American Heroes

by Oliver North

  The result was the selection of Hamid Karzai, a tall, ascetic man as the leader of their Loya Jirga, or legislative body.

  Hamid Karzai

  Hamid Karzai was living in Quetta, Pakistan, in 1999 when his father was gunned down in cold blood. The killers were agents of the Taliban government in Karzai's native Afghanistan. The killing was a warning to Karzai. He had been working to see the former king, Zahir Shah, reinstated in power.

  The day his father was murdered was when Hamid Karzai dedicated his life to defeating the Taliban. And he didn't have to wait long to see his dream realized. Once the United States went to war in Afghanistan, Karzai emerged as a leader with the Northern Alliance forces, commanding a force of three thousand Pashtun fighters. With them, he helped wrest Kandahar from the Taliban and became the chairman of the transitional administration a month later when he met with other Afghan leaders in Bonn, Germany. Six months later, a council of tribal, civic, and religious leaders voted him the interim president of the country.

  The road ahead promised to be rocky. He had his hands full trying to rebuild his nation, defeat the remnants of the Taliban, and dodge multiple assassination attempts. Two years later he won 55 percent of the vote for president in the first national election in Afghanistan's history. And all of this because American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines were willing to fight back against those who had started a Jihad against us.

  3

  EXPANDING THE WAR

  CIA Map of Iraq

  THE CASE AGAINST SADDAM

  After a U.S.-led coalition routed Saddam Hussein's army and drove them out of Kuwait in 1991, the United Nations slapped Iraq with an oil embargo and strong economic sanctions. These were designed to deny the defeated dictator the ability to rebuild his army and threaten his neighbors.

  Almost immediately, complaints began to surface that the sanctions put an inordinate burden on the average Iraqi people. Critics claimed, without substantiation, that the trade restrictions were responsible for starving thousands of Iraqi children to death.

  In 1995 the Clinton administration proposed a UN-administered "Oil for Food" program that would allow Saddam to sell limited amounts of Iraqi oil in exchange for approved humanitarian shipments of food and medicine that would go to the Iraqi people. In theory, the plan made sense. But as is often the case, especially when dealing with dictators and men whose morality can be bought, the plan was soon perverted. Even with hundreds of UN employees in Iraq as overseers, the oil-for-food program became rife with corruption.

  The full extent of the fraud will never be known, but by January of 2002, U.S. and British investigators had uncovered evidence that Saddam's family and his Baath Party officials were pocketing billions in skimmed profits, smuggled oil revenues, and illegal kickbacks. Millions more in illicit funds were apparently being diverted to line the pockets of UN officials.

  In Iraq, the effects of the corruption were far-reaching. Food and medicine purchased with oil-for-food funds were delivered to Iraqi government warehouses by Baath Party officials. From these "distribution centers" humanitarian supplies were doled out to supporters of Saddam's regime. A flourishing black market created a whole new revenue stream for the Iraqi dictator and his cronies.

  Instead of bettering the lives of the Iraqi people, oil-for-food monies were diverted to buy weapons and build more than sixty extravagant palaces for Saddam and his family. In Baghdad and Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, he constructed luxurious walled citadels that I got to see firsthand in 2003 when U.S. forces first entered these cities.

  Saddam Hussein built dozens of palaces around the country, such as the Al Faw Palace near Baghdad International Airport

  Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, were put in charge of purchasing vast quantities of munitions and explosives to rebuild the Iraqi military in direct defiance of the terms of the 1991 armistice agreement. Skimmed funds were also sent to fill the coffers of European political elites who could help influence any vote in the UN for military action. By January 2002, intelligence reports and "defector" debriefs also indicated that some of the excess oil-for-food cash was being diverted to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

  A mosque in Baghdad

  Saddam fancied himself a modern-day Nebuchadnezzar

  Saddam built this palace directly atop the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar's ancient six-hundred-room palace in Babylon, to the horror of archaeologists

  PREPARATION FOR PREEMPTION

  January 2002 State of the Union Address

  On 29 January 2002, in his State of the Union Address, President Bush described Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an "axis of evil." He announced to the world, "I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand idly by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." His statement made clear that the United States wasn't going to wait for a terror attack like 9/11 launched by the ayatollahs in Tehran, Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, or Kim Jung Il in Pyongyang. This was enough to drive the global left into paroxysms of angst.

  In London, Hollywood director Robert Altman proclaimed, "When I see an American flag flying, it's a joke" and "this present government in America, I just find disgusting." This performance would soon be replicated thousands of times over by critics of the administration.

  Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), then the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, initially gave the commander in chief high marks for his State of the Union Address. But on 11 February—the five-month anniversary of the terror attack that killed nearly three thousand Americans—he decided that it really wasn't nice to use labels like "evil." He told dozens of PBS viewers not watching the Olympics, "We've got to be very careful with rhetoric of that kind."

