A Pretext for War (33 page)

But in Iraq, across the border from Kuwait, many were still bitter and hungry for revenge. According to a senior administration official during the Clinton administration, “During and immediately after the Persian Gulf war, Saddam, through his controlled media, indicated that President Bush would be held personally responsible for the war and would be hunted down and punished even after he left office.” Prior to Bush’s trip, the CIA began picking up some worrying indications that “the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] was planning to assassinate Bush now that he had returned to private life and that the assassination attempt would occur only with authorization from Saddam Hussein.” Other information the CIA received suggested “that Saddam Hussein had authorized the assassination attempt to obtain personal revenge and intimidate Kuwait and other Arab states.”

On April 12, two days before the former president’s departure from Texas, the Iraqi Intelligence Service (Mukhabarat) held a secret meeting in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, one hundred miles from Kuwait. Among those present was an Iraqi national named Wali al-Ghazali. According to Justice and FBI documents, the meeting was to carry out the final arrangements for the assassination of former President Bush and the Emir of Kuwait.

At the meeting, al-Ghazali was given a nondescript Toyota Land Cruiser, similar to thousands in Iraq and Kuwait—with one exception. Lining the skin of the vehicle was nearly two hundred pounds of plastic explosives connected to a detonator. It was enough to create a devastating blast with a kill radius of four football fields. Also hidden in the car were another ten bombs in the shape of cubes. They were to be planted elsewhere in commercial sections of Kuwait.

The powerful car bomb was specially constructed so that it could be detonated either manually by remote control, by an electronic timer, or by a push-pull suicide switch. Al-Ghazali was given a photograph of the building at Kuwait University where Bush was to receive an honorary degree. He was instructed to cross the border into Kuwait, then detonate the car bomb by remote control at the university close to the arriving motorcade. Finally, al-Ghazali was given a bomb-encased suicide belt and told that if all else failed he was to get as close to Bush as possible and then detonate it.

In the dark of the morning on April 13, the day before Bush was to leave Texas, al-Ghazali pressed down on the accelerator and turned his bomb-laden Land Cruiser toward Kuwait. A few hours later, he passed through the rough Kuwaiti border post of Salmi, a desert haven for smugglers and black marketers, where Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia come together like wedges in a cake.

After he landed in Kuwait on April 15, the welcome must have seemed like salve on an open wound to George H. W. Bush, following his bitter election loss to Bill Clinton five months before. Thousands of Kuwaitis, dressed in flowing white robes, greeted his plane like an Arctic whiteout. There were girls with baskets of flowers, whirling sword dancers, and a rose-red carpet. Dubbed “Operation Love Storm,” the tribute included a perfume-scented motorcade route for the former commander-in-chief of Operation Desert Storm. As if still president, Bush and his family were feted and housed in the Emir’s expansive Bayan Palace. “Literally everybody wanted to see the hero of Kuwait,” said Taraq Al-Mezrem, the Kuwaiti official who handled press arrangements for the Bush trip. “We never had anything like it before.”

Bush called the reception “terribly emotional and wonderfully fulfilling” and seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself as he toured oil fields once torched by Iraqi forces and greeted American troops. Then it was time for the major ceremony at Kuwait University. On the stage, Bush introduced his daughter-in-law. “Laura Bush’s husband,” he said, “is the owner of the Texas Rangers team. Now that I am just a citizen, I can root for any team I want.”

No one on the stage or in the audience knew how close they might have come to death. Through a series of misadventures, the assassins had been caught shortly before Bush went to the university. Had the plan worked, there is little doubt that George W.’s father, mother, wife, two brothers, and one of their wives would have been killed.

According to a senior official from the Clinton administration, “From all the evidence available to it, the CIA [was] highly confident that the Iraq government at the highest levels directed its intelligence service to assassinate former President Bush.” As a result, about two months later, President Bill Clinton ordered twenty-three Tomahawk guided missiles, each packed with a thousand pounds of high explosives, fired at the downtown Baghdad headquarters of Iraqi intelligence. Although most hit their target, three of the million-dollar missiles went off course and destroyed homes in the area, killing eight civilians, among them one of the country’s most promising artists, Layla al-Attar.

President Bush was convinced (as was the Clinton administration) that Saddam Hussein had orchestrated the assassination attempts. But questions would quickly be raised about the quality of the intelligence and the evidence that led to the arrest and conviction of al-Ghazali and thirteen others suspected of involvement in the plot. “I tend to be extremely skeptical about this,” a former CIA officer who worked in the region for years told the
Baltimore Sun
’s Scott Shane. “The Kuwaitis would not be reliable sources.” And Seymour M. Hersh, in an article in
The New Yorker
magazine in November 1993, suggested that the Kuwaitis might have concocted the plot, or at least its connection to the Iraqi government. He also raised serious questions about the physical evidence that tied Iraq to the plot.

Even though al-Ghazali confessed and said his orders came from the Iraqi Intelligence Service, there was the possibility that torture or coercion was used. In a report on the trial, Amnesty International pointed out that “the defendants were not allowed access to lawyers before the trial. The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty was seriously jeopardized by statements made by Kuwait’s Public Prosecutor at a press conference on 16 May 1993. He stated that the defendants were criminals who allied with the devil and conspired with him to try to assault Kuwait’s honoured guest . . . [and that] investigations proved without doubt that it was the Iraqi intelligence service which moved this rotten group of accused persons to execute the plans of the evil Iraqi regime.”

