by Oliver Stone
Taking his cue from Cheney, Bush cloaked White House deliberations in a veil of secrecy so impenetrable that it was unprecedented in U.S. history. Access to documents under the Freedom of Information Act was sharply curtailed, and documents once publicly available were reclassified and disappeared. The government repeatedly invoked “national security” and “state secrets” to thwart those attempting to bring lawsuits. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell, said he had never seen such secrecy and described it as a “cabal” between Cheney and Rumsfeld to bypass normal channels.61 Conservatives, too, objected. “We see an unprecedented secrecy in this White House that . . . we find very troubling,” said Judicial Watch director Larry Klayman in 2002. “True conservatives don’t act this way.”62
But repressive measures in the United States paled in comparison to the measures Bush inflicted on the rest of the world. And the worst was still to come as U.S. policy makers geared up for the invasion of Iraq, which had actually been on the drawing board long before 9/11. Wolfowitz’s obsession with Iraq dated at least as far back as 1979, when he directed a Pentagon assessment of the Persian Gulf region that highlighted Iraq’s threat to its neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and proposed a buildup of U.S. forces in the region to counter this threat. The report began, “We and our major industrialized allies have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israeli conflict.”63 Based on that report, the United States had begun positioning cargo ships laden with military equipment in the region.
Wolfowitz nurtured that obsession in the intervening years. He and his allies had made dealing with Iraq a top priority of the PNAC. He fixated relentlessly on Iraq as deputy secretary of defense. A senior administration official observed, “If you look around the world at other issues, he’s nonexistent. He’s not a major player on any other issue.” In fact, the official commented, he doesn’t even know the Defense Department position on other issues.64
Iraq rose to the top of administration concerns almost from the moment Bush took office. He opened his first National Security Council meeting on January 30, 2001, by asking, “So Condi, what are we going to talk about today? What’s on the agenda?” “How Iraq is destabilizing the region, Mr. President,” Rice replied.65
Detainees pray at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. One FBI counterterrorism expert testified that of the nearly eight hundred detainees incarcerated at Guantánamo, fifty at most were worth holding.
Administration neocons were on board from the start. When the NSC principals met again two days later, Rumsfeld interrupted Powell’s discussion of “targeted sanctions” against Iran. “Sanctions are fine,” he blurted out. “But what we really want to think about is going after Saddam.” He later added, “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond it. It would demonstrate what U.S. policy is all about.” Looking back, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recognized that the die had been cast from the very beginning: “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.’ ”66
O’Neill told Ron Suskind that as early as March 2001, administration officials were discussing concrete plans for invading and occupying Iraq.67 Cheney’s Energy Task Force played an important part. Other invasion backers included Wolfowitz protégés I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was Cheney’s national security advisor; Stephen Hadley, who was Rice’s deputy; and Richard Perle, now head of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. On September 19 and 20, Defense Policy Board members decided to put Iraq in the crosshairs as soon as they disposed of Afghanistan. The New York Times reported that the insiders promoting the invasion were called the “Wolfowitz cabal.”68
Members of the cabal searched high and low for an Iraqi connection to 9/11. Rumsfeld asked the CIA to come up with evidence linking Iraq to 9/11 on at least ten separate occasions.69 Prisoners were tortured in the hope that they would divulge such information. But none existed. Rumsfeld and Cheney reviled the CIA analysts who pointed out this inconvenient fact.
