, or court could accrue enough power to overwhelm the others. Feith and his policy team formulated these thoughts in a 2002 memo titled “Sovereignty and Anticipatory Self-Defense.”21
In the twenty-first century, the idea that countries could be left alone unless and until they actually launched an aggressive war had to have exceptions. The lethality of modern weapons and the stated intent of terrorists to use them made it difficult to sustain that traditional view. Regimes with records of aggression and dishonesty, and which had or were working toward WMD capabilities, could inflict far more massive damage than ever before. An Iranian nuclear strike on the small state of Israel, for example, could destroy so much of the nation that Israel might be unable to survive as a viable state. Could a responsible Israeli prime minister allow that to occur by waiting until after a nuclear missile was launched? Nuclear or biological material covertly passed to a terrorist organization could be detonated or released in one or more of our cities, killing millions, bringing our economy to a halt, and effectively suspending our country’s cherished civil liberties. Could an American president sit back, wait, and take that risk?
In our system of governance, U.S. presidents, even when invoking preemption, are still accountable to the American people and subject to the internal checks inherent in the American political system. A president has to make decisions with an eye to the powers of the Congress and the courts, as well as the increasingly large role of the media, the internet, and other nongovernmental actors.22 Most importantly, a U.S. president must face public opinion and the consequences that come with elections. Preemptive military action or anticipatory self-defense undertaken by the United States also requires allies—including bases, overflight rights, transit routes, shared intelligence, and logistical support. While not legal checks, these were practical checks we all needed to keep in mind.
A secretary of defense and senior military officials in the chain of command are often considered by outsiders to be the most vocal advocates of the use of military force. I’ve found that more often the opposite is true. Since those in a position of responsibility for the troops understand well the costs of war, they can often be reluctant war fighters. I supported military action against al-Qaida and the Taliban because they had left us no alternative. Saddam, to my mind, was different. I thought we might be able to find other ways of bringing about regime change in Iraq.
On September 21, 2001, I wrote myself a note. “At the right moment,” I stated, “we may want to give Saddam Hussein a way out for his family to live in comfort.”23 I thought an aggressive diplomatic effort, coupled by a threat of military force, just might convince Saddam and those around him to seek exile. By 2002, the Iraqi regime had seen what we were able to do in Afghanistan. If there were enough rational individuals around Saddam, they might be convinced that George W. Bush was not bluffing and was committed to the disarmament of Saddam Hussein. I hoped the world could stand united in that message. That hope was doomed to disappointment.