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SADDAM AGAIN
THAT WAS NOT the case with Saddam Hussein, who had plunged the region into war a second time in 1990 with his invasion of Kuwait. It was well understood that Iraq was systematically violating the ceasefire agreement that it had signed in 1991 and evading the sanctions that had been levied against it. Periodic crises had flared in the intervening years, leading arms inspectors to exit Iraq in 1998 and leaving Saddam’s WMD programs unmonitored. Unlike the situation in Iran, the international community had already employed virtually every tool to deal with Saddam—diplomatic isolation, weapons inspections, economic sanctions, travel bans, oil and arms embargoes, military containment through no-fly zones, and even the use of military force (to reverse his aggression against Kuwait in 1991 and to destroy suspected WMD sites in 1998).
Upon taking office in 2001, that was the situation we inherited and tried to address by strengthening the containment of the regime. Those efforts were frustrating and largely unsuccessful. September 11 had diverted our attention from the problem of Saddam, with the President making clear that the immediate problem was the al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan. Now, in the spring of 2002, examining the WMD threat and its nexus with terrorism, the question of what to do about Saddam—who had a record of using chemical weapons against Iranian targets and ethnic minorities within his own population—was on the table again.
The President was becoming deeply concerned about our inability to deal effectively with Iraq. The intelligence picture concerning Saddam’s military programs and his intentions was darkening. There were indeed uncertainties about the precise state of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. But it is rare that policy makers are fortunate enough to have incontrovertible evidence about adversaries’ weapons programs. Rogue regimes seeking WMD will try feverishly to evade detection: they will build front companies to trade in illicit goods, ship equipment and materials under false flags, and make inspections—when they consent to them—difficult with cat-and-mouse games that almost always lead to deeply qualified assessments of the state of their programs. Unlike the Soviet Union, which was a declared nuclear weapons state and actually paraded much of its military hardware through Red Square, virtually nothing about rogue regimes’ weapons proliferation activities is conducted out in the open. That means intelligence analysis of such covert activities is the art (not the science) of piecing together information and drawing a picture of what is transpiring.
For instance, it takes certain materials and equipment to produce chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. But many of the materials can also be used for more conventional purposes. The international community was well aware of the problem, which is why restrictions were placed on Iraq’s ability to import those so-called dual use items in the 1990s. Saddam violated the prohibitions. So an intelligence report might say that Saddam had established front companies that were purchasing chlorine used in producing nerve agents or high-quality aluminum tubes that could be used in either conventional weapons, such as artillery, or centrifuges for uranium enrichment. There was always the chance that Saddam had large numbers of swimming pools to clean, but that hardly seemed like the most probable explanation for large chlorine purchases.
The next step is to assess whether a country has the capability and know-how to build weapons from these materials. In the case of Saddam, the answer was yes—the scientists who’d produced Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the first Gulf War were still alive and serving the regime.
Then there is the question of infrastructure, laboratories, warehouses, and production facilities. Because there had been no inspectors in the country since 1998, the United States and others were dependent on maps and satellite imagery to monitor Iraq’s construction of complexes in which weapons could be produced. There was no doubt that many new buildings were springing up in places associated with military activities. But of course no one could actually go in and inspect them.
Finally, there is the issue of intent: does a country have an incentive to make weapons of mass destruction? The same facts about, say, Japan’s capabilities would not lead to the same conclusions. Saddam had produced weapons of mass destruction in the past and used them. His desire for WMD was not a theoretical proposition.
That led the intelligence communities of the United States, Europe, and even Russia to assess that Saddam was skirting the sanctions and likely going down a path to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction. The question was how fast his WMD programs were proceeding and, most important, how soon he would have a nuclear weapons capability. That calculation was influenced by the fact that intelligence failures usually come from underestimating the maturity of such programs. In 1949 the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon nearly five years ahead of intelligence estimates. Although the intelligence community had suspected that India was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, decision makers were caught off guard when New Delhi conducted its first nuclear test in 1974. And in 1991, after the first Gulf War, inspectors found an Iraqi nuclear program far more advanced than analysts had believed: Saddam was a little more than a year away from having a crude nuclear device.
The final step in the process of providing an intelligence estimate is for the various agencies (the United States had twelve at that time, seventeen today) to produce a joint assessment called a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). There are almost always differences among the agencies. Some will be reconciled in the process. Others will be reported as unresolved in the text of the assessment. And some will be noted as dissenting footnotes. The process usually requires months and takes place wholly within the intelligence community; the National Security Council is not involved. The NIE is then delivered to the Congress and the executive branch.