  That same night at Brown University, AOL-Time Warner's Ted Turner took center stage in the "Blame America First" passion play. He told five hundred students attending the school that expelled him in 1960 that the nineteen terrorists who hijacked four airliners on 9/11 "were brave at the very least." He went on to deride President Bush for his "axis of evil" comment and baldly opined, "The reason the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don't have any hope for a better life." The Ivy Leaguers applauded.

  On 12 February former Vice President Al Gore joined the chorus of critics, contending that President Bush was showing "impatience and disdain" toward our "allies" in the campaign against terrorism. In remarks to the liberal Council on Foreign Relations, Gore claimed that terrorism is "today's manifestation of an anger welling up from deep layers of grievance shared by many millions of people." And what causes this anger? "Poverty, ignorance, disease and environmental disorder, corruption and political oppression." Mr. Gore' solution: Increased spending on foreign aid.

  In late March of 2002, while American soldiers were dodging gunfire in the Afghan mountains near the Pakistani border, FOX News sent me to Normandy and London to complete two War Stories episodes. One covered the 1940 Battle of Britain and the other was about the June 6, 1944, Allied landings on the Normandy coast. In both France and the United Kingdom, I found extraordinary opposition to any military operations against Saddam.

  In retrospect, it was naive of me to expect the French and British political classes to have anything but animosity for the United States and our worldwide fight against terrorism. And in fairness, those who actually work for a living—cab drivers, restaurateurs, and shopkeepers—expressed a fondness for Americans and respect for the Bush administration's goals. But in the press rooms, broadcast centers, and salons of the self-significant, there was an animosity toward the United States that I hadn't seen since the Vietnam War.

  My first encounter was at a dinner in Paris after returning from Omaha Beach. In a room overlooking streets once patroled by Hitler's storm troopers, members of the Parisian press and ex-governme
nt officials confronted me with a laundry list of grievances: "The treatment of the Afghan detainees in Guantanamo, Cuba, is inhumane." Another said, "There is no provocation for threatening Iraq." And yet another: "Don't expect us to help you make war against Moslems all around the world. George Bush is swashbuckling around the planet like President John Wayne."

  I admit that my French is deplorable, and I can't confirm whether my inquisitor said "swashbuckling" or "buckswashling." But I'm fairly certain he was thinking of Ronald Reagan, not John Wayne.

  In response, I politely reminded one antagonist that I had "just left the American cemetery at Colleville, overlooking Omaha Beach, where nearly ten thousand of my father's comrades in arms lie buried, and I don't want to hear anymore complaints about my country." Silenced, he shrugged and walked away.

  Protestors rally near the European Union headquarters in Brussels

  The next day, I learned that the timorous appeasement syndrome wasn't confined to Paris. In London, the criticism was almost identical, though easier to understand. A British newspaperman, staked out at my hotel, pointed to my Old Glory lapel pin and asked, "Here to show the American flag while your paratroopers are killing innocent Afghanis?" His follow-up was, "How many young British boys are going to have to die in the Hindu Kush before you Yanks are happy?"

  British television filled the airwaves with members of Parliament castigating Prime Minister Tony Blair for supporting the United States' war on terror. On the morning I departed for home, the Manchester Guardian featured carping critics of Blair's own party. One whined that "any extension of the war to Iraq could bring about an intensification, and indeed a breach, of the anti-terrorist coalition." Another opined, "The American Air Force has probably killed more women and children than any other force in the world." Their refrains eerily resembled British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's 29 September 1938, promise of "peace for our time."

  Had Chamberlain and the Europeans stood up to Hitler in 1938, rather than appeasing him, World War II might have been prevented and the death of 405,399 Americans might have been avoided.

  American forces liberating France, 1944

  The Euro-elites apparently forgot that the United States was attacked first and that, in many respects, the Jihad being waged against us is the consequence of Western tolerance for Islamic extremism. Mohammad Atta, Osama bin Laden's "unit commander" for the 9/11 attack, was a regular in Germany. Zacharias Moussaoui, eventually tried and convicted in Alexandria, Virginia, traveled freely in Europe on a French passport. Richard Reid, the infamous shoe bomber, wore his exploding sneakers aboard a U.S.-bound airliner from France.

  By the summer of 2002, the most commonly heard refrain went something like this: "If Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were such a big threat, our European allies and friends in the region would be with us, and they are not. Therefore, we must not attack Iraq."

  As American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines prepared to fight Saddam's military, that's a pretty close paraphrase of what they were hearing from foreign capitals, retired officials of former administrations, and much of the media.

  Europe's timid response to the prospect of military action against Iraq was easy to understand. By 2002, nearly every "NATO capital" was overrun with refugees from former colonies—many of them Islamic. The Europeans were beset with pervasive political, economic, and spiritual exhaustion, governments beset by internal European Union bickering, and fragile left-of-center polit-ical coalitions agreeing on little other than curbing U.S. influence.

