At the Pentagon on the afternoon of 9/11, because the fires nonetheless burned and ambulances blared, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld returned from the smoke-filled courtyard to his workplace. His closest aide, Undersecretary Stephen Cambone, cryptically recorded the secretary’s excited about Saddam Hussein and Osama (or Usama) bin Laden: “Hit S. H. @same time; Not only UBL; near term target needs—go massive—sweep it all up—need to do so to hit anything useful.”
The president didn’t agree. That evening, when George W. Bush returned to Washington, his principal concern was reassuring the nation, relieving its struggling, and provoking hope. Informed that al-Qaeda was most certainly liable for the assault, he didn’t give attention to Iraq. The subsequent day, at conferences of the National Security Council, Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz advocated motion in opposition to Saddam Hussein. With no good targets in Afghanistan and no struggle plans to dislodge the Taliban, Defense officers thought Iraq would possibly provide the very best alternative to exhibit American resolve and resilience. Their arguments didn’t resonate with anybody current.
The following night, nonetheless, President Bush encountered his outgoing counterterrorism skilled, Richard Clarke, and a number of other different aides outdoors the Situation Room within the White House. According to Clarke, the president mentioned, “I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.” Clarke promised he would however insisted that al-Qaeda, not Hussein, was accountable. Then he muttered to his assistants, “Wolfowitz got to him.”
There is not any actual proof that Wolfowitz did get to Bush. The president might have talked about attacking Iraq in a conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Friday, September 14. But when Wolfowitz raised the problem once more at Camp David over the weekend, Bush made it clear that he didn’t assume Hussein was linked to 9/11, and that Afghanistan was precedence No. 1. His vice chairman, nationwide safety advisers, and CIA director had been all in settlement.
Bush’s determination to invade Iraq was neither preconceived nor inevitable. It wasn’t about democracy, and it wasn’t about oil. It wasn’t about rectifying the choice of 1991, when the United States didn’t overthrow Hussein, nor was it about getting even for the dictator’s try to assassinate Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, in 1993. Rather, Bush and his advisers had been motivated by their issues with U.S. safety. They urgently wished to thwart every other attainable assault on Americans, they usually had been decided to foreclose Hussein’s skill to make use of weapons of mass destruction to test the longer term train of American energy within the Middle East.
Bush resolved to invade Iraq solely after many months of excessive anxiousness, a interval wherein hard-working, if overzealous, officers tried to parse intelligence that was incomplete and unreliable. Their extreme worry of Iraq was matched by an extreme preoccupation with American energy. And they had been unnerved, after 9/11’s stunning revelation of an unimagined vulnerability, by a way that the nation’s credibility was eroding.
In Bush’s key speeches in the course of the first week after 9/11, he didn’t dwell on Iraq. When reporters requested the president if he had a particular message for Saddam Hussein, Bush spoke generically: “Anybody who harbors terrorists needs to fear the United States … The message to every country is, there will be a campaign against terrorist activity, a worldwide campaign.” When General Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. forces within the Middle East, recommended to Bush that they start navy planning in opposition to Iraq, the president instructed him to not.
Rumsfeld and his high advisers remained extra involved about Iraq—a regime, wrote Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith on September 18, “that engages in and supports terrorism and otherwise threatens US vital interests.” But even they weren’t advocating a full-scale invasion. Instead, Wolfowitz favored seeding a Shia riot within the south, establishing an enclave or a liberation zone for organizing a provisional authorities, and denying Hussein management over the area’s oil. “If we’re capable of mounting an Afghan resistance against the Soviets,” Wolfowitz instructed me, “we could have been capable of mounting an Arab resistance.”
Bush was not fully unsympathetic to this method, however neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz may persuade him to divert his consideration from Afghanistan and the broader War on Terror. Wolfowitz deferred to Bush’s precedence, in the end serving to devise the technique that toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan. But he, Feith, and their civilian colleagues on the Pentagon didn’t relinquish the thought of regime change in Iraq. They had been incensed by Hussein’s gloating over the 9/11 assault. And they had been satisfied that he was harmful.
