Others I respected had a different view. While still British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had famously warned President George H. W. Bush not to “go wobbly” after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But the formidable Thatcher had been voted out of office before the war was concluded. She seemed unhappy with the result in Iraq. “There is the aggressor, Saddam Hussein, still in power,” she later observed. Contrasting his fate to Bush’s and hers, she noted, “There is the President of the United States, no longer in power. There is the Prime Minister of Britain, who did quite a lot to get things there, no longer in power. I wonder who won?”7
Colin Powell, who had played such a prominent role in the decision not to attempt regime change, responded to the criticism. “[I]n due course, Saddam Hussein will not be there,” he predicted. “And when that happens, all this interesting second-guessing will seem quite irrelevant.”8
CHAPTER 30
Out of the Box
In the first Gulf War’s aftermath, Iraq remained a festering problem. Though its army had been defeated in Kuwait, the regime remained intact. In an attempt to keep Saddam Hussein in check, and to pressure him to comply with demands by the United Nations, the Security Council imposed economic sanctions banning trade with Iraq, including in oil. The United States, Britain, and France imposed UN-sanctioned no-fly zones over the Kurdish-populated areas in northern Iraq and the Shiite-populated region in southern Iraq. American, British, and—initially—French aircraft patrolled the zones regularly.*
Undeterred, Saddam continued to use brutality on a massive scale. After suppressing the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings in 1991, Saddam drained the marshlands of southern Iraq, turning the region into a salt-encrusted desert. His purpose was to punish the “marsh Arabs” for their support of the rebellion against him. He drove some 150,000 Iraqis from their homes. His intelligence services were merciless in torturing suspected opponents. Arbitrary arrests and unexplained disappearances were commonplace. He built rape rooms to bring “dishonor” to the female members of families suspected of opposition to him.* And before long the Iraqi military began a near daily routine of firing on coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones.
Saddam’s regime claimed it had destroyed its arsenals of proscribed weapons, but the United Nations weapons inspectors were skeptical. Iraqi officials spied on the inspectors, sanitized suspect sites before the teams arrived, and barred them from examining Saddam’s vast palace complexes. He reorganized his biological weapons program creatively by closing his military-run weapons facilities while creating dual-use plants capable of making products for both civilian and military use.2 Facilities that produced fertilizer and antibiotics, for example, could be retooled quickly to create chemical and biological weapons. By 1998, Saddam had stopped cooperating with the UN inspectors altogether, effectively forcing them out of the country and ending even a pretense of complying with the UN Security Council’s demands. In response, the UN adopted still more resolutions expressing outrage at Saddam’s “totally unacceptable” actions.3 But few nations, other than the United States and Great Britain, appeared willing to do much, if anything, to enforce the UN resolutions.
In January 1998, I joined a group of former national security officials in signing a letter to President Clinton that called for stronger action against Saddam’s regime.4 “The only acceptable strategy,” our letter read, “is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.” For the short term, we endorsed military strikes on suspected weapons facilities. For the long term, we called for removing Saddam and his regime.5
Later in 1998, large bipartisan majorities in each house of the U.S. Congress generally endorsed the policies recommended in our letter to Clinton. The Iraq Liberation Act declared that the goal of U.S. policy should be “to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power.” The U.S. House of Representatives approved that legislation by a vote of 360 to 38.† It passed the Senate without a single dissenting vote. Clinton signed the legislation into law. Regime change in Iraq was now the official policy of the United States.
Even as Clinton endorsed regime change, some administration officials contended that the existing UN economic sanctions had kept Saddam reasonably under control—“in a box,” as Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, put it.6 However, the sanctions administered through the UN’s Oil-for-Food program had loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. The UN was generating billions of dollars in illicit, unrestricted funds for Saddam Hussein, who used the cash to finance, among other things, his dual-use weapons facilities.7 The so-called Oil-for-Food program became one of the greatest scams perpetrated in the six decades of the United Nation’s existence.8 When the second Bush administration came into office in January 2001, the Iraqi “containment” policy was in tatters.
Various commentators asserted that Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, was intent on “fixing” his father’s error of leaving Saddam in power.9 From what I saw, that was not the case. Before his inauguration, when I met with the President-elect in Austin, Texas to discuss defense policy, the subject of Iraq did not even come up. The first person I remember mentioning the issue to me in 2001 was Clinton’s outgoing Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen. He and the senior military officers in the Clinton administration were fully aware of the dangers our aircraft crews faced in the skies over Iraq. Despite the risks, Cohen believed that discontinuing our patrols of the no-fly zones was not an option. It would be a victory for Saddam and further erode an already fraying coalition of nations committed to containment of his brutal regime.
