War Stories

by Oliver North

  Notwithstanding the UN’s unwillingness to help disarm Saddam and notwithstanding the unabated criticism, President Bush again went to the international body asking for its assistance—this time in rebuilding Iraq. Despite a terrorist bombing on August 19, 2003, that destroyed the UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian national and the head of the UN mission in Baghdad, United Nations officials remain unwilling to help unless they assume absolute control over the effort.

  For the UN, it’s all about power. Before the war, Secretary-General Kofi Annan insisted that any military effort to oust Saddam without UN permission would lack “the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations.” Now Annan demands that the UN be allowed to exercise control over how U.S. forces and U.S. tax dollars are employed and spent in Iraq. All this belies the abysmal, decade-long record of the UN in the land between the rivers.

  As we witnessed in Baghdad, the UN-administered Oil-for-Food Program, established in 1995 to provide the Iraqi people with food and medicine, was totally corrupt. Under UN supervision, Saddam stole billions from the program while UN administrators took tens of millions in “management fees.” Hundreds of millions in Iraqi oil revenues are simply unaccounted for—and may be sequestered “in trust” by the UN—although this can’t be confirmed because auditors have been denied access to the UN’s books on the program. Attempts by various media outlets to scrutinize UN financial records have been routinely rebuffed. The United Nations has no Freedom of Information Act like the one we have in the United States to permit reporters to examine its records and documents.

  Despite terror attacks against personnel at its facilities—including the bombing attack in Baghdad on September 22, 2003, that killed twenty-two people—the United Nations refuses to take terrorism seriously, and continues to put terrorist nations on a par with peace-loving democracies. In fact, the Blame America First crowd at the UN steadfastly refuses to even define terrorism—perhaps because many UN member nations themselves sponsor terrorism, support it financially, or turn a blind eye to it.

  Although the UN has no lack of vocal U.S. critics, the recently retired, amiable, Swedish diplomat Hans Blix is undoubtedly the hero of the moment. As he vacated his posh digs overlooking the East River in New York City, Blix conducted a series of exit interviews and soirees in Manhattan, taking a few parting shots at the “bastards” in the Bush administration. “I have my detractors in Washington,” Blix huffed, while claiming indifference. But he also accuses the Bush administration of telling “a lot of fairy tales” about Iraq. His principal complaint: he was right and the Bush administration was wrong about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. But on the recently discovered mass graves containing the bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqis, he is strangely silent.

  Hans Blix is not alone in ignoring the mass graves and insinuating that the Bush administration “cooked the books” on intelligence about Saddam’s WMD arsenal. He has plenty of help from U.S. politicians who see President Bush as vulnerable on this issue and who seem willing to do whatever it takes to capitalize on what they see as the president’s Achilles’ heel.

  Senator Robert Byrd claims that President Bush is “intent on revising history” and suggests that the administration “bent, stretched, or massaged” intelligence reports “to make Iraq look like an imminent threat to the United States.”

  Senator Byrd is demanding an “immediate investigation” because “the administration’s rhetoric played upon the well-founded fear of the American public about future acts of terrorism,” and such statements are “just sound bites based on conjecture.”

  Conjecture? Perhaps Senator Byrd has forgotten his own words of October 3, 2002: “The last UN inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capability. Intelligence reports also indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.”

  So what’s going on here? Senator Byrd receives the same intelligence reports the president gets. Every U.S. senator has access to the information provided by the CIA and kept locked in safes in the guarded chambers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Senator Byrd, in his own words, concluded in October 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Something must have happened to change his mind—and he’s not alone.

  Senator John Kerry, as part of his outreach to antiwar Democrats, is now calling for a “regime change” in the White House, and insists that he is the victim of a “misinformation campaign” orchestrated by President Bush. “He misled every one of us,” Kerry now claims. But as late as January 23, 2003, he said, “We need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. . . . He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. . . . So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real.”

  Even though he now tells supporters of his presidential campaign that he was “misinformed” about Saddam, Senator Kerry had access to the same information as the man he wants to replace in the Oval Office. So do other aspirants for the job—like Senator Joe Lieberman, Congressman Dick Gephardt, and Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Yet they all now maintain that they are opposed to the war against Saddam—or would have been had they simply been told the truth.

  Vermont’s former governor, Howard Dean, might be excused for making outrageous accusations about President Bush and his motives for unseating Saddam, because the antiwar candidate doesn’t have access to the classified information. But that doesn’t wash for others.

  Before he withdrew from the race, Senator Bob Graham, who touted his membership on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as one of his “credentials” for higher office, routinely accused President Bush of exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam. Yet on December 8, 2002, as U.S. and British forces were preparing for war, Senator Graham boldly stated, “We are in possession of what we think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has—and has had for a number of years—a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.” If he had that “compelling evidence” in his possession then, where did it go? Did it simply disappear in an effort to punch holes in President Bush’s approval ratings?

