CHAPTER 31
Fifteen days after 9/11, the President asked me to join him in the Oval Office alone. Our meetings almost always included some combination of the vice president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of state, the national security adviser, or the White House chief of staff—but not on the morning of September 26.
The President leaned back in the black leather chair behind his desk. He asked that I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iraq. He knew the Joint Chiefs and I were concerned about Saddam Hussein’s attacks on our aircraft in the northern and southern no-fly zones, but two weeks after the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, those of us in the Department of Defense were fully occupied.
He wanted the options to be “creative,” which I took to mean that he wanted something different from the massive land force assembled during the 1991 Gulf War. I certainly did not get the impression the President had made up his mind on the merits of toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime. In fact, at the September 15 NSC meeting at Camp David days earlier when Iraq had been raised, he had specifically kept the focus on Afghanistan.
I told him I would review CENTCOM’s existing Iraq plan and speak to General Franks about updating it.
There was another matter President Bush wanted to discuss with me that morning. “Dick told me about your son,” he said. “Are you and Joyce doing okay?”
Although Nick had been in recovery from drug addiction at the time of Bush’s inauguration, his condition had been fragile, and he had relapsed. He had tried several times to turn his life around, but by the late summer of 2001, he was bottoming out again. He would disappear for periods, turning up occasionally in various towns across the West. Joyce and I had left Washington at the end of August to spend Labor Day weekend in New Mexico. After being out of touch for weeks, Nick reappeared in Taos while we were there.
In a long, painful visit, we again tried to convince him to seek treatment. My inclination was to do whatever it took to get him clean, even if it was against his wishes. Joyce understood better than I did that addiction was a disease that people eventually have to overcome on their own. As parents we could only offer support, encouragement, and a direction. Nick was weighing heavily on my mind when I returned to Washington in early September. One part of me was always thinking of him and the terrible state he was in. But in the days after 9/11, being distracted wasn’t an option.
On September 18, a week before my meeting with President Bush, Nick had called Joyce from Taos. “Happy birthday, Mom,” he said. He then told her he was leaving to check into a treatment center. Valerie’s husband, our son-in-law Paul Richard, and a friend of ours in Taos had agreed to take him. Nick said they had convinced him, and he was ready.
I had shared the information on Nick with Cheney, who had apparently passed it on to Bush. Because I knew the President had a great deal confronting him, I was surprised that he was mentioning our son, but he spoke with such concern that my family troubles seemed to be the only thing on his mind.
I told the President the activity surrounding 9/11 had not given me much time to think about our situation. But Joyce and I desperately wanted Nick’s treatment to be successful this time.
“I love Nick so much,” I said.
“You have my full support and prayers,” Bush said.
What had happened to Nick—coupled with the wounds to our country and the Pentagon—all started to hit me. At that moment, I couldn’t speak. And I was unable to hold back the emotions that until then I had shared only with Joyce. I had not imagined I might choke up in a meeting with the President of the United States, but at that moment George W. Bush wasn’t just the President. He was a compassionate human being who had a sense of what Joyce and I were going through.
Bush rose from his chair, walked around his desk, and put his arm around me.*
Because I had been reviewing the various war plans regularly, I knew no one would think it out of the ordinary for me to request a briefing on our existing options on Iraq. As a precaution, however, I asked for briefings to cover several contingencies in various parts of the world.
As the CENTCOM briefers moved through their PowerPoint slides on the on-the-shelf Iraq war plan, it quickly became clear that it was only a slightly modified version of the one used during the first Gulf War. It called for roughly the same number of forces used then—nearly half a million U.S. troops to be marshaled into the region over many months. They were to invade through Iraq’s southern desert, much as they had in 1991. Because the firepower and precision of U.S. forces had increased substantially since then, the plan would represent a vastly more lethal force in 2003.† Someone in the briefing described the plan, appropriately I thought, as “Desert Storm on Steroids.”
This was not what the Commander in Chief had told me he was looking for. It was a stale, slow-building, and dated plan that Iraqi forces would expect. A decade had come and gone since the Gulf War, yet the war plan seemed to have been frozen in time. Everyone in the briefing recognized that CENTCOM and Joint Staff planners would need to do a major overhaul.
I did not hear any more about Iraq for two months. Then, on November 21, 2001, a week after coalition forces had driven the Taliban from Kabul, the President called me aside at the end of an NSC meeting. He led me into a small, unoccupied office a few feet from the Situation Room, closed the door, and sat down.
“Where do we stand on the Iraq planning?” he asked.
I told him I had been briefed on the existing plan, and that it was very much like one for the Gulf War a decade ago. As I expected, it was not what the President was seeking. “To make progress,” I said, “I need to engage others in the Pentagon and at CENTCOM to update the Iraq plan. It will need a good deal of work.”
“That’s fine,” Bush replied. I told him that CENTCOM could update it in the normal order of things, but that they would need to work with intelligence officials as well. The latest intelligence on Iraqi military capabilities, suspected WMD sites, and other targets would shape how CENTCOM refashioned the plan. That meant I would need to talk to Tenet, and senior military officials would need to have discussions with their counterparts at the Agency.
The President said he didn’t want me to communicate with people outside of DoD for the time being, and that he would personally talk to Tenet and others at the right moment.
Back at the Pentagon, I asked Myers to stop by my office. I knew his focus at the time was almost exclusively on Afghanistan. Once we were alone, I told him about our new guidance: “Dick, the President wants to know what kind of operations plan we have for Iraq.”1
Myers showed no surprise. This was a request from the Commander in Chief, and the General’s instinct was to get to work. Myers had been with me when I had been briefed on the existing Iraq plan. He agreed it needed a thorough reworking. We both knew that CENTCOM’s planners were already taxed, given their ongoing work on Afghanistan. Nonetheless, I told him we should have Franks and CENTCOM bring the plan in line with the current capabilities of our military and with the latest intelligence on Iraq.
After receiving his new assignment from Myers, Franks took a look at the current Iraq war plan and confirmed our opinion that it was seriously out-of-date. In fact, I knew of no military officials who believed that the “Desert Storm on Steroids” war plan would be appropriate for the current circumstances. Saddam’s overall military capability had eroded since Desert Storm. At the same time, American military capabilities in precision-guided weapons had improved substantially. Also in my mind was the fact that in the 1991 Gulf War, enormous quantities of equipment and other materiel sent to the Gulf were never used.*
One thing that was clear was that Iraq would require a great many more troops on the ground than CENTCOM had marshaled in Afghanistan. Saddam’s forces, unlike the Taliban’s, were sizable. The Republican Guard contained formidable, well-trained armored divisions. And in Iraq, with the exception of the Kurds who kept to the north, there were no effective anti-regime forces like the Afghan Northern Alliance and Pashtun militias ready to help topple Saddam. By and large, the Iraqi opposition was disarmed, in exile, or dead—the last being Saddam’s preference.
By Christmas 2001, Franks was ready to brief the President on an initial cut. Bush invited us to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on December 28. With the President’s permission, I opted to join them by video teleconference and have Franks travel to the ranch alone. The President and Franks rarely had a chance to talk to each other one-on-one. I wanted this visit to be an opportunity for them to do just that.
When Myers and I joined the teleconference, the President and Franks seemed to be getting along well. Bush’s respect for him was bolstered by Franks’ quick and successful military campaign in Afghanistan. It also was clear that Franks’ experience in the Afghan campaign had honed his capabilities and built up his confidence.
I often thought of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s insightful observation that “plans are worthless, but planning is everything,” which I had adopted in my collection of Rumsfeld’s Rules. With the first contact with the enemy, elements of any plan generally have to be tossed aside. Split-second improvisation, experience, and leadership take over. Still, careful preparation is invaluable. Becoming acquainted with facts, terrain, people, capabilities, and possibilities helps military leaders cope and adapt, as they must, when new circumstances inevitably arise and it becomes necessary to adjust, recalibrate, or even discard the original plan.
I suggested that Franks start by focusing on the key assumptions underlying his plan—that is, what he expected to be happening inside and outside Iraq if war came. I believed that key assumptions needed to be the foundation of any contingency plan, but I had found that military planners did not always cite them or give them the probing, intense consideration they merited. In meetings at the Pentagon, I emphasized that failing to examine the assumptions on which a plan is based can start a planning process based on incorrect premises, and then proceed perfectly logically to incorrect conclusions.3
I was particularly concerned, for example, when I was shown the contingency plan for a possible conflict on the Korean Peninsula. By then our intelligence community’s assessment was that the North Korean regime had at least one or several nuclear weapons, yet the old war plan did not factor that absolutely essential assumption into its calculus.