That someone would order the killing of his wife, parents, and most of his immediate family—and almost succeed—would burn in George W. Bush, as it would in anyone. In private, his raw hatred for Hussein was evident. “The SOB tried to kill my dad,” he snarled at one surprised visitor. “I was a warrior for George Bush,” said George W. at another time. “I would run through a brick wall for my dad.” Despite the magnitude of the crime, Hussein had never been brought to justice. Now, as president himself, George W. Bush would have a chance to bring justice to Hussein.

In a new administration that was determined to stay on message, the message for January 30 was support for “faith-based” education. Bush began the morning with an address to religious groups in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and spent part of the afternoon at a nearby school addressing the virtues of his plan. Standing in front of a banner that showed black-and-white photos of caregivers and was emblazoned “Armies of Compassion,” Bush said, “Real change happens street by street, heart by heart—one soul, one conscience at a time.”

But soon after the “Armies of Compassion” sign was taken down, Bush turned his attention to armies of a different sort. Shortly after 3:30
P.M.
, the Bush national security team assembled around the polished wooden conference table of the Situation Room, down the stairs from the Oval Office. Along the walls, cherry paneling hides large television monitors and maps with small flashing lights. Just eighteen feet square, the tight conference room was once described by Nixon national security advisor Henry Kissinger as “uncomfortable, unaesthetic and essentially oppressive.”

As the ten brown leather chairs around the table filled, place cards identified each of the players. On one side of Bush, who occupied the seat at the head of the table, was Vice President Dick Cheney, and on the other side sat Secretary of State Colin Powell. Opposite the President at the other end, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice acted as stage manager. “Condi will run these meetings,” said Bush. “I’ll be seeing all of you regularly, but I want you to debate things out here and then Condi will report to me.”

Then Bush addressed the sole items on the agenda for his first high-level national security meeting. The topics were not terrorism—a subject he barely mentioned during the campaign—or nervousness over China or Russia, but Israel and Iraq. From the very first moment, the Bush foreign policy would focus on three key objectives: Get rid of Saddam Hussein, end American involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and rearrange the dominoes in the Middle East. A key to the policy shift would be the concept of “preemption.”

The blueprint for the new Bush policy had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisors. Soon to be appointed to senior administration positions, they were Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser. Ironically, the plan was originally intended not for Bush but for another world leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the time, the three officials were out of government and working for conservative pro-Israeli think tanks. Perle and Feith had previously served in high-level Pentagon positions during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In a very unusual move, the former—and future—senior American officials were acting as a sort of American privy council to the new Israeli prime minister. The Perle task force to advise Netanyahu was set up by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Stategic and Political Studies, where Wurmser was working.

A key part of the plan was to get the United States to pull out of peace negotiations and simply let Israel take care of the Palestinians as it saw fit. “Israel,” said the report, “can manage its own affairs. Such self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past.”

But the centerpiece of their recommendations was the removal of Saddam Hussein as the first step in remaking the Middle East into a region friendly, instead of hostile, to Israel. Their plan, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” also signaled a radical departure from the peace-oriented policies of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a member of an extreme right-wing Israeli group.

As part of their “grand strategy,” they recommended that once Iraq was conquered and Saddam Hussein overthrown, he should be replaced by a puppet leader friendly to Israel. “Whoever inherits Iraq,” they wrote, “dominates the entire Levant strategically.” Then they suggested that Syria would be the next country to be invaded. “Israel can shape its strategic environment,” they said.

This would be done, they recommended to Netanyahu, “by reestablishing the principle of preemption” and by “rolling back” its Arab neighbors. From then on, the principle would be to strike first and expand, a dangerous and provocative change in philosophy. They recommended launching a major unprovoked regional war in the Middle East, attacking Lebanon and Syria and ousting Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Then, to gain the support of the American government and public, a phony pretext would be used as the reason for the original invasion.

The recommendation of Feith, Perle, and Wurmser was for Israel to once again invade Lebanon with air strikes. But this time, to counter potentially hostile reactions from the American government and public, they suggested using a pretext. They would claim that the purpose of the invasion was to halt “Syria’s drug-money and counterfeiting infrastructure” located there. They were subjects in which Israel had virtually no interest, but they were ones, they said, “with which America can sympathize.”

Another way to win American support for a preemptive war against Syria, they suggested, was by “drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program.” The claim would be that Israel’s war was really all about protecting Americans from drugs, counterfeit bills, and WMD—nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

It was rather extraordinary for a trio of former, and potentially future, high-ranking American government officials to become advisors to a foreign government. More unsettling still was the fact that they were recommending acts of war in which Americans could be killed, and also ways to masquerade the true purpose of the attacks from the American public.

Once inside Lebanon, Israel could let loose—to begin “engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon.” Then they would widen the war even further by using proxy forces—Lebanese militia fighters acting on Israel’s behalf (as Ariel Sharon had done in the 1980s)—to invade Syria from Lebanon. Thus, they noted, they could invade Syria “by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces.”

As soon as that fighting started, they advised, Israel could begin “striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient,
striking at select targets in Syria proper
[emphasis in original].”

The Perle task force even supplied Netanyahu with some text for a television address, using the suggested pretext to justify the war. Years later, it would closely resemble speeches to justify their own Middle East war; Iraq would simply replace Syria and the United States would replace Israel: