In our system of governance, U.S. presidents, even when invoking preemption, are still accountable to the American people and subject to the internal checks inherent in the American political system. A president has to make decisions with an eye to the powers of the Congress and the courts, as well as the increasingly large role of the media, the internet, and other nongovernmental actors.22 Most importantly, a U.S. president must face public opinion and the consequences that come with elections. Preemptive military action or anticipatory self-defense undertaken by the United States also requires allies—including bases, overflight rights, transit routes, shared intelligence, and logistical support. While not legal checks, these were practical checks we all needed to keep in mind.
A secretary of defense and senior military officials in the chain of command are often considered by outsiders to be the most vocal advocates of the use of military force. I’ve found that more often the opposite is true. Since those in a position of responsibility for the troops understand well the costs of war, they can often be reluctant war fighters. I supported military action against al-Qaida and the Taliban because they had left us no alternative. Saddam, to my mind, was different. I thought we might be able to find other ways of bringing about regime change in Iraq.
On September 21, 2001, I wrote myself a note. “At the right moment,” I stated, “we may want to give Saddam Hussein a way out for his family to live in comfort.”23 I thought an aggressive diplomatic effort, coupled by a threat of military force, just might convince Saddam and those around him to seek exile. By 2002, the Iraqi regime had seen what we were able to do in Afghanistan. If there were enough rational individuals around Saddam, they might be convinced that George W. Bush was not bluffing and was committed to the disarmament of Saddam Hussein. I hoped the world could stand united in that message. That hope was doomed to disappointment.
CHAPTER 31
The Case for Regime Change
Fifteen days after 9/11, the President asked me to join him in the Oval Office alone. Our meetings almost always included some combination of the vice president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of state, the national security adviser, or the White House chief of staff—but not on the morning of September 26.
The President leaned back in the black leather chair behind his desk. He asked that I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iraq. He knew the Joint Chiefs and I were concerned about Saddam Hussein’s attacks on our aircraft in the northern and southern no-fly zones, but two weeks after the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, those of us in the Department of Defense were fully occupied.
He wanted the options to be “creative,” which I took to mean that he wanted something different from the massive land force assembled during the 1991 Gulf War. I certainly did not get the impression the President had made up his mind on the merits of toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime. In fact, at the September 15 NSC meeting at Camp David days earlier when Iraq had been raised, he had specifically kept the focus on Afghanistan.
I told him I would review CENTCOM’s existing Iraq plan and speak to General Franks about updating it.
There was another matter President Bush wanted to discuss with me that morning. “Dick told me about your son,” he said. “Are you and Joyce doing okay?”
Although Nick had been in recovery from drug addiction at the time of Bush’s inauguration, his condition had been fragile, and he had relapsed. He had tried several times to turn his life around, but by the late summer of 2001, he was bottoming out again. He would disappear for periods, turning up occasionally in various towns across the West. Joyce and I had left Washington at the end of August to spend Labor Day weekend in New Mexico. After being out of touch for weeks, Nick reappeared in Taos while we were there.
In a long, painful visit, we again tried to convince him to seek treatment. My inclination was to do whatever it took to get him clean, even if it was against his wishes. Joyce understood better than I did that addiction was a disease that people eventually have to overcome on their own. As parents we could only offer support, encouragement, and a direction. Nick was weighing heavily on my mind when I returned to Washington in early September. One part of me was always thinking of him and the terrible state he was in. But in the days after 9/11, being distracted wasn’t an option.
On September 18, a week before my meeting with President Bush, Nick had called Joyce from Taos. “Happy birthday, Mom,” he said. He then told her he was leaving to check into a treatment center. Valerie’s husband, our son-in-law Paul Richard, and a friend of ours in Taos had agreed to take him. Nick said they had convinced him, and he was ready.
I had shared the information on Nick with Cheney, who had apparently passed it on to Bush. Because I knew the President had a great deal confronting him, I was surprised that he was mentioning our son, but he spoke with such concern that my family troubles seemed to be the only thing on his mind.
I told the President the activity surrounding 9/11 had not given me much time to think about our situation. But Joyce and I desperately wanted Nick’s treatment to be successful this time.
“I love Nick so much,” I said.
“You have my full support and prayers,” Bush said.
What had happened to Nick—coupled with the wounds to our country and the Pentagon—all started to hit me. At that moment, I couldn’t speak. And I was unable to hold back the emotions that until then I had shared only with Joyce. I had not imagined I might choke up in a meeting with the President of the United States, but at that moment George W. Bush wasn’t just the President. He was a compassionate human being who had a sense of what Joyce and I were going through.
Bush rose from his chair, walked around his desk, and put his arm around me.*
Because I had been reviewing the various war plans regularly, I knew no one would think it out of the ordinary for me to request a briefing on our existing options on Iraq. As a precaution, however, I asked for briefings to cover several contingencies in various parts of the world.