From the time he took office, the President had been receiving, almost daily, increasingly alarming reports about Saddam’s progress in reconstituting his weapons of mass destruction program. The director of the CIA, George Tenet, was at the time responsible for providing to the President the collective assessment of the intelligence agencies. George was a tough-talking, cigar-chewing easterner who stated his case compellingly. Even in retrospect I don’t think he overstated the evidence; he drew conclusions that pointed clearly toward Saddam’s progress in reconstituting his WMD.
The NIE, in October 2002, would sum it up this way: “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.”
The NIE also included an alternative view from the State Department’s assistant secretary for intelligence and research (INR) concerning nuclear weapons, though State joined the consensus on chemical and biological capabilities. While the INR view recognized Saddam’s desire for a nuclear capability, it stated, “The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing … an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq may be doing so, but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment. Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, INR is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors or to project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening. As a result, INR is unable to predict when Iraq could acquire a nuclear device or weapon.”
A policy maker confronted with one assessment that says that Baghdad “could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year” should it “acquire sufficient fissile material from abroad” and the INR alternative view that could not speak to timing is not likely to take the risks of accepting the latter, particularly after 9/11 and the specter of WMD terrorism.
Saddam was known to support terrorists. He paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers $25,000 apiece after attacks.
He had harbored Abu Abbas, who’d hijacked the Achille Lauro and killed a paraplegic American. In the shadow of 9/11, the possibility that Saddam might arm terrorists with chemical or biological weapons or even a nuclear device and set them loose against the United States was very real to us. We’d failed to connect the dots on September 10 and had never imagined the use of civilian airliners as missiles against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; that an unconstrained Saddam might aid a terrorist in an attack on the United States did not seem far-fetched.
Some observers said that Saddam would never transfer WMD to terrorists out of fear of retaliation should the weapons be traced back to their source. He had, however, established a pattern of recklessness, particularly in failing to anticipate the international community’s strong response to his 1990 invasion of Kuwait and his 1993 attempt to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush. When coupling his proclivity toward miscalculation with his past support for terrorist activity, it was not unreasonable to suspect that he might supply extremists with a weapon that could be detonated in an American city. And in any case, it was a chance we were not willing to take.
Certainly, the debate was influenced briefly by the question of whether Saddam had a hand in the September 11 attacks. It was reasonable to ask whether this implacable enemy of the United States had aided and abetted the attack on the Twin Towers. Some suggested that Saddam and al Qaeda were unlikely allies, given the dictator’s brutal secularism and his likely fear of bin Laden’s ambition to change the status quo in the Middle East. I was never convinced by that argument. There had been too many times in history when the explanation was simply “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But as the CIA reviewed the evidence, there was simply no convincing case to be made for a link between 9/11 and Saddam.
The Vice President and his staff, however, were absolutely convinced that Saddam was somehow culpable. Given to personally sifting through raw intelligence data (not assessments that have been analyzed, checked for credibility, and integrated with other intelligence, but undigested information coming straight from the field), the Vice President latched on to every report of a meeting between Iraqi agents and al Qaeda affiliates. Many of the reports were of highly questionable origin and reliability—so much so that the CIA felt strongly that there had been no complicity between Saddam and al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks and said so. But the Vice President’s office remained convinced that there had been. At one point the Vice President asked Lewis “Scooter” Libby to present the evidence to the President. That was highly unusual. We sat in the Oval and listened to Scooter, whose eloquence actually made the case sound plausible. But after he was done, much to my relief, the President just said, “You keep on digging.”
I stayed behind to make sure that he knew that the presentation had not been vetted with the intelligence agencies. He assured me that he did. The President didn’t use any of the reports in a speech, briefing, or private conversation. He believed that the problem was not a connection between Saddam and September 11 but rather a potential link between Iraq’s WMD and terrorism going forward.
We began to reconsider our strategy toward Saddam on two separate tracks. The NSC Principals met repeatedly after January 2002 to consider our options: continuing the policy of containment, including establishing smart sanctions and no-fly zones; promoting regime change through expatriates and covert action; enhancing international pressure to get arms inspectors back into Iraq; persuading or pressuring Saddam to give up power; using military force to overthrow him. There was brief consideration of setting up a Kurdish protectorate in the North to pressure the regime from within, but that idea gained little credence. In any case, the prospect of an independent Kurdish political unit within Iraq would have been unacceptable to the Turks, who have tried for decades to calm the restive Kurdish population along their border and dismantle the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist organization.
The discussion the first few times was inconclusive. Yet no one believed that Saddam would give up power peacefully, and overthrowing him using the mixed bag that was the Iraqi National Congress seemed highly unlikely. We were really down to two options if we wanted to change course: increasing international pressure to make him give up his WMD or overthrowing him by force.
