The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  The difference between Iraq, Iran and North Korea

  5. By linking these countries together in his “axis of evil” speech, President Bush implied an identity between them not only in terms of their threat, but also in terms of the action necessary to deal with the threat. A lot of work will now need to be [done] to delink the three, and to show why military action against Iraq is so much more justified than against Iran and North Korea. The heart of this case—that Iraq poses a unique and present danger—rests on the facts that it:

  • invaded a neighbour;

  • has used WMD and would use them again;

  • is in breach of nine [United Nations Security Council] resolutions.

  By summer the argument was in place and the work of delinking Iraq from North Korea and Iran under way. Though Bush’s ambitions were global, he had always been more interested in challenging Iraq than in taking on the other two states, something he avoided doing throughout his two terms as president. The war he increasingly wanted was his father’s war, left unfinished, and his primary motivation for wanting it was the same as his father’s: to make an example of Iraq to scare away potential competitors to American hegemony. Not surprisingly, then, he and his advisers—many of them, Dick Cheney in particular, alumni of his father’s administration—decided to make the same case for attacking Iraq that Bush senior had made: that Saddam Hussein was secretly developing weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons in particular, and must be prevented from doing so lest he pass them to terrorists to use against the United States.

  Paul Wolfowitz confirmed that decision in an interview the following year with the journalist Sam Tanenhaus. “The truth is,” Wolfowitz told Tanenhaus, “that for reasons27 that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.” Wolfowitz went on to assert, “But … there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people.… The third one by itself … is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there’s the most disagreement within the bureaucracy.”

  Sir Richard Dearlove, the director of MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA, traveled to Washington for war talks in July 2002 and reported to Blair on 23 July that he found “a perceptible shift in attitude”28 among members of the Bush administration. “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” There would be debate later, when this secret Downing Street memorandum saw the light of day, about what “fixed around the policy” meant. The context seems clear enough: The Bush administration intended to make a case for war like the case Bush’s father had made in 1990, by picking out intelligence “facts” that lent themselves prima facie to the WMD/terrorism interpretation or that could be so interpreted—“fixed” in the sense of “attached to.”

  If Iraq, for example, proved to be attempting to import sixty thousand high-strength aluminum tubes from China, as it did, those tubes would be identified as potential centrifuge rotors for uranium enrichment even if their specifications were wrong for such rotors but right for artillery-rocket casings. Iraq experts, and even the U.S.’s own Department of Energy, might argue against the more malevolent interpretation, but why should their opinion count? The judges to be convinced were the members of Congress who would be asked to authorize the war and the American people, and neither population was expert in centrifuge rotors and rocket casings or immune to threat inflation. As Dearlove explained to Blair, “It seemed clear that Bush29 had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.” Threat inflation would bolster the case, as it had bolstered the case against the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, when it had been the primary political strategy of the U.S. military-industrial complex and its conservative allies in both political parties. If it had worked through all the ups and downs of America’s relationship with the Soviet Union, it ought to work at least as well against Iraq.

  For the nuclear part of its argument, the Bush administration settled on two related “facts” to make its case for waging preventive war against Iraq. One was the aluminum tubes, which Iraq had attempted to buy from China in 2001. The other was an alleged attempt by Iraq to buy and import 500 metric tons of uranium yellowcake from the impoverished but uranium-rich western African country of Niger. Together, these incidents were supposed to demonstrate a renewed Iraqi effort to develop nuclear weapons.

  Such supposition might have foundered on the awkward fact that years of highly visible effort would be necessary to turn aluminum tubes into centrifuge cascades, to operate such centrifuges long enough to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade, and then to construct the weapons themselves—in which case, why rush into war? The Bush administration anticipated this argument with a barrage of assertions about the uncertainty of the intelligence and the pressure of time. That Iraq had expelled IAEA and UNSCOM inspectors in 1998 played into the administration’s hands, allowing it to plausibly claim that Saddam had put his weapons complex back to work on WMD during the four-year interim. Both Richard Butler and Hans Blix had believed at the time that the Iraqi dictator had done so, though they quickly changed their minds as the IAEA turned up evidence to the contrary in the months before the war.

  Cheney began the administration barrage. In a major speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their national convention in Nashville on 26 August 2002, the vice president claimed to “now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we’ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors—including Saddam’s own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam’s direction. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.” Since Hussein Kamel had specifically informed his UNSCOM and IAEA interviewers in August 1995 that “all weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed,” a fact that Cheney knew, the vice president’s invocation of Kamel’s testimony as evidence to the contrary is breathtaking in its audacity. Kamel’s testimony was still secret in August 2002; when it was finally made public, in late February 2003, the Bush administration with equal audacity would use it selectively to continue making its case for war to the United Nations and the world.