Similarly, I urged the military planners to think carefully about the range of possible Iraqi responses to possible U.S. military actions. This iterative process was also happening at levels well below ours. Franks was getting input from State Department advisers and CIA analysts present at CENTCOM. With a continually evolving diplomatic and intelligence landscape, the Iraq plan was never fixed. Planning would take place until President Bush actually made his final decision and signed an order to execute, and on every day thereafter as new circumstances evolved.
In Texas, Franks went through each of his key assumptions, giving the President an opportunity to consider them and comment. As was usually the case, many of the major assumptions CENTCOM relied on in the political-military sphere came from the intelligence community. Military planners are not necessarily experts in the language, culture, history, and politics of the people in the Defense Department’s wide and varied spheres of operation. One assumption was that Iraq possessed WMD, and that advancing U.S. troops could come under chemical or biological attack. Another of Franks’ considerations was that Saddam’s most loyal forces might turn the capital into “Fortress Baghdad,” leading to a long and bloody standoff with substantial risk to both the city’s civilian population and to American troops fighting in the urban environment. Other assumptions in the plan included: some countries in the region would give cooperation and basing rights; Iraq could attack Israel in the event of a conflict; forces would need to number at least 100,000 before combat operations could begin; and regional threats like Syria and Iran would not become directly involved.
It was also an assumption that anti-Saddam opposition groups inside and outside of Iraq would favor a U.S. and coalition military effort. Though they were unlikely to be able to offer tangible military assistance, as the Northern Alliance had in Afghanistan, the opposition, with help from the Department of State, could form part of a provisional government, much as the Bonn process had led to a broad-based interim government in Afghanistan. Myers and I directed CENTCOM planners to begin thinking through a postwar plan, even in the preliminary phases.
On the operations side, Franks’ plan called for an invasion force buildup of 145,000 troops over six months, which would be increased to 275,000 if and as needed. The President, the Joint Chiefs, and I stood ready to muster whatever number of troops Franks determined would be necessary to get the job done. He believed that Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and U.S. operations elsewhere could provide a degree of cover to allow him to bring forces forward and arrange them around the Middle East without creating a major stir. To counter the concern about a possible Fortress Baghdad scenario, Franks emphasized speed as one of his most important priorities once war began. If U.S. forces could begin an attack with an element of surprise and race to Baghdad, Saddam’s forces might not have time to reinforce and arm their defensive positions there. A swift campaign would also help satisfy our Muslim friends in the region, who were concerned about domestic unrest if major combat operations against another Muslim nation were prolonged.
I thought Franks’ December 2001 briefing was a solid early cut, considering the relatively short time he had had to prepare. Bush seemed satisfied as well. The President expressed the hope I shared that diplomacy would persuade the Iraqis to comply with UN Security Council resolutions. Franks, Myers, and I would happily throw many thousands of hours of work into the shredder if it meant the men and women of the U.S. military would not have to go to war. Nonetheless, we all believed, as the President did, that the intelligence about Iraq and Saddam’s documented history of aggression and deception were too unsettling to not at least be ready for a military confrontation if diplomacy were to fail.
Though the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq are now well-known, recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning. They include, for example: the poor quality of the intelligence gathered on the ground in Vietnam; the underestimates of the scale of the Soviet Union’s military efforts during the Cold War; a lack of awareness about the brewing Iranian revolution that forced the Shah, an American ally, to flee the country; the failure to detect preparations for India’s nuclear test; and consistently underestimating the number of missiles that China had deployed along the Taiwan Straits. For Iraq, there was a similar pattern of intelligence estimates that had dangerously miscalculated Saddam’s capabilities. In 1991, experts actually underestimated Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capability. After the Gulf War, UN weapons inspectors were surprised to discover that Iraq had been no more than a year or two away from having enough fissile material to produce a nuclear bomb.*
Less than perfect intelligence reports are, of course, a fact of life for national security decision makers. Intelligence officials have some of the most difficult jobs in the world. Uncertainty, gaps in knowledge, and outright errors are inevitable. Targets are hostile and working to deceive and conceal the very information that is most sought after. Closed, repressive regimes and their terrorist allies can make their decisions in small, tightly controlled cliques without regard to public opinion, parliaments, or media scrutiny, making it particularly difficult to discover their intentions.
