The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity

by Joseph Wilson

  To my great pleasure, our work with the American Turkish Council threw us together from time to time. We fell into an easy relationship and would banter back and forth about the new administration and its predecessors. After board meetings or other events, we often Metroed back across town together. As the obsession with Iraq overtook many influential members of the Bush administration, our conversations turned frequently to the emerging debate on Iraq and the merits of the approach being advanced by the prowar crowd.

  When the first airplane hit the World Trade Center that fateful morning, I was stuck in traffic on the Whitehurst Freeway, a mile-long stretch of highway that skirts Georgetown along the Potomac River. I could see the Kennedy Center, its modern lines squaring up at the soft bend in the river. Behind it the Washington Monument poked into the cloudless blue sky; the sticky humidity of barely a week before had disappeared. I was on my cell phone, talking with a friend, as cars around me eased forward only a few feet with every change of the traffic lights. He told me that an airplane had hit the north tower and that I should to turn on the television as soon as I arrived at work. He was describing what he was watching on TV when he suddenly cried out that a second plane had just hit the other tower. Clearly, terrorists had struck.

  I arrived at my office, a block from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, and was talking to a colleague when the phone rang with the news that the Pentagon had also been hit. Then Valerie called from CIA headquarters; I told her that I would go home and get the kids into the house. They were with our nanny at a park down the street from where we lived, a park that lay right in the landing pattern for flights into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, across the Potomac River from the White House and downtown Washington. I closed the office and sent everybody home; nobody was going to get any work done this day. It was a good decision. Within ten minutes of leaving our building, the federal government closed, and the relatively empty streets that I had just navigated were clogged with vehicles fleeing the center of the city.

  With three targets already hit, could the White House or the Capitol be next? Or, for that matter, could CIA headquarters be a target?

  Heading home, I could see the white smoke pouring from the Pentagon across the river. I worried about my twins, now almost two years old. If it became necessary to shoot down a suspicious aircraft, I was certain we would do it. We would have no choice. I wanted my kids nowhere near the landmarks under a flight path. Fortunately, by the time I arrived at the park, National Airport had been closed to traffic. I got the kids and the nanny into the back of the car and raced home. While they fussed in the other room, I restlessly flipped from one TV channel to another, mesmerized by the enormity of the disaster. Phone lines were saturated, and it was impossible to get through to Valerie’s parents in Pennsylvania, though I did manage to reassure my brother, in California, that we were safe.

  Valerie arrived home about lunchtime. Throughout the afternoon we watched TV fixedly as the rumors of more planes en route to strategic sites and of bombs going off near the State Department made us wonder how extensive the attack was.

  As the nightmare unfolded over the next few days, our neighborhood was remarkably calm. With all flights grounded, the familiar sounds of airplanes making their final turn down the river about a half mile from our house were eerily absent. The chirping of birds, usually drowned out by the drone of jet engines, was the only background noise—but to our ears it was joyless music. Smoke continued to rise from the wreckage of the Pentagon wing that had been hit, and day and night, the airwaves bore the raw emotions of a nation in mourning, a nation shocked at the loss of thousands of our fellow citizens and the assault on these important symbols in two of our greatest cities. The country was coming to grips with its new vulnerability after two centuries of seeming invincibility afforded by two oceans. As a people, we had to deal with this assault on our person, our property, and our innocence.

  Valerie and I watched as our president made us proud with his trip to New York and with his eulogy at the National Cathedral. Knowing his father, I was particularly touched to see the former president reach over and pat the present one on the arm when he returned to his pew. That gesture epitomized perfectly the character, as I knew him, of this most human of presidents and of men. Later, we applauded as his son, the young president, stood in the rubble of the twin towers with his arm around a firefighter and a bullhorn to his mouth, defiantly promising to avenge the attack. President Bush comforted us all in a time of great emotional need. He had risen to the occasion and had shown the mettle that the situation demanded. He and his team had lived up to their billing as experienced and sober men ready to meet any challenge to our national security.

  In the ensuing days, we later learned, before the airports reopened and the planes flew again, officials at the National Security Council meetings chaired by the president began to consider the range of actions that might be taken in response to the attack. According to Bob Woodward’s book Bush at War, even as the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was coming into view as a legitimate target of our response on the afternoon of September 12, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had already raised the possibility of using the terrorist attacks as a pretext to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein: “Why shouldn’t we go against Iraq, not just al Qaeda?” he asked. Rumsfeld was speaking not only for himself when he raised the question. His deputy, Paul C. Wolfowitz, was committed to a policy that would make Iraq a principal target for the first round in the war on terrorism, according to Woodward.