Iraq’s repeated efforts to shoot down our aircraft weighed heavily on my mind. Iraq was the only nation in the world that was attacking the U.S. military on a daily basis—in fact, more than two thousand times from January 2000 to September 2002.10 I was concerned, as were the CENTCOM commander and the Joint Chiefs, that one of our aircraft would soon be shot down and its crew killed or captured.* In my first months back at the Pentagon, I asked General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to brief me on CENTCOM’s plans in the event Iraq successfully brought down one of our planes. The plan, code-named Desert Badger, was seriously limited. Its goal was to rescue the crew of a downed aircraft—but it had no component to inflict any damage or to send any kind of message to Saddam Hussein that such provocations were unacceptable. Our friends in the region had criticized previous American responses to Iraqi aggression as weak and indecisive and had advised us that our enemies had taken comfort from America’s timidity. The Desert Badger plan was clear evidence of that problem. I asked Shelton and General Franks to have their planners come up with a range of other options the President could consider. If an aircraft was downed, I wanted to be sure we had ideas for the President that would enable him to inflict a memorable cost. The new proposals I ordered included attacks on Iraq’s air defense systems and their command-and-control facilities to enable us to cripple the regime’s abilities to attack our planes.
Several weeks into the administration we had reason to signal to Baghdad that the days of mild and ineffective U.S. responses to their repeated provocations were coming to a close. Iraq was working to strengthen its air defense and radar capabilities in the no-fly zones by installing fixing-optic cables to make it more difficult for us to monitor their communications. The network was a direct challenge to the UN no-fly zones. On February 16, 2001, after Iraqi ground units had again targeted our aircraft, twenty-four American and British aircraft launched a coordinated attack on five Iraqi air defense sites, destroying them.*
Though Iraq was discussed occasionally at the senior levels of the administration, by the summer of 2001, U.S. policy remained essentially what it had been at the end of the Clinton administration—adrift. I decided to bring my questions about our inherited Iraq strategy to the members of the National Security Council to seek some clarity and presidential guidance.
In July, I sent a memo to Cheney, Powell, and Rice asking that
we hold a principals committee meeting to discuss Iraq. In the document I raised two scenarios that could have the effect of forcing the President to make a decision on Iraq under unfavorable circumstances. The first involved its neighbor Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, which would dramatically change the balance in the region and possibly spark a regionwide arms buildup. Second was the possibility that “Somebody, whether Iran, Iraq, or Usama Bin Laden, could take out the royal family in one or more of the Gulf states and change the regime and the balance, perhaps inviting Iranian or Iraqi troops in to protect them.” I also noted that some event totally unforeseen by us and out of our control could force a U.S. decision on Iraq. I argued that we would be better off developing a policy well ahead of events that could overtake us. On the broader subject of Iraq, I outlined a range of possibilities for consideration:
We can publicly acknowledge that sanctions don’t work over extended periods and stop the pretense of having a policy that is keeping Saddam “in the box ...”
A second option would be to go to our moderate Arab friends, have a reappraisal and see whether they are willing to engage in a more robust policy. We would have to assert strong leadership and convince them that we will see the project through and not leave them later to face a provoked, but still incumbent, Saddam. The risks of a serious regime-change policy must be weighed against the certainty of the danger of an increasingly bold and nuclear-armed Saddam in the near future.
A third possibility perhaps is to take a crack at initiating contact with Saddam Hussein. He has his own interests. It may be that, for whatever reason, at his stage in life he might prefer to not have the hostility of the United States and the West and might be willing to make some accommodation. Opening a dialogue with Saddam would be an astonishing departure for the USG, [U.S. government] although I did it for President Reagan [in] the mid-1980s. It would win praise from certain quarters, but might cause friends, especially those in the region, to question our strength, steadiness and judgment. And the likelihood of Saddam making and respecting an acceptable accommodation of our interests over a long period may be small.12
I thought a diplomatic overture on Iraq from the Bush administration—a “Nixon goes to China” approach—was worth suggesting to the President. As I wrote in my memo to the NSC principals, echoing my thoughts of some twenty years earlier when I visited Baghdad, “There ought to be a way for the U.S. to not be at loggerheads with both of the two most powerful nations in the Gulf—Iran and Iraq.” Though the Iran-Iraq War had ended more than a decade earlier, the regimes in Tehran and Baghdad still viewed each other with hostility. Despite that animosity, both still had poor relations with the United States. I wondered if the right combination of blandishments and pressures might lead or compel Saddam Hussein toward an improved arrangement with America.* While a long shot, it was not out of the question.
The National Security Council never organized the comprehensive review of U.S.-Iraq policy I requested in the summer of 2001. We can’t know how the Bush administration’s Iraq policy might have evolved if 9/11 had not occurred, but that event compelled our government to make terrorism a focus of intense attention. It demanded that American officials reexamine national security policy comprehensively in light of the vulnerabilities the attack exposed. It forced the still new administration to recognize the special danger posed by nations that both supported terrorist groups and possessed or pursued weapons of mass destruction.
