Known and Unknown (50 page)

In April 2002, Karzai told Pacha Khan to surrender or be annihilated. This was a rather bold ultimatum, since Karzai originally had no large militia of his own that he could rely on. Karzai expressed a desire to have American forces available to him if his new government's military, amassed from the militias of other allied warlords, could not defeat Pacha Khan's militia. He believed he wouldn't actually need the assistance, since he was confident Pacha Khan would back down if he merely threatened that American forces would intervene. I told Karzai I'd get back to him after I consulted with my colleagues.

This led to animated discussions in the National Security Council over whether Karzai should be allowed, in effect, to threaten the use of the United States military against an uncooperative and potentially threatening Afghan leader. Powell and Rice seemed to support Karzai's position, as did Vice President Cheney. They argued accurately that Karzai was vulnerable and might need American assistance if Afghanistan were to remain under the control of a central government. I felt a bigger principle was at stake. As I pointed out in a May 10, 2002, memo to the President, the current moment was “of unusual importance” and perhaps “the most significant war-related call to be made since forces were sent into Afghanistan in October 2001.” “The issue,” I wrote, “is whether the Afghan government will be required to take responsibility for its actions—political and military—or whether it will be allowed to become dependent on US forces to stay in power.”
²⁶

I was concerned that giving Karzai the ability to threaten the use of American military force could make him seem to be exactly what some of his rivals said he was—a pawn of the United States. If Karzai could not prevail against local forces without American military assistance, I felt he could not survive politically anyway. A second point, I told the President, was that “it is not in the interest of the US or Karzai for us to make it easier for Karzai to rely on force, rather than political methods, to resolve [his] problems with regional leaders.”

It was not a perfect analogy, but I was convinced Karzai needed to learn to govern the Chicago way. In the 1960s, Mayor Richard J. Daley ruled Chicago—a city of many diverse and powerful elements—using maneuver, guile, money, patronage, and services to keep the city's fractious leaders from rebelling against his authority. In parts of Chicago, where officials threatened the mayor's authority, potholes were left untended and other services were neglected. In areas where local officials cooperated with the mayor, Daley brought the services of the city government to bear and was generous in his patronage. My point was that instead of giving Karzai the freedom to throw around the weight of the U.S. military, he should learn to use patronage and political incentives and disincentives to get the local Afghan warlords, governors, and cabinet officials in line. “A Karzai tempted to overreach could drag us into re-living the British and Soviet experiences of trying to use outside force to impose centralized rule on the fractious people of Afghanistan,” I concluded in my memo to President Bush.
²⁷

Even if it meant getting some things wrong in his first months in office, Karzai would need to learn the tough lessons of governing. I knew Karzai would be unlikely to develop those skills if all he needed to do to settle the inevitable differences was to invoke American military power.

President Bush agreed with my recommendation, and I told Karzai he would have to resolve the dispute without the promise of rescue by the American military. In short, Karzai was not authorized to threaten the use of American military force. It was a gamble, but in the end, Karzai and Pacha Khan resolved their differences as I had hoped, through negotiation. Pacha Khan eventually sought a role in the Afghan parliament, and Karzai did not stand in his way.
²⁸

 

O
ur military was justly proud of what it had accomplished in Afghanistan. The creative and constructive way the CIA and the Defense Department worked together showed that America was not a superpower capable of only massive applications of brute force. The United States, still a young nation, had operated strategically and skillfully in Afghanistan, an ancient land in which many great empires had stumbled badly over the millennia. Our country, at least for the moment, had avoided becoming the latest corpse in Afghanistan's graveyard.

At the outset, expectations were low, but when major military operations in Afghanistan ended in five weeks, expectations heightened dramatically. Typical was the well-meaning comment of a 10th Mountain Division soldier reported in the
Washington Post
: “We got hit three months ago and in less than three months we've toppled this regime. And within a week from now, we've got an interim government that's stepping in. What more can you ask for than a splendid little war over here?”
²⁹

The sentiment was understandable, but I did not think the long struggle against terrorism could or should be viewed as a series of quick, relatively painless, “splendid little wars.” I was convinced that that was not going to be the case. Though the deep-seated pessimism at the outset of the war proved to be misplaced, I knew too that the buoyant optimism after the Taliban was toppled would prove to be just as mistaken. Ending the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan would be only the opening of a long, sustained campaign that would require patience and grit. Taking the fight to the terrorists would mean our military men and women would have to be deployed elsewhere. To keep the pressure on, we would need to continue to pursue the terrorists wherever they took refuge and isolate the regimes that harbored them and could give them the weapons of mass destruction they desperately sought. The President had told me privately what he had in mind.

JANUARY 16, 1991

I
n a televised address from the Oval Office, President Bush announced the start of military operations in Iraq. He set forth the reasons for his decision to go to war. It was a long list. He and the national security officials in his administration—Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz among them—believed that the United States and its allies had exhausted all reasonable diplomatic efforts to force Saddam Hussein's regime to comply with its obligations to the UN Security Council and, further, the UN's economic sanctions were not accomplishing their objectives. According to American intelligence officials, Saddam was working to add a nuclear bomb to Iraq's arsenal, which the CIA judged already contained chemical weapons.
¹
“Saddam Hussein started this cruel war,” the President said. “Tonight, the battle has been joined.”
²

The date was January 16, 1991. And the president was George Herbert Walker Bush.