  More recently, we have learned that the focus on Iraq began even earlier than the day after the terrorist attacks. The revelations in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill document that in the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush presidency, on January 30, 2001—more than seven months before 9/11—the administration made the decision that the ouster of Saddam Hussein would take center stage on the policy agenda, while at the same time they would disengage from mediation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  In the book, O’Neill recalls the administration’s early days this way: “From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this.’ ”

  In that earlier NSC meeting, President Bush, remembering a helicopter flight he’d made over Palestinian refugee camps with Ariel Sharon in 1998, said: “‘Looked real bad down there. I don’t see much we can do over there at this point. I think it’s time to pull out of that situation.’” The recollections of O’Neill and other administration officials in Suskind’s book shed much light on the unprecedented decision to reduce our efforts to mediate peace between Israel and its neighbors, even as the situation began to spiral downward with the onset of the second intifada.

  In the aftermath of 9/11, to the members of the president’s inner circle, the focus of their counterattack was already destined to include Iraq, even if no ties were to be found between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. Even as the administration was brilliantly reacting to the attacks and preparing to destroy al Qaeda and its Taliban host, it was already becoming distracted from the war on terrorism to focus on the military invasion and conquest of Iraq. As Bob Woodward points out in his book, Paul Wolfowitz and fellow neoconservatives had long seen Saddam as the most dangerous threat to peace in the Middle East. The seeds of the new Iraq war had been sown in the first Gulf War in 1991 and grew in the frustration that Saddam had not been deposed then. The trigger that propelled the renewed effort to take him down was a monstrous national calamity not of Saddam’s making, nor any immediate threat that Iraq posed to our national security. That a tragedy would be used to abuse the instruments of government, deceive the American people, and entangle us in a foreign adventure guaranteed to fail
before we put the first soldier across the border is a travesty. It was also a strategic mistake of historic proportions.

  Most analysts agreed that Saddam’s hard line against Israel, his support for some of the region’s most notorious characters, his stockpile of chemical weapons, and his ambition to develop both biological and nuclear weapons had made him an enemy who could not be ignored. There was no question that his regime had regional ambitions, that it had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and that it sought additional capability.

  The Israelis did not ignore him. In 1981, they had perceived the Iraqi construction of a nuclear power facility as such a danger that they destroyed it in a precision air attack.

  The United States had not ignored him either. In 1991, we had effectively destroyed his army, at the time estimated to be the fourth largest in the world.

  The United Nations, under our leadership, had run a successful inspection regime for seven years, destroying more WMD than even the Gulf War coalition had, and also ferreting out the details of Saddam’s nuclear program. (Yes, a defector had provided the key clue, but detective work usually depends on a break here and a break there; and, irrespective of how, the goal had been achieved.) The United States, the United Kingdom, and Turkey had successfully interdicted Iraqi control of most of its own airspace since 1991, and, of course, the sanctions had made key ingredients for a WMD program very difficult to obtain without detection. Even after the withdrawal of the inspectors in 1998, and the erosion of the international will to maintain sanctions on Iraq, Saddam was still contained. There was minimal threat to the region or to us so long as we remained vigilant.

  In short, Saddam was hardly being ignored.

  But Wolfowitz and his colleagues persisted in arguing that the only way to deal with the menace of Iraq was with invasive military action. For many years they had lobbied to build support in Congress, where Saddam—a notorious tyrant and serial sociopath, who started wars with impunity, gassed his own people, and engaged in some of the most dastardly human rights violations of the twentieth century—surely had no friends. His ongoing efforts to thwart the weapons inspectors, his clumsy attempt to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait, and his unremitting hostility toward his neighbors and Israel made him anathema to all American leaders, of both parties. However, the United States does not invade a country simply because it has an evil leader; it only does so if that country poses a grave and gathering danger to our national security.

  In 1998 Congress had passed—and President Clinton signed—the Iraq Liberation Act, which codified regime change and made available approximately $90 million per year to fund opposition activities. Even without such legislation, American administrations have long had regime-change policies in place toward countries whose leaders we did not like—Cuba, Libya, and Sudan, for instance. There had been a number of precedents for effecting regime change without resorting to war, including successful efforts during the Reagan administration in Poland and in the southern Africa countries of Namibia and South Africa.

  Our military is the greatest in the world, but our society is not a marauding one that readily agrees to using our might on foreign adventures. The attack on September 11, 2001, was key for the prowar crowd because it provided a cataclysmic event the administration could use to frighten Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein was at the root of all their fears and that an offensive war against Iraq was the only remedy. It was not happenstance that large pluralities of Americans came to believe that Saddam had been responsible for 9/11 and that he had nuclear weapons. These were misconceptions fostered by administration officials who continually made misleading statements in a classic propaganda operation staged to fool all of the people in the some-of-the-time it took to go to war.