On a separate track, the President had asked Don Rumsfeld to examine U.S. military options. Having witnessed the United States’ decision not to push toward Baghdad at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, President Bush wanted to understand the feasibility of overthrowing Saddam. The President had also been highly frustrated with the military’s lack of readiness prior to the invasion of Afghanistan and sought an early outline of the Iraqi battle plan if it ultimately proved necessary.
Don formally began that work with a secret order to General Tommy Franks on December 1, 2001. Franks farmed out pieces to various parts of the Joint Staff’s planning apparatus, trying to prevent all but the highest levels of the Pentagon from knowing what question they were really asking. Tommy Franks gave a preliminary briefing to the NSC via videoconference on December 28. The prospect of a six-month buildup to 400,000 troops sounded daunting, and Tommy noted that he was examining options with a lighter footprint—a way to give U.S. forces a “generated start.”
The President was at Camp David in February 2002 after addressing a Republican Congressional Retreat in West Virginia. On the Sunday morning after church, Andy Card and I were standing with him in his office. Iraq was on his mind, and he was wondering how to use the threat of force to compel Saddam to comply with his obligations and destroy his suspected WMD. “All he cares about is staying in power,” the President said. “Maybe if he thinks we’ll overthrow him, he’ll change.” I told the President that in political science we called that “coercive diplomacy.” He loved the term, and in time the two remaining options—international pressure and military force—would merge into one.
Bringing the Europeans on Board
THE REASSESSMENT of the Iraq strategy proceeded at a steady pace. In April the President and Tony Blair had an extended discussion about Iraq and the need to do something about Saddam. The President was clear that Saddam had to fear the international community if he was ever going to comply. He and Blair found common ground in that assessment, but what about the other allies?
The big event of the late spring was the President’s trip to Germany, Russia, and France, and then to Italy for a NATO summit. (NATO summits are convened in a member country or at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels as needed.) The trip was memorable for an audience with the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, and my first trip to the Vatican. I will always remember my Protestant faux pas. When the Holy Father took my hand, I said, “God bless you,” and then immediately realized that it should have been the other way around: you don’t bless the Holy Father—he blesses you. He simply said, “Thank you.”
The trip also included the first time we were treated to the hospitality of Silvio Berlusconi. The dinner took place at the spectacular Villa Madama. The sixteenth-century house overlooks Roman ruins on one side and the Vatican on the other. Standing on the balcony as the sun set on Rome, Andy Card quipped, “I guess the view from the Truman Balcony [at the White House] isn’t so great after all.”
As we turned to go in to a dinner consisting of tricolored pasta and beef and triflavored gelato matching the Italian flag, Berlusconi said, “Be sure to look at the ceiling frescos. They were painted by Raphael.”
I turned to Andy and said, “I guess the ceiling in the White House isn’t so special either.”
But the trip to Russia was the highlight of the journey. As a student of Russia, I found it personally satisfying to ride through the Spassky Gate of the Kremlin in the limousine of the President of the United States. I couldn’t help but flash back to my first time on Red Square as a somewhat insecure graduate student in 1979. I would never have dreamed then that I’d end up as the President’s national security advisor. I was a little sad that my mom and dad couldn’t see that
moment.
For the national security advisor, presidential trips are always busy and anxiety-filled. There is just so much to do to bring all of the agencies on board for various initiatives while attending to every detail of the President’s visit. But the trip to Moscow was relatively relaxed. We had the “deliverable” (that is, the breakthrough every President is expected to deliver during a major trip abroad), the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Strategic Offensive Reductions, also known as the Moscow Treaty, which dramatically reduced the offensive arsenals of the two sides. It was quite an accomplishment, coming less than a year after the United States had abrogated the ABM Treaty. Our relations with Russia were calm, even warm. Putin had visited the President at his ranch a few months earlier, and this was a return engagement for two men who enjoyed a certain degree of personal chemistry.
Crawford, Texas, was the President’s home, and an invitation to visit it signaled a personal commitment to a relationship with a head of state. That visit had been very successful, even though it had rained buckets upon Putin’s arrival. The President was annoyed that the visit to his special place had begun in foul weather. He was even unhappier when Putin, who was staying in the guesthouse, showed up for dinner an hour early. As Putin politely returned to his room, the President turned to Karen Hughes and me and barked, “Somebody forgot to tell Vladimir about the time change.” I knew that he meant me and I should have been chagrined. But for some reason I laughed. The thought that a former senior KGB officer somehow couldn’t get the time of day right—having failed to set his watch to the time change—struck me as funny. No harm was done, and the dinner was a great success. The next day, when the two men held a press conference before students of Crawford High School, the relationship seemed to be in very good shape indeed.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 21