  Condoleezza Rice weighed in next, on the Sunday before the one-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Late Edition, she pointed to the absence of inspectors to argue for intervention in Iraq. “We know that in the last four years30 there have been no weapons inspectors in Iraq to monitor what [Saddam] is doing,” she told Blitzer, “and we have evidence, increasing evidence, that he continues his march toward weapons of mass destruction.” Blitzer asked how much longer the United States could wait. “No one can give you an exact time line as to when he is going to have this or that weapon,” Rice said, “but given what we have experienced in history and given what we have experienced on September 11, I don’t think anyone wants to wait for the 100 percent surety that he has a weapon of mass destruction that can reach the United States, because the only time we may be 100 percent sure is when something lands on our territory.” The national security adviser next mentioned “high-quality aluminum tubes that are really only suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs,” as evidence of a revived Iraqi effort to develop a bomb, putting the aluminum-tube argument in place in the public discourse. Then, most famously, she linked two familiar Washington tropes into a threatening image of disaster that Bush would soon borrow for his own u
se: “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

  Bush built on these earlier claims by his vice president and national security adviser in his first nationally televised speech on Iraq, in Cincinnati, Ohio,31 on 7 October 2002. “Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes,” he said, repeating the administration mantra, and added for good measure, “and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.” He repeated Rice’s formulation that, “facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” At the last minute, he had agreed to leave out of his speech the other component of the nuclear argument his administration had settled upon, yellowcake from Niger, because the CIA had warned him off. As a congressional investigation report explained later, “Referring to the sentence32 [in Bush’s speech draft] on uranium from Africa, the CIA said, ‘remove the sentence because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from the source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory.’”

  Despite this warning, Bush’s people still included a reference to the supposed purchase in the next draft of the Cincinnati speech, so the CIA faxed another review to the White House that listed three reasons for removing the assertion from Bush’s speech: “(1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq’s nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British.”

  Bush left the Niger story out of his Cincinnati speech. It wasn’t needed; the House of Representatives on 10 October and the Senate on 11 October passed a joint resolution authorizing him to use force against Iraq “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate.”

  JOE WILSON, the Foreign Service officer who had worked to free the hostages Iraq had held prior to the first Gulf War, had gone on in the 1990s to serve as U.S. ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe and then as senior director for African affairs on the Clinton National Security Council. He had retired from government service in 1998, the year he married an elegant blonde undercover CIA agent named Valerie Plame, and had taken up international consulting. He knew Africa well, and in February 2002, when the CIA had asked him to attend a meeting about Niger, he had been happy to do so.

  He learned at the meeting, he wrote subsequently, that “a report purporting to be33 a memorandum of sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq had aroused the interest of Vice President Dick Cheney. His office, I was told, had tasked the CIA to determine if there was any truth to the report. I was being asked now to share with the analysts my knowledge of the uranium business and of the Nigerien personalities in power at the time the alleged contract had been executed, supposedly in 1999 or early 2000. The Nigeriens were the same people I had dealt with during and after my time at the National Security Council, people I knew well.” Wilson was able to tell the analysts what he had learned on his most recent trip to Niger, two years previously: that four countries—France, Germany, Spain, and Japan—jointly owned the Niger uranium-mining concession, that its ownership and organization hadn’t changed in twenty-five years, and that “Niger had not actually34 sold uranium on its own since the collapse of the uranium market in the mid-1980s.”

  After further discussions, the CIA sent Wilson to Niger to look into the allegation of uranium sales to Iraq. The first information he collected there came from the U.S. ambassador, a career foreign service officer named Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick. She told Wilson she had already discussed the allegation with the president of Niger, who denied it and explained why such a deal was impossible. The Marine general in charge of U.S. military relations with African countries had also investigated the charge, she added, and had also concluded it could not possibly be true.35

  Talking to old contacts and investigating further on his own, Wilson learned that uranium mining in Niger was limited to two mines in the middle of the country in the Sahara Desert that were managed by the French nuclear materials company COGEMA on behalf of the four concessionaires; “but only COGEMA,”36 he wrote, “has actual possession of the ore from the time it is in the ground until it arrives at its destination.” Five hundred tons of additional yellowcake production would have represented almost a 40 percent increase in annual production, which “would have been absolutely37 impossible to hide from the other partners.” In short, the sale of a large volume of Nigerien uranium ore to Iraq never happened. Nor did Iraq need to risk flaunting U.N. sanctions to secretly acquire foreign uranium when comparable volumes of indigenous ore were available from its own mines. Nor, of course, could natural uranium be used to make a bomb without enrichment of its .0072 percent content of fissile U-235 to 90 percent U-235, a laborious process requiring the construction and extended operation of large numbers of as-yet-nonexistent centrifuges.