It wasn’t only our enemies that compounded the intelligence community’s challenges. Budget cuts during the 1990s amounting to 10 percent of the intelligence community’s budget were a costly self-inflicted wound that weakened our capabilities for years, particularly in the area of human intelligence. I had worked with our intelligence agencies off and on over some three decades, and intensely when I chaired the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in 1998. That experience was sobering. Compartmentalization hampered intelligence analysis. Policy makers did not engage sufficiently with intelligence professionals in setting intelligence priorities and asking informed questions about their analyses and conclusions.* In a unanimous letter to CIA Director Tenet, our bipartisan commission members shared our concerns about the quality of the intelligence community’s products. In the letter we wrote:
Unless and until senior users take time to engage analysts, question their assumptions and methods, seek from them what they know, what they don’t know and ask them their opinions—and do so without penalizing the analysts when their opinions differ from those of the user—senior users cannot have a substantial impact in improving the intelligence product they receive.5
What was unique about Iraq was that the intelligence community reported near total confidence in their conclusions. Their assessments appeared to be unusually consistent. In August 2002, Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin presented to the principals committee the intelligence community’s judgments about Iraq’s WMD activities. McLaughlin, a serious and measured career intelligence professional, described the situation in stark terms. According to my notes, his briefing concluded that:
· Iraq had reconstituted its facilities for biological and chemical weapons.
· There were 3,200 tons of chemical weapons the regime previously had that remained unaccounted for.
· Saddam had a mobile biological warfare capability, and a variety of means to deliver them, likely including UAVs.
· Saddam had retained many of the same experts who had developed nuclear weapons prior to the Gulf War.
· There was construction at old nuclear facilities, and Iraq was “clearly working” on fissile material, which meant that Saddam could have a nuclear weapon within one year.6
McLaughlin’s briefing covered many of the same points that were emphasized in the intelligence community’s analyses of Iraq’s WMD programs, and later in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN. As McLaughlin gave the Agency’s official and authoritative briefing, I wrote a note to myself. It said “caution—strong case,” but I added, “could be wrong.”7 There were few qualifiers in the briefing. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, we heard a great deal about what our intelligence community knew or thought they knew, but not enough about what they knew they didn’t know.
Two months after McLaughlin’s briefing, in October 2002, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the coordinating body for the U.S. intelligence community’s analytical products, issued the authoritative National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. The NIE, which is now declassified, was an alarming report on Iraq’s weapons systems. The report included the following:
· We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.
· Iraq has largely rebuilt missile and biological weapons facilities damaged during Operation Desert Fox and has expanded its chemical and biological infrastructure under the cover of civilian production.
· Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them. Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that [UN] inspectors departed—December 1998.
· If Baghdad acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad it could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year.
· Baghdad has mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents; these facilities can evade detection and are highly survivable. Within three to six months these units probably could produce an amount of agent equal to the total that Iraq produced in the years prior to the Gulf war.
· Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al-Qa’ida—with worldwide reach and extensive terrorist infrastructure, and already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States—could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct.
· In such circumstances, he might decide that the extreme step of assisting the Islamist terrorists in conducting a CBW [chemical or biological weapon] attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.8
American intelligence officials were joined in many of these startling assessments by intelligence services from other nations—Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, and Poland among them—all of whom judged that Saddam’s regime possessed WMD and was expanding its capabilities. Even Russia, China, Germany, and France, then skeptical of any military action against Iraq, agreed. “There is a problem—the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq,” said French President Jacques Chirac. He added, “The international community is right ... in having decided Iraq should be disarmed.”9 On the subject of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, the German chief of intelligence actually held a grimmer view than the U.S. intelligence community: “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years.”10 Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak cautioned General Franks that Saddam had biological weapons and would use them on American forces.11 A multitude of specific, seemingly credible reports, some even illustrated with satellite photographs, provided supporting evidence.
Early in the war, while major combat operations were still underway, I was asked on a news program if I was concerned about the failure to find WMD in Iraq. I had always tried to speak with reserve and precision on intelligence matters, but on this occasion, I made a misstatement. Recalling the CIA’s designation of various “suspect” WMD sites in Iraq, I replied, “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.”12 I should have used the phrase “suspect sites.” My words have been quoted many times by critics of the war as an example of how the Bush administration misled the public.