Though intelligence did not report that Saddam was tightly connected to al-Qaida or that he was involved in the 9/11 attack, Iraq was included in almost any analysis of state supporters of terrorism. Iraq had been on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror since 1990. The regime’s links to individual terrorists and terrorist groups earned Iraq its place on the “axis of evil” list.14
When I was queried by reporters on links between Iraq and terrorists, I referred to an unclassified written statement I had requested of George Tenet and that was subsequently prepared by the CIA. The paper was taken directly from Tenet’s unclassified conclusions provided to Congress, which stated:
We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’ida going back a decade.
Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qa’ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression.
Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qa’ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad.
We have credible reporting that al-Qa’ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qa’ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.15
Tenet, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration were certainly not the only ones thinking about possible linkages. A few hours after the 9/11 attack, James Woolsey, CIA director under President Clinton, raised the question of whether Saddam was involved.16 ABC News, the Guardian newspaper, and other media outlets floated similar questions prominently. Their queries were not unreasonable. At the time Saddam was offering twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonuses to the families of suicide bombers to encourage them to attack Israel. He allowed terrorist groups such as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Palestine Liberation Front, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Arab Liberation Front to operate within Iraq’s borders.17 During the 1990s, terrorists supported by Saddam struck in Rome and Vienna, killing Americans and Israelis. Saddam gave refuge to terrorists on the run, like Abu Nidal, whose group was responsible for some nine hundred deaths and casualties, including a number of Americans, in attacks in more than twenty countries.18 Abu Abbas, who hijacked the cruise liner Achille Lauro and murdered an American citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, was living openly and safely in Baghdad.
Documents discovered after the coalition’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 shed more light on the depth of the regime’s linkages with terrorism. As far back as January 1993, for example, Saddam had ordered the formation of “a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia.”19 Saddam used his paramilitary group, the Fedayeen Saddam, to train thousands of terrorists to be deployed both inside and outside of Iraq’s borders.20 While the idea of Iraq working with al-Qaida to inflict harm on the United States did not seem to be much of a stretch, in my public remarks I stayed close to the CIA’s official assessment.
My concerns about Iraq went beyond Saddam’s support of terrorism or any involvement with al-Qaida. It went beyond his savage oppression and genocidal acts against his own people. My view rested on the fact that previous attempts to reduce the risks Saddam posed had failed. The UN sanctions that had checked Iraqi ambitions in the 1990s were crumbling. Further, the sanctions were punishing the Iraqi people more than they were disadvantaging Saddam Hussein and, as a result, international support for the sanctions had waned. Saddam’s belligerence was one of the main reasons we had kept U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which had fueled bin Laden’s propaganda. Saddam’s long record of aggression and regional ambition were not in doubt, and there were no indications that he had changed. If anything, Saddam seemed emboldened by a decade of UN and American acquiescence. It was increasingly clear that Iraq’s continued defiance of the United Nations would further weaken that institution and encourage other dangerous regimes to follow suit.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and our changed global environment, I wanted updated thinking about U.S. interests and options. I asked Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, to consider the broader principles involved, not just Iraq’s history under Saddam. Among other questions, I asked: What steps should the United States consider taking—when, and with whom? Is it proper to act alone? What about the argument that we should try to obtain approval from the UN Security Council? When is it reasonable to conclude that all means short of war have been tried and have failed? Is preemptive action to forestall the threat then justi
fied?
Feith was the right person for the assignment. He listened carefully to views contrary to his own and could reformulate them and present them respectfully and accurately. He advised that even those friendly to the United States and sensitive to our security interests worried about a world in which the American president could decide to bring about regime change by force in country after country. I understood that concern. The Bush doctrine of preemption, or more precisely, anticipatory self-defense, could not be seen as a license for an American president to exercise unchecked military power on a whim. After all, the Founding Fathers saw unchecked power as the greatest danger to human liberty. Our Constitution created a system of checks and balances in the hope of ensuring that no president, legislative body, or court could accrue enough power to overwhelm the others. Feith and his policy team formulated these thoughts in a 2002 memo titled “Sovereignty and Anticipatory Self-Defense.”21
In the twenty-first century, the idea that countries could be left alone unless and until they actually launched an aggressive war had to have exceptions. The lethality of modern weapons and the stated intent of terrorists to use them made it difficult to sustain that traditional view. Regimes with records of aggression and dishonesty, and which had or were working toward WMD capabilities, could inflict far more massive damage than ever before. An Iranian nuclear strike on the small state of Israel, for example, could destroy so much of the nation that Israel might be unable to survive as a viable state. Could a responsible Israeli prime minister allow that to occur by waiting until after a nuclear missile was launched? Nuclear or biological material covertly passed to a terrorist organization could be detonated or released in one or more of our cities, killing millions, bringing our economy to a halt, and effectively suspending our country’s cherished civil liberties. Could an American president sit back, wait, and take that risk?
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