  Wilson reported his findings to a CIA officer over Chinese takeout at his home in Washington in March 2002. He had no further official contact with the CIA for a year and a half. He next heard of the Niger claim in George Bush’s 28 January 2003 State of the Union speech, when Bush deviously avoided challenging the CIA’s repeated assessment that the sale had never occurred by attributing the intelligence to the British. “The British government,”38 the president notoriously said, “has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Bush also mentioned the discredited aluminum tubes, claiming they were “suitable for nuclear weapons production.” The two claims, both false, together comprised the only physical evidence that Bush adduced to support his claim of a renewed Iraqi bomb program.

  SADDAM HUSSEIN was fully aware of the Bush administration’s efforts to pick a fight. In the summer of 2002, the intelligence analyst John Prados has written, “Baghdad offered to let39 UN weapons inspectors return and resume the disarmament process that had lain fallow since 1998.” At first the Iraqis debated conditions with UNMOVIC and Hans Blix, Prados reported, but “as the drumbeat of Bush rhetoric about regime change continued, Baghdad’s reluctance seemed to disappear.” Blix negotiated a new inspection resolution with the interested parties at the U.N., the United States in particular, through the end of October, at which time he met with Cheney and then Bush at the White House.

  Blix thought Cheney, who did most of the talking during their meeting, “gave the impression of a solid,40 self-confident—even overconfident—chief executive.” The vice president made it clear “that inspections, if they do not give results, cannot go on forever, and said the U.S. was ‘ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament.’” That, Blix wrote, was “a pretty straight way, I thought, of saying that if we did not soon find the weapons of mass destruction that the U.S. was convinced Iraq possessed (though they did not know where), the U.S. would be ready to say that the inspectors were useless and embark on disarmament by other means.” The meeting with the president, whom Blix thought boyish and animated, was less substantial. “He explained to us that the U.S.41 genuinely wanted peace,” Blix recalled. “With some self-deprecation, he said that, contrary to what was being alleged, he was no wild, gung-ho Texan bent on dragging the U.S. into war. He would let the Security Council talk about a resolution—but not for long.” Blix read the meetings as affirming, despite the administration’s increasing criticism of the inspection process, that “the U.S. was with us for now.”

  After the U.N. adopted a new resolution on 8 November 2002 demanding of Iraq, as Blix wrote, “imm
ediate, unconditional and active42 cooperation” and threatening possible armed action for any further material breach in compliance, Blix went to work putting together an inspection program. “We counted on keeping43 some two hundred people in Baghdad,” he wrote, “in addition to a number of biological, chemical, missile and multidisciplinary teams of about ten inspectors each.… We had planned for a number of helicopters with a total of about forty people serving them. Computers, communication equipment (including secure lines) and whatnot were all on order. We knew a great many sites we wanted to inspect and a great many questions we wanted to ask.” With Iraq’s bitter but complete commitment to open inspections, UNMOVIC and the IAEA under Mohamed ElBaradei went in for a first round in late November.

  Blix’s notes for a presentation to the UNMOVIC commissioners after his November visit to Baghdad pulse with the urgency of the inspection effort:

  Should we expand44 our staff? 100 inspectors in Iraq by Xmas. Can we go much faster? Doubtful. A state military organization is something different. It is ready, trained for deployment [and] supplied with a ready infrastructure. We have to create much of that. If too large, we might easily risk chaos. Already now straining of capacity. More rooms needed in Baghdad. More space needed in New York. Will take a little time. We have a number of potential chief inspectors with special training. 80 on the roster have responded positively for engagement by now. This is a good result. One month before Xmas! But sending out 8 missions simultaneously a day. The planning part will not be easy: 100 people. How many jeeps? How many helicopters? How many cameras? Lucky we have had time to train 300. What would have happened [if we had tried to inspect] in 2000? Risky to overreach. New training course in January. Slow growth. More Arabs [needed]. More women.