During that first Gulf War, I had been out of government for nearly fifteen years and living back home in Chicago. I watched the war from afar. I was impressed with the combination of air power and tank warfare in the southern Iraqi desert that decimated Saddam's army. Television images showed the wreckage of Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, and trucks littering what became known as the highway of death.

With Saddam's forces on the run, the Bush team faced a crucial decision, one that would have lasting consequences. The war's initial goal had been achieved: Saddam's forces had been driven from Kuwait. The question then was whether the United States should end the conflict or move to Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein's regime.

“I remember very clearly Colin Powell saying that this thing was turning into a massacre,” Robert Gates, then the deputy national security adviser, later recalled. “And that to continue it beyond a certain point would be un-American, and he even used the word unchivalrous.”
³
Others in the administration, including Secretary of State James Baker, said they believed Saddam had suffered such a thorough defeat that he would not be able to retain power.
⁴
Bush agreed, and drew the war to a quick close. After the war ended, President Bush urged Iraqis to “take matters into their own hands” when it came to the supposedly defeated dictator. With the administration's encouragement, pro-democracy elements in Iraq twice rose up in an effort to topple Saddam's regime.
^*

As part of the U.S.-Iraqi cease-fire agreement, General Norman Schwarzkopf allowed the Iraqis to operate helicopters, supposedly for the purpose of withdrawing their troops. Saddam proceeded to use his helicopter gunships to put down both of the revolts against his regime, massacring tens of thousands of Shia in the south and Kurdish Iraqis in the north. In Washington, some in the administration, including Wolfowitz, urged the Bush national security team to intervene and stop the massacres. The President decided otherwise. “[I]t was not clear what purpose would have been achieved by getting ourselves mixed up in the middle of that,” said Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
⁵
The rebels were quickly crushed by Saddam's forces in the spring of 1991, creating among many Iraqi dissidents a lasting sense of betrayal and distrust.

For his part, Saddam Hussein came to believe that the United States lacked the commitment to follow through on its rhetoric. He saw America as unwilling to take the risks necessary for an invasion of Iraq. As he would explain to his interrogators after his capture in December 2003, Saddam had concluded that America was a paper tiger. He interpreted the first Bush administration's decision not to march into Baghdad as proof that he had triumphed in what he called the “mother of all battles” against the mightiest military power in world history. Looking back, an opportunity to take care of the problem before it turned into a larger crisis was missed and the tyrant was emboldened.

By 1992, a U.S. presidential election year, Bill Clinton, the politically astute young governor of Arkansas, accused President George H. W. Bush and his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, of being “soft” on Iraq. I was interested in this debate, as I had played a role in the drama when I met with Saddam Hussein as President Ronald Reagan's Middle East envoy. Clinton may have been looking to burnish his national security credentials by trying to appear tougher in foreign policy than the Bush administration. Clinton's running mate, Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Jr., went even further than Clinton, accusing President George H. W. Bush of deliberately concealing the extent of Saddam's ties to terrorism, his attacks on U.S. interests, and his efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.
⁶
Clinton and Gore pledged that their administration would be under no illusions when it came to dealing with Saddam. Supporters of the 1992 Democratic presidential ticket exploited the poor economic news of the day by distributing a bumper sticker that read: saddam hussein still has his job. do you?

A campaign to take Baghdad and oust Saddam was a daunting notion. Saddam had options if U.S. forces had marched to Baghdad in 1991, including the use of chemical or biological weapons against our forces. The senior Bush also pointed out that regime change in Baghdad had not been among the U.S. goals when the pledge to liberate Kuwait was first made. The administration felt it would not have full coalition support if it decided to continue on to Baghdad.

Others I respected had a different view. While still British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had famously warned President George H. W. Bush not to “go wobbly” after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But the formidable Thatcher had been voted out of office before the war was concluded. She seemed unhappy with the result in Iraq. “There is the aggressor, Saddam Hussein, still in power,” she later observed. Contrasting his fate to Bush's and hers, she noted, “There is the President of the United States, no longer in power. There is the Prime Minister of Britain, who did quite a lot to get things there, no longer in power. I wonder who won?”
⁷

Colin Powell, who had played such a prominent role in the decision not to attempt regime change, responded to the criticism. “[I]n due course, Saddam Hussein will not be there,” he predicted. “And when that happens, all this interesting second-guessing will seem quite irrelevant.”
⁸

I
n the first Gulf War's aftermath, Iraq remained a festering problem. Though its army had been defeated in Kuwait, the regime remained intact. In an attempt to keep Saddam Hussein in check, and to pressure him to comply with demands by the United Nations, the Security Council imposed economic sanctions banning trade with Iraq, including in oil. The United States, Britain, and France imposed UN-sanctioned no-fly zones over the Kurdish-populated areas in northern Iraq and the Shiite-populated region in southern Iraq. American, British, and—initially—French aircraft patrolled the zones regularly.
^*

Undeterred, Saddam continued to use brutality on a massive scale. After suppressing the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings in 1991, Saddam drained the marshlands of southern Iraq, turning the region into a salt-encrusted desert. His purpose was to punish the “marsh Arabs” for their support of the rebellion against him. He drove some 150,000 Iraqis from their homes. His intelligence services were merciless in torturing suspected opponents. Arbitrary arrests and unexplained disappearances were commonplace. He built rape rooms to bring “dishonor” to the female members of families suspected of opposition to him.
^*
And before long the Iraqi military began a near daily routine of firing on coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones.