  Global Day of Protest against the Iraq War, 15 February 2003

  Euro-business lead-ers were afraid of losing their exclusive "axis of evil" cookie jar in Iraq where they could operate without American economic competition. "Nobody in Germany or continental Europe agrees with Bush," Holger Friedrich, a fund manager for Frankfurt-based Union Investment GmbH, said in August, as his firm purchased Iranian bonds to help fund the radical Islamic theocracy in Tehran. Even Britain's Aberdeen Asset Management Trust was invested in Iraqi and North Korean debt. "It's toxic stuff," admitted Colm McDonagh, an Aberdeen fund manager, "but when it moves, it really moves."

  In 1997, Total SA, a French oil company with permanent suites at the Al-Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, struck a two-billion-dollar natural gas contract with Iran. On the occasion, then-Premier Lionel Jospin applauded this triumph of French enterprise. "American laws apply in the United States," he sneered. "They do not apply in France." The French remained Saddam's principal European trading partners and financial supporters until the U.S.-led invasion in March of 2003.

  The timorous grandchildren of those who tried to appease Hitler did not savor the prospect of U.S. intelligence teams roaming at will through the records of Saddam's "defense industries" and exposing Europe's complicity in building Iraq's arsenals. After the first Gulf War, Kenneth Timmerman chronicled in The Death Lobby Saddam's success in gaining the help of foreign corporations and governments in building his storehouse of ABCs—atomic, biological, and chemical weapons.

  29 January 2002

  State of the Union Address

  European leaders – with the exception of British Prime Minister Tony Blair – apparently didn't believe President Bush when he said, "Some governments will be timid in the face of terror. (But) make no mistake about it; if they do not act, America will."

  French engineers had helped build the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, which the Israelis destroyed in 1981. In 2002 the French were holding four billion dollars in unpaid Iraqi debts. German firms specialized in providing technologies for making poison gas and building missiles. W. Seth Carus, a senior research professor at the National Defense University, had noted in 1992, "Everything that showed up in Iraq—chemical, biological, nuclear—had a German element in it." And Saddam's "supergun," the long-range, nuclear-capable cannon that was nearly completed when Operation Desert Storm commenced, had been produced by companies from seven different European countries. Little of that had changed a decade later.

  More ominous than Europe's craven reaction to Baghdad's aggressiveness was the stunning stance of Saddam's very vulnerable neighbors. The region's leaders had well-founded apprehension that they could all go the way of Anwar Sadat—in a hail of gunfire from radical Islamic extremists.

  In Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud sought to prevent such an outcome by dancing with both the West and radical Islam. They devised an Arabian version of economic liberalism and political repression similar to that in communist China. The consequence of Riyadh's political polygamy was demonstrated on 9/11, when fifteen children of middle-class Saudis transformed themselves into suicide hijackers and mass murderers.

  Regimes throughout the rest of the region, whether friendly or not to the United States, equate political freedom with instability. They are dominated by political systems typified by military coups, oil-saturated oligarchies, and events like Gen. Pervez Musharraf's seizure of control in Pakistan and his unilateral decision to revise the country's constitution.

  The leaders of Iraq's neighboring governments had no great love for Saddam. But they had even less affection for the United States bringing about a democratic transition next door. After all, if "free and fair elections" work in Baghdad, they will also work in Tehran, Amman, Riyadh, Ramallah, Damascus, and Cairo.

  By the autumn of 2002, our "allies"—the French, Germans, and most of "Old Europe"—were using every forum they could find to decry the Bush administration's "rush to war" in Iraq. Encouraged by massive anti-American protests on the streets of European capitals, President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder repeatedly urged the United States and Great Britain to delay plans for military action against Saddam until the UN's super-sleuth, Hans Blix, had "completed" his search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.

  U.S. chemical experts of the 101st Airborne Division examine a pod that may have been intended as a delivery system for a chemi
cal-biological agent

  WMD: THE CASUS BELLI

  NORTHERN KUWAIT — Marines of Charlie Company, 1st Bn, 5th Marines, 5th Regimental Combat Team, take cover wearing MOPP level-4 gear

  The search for nuclear, chemical, and biological WMDs in Iraq was significantly hindered by Saddam's response to UN-mandated inspections: deceit, denial, and deception. It was a stance that President Bush deemed to be simply unacceptable. That's what he told the United Nations General Assembly when he addressed the body on 12 September 2002, a year and a day after the 9/11 attacks. He asked the UN for a clear deadline for compliance. France and Russia refused to allow the resolution to pass the Security Council.

  A week after the president noted that Saddam was defying over a dozen Security Council resolutions, Saddam invited UN weapons inspectors back to Iraq. Skeptics—and I was certainly one of them—pointed out that UN Security Council Resolution 687, passed in 1991, compelled Iraq to unconditionally accept weapons inspectors. Yet, since 1994, Iraqi authorities had consistently impeded UN access to its military and research facilities. UN inspectors in Iraq had been fired upon, assaulted, stripped of incriminating documents, and denied both air and vehicular access to "sensitive" areas. In 1997, Iraq even banned Americans from participating in UN inspections.