Bush’s consideration didn’t gravitate to Iraq till the autumn, after anthrax spores circulated by means of the U.S. mail, killing a number of postal employees, and turned up in a Senate workplace constructing and at a facility dealing with White House mail. On October 18, sensors contained in the White House alerted workers to the presence of a lethal toxin; it was a false alarm, however one which intensified worries about an assault with organic or chemical weapons.
Bush and his advisers had been troubled by what they thought they knew about Iraq, although assessing Hussein’s intentions and capabilities was troublesome. The Iraqi dictator had expelled worldwide inspectors in 1998, leaving the CIA unable to gather info. But analysts had been satisfied that Hussein couldn’t be trusted to have destroyed the entire weapons of mass destruction he’d beforehand possessed. Their suspicions had been strengthened when an Iraqi defector claimed that Iraq had established cellular biological-weapons-production vegetation and now possessed “capabilities surpassing the pre–Gulf War era.”
Michael Morell, the president’s CIA briefer, insisted to me that somebody reexamining the out there proof on the time would nonetheless conclude that Hussein “had a chemical-weapons capability, that he had chemical weapons stockpiled, that he had a biological-weapons-production capability, and he was restarting a nuclear program. Today you would come to that judgment based on what was on that table.” But what was on the desk, Morell instructed me, was circumstantial and suspect, a lot of it coming from Iraqi Kurdish foes of the regime. Morell acknowledged that he ought to have mentioned, “Mr. President, here is what we think … But what you really need to know is that we have low confidence in that judgment and here is why.” Instead, Morell was telling the president that Hussein “had a chemical-weapons program. He’s got a biological-weapons-production capability.”
Bush and his high advisers had been predisposed to assume that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This was true not solely of the hawks within the administration. Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice believed that Hussein possessed WMDs. So did State Department analysts and their counterparts within the CIA and on the National Security Agency. They disagreed in regards to the goal of aluminum tubes and about Iraq’s acquisition of uranium yellowcake, they usually had been conscious that Hussein would wish 5 to seven years to develop a nuclear weapon as soon as the regime started engaged on it once more. Nevertheless, they thought they knew that Iraq had organic and chemical weapons, or may develop them shortly, and that Hussein aspired to reconstitute a nuclear program.
Foreign-intelligence companions concurred. Tony Blair and his most trusted advisers felt the identical means. Nobody instructed Bush that Hussein didn’t have WMDs.
Hussein had been significantly hampered by sanctions and the presence of inspectors. But now the inspectors had been gone, and the sanctions had been disappearing. The conundrum going through U.S. coverage makers was learn how to comprise Hussein if the sanctions regime ended and if United Nations screens didn’t return. “I wasn’t worried about what he would do in 2001,” Wolfowitz instructed me. “I was worried about what he would do in 2010 if the existing containment … collapsed.”
Hussein was not doing a lot to allay American fears. He was utilizing his oil revenues to leverage assist from France, China, and Russia to finish UN sanctions. He had not ceased offering assist for terrorist exercise in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a few of which focused American support employees. And studies of his pervasive repressions inside Iraq continued.
At the identical time, Hussein was investing his rising monetary reserves in strengthening Iraq’s military-industrial advanced and buying supplies that might be used for chemical and organic weapons. According to British intelligence, the Iraqis had been nonetheless concealing details about 31,000 chemical munitions, 4,000 tons of chemical compounds that might be used for weapons, and huge portions of fabric that might be employed for the manufacturing of organic weapons.
Such assessments held by means of the winter. “Iraq continues to pursue its WMD programmes,” concluded the British Joint Intelligence Committee in February 2002. “If it has not already done so, Iraq could produce significant quantities of biological warfare agents within days and chemical warfare agents within weeks of a decision to do so.”
“I have no doubt we need to deal with Saddam,” Blair had written to Bush within the fall of 2001. But if we “hit Iraq now,” Blair had warned, “we would lose the Arab world, Russia, probably half the EU and my fear is the impact on Pakistan.” Far higher to deliberate quietly and keep away from public debate “until we know exactly what we want to do; and how we can do it.” Bush agreed.