One of the challenges for historians is distinguishing the essential from the inessential, the predominant from the marginal, the characteristic from the exceptional. Promoters of the frequently repeated “Bush lied, people died” line have scoured a voluminous record of official statements on Iraqi WMD to compile a small string of comments—ill chosen or otherwise deficient—to try to depict the administration as purposefully misrepresenting the intelligence. While I made a few misstatements—in particular the one mentioned above—they were not common and certainly not characteristic. Other senior administration officials also did a reasonably good job of representing the intelligence community’s assessments accurately in their public comments about Iraqi WMD, despite some occasionally imperfect formulations.
Intelligence evidence about WMD had a way of taking pride of place in the litany of reasons for going to war. In fact, that should have been only one of the many reasons. There was a long list of other charges against Saddam Hussein’s regime—its support for terrorism, its attacks on American pilots in the no-fly zones, its violation of the United Nations Security Council resolutions, its history of aggression, and its crimes against its people. At one point I cautioned Torie Clarke, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, that the administration’s spokespeople were not using all of the many arguments that had been presented against Iraq.13 Obviously the focus on WMD to the exclusion of almost all else was a public relations error that cost the administration dearly.
In October 2002, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq. This often overlooked but significant congressional action reflected a strong, broad, and bipartisan view that Saddam Hussein’s regime would need to be toppled by force to protect the United States and international peace and security. Rather than focusing solely on WMD programs, the legislation listed twenty-three separate indictments against the regime. The points included:
· violating resolution of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population ...
· attempting in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush ...
· firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council; ...
· members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq; ...
· Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens.14
The House of Representatives passed that authorization by a margin of 297 to 133. The legislation, in fact, garnered 47 more votes of support in the House than the congressional authorization of the 1991 Gulf War. The Senate vote—77 to 23—was similarly lopsided. In later years, when things got tough, some who supported the military force authorization tried to explain away their votes. They claimed they were hoodwinked and misled on the intelligence or that they didn’t think the legislation had actually authorized military action. In the military there is a phrase accorded to people like that: You wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole with them.
The views of a number of prominent legislators were in fact quite different before the war began than their later statements.
“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat,” Senator Joe Biden said in August 2002. “This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.”15
“In the four years since the inspectors,” Senator Hillary Clinton stated, “intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program.” Stepping into what would become a controversial issue, Clinton volunteered that Saddam “has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members.”16
“When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region,” said Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who later adopted a quite different tone as the Democratic Party’s presidential standard-bearer in 2004.17
“Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter,” said former vice president and 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, “and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”18
Three of the Democratic front-runners for president—from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 campaigns—made absolutely clear their conviction that Saddam Hussein was a threat to our country. Yet when opposing the Bush administration’s efforts in Iraq became politically convenient, they acted as if they had never said any such thing.
Throughout 2002, General Franks briefed the National Security Council numerous times on the evolving war plan. The latest version of the plan called for a force of up to 450,000 U.S. troops for a ground invasion. During the plan’s development, CENTCOM planners had come up with the idea of “on ramps” and “off ramps” that would allow Franks to increase or slow the flow of troops into Iraq depending on circumstances. Franks believed that speed was the key to success in Iraq, as it had proved to be in Afghanistan.
Before an NSC meeting at Camp David, on September 7, 2002, Colin Powell called Franks to say he intended to ask a question about troop levels for the initial invasion. I thought calling Franks beforehand was a thoughtful thing for Powell to do, so Franks would not be caught off guard.
Franks told me about Powell’s phone call, and I told him to respond directly to every point that Powell or anyone else on the NSC might raise. If Powell had concerns, Franks and I wanted him to lay them out in front of everyone for a serious discussion.19Powell was not only secretary of state, he was also a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who knew a good deal about invading Iraq.
Powell had long been a proponent of the doctrine of “overwhelming force,” known variously as the Weinberger or Powell Doctrine. This approach sought to correct the problems created by President Lyndon Johnson’s gradual escalation policy in Vietnam during the 1960s and the deployments of small contingents of troops to places like Lebanon and Grenada in the 1980s. I appreciated the merits of overwhelming force, but complex operations in the real world often don’t adhere to hard-and-fast rules. I have found that there often seem to be exceptions even to the wisest doctrines. It is appealing to seek simplicity and relief from the burdens and risks of continually having to make difficult judgment calls. Faced with major decisions, senior officials—military and civilian—need to be careful not to follow doctrine mechanically instead of engaging their judgments.