  Congressman Gephardt calls President Bush “a miserable failure.” Former senator Carol Moseley Braun says that the United States has no business in Iraq and “We got off on the wrong track.” And Senator Ted Kennedy, in one of the most egregious slanders in American political history, charges that Operation Iraqi Freedom “was a fraud cooked up in Texas.”

  All of these politicians, who are members of the U.S. Congress, were provided with the same information that President Bush received about Saddam Hussein and his regime. Senator Kennedy was so impressed by the intelligence he had seen that on October 4, 2002, he felt compelled to acknowledge, “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.” Yet, whatever Kennedy and these others knew then, they apparently don’t know now.

  For the young Americans at risk in Iraq and Afghanistan, the drumbeat of criticism from the media, Hollywood, and the UN is “situation normal.” Few of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen, or Marines I talk to expect anything better from the media than the “bad news” stories they are now getting. They regard the reports filed by the embedded media as exceptions and the current coverage to be the rule. None seem surprised by the way the stars of the entertainment industry are aligned—although I did watch some Dixie Chicks CDs being used as sporting clays for target practice with a Benelli combat shotgun. As for the UN, most of these troops remember cheering when the current commander in chief told them to throw away their blue UN berets.

  But ask any of the troops now committed—or those awaiting orders to duty on the front lines in the war on terrorism—what they think of the current tenor of
American political rhetoric and they’ll admit that it is at best confusing and at worst demoralizing. Experienced officers and NCOs feel that an effort is being made to “create a divide” between the military and its commander in chief.

  Though they are all in danger, and all want to come home—as they should—they also know that given the choice, it is far better to fight terrorists in Baghdad than in Boston or Baltimore. They also know that Saddam was a real threat and that, despite the naysayers, they are making real progress in Iraq.

  If asked, the troops who have been searching for WMD will remind the questioner that Saddam had more than five months to destroy, remove, or hide anything he wanted before U.S. and British troops arrived on his doorstep. They will also point to the terrorbomb jackets, terrorist training manuals, and large numbers of foreign terrorists who were trained at Salman Pak. They will present the tons of chemical protective equipment, atropine injectors, and chemical warfare manuals that they found all over Iraq and ask, “If Saddam didn’t have chemical agents, how come his troops had all this gear?”

  Unfortunately, we don’t know the answer to that question, or many others. We don’t know where Osama bin Laden is. We can’t find Saddam. All of this points to the desperate need to rebuild a human intelligence collection capability within our intelligence services. And we’d better do it quickly. Not just because politicians vying for higher office are apparently confused by what they knew, when they knew it, and when they conveniently forgot it, but because our future may depend on knowing more about our terrorist adversaries than we do now.

  Former CIA director James Woolsey maintains that “the war on terrorism is World War IV—a war we cannot afford to lose.” Recently retired Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded CENTCOM through Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and then led Operation Iraqi Freedom through to the liberation of Iraq, said on October 10, 2003, that “the war on terrorism is going to go on for a long, long time.”

  He went on to point out that victory in Iraq is an important step in that war. He’s right. Those we face aren’t just willing to die for their cause—they want to die for their cause. They have been taught to hate, to kill, and to die in trying to kill Americans, Christians, and Jews. They have been promised spiritual rewards for themselves and financial benefits for their families if they succeed in killing themselves the “right way.” Transforming Iraq into a secure democracy with a thriving economy will mean one less place where terrorists can be recruited or trained or take refuge.

  Yet the president’s request for funds to accomplish this transformation is described as “too expensive” by political opponents in our Congress—and by Europeans, who were rescued twice in the last century by force of American arms and dollars. Some have described the request as “throwing good money after bad.”

  The current excuse for this defamatory political rhetoric is that it’s a “presidential election year.” So was 1944. Yet no political opponent of FDR tried to smear the seriously ill chief executive by claiming he wasn’t “up to the task.” No candidate for any office suggested that Roosevelt couldn’t handle the job, because of his increasing frailty. No member of the House or Senate dared claim that it was too expensive to beat Hitler in Germany or Tojo in Japan. And no member of Congress tried to tell the commander in chief where to cross the Rhine or what island to take next in the Pacific.

  None of these things happened in the midst of World War II because politicians recognized that any such decisions or actions would be disastrous to the morale of millions of young Americans serving in uniform. We don’t have millions of men and women in uniform anymore. Instead, we rely on very sophisticated weapons in the hands of a few more than one million warriors. Some of them fly high-performance fighter aircrafts, helicopters, or transports, or they pilot unmanned aerial vehicles with an armchair controller. Others serve at sea—or under it—waiting for the word to use an awesome arsenal against an adversary. And still others, sweating in twenty-pound flak jackets and four-pound helmets, patrol hot, foul-smelling streets far from home, searching for those who want nothing more than to kill them—and us.

  And while they hunt for terrorists, they deserve better than political terrorism from their own countrymen here at home. These men and women of America won an extraordinary victory in Iraq. America’s critics shouldn’t be allowed to steal it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE ROCKY ROAD TO DEMOCRACY

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #43

  Baghdad, Iraq

  Saturday, 25 October 2003

  1415 Hours Local

  By the time I returned to Iraq in the summer, there were ominous signs that “rebuilding” Iraq was not going to be a simple task. Though Uday and Qusay were gone, Saddam himself was still on the loose, and this fact alone seemed to be inspiring resistance—particularly in the Sunni Triangle. The troops on the ground had become increasingly wary of the civilian population in places like Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Baghdad proper. Commanders in these areas privately talked about a new threat—the “marriage of convenience” between former regime elements and foreign jihadists bent on trying to prevent the transition to democracy.

  Most of Saddam’s army had deserted when the dictatorship collapsed. His soldiers, mostly Shi’ite conscripts and poor Sunnis, simply went home—taking their AK-47s and RPGs with them. Within a matter of weeks, many of them began using those weapons to perpetrate crimes against their fellow Iraqis and in small-scale terror attacks against coalition forces.

  Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), rejected the concept of offering financial incentives to Iraqi army deserters who returned to their barracks with their weapons. Instead, the CPA embarked on a costly and time-consuming effort to completely rebuild Iraq’s police, national guard, and security forces. Unbeknownst to any of us who had covered the first phase of the war—and most of those who had fought in it—Operation Iraqi Freedom was about to become a very deadly endeavor.

  As the heat of summer beat down on the land between the rivers, the number and scale of the attacks increased dramatically. Several factors contributed to the escalating violence—and growing U.S. casualties:

  First, Iraq’s neighbors—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Iran—were either unable or unwilling to stop hundreds of fanatical jihadists, inspired radical Islamic clerics and leaders of terror movements, from crossing into Iraq. Terrorists from these neighboring countries and others from Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Chechnya flooded into Iraq to join the jihad. By autumn 2003, they were effectively integrated into scores of disparate but deadly “cells” throughout the Sunni Triangle and incorporated into a significant number of Shi’ite communities.

  Second, senior members of Saddam’s now outlawed Baath Party had succeeded in fleeing to Syria with tens of millions in stolen funds. From there, they launched an organized effort to convince the Sunni minority in Iraq that Saddam was going to make a “comeback.” Messengers from Syria told Sunni sheikhs and imams that unless the Sunnis fought back against American-imposed democracy, they would soon be repressed by the Shi’ite majority.

  Third, Iraq’s abandoned ammunition depots, munitions storage facilities, and arms depositories provided a treasure trove of weapons and explosives for arming opponents and building improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

  On my first trip to Iraq, I had been with Lt. Col. “Pepper” Jackson’s 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment when they had captured Bayji and its enormous munitions depot. Now his battalion was providing security for USA Environmental—the contractor charged with the destruction of the site’s 300 million tons of ordnance. Their goal: to haul 100 tons per day out into the desert and destroy it in earth-shaking, ear-shattering controlled detonations. From more than a mile away, one such blast knocked my camera off its tripod.

  The work is difficult and dangerous. One of the EOD experts who had also worked in Kosovo, Ukraine, and Afghanistan said, “This is the most militarized place on the plan
et. At this rate, just cleaning up Bayji will take us five years. But it’s worth it. Once we’ve blown it up, the ‘bad guys’ can’t use it to kill anyone else.”

  He’s right. In the hands of suicidal terrorists bent on killing “infidels,” a stolen automobile or truck heavily loaded with explosives is a guided bomb, nearly as deadly as the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II.

  On 19 August 2003, a suicide terrorist driving an explosives-laden truck destroyed the UN headquarters building in Baghdad, killing twenty-four and wounding another hundred. Within weeks, the UN closed its offices in Iraq and fled the country. By October 2003, when the last UN officials departed, IEDs had become the number-one cause of casualties in Iraq.

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #44

  4th ID HQ

  Tikrit, Iraq

  Saturday, 13 December 2003

  1730 Hours Local

  Each time I visited the headquarters of the 4th ID in Tikrit, General Ray Odierno—the division commander—or one of his subordinates would remind me that they had made it their mission to capture or kill Saddam Hussein. Though reports at the time suggested that the deposed dictator could be hiding anywhere from the suburbs of Baghdad to the outskirts of Damascus, the 4th ID soldiers were convinced that Saddam was still hiding out in the vicinity of his hometown.

  Odierno is a tough, tall, lean soldier. He had borne the frustration of getting his division into the fight with considerable grace—a quality that would be sorely tested when his own son was grievously wounded.

  On one occasion he took me into the G-2 spaces at his headquarters, where his intelligence staff explained the painstaking effort they were making to track down and double-check every piece of information that had been gleaned about Saddam. I made the observation that this was impressive work and inquired as to how much help the CIA was in this endeavor. A captain working nearby chuckled and replied, “CIA? We don’t get much of anything that’s useful from them. So we set this up just like we would in the NYPD, where I’m a homicide detective when I’m not wearing this uniform.”