“President Bush believed,” Rumsfeld subsequently wrote, “that the key to successful diplomacy with Saddam was a credible threat of military action. We hoped that the process of moving an increasing number of American forces into a position where they could attack Iraq might convince the Iraqis to end their defiance.” As Stephen Hadley, the deputy nationwide safety adviser throughout Bush’s first time period, instructed me: “We thought it would coerce him … to do what the international community asked, which is either destroy the WMD or show us that you destroyed it. That was it. Either do it or, if you’ve already done it, show it, prove it.”
Bush wished to make use of the specter of pressure to renew inspections and acquire confidence that Iraq didn’t possess WMDs that may fall into the arms of terrorists or be used to blackmail the U.S. sooner or later. But he additionally wished to make use of the specter of pressure to take away Hussein from energy. He didn’t actually know which of those objectives had precedence. He by no means clearly sorted out these overlapping but conflicting impulses, whilst every appeared to turn out to be extra compelling.
“The best way to get Saddam to come into compliance with UN demands,” wrote Cheney in his memoir, In My Time, “was to convince him we would use force.” Prominent Democrats didn’t disagree. In early February 2002, Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, held hearings coping with the State Department’s request for the 2003 finances. Secretary Powell emphasised that the War on Terror was his No. 1 precedence. There had been regimes, Powell mentioned, that not solely supported terror however had been creating WMDs. They “could provide the wherewithal to terrorist organizations to use these sorts of things against us.”
Biden requested whether or not this meant that the president was saying a brand new coverage of preemption, as overseas allies thought he was doing. After Powell denied this allegation, Biden proclaimed his personal fears in regards to the proliferation of WMDs, particularly in Iraq. “I happen to be one that thinks that one way or another Saddam has got to go and it is likely to be required to have U.S. force to have him go,” he mentioned. “The question is how to do it, in my view, not if to do it.”
Intelligence studies over the next months didn’t ease Bush’s anxieties. What alarmed the president was new info that al-Qaeda was looking for organic and chemical weapons, alongside the data that Iraq had had them and used them.
In late May 2002, analysts reported that al-Qaeda operatives had been transferring into Baghdad, together with the high-ranking jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. “Other individuals associated with al-Qaida,” the pinnacle of the State Department’s intelligence workplace knowledgeable Powell, “are operating in Baghdad and are in contact with colleagues who, in turn, may be more directly involved in attack planning.” Since 9/11, there had been little al-Qaeda exercise in Iraq, and consultants disagreed in regards to the nature of the connection between the Iraqi dictator and Osama bin Laden. Hardly anybody thought Iraq had something to do with 9/11, however, in response to a postwar Senate investigation, there have been “a dozen or so reports of varying reliability mentioning the involvement of Iraq or Iraqi nationals in al-Qa’ida’s efforts to obtain” chemical- and biological-warfare coaching.
Al-Zarqawi was a identified terrorist, a Jordanian who had fought in Afghanistan, met with bin Laden, and managed his personal coaching camps in Herat. Already infamous for his toughness, radicalism, and barbarity, he lusted to wreak revenge on Americans. Reports of al-Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq got here shortly earlier than U.S. coverage makers acquired details about an Iraqi procurement agent’s exercise in Australia. Allegedly, this agent was looking for to purchase GPS software program that might enable the regime to map American cities. Might the Iraqi dictator be plotting a WMD assault contained in the United States?
Al-Zarqawi was additionally collaborating with Ansar al-Islam, an Islamist extremist group that was battling a mainline Kurdish social gathering for management of northeastern Iraq. A small CIA crew had infiltrated the area close to town of Khurmal and reported in July that al-Zarqawi had begun experimenting with organic and chemical brokers that terrorists may put in air flow methods. According to one of many CIA brokers, “they were full-bore on biological and chemical warfare … They were doing a lot of testing on donkeys, rabbits, mice, and other animals.”
In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff favored navy motion in Khurmal. So did Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. They didn’t consider that al-Qaeda can be in Iraq—even a component not managed by Hussein—with out the dictator’s acquiescence. Their suspicions grew when info positioned al-Zarqawi and different al-Qaeda fighters in Baghdad. The CIA brokers in Iraq noticed no proof that the al-Qaeda operatives had been linked to Hussein, however everybody they spoke with believed that Hussein had WMDs.