Lacking evidence, they manufactured their own. Cheney and Libby pointed repeatedly to a meeting in Prague between the hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official, even though Tenet had proved that Atta was in the United States at the time of the alleged meeting, living in Virginia in the shadow of CIA headquarters.70
Wolfowitz turned to Laurie Mylroie, whose thoroughly discredited writings had tied Iraq to practically every terrorist episode in recent memory, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Mylroie complained that the Clinton administration had dismissed her as “a nut case.”71 CNN analyst Peter Bergen called her a “crackpot,” a view shared by the intelligence community. He mocked her “unified field theory of terrorism.” But Wolfowitz and Perle took her seriously, as did New York Times reporter Judith Miller, with whom she coauthored a 1990 book about Saddam Hussein. Wolfowitz sent former CIA Director James Woolsey on a wild-goose chase overseas to try to corroborate her cockamamie theories. Though most of the administration neocons stopped short of Mylroie’s assertion that “Al Qaeda is a front for Iraqi intelligence,”72 Bush and Cheney repeatedly alluded to Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. In September 2003, Cheney told Meet the Press’s Tim Russert that Iraq was the “heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”73
The CIA, meanwhile, was conjuring up its own perverse and outlandish ways to discredit both Saddam and bin Laden. The CIA’s Iraq Operations Group considered fabricating a video showing Saddam having sex with a teenage boy and then “flood[ing] Iraq with the videos.” “It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” said a former official. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.” The CIA did actually produce a video simulating bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda buddies around a campfire imbibing liquor and sharing tales of sexual encounters with boys.74
Such undertakings were only slightly less bizarre than the actual “intelligence” collected during the buildup to the war. One of the administration’s favorite intelligence sources was Ahmed Chalabi, who headed the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The INC, which received millions of dollars from the Bush administration, relayed fanciful reports of ongoing WMD programs from Iraqi defectors, many of whom were clearly out to instigate a U.S. attack. Later, with the Americans occupying Baghdad, Chalabi boasted, “We are heroes in error. As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful.”75
One former top Defense Intelligence Agency official, Colonel Patrick Lang, saw Defense Department fingerprints all over this. “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off,” he complained bitterly. “They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”76
Using this kind of notoriously false information, the administration challenged the findings of CIA analysts and UN weapons inspectors and tirelessly made its case for invading Iraq. “We know they have weapons of mass destruction,” Rumsfeld insisted. “There isn’t any debate about it.”77 In early October 2002, Bush, echoing a similar warning from Rice the month before, announced, “we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”78 But no one could outdo Cheney when it came to outright fabrications and dire prognostications:
The Iraqi regime has . . . been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue the nuclear program. . . . Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror and a se
at at a top [sic] 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, directly threaten America’s friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.79
Based upon this fictitious threat assessment, which the Intelligence Community echoed in its National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, Bush readied for war while maintaining the facade of seeking a peaceful resolution.80 In March 2002, he popped unexpectedly into a meeting between Rice and a bipartisan group of senators and exclaimed, “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”81 In May, he told Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, “I’m going to kick his sorry motherfucking ass all over the Mideast.”82
But some experts knew that Bush’s claims about Iraqi WMD were grossly exaggerated if not completely false. Former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter told CNN in 2002, “No one has substantiated the allegations that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction or is attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction.” CNN’s Fionnuala Sweeney pointed out, “It is hard to account if you cannot get into the country.” Ritter’s response to that and subsequent questions shed important light on the administration’s use of WMD as a casus belli:
That’s right. Then why did the United States pick up the phone in December 1998 and order the inspectors out—let’s remember Saddam Hussein didn’t kick the inspectors out. The U.S. ordered the inspectors out 48 hours before they initiated Operation Desert Fox—military action that didn’t have the support of the U.N. Security Council and which used information gathered by the inspectors, to target Iraq. . . . As of December 1998 we had accounted for 90 to 95 percent of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capability—“we” being the weapons inspectors. We destroyed all the factories, all of the means of production and we couldn’t account for some of the weaponry, but chemical weapons have a shelf-life of five years. Biological weapons have a shelf-life of three years. To have weapons today, they would have had to rebuild the factories and start the process of producing these weapons since December 1998.
“How much access did you get to the weapons inspection sites?” Sweeney asked. “One-hundred percent,” Ritter assured her.83
Though Ritter was persona non grata within the administration and could be easily dismissed, there was no excuse for ignoring the cautionary words of General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, whom Rumsfeld tasked with drawing up war plans. At a September 2002 meeting of the NSC, Franks stated bluntly, “Mr. President, we’ve been looking for Scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for ten years and haven’t found any yet.”84
Leading establishment figures, including several linked to the president’s father, tried to convince Bush that an invasion would be pure folly. The dissenters included General Brent Scowcroft, who had been George H. W. Bush’s national security advisor, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, and George Kennan. Military opposition also ran deep. Marine Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recalled, “I can’t tell you how many senior officers said to me, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ ” They asked, “Why Iraq? Why now?”85
British Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped forward to lend a hand. In September 2002, Blair, who would be widely mocked as “Bush’s poodle,” released a dossier about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that was so riddled with falsehoods, it would later prove scandalous. Blair insisted, however, on getting a UN resolution to provide him with political cover in Britain, where antiwar sentiment remained strong.86
The UN Security Council voted to send inspectors into Iraq again. Saddam accepted unconditionally. Inspections began in November. Over the next three and a half months, UN inspectors visited five hundred sites, some repeatedly. The list included those identified by the CIA as the most likely locations for concealing WMD. Nothing turned up. UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix wondered, “If this was the best, what was the rest? . . . could there be 100 percent certainty about the existence of weapons of mass destruction but zero percent knowledge about their location?”87 Blix later compared Bush administration officials to medieval witch hunters, who “were [so] convinced there were witches, when they looked for them, they certainly found them.”88
In the midst of this latest round of inspections, Iraq submitted its 11,800-page weapons dossier to the United Nations. “Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction,” declared Lieutenant General Hossam Mohammed Amin. But Bush, having already stipulated that any weapons declaration that did not admit to having WMD would be fraudulent, dismissed it scornfully. “The declaration is nothing, it’s empty, it’s a joke,” he told visiting Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar. “At some point, we will conclude that enough is enough and take him out.” Iraq’s UN ambassador, Mohammed Aldouri, challenged the United States to provide evidence of its allegations. Not only did the United States have no reliable evidence, it edited out more than 8,000 pages from Iraq’s report before passing it on to the ten nonpermanent members of the Security Council—in part to hide the role of the U.S. government and twenty-four major U.S. corporations in supporting Iraq’s weapons programs.89
After rigorous inspections, Blix refused to charge Iraq with being in violation of UN Resolution 1441 requiring Iraq to disarm. Newsweek reported on March 3, 2003, that Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who had run Iraq’s WMD programs for ten years before defecting in 1995, told the CIA, British intelligence, and UN inspectors that Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons after the Gulf War. Rolf Ekéus, who headed the UN inspections team from 1991 to 1997, said that Kamel’s information was “almost embarrassing, it was so extensive.”90
Between 1991 and 1998, UN inspectors supervised the destruction of 817 of Iraq’s 819 proscribed medium-range missiles, 9 trailers, 14 launchers, and 56 fixed missile-launch sites. Iraq also destroyed 73 of 75 chemical or biological warheads, 163 warheads for conventional explosives, 88,000 filled and unfilled chemical munitions, 4,000 tons of precursor chemicals, more than 600 tons of weaponized and bulk chemical weapons agents, and 980 pieces of equipment essential for production of such weapons. The Iraqis destroyed Al Hakam, the main facility producing and developing biological weapons, plus 60 pieces of equipment taken from three other facilities and 22 tons of growth media for biological weapons.91
If Middle Eastern and South Asian countries having WMD were by itself sufficient reason to justify a U.S. invasion, there were several other potential targets in the area. In the 2002 report titled “Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East,” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies listed Egypt (chemical), India (chemical, biological, nuclear), Iran (chemical, biological), Israel (chemical, biological, nuclear), Libya (chemical), Pakistan (chemical, biological, nuclear), and Syria (chemical, biological).92
In fact, Iraq posed no threat. It had destroyed so many weapons between 1991 and 1998 that it had become one of the weaker states in the region. Its military expenditures were just a fraction of that of some of its neighbors. In 2002, Iraq spent approximately $1.4 billion on its military. The United States spent more than three hundred times that amount.93
Nevertheless, the scare tactics worked. To make sure they would, the administration deliberately timed the congressional vote to occur before the 2002 midterm elections and threatened to brand all who opposed the rush to war as unpatriotic and cowardly at a time of grave national crisis. Many caved in to the pressure, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. On October 2, 2002, the Senate voted 77–23 to authorize the use of force. The House did likewise, 296–133. The resolution directly connected Iraq to Al-Qaeda and alleged that Iraq posed a threat to the United States.
Only one Republican—Lincoln
Chafee of Rhode Island—voted against the resolution in the Senate. He later condemned the spinelessness of top Democrats who had succumbed to Bush’s blackmail: “They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post–September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom.” Chafee watched as cowering Democrats repeatedly “went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration’s nonsense.”94
Among the groups lobbying Congress to support the war was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an influential organization that was considerably to the right of mainstream American Jewish opinion and generally in lockstep with the neocons on Middle East policy. In January 2003, AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr told the New York Sun that “ ‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” had been one of “AIPAC’s successes over the past year.”95
Much has rightly been made of the administration neocons’ fierce defense of what they perceived as Israeli interests, which, in their minds, included toppling Saddam Hussein. Again, Wolfowitz led the way. The Jerusalem Post reported that Bush’s appointment of Wolfowitz as deputy secretary of defense had “the Jewish and pro-Israel communities . . . jumping with joy.” In 2002, the Forward described him as “the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration.” If his was the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice, others including Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s, Perle’s, Libby’s, and Bolton’s were close behind.96
