A Pretext for War (36 page)

Soon after moving into the right-wing settlement of Alon Shvut, about twenty minutes south of Jerusalem, Zell and Feith opened their Jerusalem office and the two began soliciting Israeli-American business. While Marc Zell remained on the front lines of the settlement movement in Israel, Feith, the managing partner of the firm, was the settler’s man in Washington. In July he joined with Perle, David Wurmser, and Wurmser’s Israeli-born wife, Meryav, to develop the foreign-policy position paper “Clean Break” for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Soon after helping to write the report, David Wurmser became the director of the Middle East Studies Program at the American Enterprise Institute, where Perle also worked. His position was funded by Irving Moscowitz, a wealthy American who was a key financial backer of Jewish settlements in Israel’s Occupied Territories. Meryav Wurmser founded an organization, Memri, that translates Arabic press reports that highlight negative views of the West.

A few months after they finished the “Clean Break” proposal, Feith’s Center for Security Policy issued a paper titled “Israeli Settlements: Legitimate, Democratically Mandated, Vital to Israel’s Security and, Therefore, in U.S. Interest.” The document claimed, “Israel is fully entitled to expand existing settlements or build new ones in the disputed territories.”

By 1997, Feith was going so far as to call for Israel to repudiate the Oslo peace accords and launch a full-scale war against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. “Repudiate Oslo,” he wrote in a paper titled “A Strategy for Israel.” Such a violent move, he acknowledged, would lead to a “massive upheaval in the territories, and the prospect of confrontation with 50,000 or so PA [Palestinian Authority] policemen with automatic weapons.” Then he added coldly, “Any strategy for repudiating Oslo must therefore take into account the price in blood Israel would have to pay.”

Following Feith’s call for a war against the occupied Palestinians, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and a small group of neocons signed a letter to President Clinton pleading with him to make the ouster of Saddam Hussein the “aim of American foreign policy” and to use military force. If he agreed, they wrote, they would “offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.” Clinton, however, made only a token effort, lobbing cruise missiles into Iraq, and refused to involve United States forces in a ground war to oust Hussein.

But Perle and Wolfowitz soon found a sympathetic ear with George W. Bush, and at the start of his candidacy he named them as top advisors to his foreign policy team, then being coordinated by Condoleezza Rice.

Thus, it was little wonder that during his first National Security Council meeting, when the only topics on the agenda were Israel and Iraq, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill thought that all the issues had already been decided. “The meeting had seemed scripted,” he thought. “Rumsfeld had said little, Cheney nothing at all, though both men had long entertained the idea of overthrowing Saddam. . . . Was a multipronged assault on Saddam Hussein really a priority in early 2001?” What most concerned him was that the entire thrust of the meeting had been only about the “hows” of the attack. But it was the “whys” that still confused him.

CHAPTER 12

WAR ROOM

It was predawn when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld emerged from his $3,350,000 three-story brick house in the Kalorama section of Washington and stepped into the back of his armored SUV. Named for the Greek word for “beautiful view,” Kalorama is a small residential neighborhood that sits on a low hill near the edge of the city’s gray-columned Federal heart. It is a land of faux-Tudor mansions and staid embassies with colorful flags and shiny gold plaques. Black Lincolns, many with red, white, and blue diplomatic tags, prowl the neighborhood like silent panthers, and residents such as California Senator Dianne Feinstein and former Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen line the pages of the “green book,” Washington’s social register.

As his convoy snaked its way through downtown Washington on the morning of September 11, 2001, Rumsfeld, with slicked-down hair and wire-rimmed bifocals, and dressed in his trademark tab-collar shirt and gray suit, thumbed through a copy of the
Early Bird,
a compilation of that morning’s most important national and international press clippings. He was checking for coverage of his talk to the Pentagon workforce the previous day. In that speech, Rumsfeld had declared war against the country’s most serious enemy.

“The topic today,” he said, “is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.”

The enemy was not Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. It was, said Rumsfeld, “the Pentagon bureaucracy. Not the people, but the processes. Not the civilians, but the systems. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that we too often impose on them.”

In the early morning of September 11, 2001, the greatest threat facing the nation, according to Rumsfeld, was Pentagon red tape. But within hours he would be gunning for a different enemy, a target of opportunity located in Baghdad.

Shortly after the devastating explosion caused when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and other officials evacuated to the bombproof War Room—the National Military Command Center—in the Pentagon’s basement. Then, at five minutes past noon, CIA Director George Tenet passed him the information intercepted by NSA at 9:53 that morning, only minutes after the crash.

A bin Laden operative in Afghanistan, Tenet related, had telephoned a number in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and asked if he had “heard good news.” At the same time, he had indicated that at least one more target was yet to be hit. Ten minutes later, United Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania en route to a fourth target in Washington.

Yet despite the implications that a member of bin Laden’s team appeared to have foreknowledge of one of the attacks, Rumsfeld dismissed the intelligence as “vague,” that it “might not mean something,” and there was “no good basis for hanging hat.” The clear evidence aside, it was not the Afghan cave dweller that Rumsfeld was interested in.

At 2:40 that afternoon, an aide to the Defense Secretary jotted notes of Rumsfeld’s conversations. Written deep in the War Room, the notes describe the Pentagon chief as wanting “best info fast; judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only U.B.L. [Osama bin Laden].” “Go massive,” he noted. “Sweep it all up. Things related, and not.”

From the notes it was clear that the attacks would be used as a pretext for war against Saddam Hussein. Despite the fact that there was absolutely no evidence implicating the Iraqi leader, Rumsfeld wanted to “hit S.H. at same time.” The idea was to “sweep” him up, whether “related” to 9/11 or “not.” Wolfowitz had the same idea and quickly began talking up an Iraqi connection in conference calls with other officials, including Cheney.

Twelve hours later, around two o’clock on the morning of September 12, Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke headed back to the White House for a series of meetings. He had just left the building a little more than an hour before in order to take a shower and put on some clean clothes. “I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks should be,” he recalled, “what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term.” Clarke continued:

Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting Al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002. On the morning of the 12th DOD’s focus was already beginning to shift from Al Qaeda.

By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and “getting Iraq” . . . I vented. “Having been attacked by Al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.” . . . Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied.

A few days later at Camp David, Wolfowitz would tell Bush that the terrorist attacks created an opportunity to strike Iraq. Nearly four years before, Wolfowitz had written an article for the conservative
Weekly Standard
magazine in which he argued that the U.S. should go after Saddam Hussein. “We will have to confront him sooner or later—and sooner would be better,” he wrote in the December 1994 issue of the magazine, which had the words “Saddam Must Go: A How-to Guide” boldly stretched across its cover. Wolfowitz’s co-author on the article was Zalmay M. Khalilzad, whom George W. Bush would name as his special envoy to Iraqi opposition groups.

A month after the article, both of them, together with Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and several other neoconservatives, would sign a letter urging President Bill Clinton to begin “implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power.” Referring to the letter,
The Washington Post
’s Glenn Kessler wrote: “Many advocates of action were skeptical that Hussein could be contained indefinitely, even by repeated weapons inspections, and they viewed his control of Iraq—and his possible acquisition of weapons of mass destruction—as inherently destabilizing in the region. Many were also strong supporters of Israel, and they saw ousting Hussein as key to changing the political dynamic of the entire Middle East.”

On September 17, shortly after the group returned from Camp David and just six days after the attacks, Bush signed a Top Secret two-and-a-half-page order that laid out his plan for going to war in Afghanistan. At the same time, the document directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.

Two days later, Richard Perle convened a meeting of his Defense Policy Board and among those present was Defense chief Rumsfeld. Saddam Hussein was the central topic. Invited as a guest of Perle was Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an anti–Saddam Hussein group. It was a significant move. For years, Chalabi had been the man Perle and Wolfowitz had wanted to run Iraq once they got rid of Saddam Hussein.

Within hours of the attacks, an effort was begun to quickly create a believable case showing Hussein’s ties to the attacks, al Qaeda and bin Laden. One of the first people Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle turned to was David Wurmser. He was charged with putting together a very secret intelligence unit that would bypass the normal channels and report directly to Feith.

Like Feith, Wurmser was a Perle protégé and an original member of Perle’s task force that advised Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and recommended a war to oust Saddam Hussein. Just weeks before Bush took office, recall, Wurmser was pushing an expanded version of the plan, one calling for an all-out American-Israeli preemptive war in the Middle East. He recommended that the two countries join forces to “strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza.”

In his paper, Wurmser also suggested that “crises can be opportunities,” an idea that seemed to coincide with Rumsfeld’s plan to use the day’s attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq. Thus Feith quickly got in touch with his old friend and asked him to set up a small and very secret intelligence unit in his office. By then, as the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Feith was the third-ranking official in the Pentagon after Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Among those told of the plan was conservative journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, the editor-at-large of the equally conservative
Washington Times.
“When this writer first heard from prominent neoconservatives in April 2002 that war was no longer a question of ‘if’ but ‘when,’ the
casus belli
had little to do with WMDs,” he said. “The Bush administration, they explained, starkly and simply, had decided to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East. The Bush Doctrine of preemption had become the vehicle for driving axis-of-evil practitioners out of power.”

While every effort was made to tie Saddam Hussein to 9/11, Perle and a number of leading neoconservatives sent a letter to Bush less than a week after the attacks arguing that he immediately focus on a war with Iraq regardless of whether he can show a connection. “Dear Mr. President,” it said. “It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”