Bush mentioned he would act with “deliberation,” using solely the very best intelligence. But the intelligence was murky, resulting in contentious assessments, conflicting judgments, and unsure suggestions. Sometimes, the president overstated the proof he had. Hussein’s a risk, Bush instructed the press corps in November 2002, “because he is dealing with al-Qaeda.” Although this was an exaggeration, Bush did know that al-Zarqawi had been in Baghdad, had hyperlinks to al-Qaeda, and was experimenting with organic and chemical weapons. And he knew that Hussein supported suicide bombings and celebrated their “martyrs.”
Bush selected to not authorize navy motion in Khurmal. On July 31, he instructed Blair that he had not but selected struggle—that he would possibly give the Iraqi dictator another likelihood to abide by his guarantees to permit inspections and destroy his weapons of mass destruction. At the identical time, nonetheless, the president instructed General Franks to proceed along with his struggle planning.
Although Bush had not resolved whether or not he meant to disarm or depose the Iraqi dictator, he mobilized public and congressional assist for his insurance policies. In October, the House accredited a decision authorizing him to make use of navy pressure, by a vote of 296–133, and the Senate did the identical, 77–23. The political effort in Washington was matched by a diplomatic one in New York. On November 8, the UN Security Council handed Resolution 1441, which demanded inspections and stipulated that the Iraqi regime was already in breach of previous resolutions. In the administration’s view, this offered justification for the U.S. to take unilateral motion if it selected to take action.
Bush was working towards coercive diplomacy, hoping to realize his objectives by means of intimidation. “We were giving Saddam one final choice,” his British associate on this coverage, Blair, defined in 2011. If Hussein proved recalcitrant, the president’s credibility—and America’s—can be in danger, wherein case coercive diplomacy must finish with a navy intervention. The prices of that intervention, nonetheless, had not been calculated.
Bush did need a free, democratic Iraq to emerge if he resorted to navy motion, however he had spent little time discussing the establishments, insurance policies, and expenditures that might be required to translate the liberation of Iraq into a greater life for its residents. In a gathering with General Franks, Bush requested, “Can we win?”
“Yes, sir,” mentioned Franks.
“Can we get rid of Saddam?” the president requested once more.
“Yes, sir,” mentioned his basic.
The president didn’t ask, “What then?”
After the invasion became a chaotic, dysfunctional occupation and Iraq’s alleged WMDs weren’t discovered, Bush instructed his director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, to ascertain a particular mission named the Iraq Survey Group to research what had occurred to those lethal armaments. The group’s first director, David Kay, appeared earlier than the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28, 2004: “Let me begin,” he admitted, “by saying that we were almost all wrong” about Iraqi WMD applications. Though chastened by the misreading of Iraqi capabilities, Kay didn’t assume that intelligence analysts had misled coverage makers in regards to the basic risk. “I think the world is far safer with the disappearance and removal of Saddam Hussein.”
The survey group’s second chief, Charles Duelfer, oversaw a part of the interrogation of Saddam Hussein after U.S. forces captured him in December 2003. Duelfer dwelled on Hussein’s “controlling presence.” Hussein “was not a cartoon,” Duelfer emphasised. “He was catastrophically brilliant and extremely talented in a black, insidious way,” very similar to Joseph Stalin, the chief whom Hussein most wished to emulate. And his aspirations had been clear: to thwart Iran, defeat Israel, and dominate the area. To obtain these objectives, Hussein yearned to accumulate WMDs.
That was Duelfer’s conclusion when, in September 2004, he delivered the ultimate, complete report of the survey group. The proof appeared conclusive: Iraq didn’t have WMD stockpiles, nor any energetic applications. But “it was very clear,” Duelfer later wrote in his memoir, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, “that Saddam complied with UN disarmament restrictions only as a tactic.” Hussein’s overriding aims, the survey group affirmed, had been to carry sanctions to an finish and to maneuver forward with securing WMDs. “Virtually” no senior Iraqi chief “believed that Saddam had forsaken WMD forever.” Denied his want to be executed by firing squad, Hussein was hanged in jail on December 30, 2006.