As the CENTCOM briefers moved through their PowerPoint slides on the on-the-shelf Iraq war plan, it quickly became clear that it was only a slightly modified version of the one used during the first Gulf War. It called for roughly the same number of forces used then—nearly half a million U.S. troops to be marshaled into the region over many months. They were to invade through Iraq’s southern desert, much as they had in 1991. Because the firepower and precision of U.S. forces had increased substantially since then, the plan would represent a vastly more lethal force in 2003.† Someone in the briefing described the plan, appropriately I thought, as “Desert Storm on Steroids.”
This was not what the Commander in Chief had told me he was looking for. It was a stale, slow-building, and dated plan that Iraqi forces would expect. A decade had come and gone since the Gulf War, yet the war plan seemed to have been frozen in time. Everyone in the briefing recognized that CENTCOM and Joint Staff planners would need to do a major overhaul.
I did not hear any more about Iraq for two months. Then, on November 21, 2001, a week after coalition forces had driven the Taliban from Kabul, the President called me aside at the end of an NSC meeting. He led me into a small, unoccupied office a few feet from the Situation Room, closed the door, and sat down.
“Where do we stand on the Iraq planning?” he asked.
I told him I had been briefed on the existing plan, and that it was very much like one for the Gulf War a decade ago. As I expected, it was not what the President was seeking. “To make progress,” I said, “I need to engage others in the Pentagon and at CENTCOM to update the Iraq plan. It will need a good deal of work.”
“That’s fine,” Bush replied. I told him that CENTCOM could update it in the normal order of things, but that they would need to work with intelligence officials as well. The latest intelligence on Iraqi military capabilities, suspected WMD sites, and other targets would shape how CENTCOM refashioned the plan. That meant I would need to talk
to Tenet, and senior military officials would need to have discussions with their counterparts at the Agency.
The President said he didn’t want me to communicate with people outside of DoD for the time being, and that he would personally talk to Tenet and others at the right moment.
Back at the Pentagon, I asked Myers to stop by my office. I knew his focus at the time was almost exclusively on Afghanistan. Once we were alone, I told him about our new guidance: “Dick, the President wants to know what kind of operations plan we have for Iraq.”1
Myers showed no surprise. This was a request from the Commander in Chief, and the General’s instinct was to get to work. Myers had been with me when I had been briefed on the existing Iraq plan. He agreed it needed a thorough reworking. We both knew that CENTCOM’s planners were already taxed, given their ongoing work on Afghanistan. Nonetheless, I told him we should have Franks and CENTCOM bring the plan in line with the current capabilities of our military and with the latest intelligence on Iraq.
After receiving his new assignment from Myers, Franks took a look at the current Iraq war plan and confirmed our opinion that it was seriously out-of-date. In fact, I knew of no military officials who believed that the “Desert Storm on Steroids” war plan would be appropriate for the current circumstances. Saddam’s overall military capability had eroded since Desert Storm. At the same time, American military capabilities in precision-guided weapons had improved substantially. Also in my mind was the fact that in the 1991 Gulf War, enormous quantities of equipment and other materiel sent to the Gulf were never used.*
One thing that was clear was that Iraq would require a great many more troops on the ground than CENTCOM had marshaled in Afghanistan. Saddam’s forces, unlike the Taliban’s, were sizable. The Republican Guard contained formidable, well-trained armored divisions. And in Iraq, with the exception of the Kurds who kept to the north, there were no effective anti-regime forces like the Afghan Northern Alliance and Pashtun militias ready to help topple Saddam. By and large, the Iraqi opposition was disarmed, in exile, or dead—the last being Saddam’s preference.
By Christmas 2001, Franks was ready to brief the President on an initial cut. Bush invited us to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on December 28. With the President’s permission, I opted to join them by video teleconference and have Franks travel to the ranch alone. The President and Franks rarely had a chance to talk to each other one-on-one. I wanted this visit to be an opportunity for them to do just that.
When Myers and I joined the teleconference, the President and Franks seemed to be getting along well. Bush’s respect for him was bolstered by Franks’ quick and successful military campaign in Afghanistan. It also was clear that Franks’ experience in the Afghan campaign had honed his capabilities and built up his confidence.
I often thought of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s insightful observation that “plans are worthless, but planning is everything,” which I had adopted in my collection of Rumsfeld’s Rules. With the first contact with the enemy, elements of any plan generally have to be tossed aside. Split-second improvisation, experience, and leadership take over. Still, careful preparation is invaluable. Becoming acquainted with facts, terrain, people, capabilities, and possibilities helps military leaders cope and adapt, as they must, when new circumstances inevitably arise and it becomes necessary to adjust, recalibrate, or even discard the original plan.
I suggested that Franks start by focusing on the key assumptions underlying his plan—that is, what he expected to be happening inside and outside Iraq if war came. I believed that key assumptions needed to be the foundation of any contingency plan, but I had found that military planners did not always cite them or give them the probing, intense consideration they merited. In meetings at the Pentagon, I emphasized that failing to examine the assumptions on which a plan is based can start a planning process based on incorrect premises, and then proceed perfectly logically to incorrect conclusions.3
I was particularly concerned, for example, when I was shown the contingency plan for a possible conflict on the Korean Peninsula. By then our intelligence community’s assessment was that the North Korean regime had at least one or several nuclear weapons, yet the old war plan did not factor that absolutely essential assumption into its calculus.
Similarly, I urged the military planners to think carefully about the range of possible Iraqi responses to possible U.S. military actions. This iterative process was also happening at levels well below ours. Franks was getting input from State Department advisers and CIA analysts present at CENTCOM. With a continually evolving diplomatic and intelligence landscape, the Iraq plan was never fixed. Planning would take place until President Bush actually made his final decision and signed an order to execute, and on every day thereafter as new circumstances evolved.
In Texas, Franks went through each of his key assumptions, giving the President an opportunity to consider them and comment. As was usually the case, many of the major assumptions CENTCOM relied on in the political-military sphere came from the intelligence community. Military planners are not necessarily experts in the language, culture, history, and politics of the people in the Defense Department’s wide and varied spheres of operation. One assumption was that Iraq possessed WMD, and that advancing U.S. troops could come under chemical or biological attack. Another of Franks’ considerations was that Saddam’s most loyal forces might turn the capital into “Fortress Baghdad,” leading to a long and bloody standoff with substantial risk to both the city’s civilian population and to American troops fighting in the urban environment. Other assumptions in the plan included: some countries in the region would give cooperation and basing rights; Iraq could attack Israel in the event of a conflict; forces would need to number at least 100,000 before combat operations could begin; and regional threats like Syria and Iran would not become directly involved.
It was also an assumption that anti-Saddam opposition groups inside and outside of Iraq would favor a U.S. and coalition military effort. Though they were unlikely to be able to offer tangible military assistance, as the Northern Alliance had in Afghanistan, the opposition, with help from the Department of State, could form part of a provisional government, much as the Bonn process had led to a broad-based interim government in Afghanistan. Myers and I directed CENTCOM planners to begin thinking through a postwar plan, even in the preliminary phases.
On the operations side, Franks’ plan called for an invasion force buildup of 145,000 troops over six months, which would be increased to 275,000 if and as needed. The President, the Joint Chiefs, and I stood ready to muster whatever number of troops Franks determined would be necessary to get the job done. He believed that Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and U.S. operations elsewhere could provide a degree of cover to allow him to bring forces forward and arrange them around the Middle East without creating a major stir. To counter the concern about a possible Fortress Baghdad scenario, Franks emphasized speed as one of his most important priorities once war began. If U.S. forces could begin an attack with an element of surprise and race to Baghdad, Saddam’s forces might not have time to reinforce and arm their defensive positions there. A swift campaign would also help satisfy our Muslim friends in the region, who were concerned about domestic unrest if major combat operations against another Muslim nation were prolonged.
I thought Franks’ December 2001 briefing was a solid early cut, considering the relatively short time he had had to prepare. Bush seemed satisfied as well. The President expressed the hope I shared that diplomacy would persuade the Iraqis to comply with UN Security Council resolutions. Franks, Myers, and I would happily throw many thousands of hours of work into the shredder if it meant the men and women of the U.S. military would not have to go to war. Nonetheless, we all believed, as the President did, that the intelligence about Iraq and Saddam’s documented history of aggression and deception were too unsettling to not at least be ready for a military confrontation if diplomacy were to fail.
Though the intelligenc
e failures surrounding Iraq are now well-known, recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning. They include, for example: the poor quality of the intelligence gathered on the ground in Vietnam; the underestimates of the scale of the Soviet Union’s military efforts during the Cold War; a lack of awareness about the brewing Iranian revolution that forced the Shah, an American ally, to flee the country; the failure to detect preparations for India’s nuclear test; and consistently underestimating the number of missiles that China had deployed along the Taiwan Straits. For Iraq, there was a similar pattern of intelligence estimates that had dangerously miscalculated Saddam’s capabilities. In 1991, experts actually underestimated Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capability. After the Gulf War, UN weapons inspectors were surprised to discover that Iraq had been no more than a year or two away from having enough fissile material to produce a nuclear bomb.*
Less than perfect intelligence reports are, of course, a fact of life for national security decision makers. Intelligence officials have some of the most difficult jobs in the world. Uncertainty, gaps in knowledge, and outright errors are inevitable. Targets are hostile and working to deceive and conceal the very information that is most sought after. Closed, repressive regimes and their terrorist allies can make their decisions in small, tightly controlled cliques without regard to public opinion, parliaments, or media scrutiny, making it particularly difficult to discover their intentions.
It wasn’t only our enemies that compounded the intelligence community’s challenges. Budget cuts during the 1990s amounting to 10 percent of the intelligence community’s budget were a costly self-inflicted wound that weakened our capabilities for years, particularly in the area of human intelligence. I had worked with our intelligence agencies off and on over some three decades, and intensely when I chaired the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in 1998. That experience was sobering. Compartmentalization hampered intelligence analysis. Policy makers did not engage sufficiently with intelligence professionals in setting intelligence priorities and asking informed questions about their analyses and conclusions.* In a unanimous letter to CIA Director Tenet, our bipartisan commission members shared our concerns about the quality of the intelligence community’s products. In the letter we wrote:
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