At Camp David, despite his call to Franks, Powell did not raise any questions about troop levels, the war plan, or the numbers of troops in a postwar environment though press stories, to my great surprise, reported that Powell later indicated that he had.20Instead, he expressed the thought that “long supply lines” might slow down the invasion.*
After everyone had an opportunity to comment, I surveyed the officials in the room from the Vice President to the Secretary of State to the National Security Adviser to the White House Chief of Staff to the Director of the CIA, and finally to the President. “I want all of you to be comfortable with this plan,” I said. No one dissented. No reservations were voiced.
In addition to the 450,000 forces made available for deployment to the theater, the Iraq war plan, designated OPLAN 1003 Victor, authorized commanders to draw on thousands more U.S. forces in neighboring nations for support in logistics, intelligence, and communications. The plan called for 150,000 troops to be deployed immediately and an additional 300,000 kept in the pipeline as CENTCOM deemed necessary. Other troops would be supporting the ground forces from the air and sea. Additionally, we could count on support ranging from ground troops to overflight rights from forty-eight other nations.22 With nearly half a million ground troops available if necessary, this was not the “light footprint” war plan some critics would later claim it was.23
In the autumn of 2002, as troops and supplies were moved to the region, Franks, Myers, and I discussed a system called the Time-Phased Force and Deployment Data (TPFDD, pronounced “tip-fid”) to manage deployments. It produced highly detailed plans for how and when specific units would be needed on overseas missions. Figuring out which reserve and active units and what supplies—literally hundreds of thousands of tons—were required for combat is an exceedingly complex task. Reserve units would have to be called up.* For every combat soldier—“the teeth” of the operation—there were large numbers of personnel needed for the support—“the tail.” The TPFDD, as it existed, was an all-on or an all-off plan, with little flexibility in between. The problem was that we needed more than an on or off switch. We needed a rheostat that could ratchet up the American military presence in a way that complemented President Bush’s diplomatic efforts. Our hope was that coordinated military and diplomatic pressure would persuade Saddam to back down and war could be avoided.
On November 26, 2002, two days before Thanksgiving, Franks came to Myers and me with what he called the “mother of all deployment orders.” It would have authorized the flow of 450,000 troops to the Persian Gulf region as envisioned by the TPFDD. Franks’ proposal would have put the switch to full “on.” The problem was that from a diplomatic standpoint, the timing was not good. The next day, UN inspectors were reentering Iraq for another round of inspections. This was a critical component of the President’s diplomatic approach. If I approved sending several hundred thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf at that moment, Bush would be accused of being intent on war no matter the result of the inspections. Though it might help convince Saddam Hussein of the President’s seriousness of purpose, it could rattle potential allies.
Another consideration was the effect of the proposed deployments on military families, active duty and reserves, as we moved into the Christmas holiday season. I was concerned about having tens of thousands of our soldiers shipping out and leaving their families right before Christmas and New Year’s Day if there was no need to do so, which at that moment there was not.†
I asked Franks if the plan could be adjusted to enable him to send troops to the region more selectively. This would help the troops and their families and be more supportive of the pace of the President’s diplomatic efforts. It fell to General John Handy, the commander of U.S. Transportation Command, to improvise, by breaking up the TPFDD into smaller pieces and flowing the forces in at a more measured pace. Handy recognized the problem and deftly managed the task. Redesigning the flow of forces, rather than simply turning on the TPFDD, had its costs. Some logisticians complained about having their hard work scrapped in favor of a different flow. I could understand their frustrations. There was an important lesson to be learned, though: Military deployments not only needed to be more sensitive to the lives of those being called up, but they also needed to be more flexible so as to combine military considerations with presidential diplomatic initiatives.
To gain broader international support if the President were to decide in favor of military action against Iraq, he knew it would be desirable to have the backing of the United Nations Security Council. Though the irony was missed by most people, it was the Security Council’s own resolutions on Iraq that the supposedly unilateralist Bush administration and its allies were seeking to enforce. As diplomatically and politically useful as a Security Council use-of-force resolution might have been, it was not a necessary precursor to military action. American-led coalitions had used our military abroad without the UN Security Council’s approval on many occasions under both Democratic and Republican presidents dating back to the 1948 Berlin airlift.*
There was little doubt that at least some of the nations on the UN Security Council would not take part in an effort to dislodge Saddam. Russia and China, in particular, were often opposed to American proposals. France sometimes joined them.25 Saddam’s agents actively worked to cultivate their friends in Paris, Berlin, and Moscow by offering lucrative oil and other contracts. The French had an especially close, longstanding relationship with him. “France in particular,” as Saddam put it when I met with him in 1983, “understood the Iraqi view.”26 French leaders in industry, and perhaps some in politics, not only “understood” Iraq; they came to profit handsomely from it. President Jacques Chirac, for one, seemed comfortable with Saddam, whom he had shown around French nuclear power facilities in the 1970s. He had also negotiated an agreement to sell Iraq a nuclear reactor. In the decades that followed, France sold some $1. 5 billion of military equipment to Iraq.27 I don’t doubt that Iraq’s intransigence in defying the United Nations had been at least in part a result of Saddam’s belief that the UN Security Council was ineffective, and that his friends there would continue to give him political cover. He was right—almost.
By the end of 2002, the United Nations had reached a new low. The organization’s members seemed to have abandoned judgment and elected Libya, one of the world’s most backward dictatorships, to chair the UN Commission on Human Rights. To top that, the UN made Iraq the chair of the UN Disarmament Commission. This put Saddam in the driver’s seat of a body responsible for examining whether he was complying with disarmament obligations to the UN. And when it came to Iraq, the UN Oil-for-Food program had become a sad story of corruption and lies, as a later independent investigation established.*
As frustrating as the organization could be, it was not in America’s interests to see the United Nations follow the path of its predecessor, the League of Nations, the organization that watched as Italy’s Fascist forces invaded Abyssinia in 1935. President Bush wanted to rally the United Nations to support a U.S.-led effort to enforce the Security Council’s resolutions on Iraq. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a persuasive advocate, buttressed Bush’s efforts. Bush and Blair, Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw coaxed and cajoled the members of the UN Security Council on the matter. Finally, on November 8, 2002, the Security Council voted 15-0 to support Resolution 1441. The resolution condemned Iraq’s weapons programs, demanded that Iraq reopen suspected weapons facilities for inspection, and threatened “serious consequences” if Iraq failed to provide the UN a comprehensive list of the WMD it retained. The resolution stated that this was Iraq’s “final opportunity” to comply with the international community.29
There had been no fewer than seventeen UN resolutions demanding that Saddam comply with various requirements since 1991. They specified that his regime demonstrate that it had: destroyed its WMD arsenal; ended support for international terrorists; stopped threatening neighbors; and ceased oppressing Kurds and Shiites. Because nothing seemed to result from their noncompliance with the earlier resolutions, Iraq concluded, not unreasonably, that it could safely respond to this latest, UN Resolution 1441, with still another shrug.
Weeks later Saddam Hussein’s regime produced a contemptuously incomplete declaration of their weapons programs. In December 2002, President Bush concluded that Iraq was in “material breach” of UN Resolution 1441.30 United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix reported to the UN that “Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.” Blix also said that based on an Iraqi Air Force document and Iraq’s former claims, one thousand tons of toxic nerve gas, one of the most lethal chemical weapons, remained “unaccounted for.” Since Iraq had actually used nerve gas before in the Iran-Iraq War, there was every reason to believe the regime still possessed it.31
Though Resolution 1441 was written as Iraq’s last chance to come into compliance with its obligations to the United Nations—the tip-off to most people was the phrase “final opportunity”—some members of the Security Council proceeded to insist that there needed to be still another vote on an additional “this time we really mean it” resolution before they would sign onto any military action. Prime Minister Blair seemed to believe that it might be possible to obtain such a resolution and, along with it, additional international support, most notably from France and Germany. The other way to look at it—and perhaps the way Saddam did—was that this was an opportunity to further drag out the process.
Seeing the disappointing state of play, at one point Bush told me with a rueful smile, “This is a quagmire of my own making.” In fact the diplomatic efforts surrounding the final months before combat operations began proved to not be anyone’s finest hour.