  Before 9/11, regime change by invasion was still just a fringe part of the debate about how to handle Saddam Hussein. The Iraq Liberation Act was viewed mostly as a way to bring additional pressure to bear on him by activating other tools at America’s disposal—funding of resistance efforts, subversion, and propaganda—and not as a call to commit American troops to war. As we know from the rapidly rising costs of the war that the Bush administration committed the country to ($150 billion as of February 2004), the $90 million annual appropriation in the 1998 act would barely have funded three days’ meals for the conquering army, much less a full-scale war. Very few saw the act as presaging a military offensive. But one who did was Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, the commander of U.S. armed forces responsible for the Gulf region, of Central Command (CENTCOM), from 1997 to 2000. As the bill made its way through Congress, he warned some senior members of his staff about its implications and said the bill was far more serious than skep-tics believed. Zinni understood that this was no mere gesture but a rallying point for the prowar crowd. It was a preliminary stride toward invasion, not just another small step in the political campaign to undermine Saddam. He was, of course, right, but few were listening.

  Well before the fires in the World Trade Center wreckage had stopped smoldering, neoconservatives were on their favored cable television shows calling on the administration to implement the thrust of the Iraq Liberation Act by going to war. The act’s passage was cited as the bipartisan expression of the will of Congress that now, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, must be fully implemented. The drums of war against Iraq were being pounded. They would beat relentlessly for the next year and a half.

  When Brent Scowcroft and I would talk about the strident tone of the neoconservatives, he was dismissive. “Right-wing nuts,” he called them. I was more alarmed, but he reassured me that they did not enjoy senior administration support, even as their rhetoric reached fever pitch. “They will not win the policy,” he would say. I listened and wanted to believe him. Occasionally, I’d gently tease him that the Republicans seemed to be straying off course. We were committing our future, I’d say, to a band of fanatics whose approach was the opposite of that pursued by the first President Bush, or articulated by candidate George W. Bush in his November 1999 foreign policy speech at the Reagan Library and in his debates with Al Gore.

  Brent had worked with Vice President Cheney and with Secretary Rumsfeld since the Ford administration. He had been part of the team that coined the phrase “New World Order” to encapsulate a vision of an interconnected global security system that fostered international cooperation to deal with threats to our common good. Surely, I thought, his sage counsel was being listened to in the White House.

  In May 2002, several months after my trip to Niger, I participated in the annual conference of the American Turkish Council. One of the keynote speakers was Richard Perle, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the most virulent of the neoconservative war advocates. In a seminal paper, written in 1996 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entitled “A Clean Break: A New Security Strategy for the Realm,” Perle and his coauthors argued for the redrawing of the political map of the Middle East to serve Israel’s national security interests. The strategy included the overthrow of Saddam—“a laudable goal in its own right,” remarked the paper—as well as the neutralization of Israel’s other neighbors.

  In his speech at the conference, Perle spoke openly of a coming war with Iraq. His words, laden with the fire and brimstone of the true zealot, troubled me deeply. In a symposium that I cochaired the same afternoon with the former Turkish military commander, Cevik Bir, I voiced my concerns.

  It was the first time in more than a decade that I’d spoken publicly about Iraq. I had been out of government for four years. I was making a nice second career for myself by seeking out investment opportunities for select international clients. I did not need any notoriety that might result from stating my views publicly. Yet I was increasingly worried that only one point of view was being presented in a debate of paramount importance to any society, but particularly to a great democracy such as ours. No decision is more important than that to send a nation’s sons and daughters to a forei
gn land in order to kill and perhaps die for their country. As a democracy, we are all participants in that decision. Not to speak out would amount to complicity in whatever decision was taken.

  In my comments at the symposium, I argued that if we were prepared to entertain the possibility that in the coming year Iraq might be reduced to a chemical, biological, and nuclear wasteland, then we should march in lockstep to the martial music being played by Perle; if not, then we should think about alternatives to war. Bir, an experienced military man who had also served with the United Nations effort in Somalia, agreed, and, if anything, was even more strident than me in his opposition to military action. For the most part, the audience, largely American and Turkish businessmen, agreed with us. Perle, of course, had long since departed the meeting.

  As I later discovered while debating the issue, the prowar advocates were little inclined to listen to the views of others. They had made up their minds long ago, and now it was a matter of ramming their agenda through the decision-making process.

  By June 2002, it was clear that there were few forces willing to confront the neoconservative juggernaut. They had mastered the art of marketing their policy prescriptions and were aggressive and intimidating in debate. Their strategy, as I discovered, was to make an opening statement, interrupt the person making a different argument, and then filibuster to the end of a five-minute television segment. That domination of the available time, coupled with aggressively stated talking points and ad hominem attacks on the credibility and intelligence of their interlocutor, was designed to leave viewers with the impression these neocon experts were the only ones who knew what they were talking about. After a while, many of the genuine experts on the region, people who had spent their careers living and working in the Arab world, simply refused to subject themselves to such demeaning behavior and retired to the sidelines.