Bush determined, initially, to confront Hussein—not invade Iraq. The president feared one other assault, one maybe much more dire than 9/11. Rogue states like Iraq, Bush fearful, would possibly share the world’s deadliest weapons with terrorists who desperately wished to inflict ache on America, puncture its air of invincibility, undermine its establishments, and make Americans doubt the worth of their freedoms.
Yet worry alone didn’t form the president’s technique. Bush’s religion in American would possibly was equally necessary. From the outset of his administration, he aimed to increase American navy capabilities, which already far exceeded these of every other nation. The use of airpower, particular forces, and new applied sciences to expel the Taliban from Kabul in 2001 strengthened his sense of power. America’s attain appeared to haven’t any bounds. Washington, he felt, should not be dissuaded from serving to its associates and defending its pursuits, particularly in areas harboring essential uncooked supplies and power reserves. The U.S. had the facility to take action and wanted to exhibit it.
Fear and energy had been strengthened by hubris. Bush insisted that each one folks wished to reside by American values—to be free to say what they happy and pray as they wished. If the United States overthrew a brutal dictator, American officers may take satisfaction in understanding that they had been enriching the lives of his benighted topics.
Spurred by worry, rising confidence in American energy, and a way of ethical advantage, Bush embraced coercive diplomacy. The technique was interesting as a result of virtually everybody surrounding Bush believed that Hussein’s defiance wouldn’t stop till he was confronted by superior pressure. But the technique was adopted with out a clear purpose—regime change or WMD elimination.
When, after the invasion, these weapons weren’t discovered, Bush shifted to a extra ideological discourse. “The failure of Iraq democracy,” he warned, “would embolden terrorists around the world … Success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran—that freedom can be the future of every nation.” When the U.S. bought locked in an insurrectionary wrestle and Islamic fundamentalism surged, neither Bush’s objectives nor his technique appeared to make sense. His critics mocked his naivete, accused him of dishonesty, and ridiculed his democratic zealotry.
These critics underestimated Bush’s qualities and misconstrued his considering. Bush failed not as a result of he was a weak chief, a naive ideologue, or a manipulative liar. He was all the time totally in control of the administration’s Iraq coverage, and he didn’t rush to struggle. He went to struggle not to make Iraq democratic however to take away a murderous dictator who meant to restart his weapons applications, supported suicide missions, and cultivated hyperlinks with terrorist teams (even when not, really, al-Qaeda).
In these slim goals, Bush succeeded. Another assault on American soil didn’t happen and he did eradicate a brutal, erratic, and harmful tyrant. But he didn’t obtain that at a suitable price. The struggle proved catastrophic for Iraq. Over the following years, greater than 200,000 Iraqis perished on account of the struggle, rebel, and civic strife, and greater than 9 million folks—a few third of the prewar inhabitants—had been internally displaced or fled overseas.
The intervention additionally exacted a human, monetary, financial, and psychological toll on the United States that hardly anybody had foreseen. The struggle enhanced Iranian energy within the Persian Gulf, diverted consideration and assets from the continuing wrestle inside Afghanistan, divided America’s European allies, and offered extra alternative for China’s rise and Russia’s revanchism. The battle besmirched America’s status and heightened anti-Americanism. It fueled the sense of grievance amongst Muslims, accentuated perceptions of American conceitedness, sophisticated the wrestle in opposition to terrorism, and dampened hopes for democracy and peace amongst Arabs and Jews within the Middle East. Rather than having unfold liberty, the president and his advisers left workplace witnessing the worldwide recession of freedom.
Fear, energy, and hubris clarify America’s march to struggle in Iraq. By considering in any other case, by simplifying the story and believing that each one can be properly if we solely had extra trustworthy officers, stronger leaders, and extra lifelike coverage makers, we delude ourselves. Tragedy happens not as a result of our leaders are naive, silly, and corrupt. Tragedy happens when earnest and accountable officers attempt their finest to make America safer and find yourself making issues a lot worse. We have to ask why this occurs. We want to understand the hazards that lurk when there’s an excessive amount of worry, an excessive amount of energy, an excessive amount of hubris—and inadequate prudence.
This article is tailored from Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq.