Against All Enemies (41 page)

I believe all of these motivations were at work. Most of them reflect a concern with the long-term stability of the House of Saud. In addition, particularly for President Bush, I think there was a felt need to “do something big” to respond to the events of September 11. Of course, he could have responded by investing seriously in domestic preparedness, stabilizing Afghanistan, and helping other nations deal with the sources and manifestations of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. Those actions would have been “something big.” None of those were, however, the big, fast, bold, simple move that would send a signal at home and abroad, a signal that said “don't mess with Texas, or America.” Unfortunately, invading Iraq turned out to be something other than what President Bush and his inner circle had hoped it would be. The decision to invade Iraq, largely unilaterally, in 2003 was both mistaken and costly. The costs were in lives, in money, but even more important, in opportunities lost, and in future problems created or aggravated.

The clearest indication of the depth of President Bush's understanding and of his own motivations came in Diane Sawyer's interview with Bush on ABC Television. Sawyer asked Bush about the “hard fact that there were weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that [Saddam] might move to acquire those weapons.” The President's considered response was, “What's the difference?” Then he added, “The possibility that he could acquire weapons. If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger.”

Sawyer pressed on, noting that in addition to the weapons issue there was a “failure to establish proof of elaborate terrorism contacts” and that this was at best a lack of precision and “misleading at worst.” The President replied, “Yeah. Look—what—what we based our evidence on was a very sound National Intelligence Estimate.” Could it not have been more precise, Sawyer wondered. “What—I, I made my decision based upon enough intelligence to tell me this country was threatened with Saddam Hussein in power.” Valiantly Sawyer asked again, what would it take to convince you that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Again Bush replied with his mantra, “America is a safer country.” Finally in exasperation, the President said, “I'm telling you I made the right decision for America because Saddam Hussein used weapons of mass destruction and invaded Kuwait.”

And so Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 because Saddam had used weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s and invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Bush concluded on the subject with Diane Sawyer, saying again that his invasion of Iraq “means America's a more secure country.” In fact, with our Army stretched to the breaking point, our international credibility at an all-time low, Muslims further radicalized against us, our relations with key Allies damaged, and our soldiers in a shooting gallery, it is as hard to believe that America is safer for the invasion as it is to believe that President Bush had good intelligence on weapons of mass destruction or that “this country was threatened with Saddam Hussein in power.”

Time and again the Administration claimed that there was an urgency to act against Iraq because there was a growing threat to the United States. They were generally vague about the details of the threat, but left the impression that it stemmed from weapons of mass destruction, i.e., chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons about to be used against us by Iraq. Like most national security bureaucrats, I believed Iraq had chemical and/or biological weapons in 2003. We knew that Iraq had them in 1992 and later because we had seen them. Iraq gave every indication that they were hiding some in 1998, but there was no reliable intelligence on what had happened to them since 1998. Charles Duelfer was the leading American expert on the issue, having spent over a decade working on Iraqi WMD analysis for the U.S. and the U.N. Duelfer thought in 2002 that there was no remaining large and threatening stockpile. He was ignored before the invasion and for months after and only asked by the Administration to go to Iraq to lead the investigation in 2004.

As studies by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Carnegie Endowment have made clear, both the CIA and the President failed to tell the Congress and the American people that they were making judgments about the Iraqi WMD threat based on dated information. As WMD inspector David Kay was forced to admit, “we were all wrong, probably.”

Even if Iraq still had WMD stockpiles, possession of weapons of mass destruction is not in and of itself a threat to the United States. Over two dozen nations possess WMD, according to unclassified CIA testimony to Congress. Never did I think the Iraqi chemical or biological weapons were an imminent threat to the United States in 2002. Saddam had ample opportunity to use them on the U.S. for over a decade and did not. As to nuclear weapons, Iraq had demonstrated its ability to create a large, covert nuclear weapons development program in 1991. CIA had demonstrated its inability to notice such a large program. Together, those two facts were a legitimate source of concern. The means to deal with that risk were present, however, in intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, active control of Iraqi imports related to nuclear development, and the use of other nations' intelligence services. Indeed, those methods may have been successful because (as we now know) there was no active nuclear weapons program in 2002. Nothing in 2002 indicated Saddam intended to build nukes, much less use them, and certainly not imminently. Indeed CIA's publicly released analysis concluded that there was little risk of Iraq's WMD against the U.S. unless we attacked them.

Both the White House and the CIA must have known there was no “imminent threat” to the U.S., but one claimed the opposite, and the other allowed them to do so uncorrected.

In his famous “Top Gun” moment on the deck of the USS
Abraham Lincoln,
the President claimed that the invasion of Iraq was just one battle “in the War on Terrorism that began on September 11.” It is not hard to understand why, after repeatedly hearing remarks like that, 70 percent of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein had attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. I suspect that many of the heroic U.S. troops who risked their lives fighting in Iraq thought, because of misleading statements from the White House, that they were avenging the 3,000 dead from September 11. What a horrible thing it was to give such a false impression to our people and our troops. Only in September 2003, only after occupying Iraq, only after Vice President Cheney had stretched credulity on
Meet the Press,
did the President clearly state that there was “no evidence that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks.” That new clarity might have come as a disappointing shock to American troops being targeted by snipers and blown up by landmines in Iraq.

After President Bush was forced to admit publicly that there was no connection between the al Qaeda attack of September 11 and Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq, advocates of the Iraq War began to shift their argument. They began to emphasize the “connections” and “linkages” between Iraq and al Qaeda in general, no longer specifically mentioning September 11. When challenged in congressional testimony, Under Secretary of Defense Doug Feith promised to produce the intelligence that demonstrated the link. Not only did he send a memo to a congressional committee with a précis of dozens of such intelligence reports, someone leaked the highly classified memo to a neoconservative magazine, which promptly printed the secret information. Neoconservative commentators then pointed to the illegally leaked document as conclusive proof of the al Qaeda–Iraq nexus.

For those uninitiated in how to read raw intelligence reports, the Feith memo might have been persuasive. For those who have read thousands of such reports over many years, the Feith memo proved little. The
Washington Post
quoted longtime Defense Intelligence Agency expert Pat Lang as saying the memo was “a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports,” many of which actually proved that al Qaeda and Iraq had not succeeded in establishing a modus vivendi.

The
Post
went on to quote another senior intelligence officer as saying it was merely “data points…among the millions of holdings of the intelligence community, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true.” Indeed, the Pentagon itself issued a statement in the wake of the Feith memo leak, saying that news reports that the Defense Department had confirmed new information about an al Qaeda–Iraq link before the war are “inaccurate,” and went on to describe the Feith memo as “not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda…and drew no conclusions.”

The simple fact is that lots of people, particularly in the Middle East, pass along many rumors and they end up being recorded and filed by U.S. intelligence agencies in raw reports. That does not make them “intelligence.” Intelligence involves analysis of raw reports, not merely their enumeration or weighing them by the pound. Analysis, in turn, involves finding independent means of corroborating the reports. Did al Qaeda agents ever talk to Iraqi agents? I would be startled if they had not. I would also be startled if American, Israeli, Iranian, British, or Jordanian agents had somehow failed to talk to al Qaeda or Iraqi agents. Talking to each other is what intelligence agents do, often under assumed identities or “false flags,” looking for information or possible defectors.

It is certainly possible that Iraqi agents dangled the possibility of asylum in Iraq before bin Laden at some point when everyone knew that the U.S. was pressuring the Taliban to arrest him. If that dangle happened, bin Laden's accepting that asylum clearly did not. Was there an al Qaeda affiliate group, complete with terrorist training camp, in Iraq? Yes, in the area outside the control of Saddam Hussein, in the north of the country controlled by Saddam's opponents. This terrorist camp was known to the Bush administration, which chose not to bomb it after September 11, but rather to wait eighteen months. The group and its camp must not have been much of a threat. Now, however, there is an al Qaeda–Iraq connection, as al Qaeda fighters move to Iraq in response to Bush's invitation to “bring 'em on.”

If there were evidence of Iraq giving funds or safe haven to al Qaeda before the invasion, the Administration would have produced it. There is, of course, evidence that Iran provided al Qaeda safe haven before and after September 11. There is also evidence that Saudis provided al Qaeda with funds, and that Saudi “charities” were used by al Qaeda for cover. Any Iraqi “link” to al Qaeda is a minor footnote when compared to the links with other regimes, and none of the possible “links” between Iraq and al Qaeda rise to the level of noteworthy assistance and support.

Several sources have reported that internal Pentagon plans assumed a U.S. occupation force of about thirty thousand troops, or one division plus its support units. Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki had, of course, candidly told a congressional committee that a realistic number was 200,000. His estimate was publicly rejected by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. For most of 2003, the actual number of U.S. troops in the Iraqi theater, which includes support units in Kuwait, was about 150,000. Many military analysts believed that number was too small. This difference of opinion is more than a numbers game. If there are too few U.S. troops to secure convoy routes or spot snipers, then U.S. military personnel are killed and wounded by Iraqi bombs, landmines, and bullets. It is worth recalling that Secretary of Defense Les Aspin was driven from office in 1993 because, it was charged, he had not provided U.S. troops in Somalia with what they needed to protect themselves, and seventeen soldiers were killed. In the months of the Iraqi occupation, hundreds of U.S. military personnel have been killed and many others wounded in part because there were not enough U.S. military assets to spot snipers and landmines.

There are additional costs of getting the occupation force estimate wrong. Producing the 150,000 U.S. forces in the Iraqi theater has badly stretched the Army. Most of the maneuver brigades in the Army are deployed overseas. Those left in the U.S. are too few to maintain the contingency reserve or the training base necessary. National Guard and Reserve personnel have been mobilized for extended service, disrupting the lives of tens of thousands who counted on their civilian salaries to pay mortgages and other family expenses. The irony is that during the 2000 presidential campaign, the Bush team charged that peacekeeping missions had overstretched the U.S. Army. They noted that battalions that had engaged in peacekeeping were not passing inspections because they had not been able to keep up with training proficiency and testing. By those measures, the Bush administration has now far more badly damaged the United States Army. As Army National Guard and Reserve reenlistments plummet, the damage will grow. The condition of the Army is of concern because unlike Iraq, which showed no sign of attacking us, North Korea regularly threatens us with war. If that were to happen with the Army tied down in Iraq and our reserves stretched, the outcome might not be favorable.

Before the war the Administration gave the impression to Iraqis who were closely watching that we only had a problem with Saddam and his sons, plus a handful of others. If they were to go peacefully (or with a bullet), we would be satisfied. The message sent to Iraqi commanders through a variety of creative means was “Don't Fight,” just let us get rid of Saddam. Because of those messages, many Iraqi commanders did not fight and actually sent their troops home. Yet after Jerry Bremer was appointed pro-consul of Iraq, the U.S. had another message: “You're all fired.” Not only did the United States announce it was dismissing the Iraqi army officer corps, it went on to relieve anyone who was a member of the Baath Party from any job they might hold. The hundreds of thousands of people affected by this bait and switch were then told that the pensions they had planned on when hitting retirement age would not be there. It is little wonder that U.S. popularity plummeted and critical infrastructures and services in Iraq stopped working.