Saddam's regime claimed it had destroyed its arsenals of proscribed weapons, but the United Nations weapons inspectors were skeptical. Iraqi officials spied on the inspectors, sanitized suspect sites before the teams arrived, and barred them from examining Saddam's vast palace complexes. He reorganized his biological weapons program creatively by closing his military-run weapons facilities while creating dual-use plants capable of making products for both civilian and military use.
²
Facilities that produced fertilizer and antibiotics, for example, could be retooled quickly to create chemical and biological weapons. By 1998, Saddam had stopped cooperating with the UN inspectors altogether, effectively forcing them out of the country and ending even a pretense of complying with the UN Security Council's demands. In response, the UN adopted still more resolutions expressing outrage at Saddam's “totally unacceptable” actions.
³
But few nations, other than the United States and Great Britain, appeared willing to do much, if anything, to enforce the UN resolutions.

In January 1998, I joined a group of former national security officials in signing a letter to President Clinton that called for stronger action against Saddam's regime.
⁴
“The only acceptable strategy,” our letter read, “is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.” For the short term, we endorsed military strikes on suspected weapons facilities. For the long term, we called for removing Saddam and his regime.
⁵

Later in 1998, large bipartisan majorities in each house of the U.S. Congress generally endorsed the policies recommended in our letter to Clinton. The Iraq Liberation Act declared that the goal of U.S. policy should be “to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power.” The U.S. House of Representatives approved that legislation by a vote of 360 to 38.
^†
It passed the Senate without a single dissenting vote. Clinton signed the legislation into law. Regime change in Iraq was now the official policy of the United States.

Even as Clinton endorsed regime change, some administration officials contended that the existing UN economic sanctions had kept Saddam reasonably under control—“in a box,” as Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, put it.
⁶
However, the sanctions administered through the UN's Oil-for-Food program had loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. The UN was generating billions of dollars in illicit, unrestricted funds for Saddam Hussein, who used the cash to finance, among other things, his dual-use weapons facilities.
⁷
The so-called Oil-for-Food program became one of the greatest scams perpetrated in the six decades of the United Nation's existence.
⁸
When the second Bush administration came into office in January 2001, the Iraqi “containment” policy was in tatters.

 

V
arious commentators asserted that Clinton's successor, George W. Bush, was intent on “fixing” his father's error of leaving Saddam in power.
⁹
From what I saw, that was not the case. Before his inauguration, when I met with the President-elect in Austin, Texas to discuss defense policy, the subject of Iraq did not even come up. The first person I remember mentioning the issue to me in 2001 was Clinton's outgoing Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen. He and the senior military officers in the Clinton administration were fully aware of the dangers our aircraft crews faced in the skies over Iraq. Despite the risks, Cohen believed that discontinuing our patrols of the no-fly zones was not an option. It would be a victory for Saddam and further erode an already fraying coalition of nations committed to containment of his brutal regime.

Iraq's repeated efforts to shoot down our aircraft weighed heavily on my mind. Iraq was the only nation in the world that was attacking the U.S. military on a daily basis—in fact, more than two thousand times from January 2000 to September 2002.
¹⁰
I was concerned, as were the CENTCOM commander and the Joint Chiefs, that one of our aircraft would soon be shot down and its crew killed or captured.
^*
In my first months back at the Pentagon, I asked General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to brief me on CENTCOM's plans in the event Iraq successfully brought down one of our planes. The plan, code-named Desert Badger, was seriously limited. Its goal was to rescue the crew of a downed aircraft—but it had no component to inflict any damage or to send any kind of message to Saddam Hussein that such provocations were unacceptable. Our friends in the region had criticized previous American responses to Iraqi aggression as weak and indecisive and had advised us that our enemies had taken comfort from America's timidity. The Desert Badger plan was clear evidence of that problem. I asked Shelton and General Franks to have their planners come up with a range of other options the President could consider. If an aircraft was downed, I wanted to be sure we had ideas for the President that would enable him to inflict a memorable cost. The new proposals I ordered included attacks on Iraq's air defense systems and their command-and-control facilities to enable us to cripple the regime's abilities to attack our planes.

Several weeks into the administration we had reason to signal to Baghdad that the days of mild and ineffective U.S. responses to their repeated provocations were coming to a close. Iraq was working to strengthen its air defense and radar capabilities in the no-fly zones by installing fixing-optic cables to make it more difficult for us to monitor their communications. The network was a direct challenge to the UN no-fly zones. On February 16, 2001, after Iraqi ground units had again targeted our aircraft, twenty-four American and British aircraft launched a coordinated attack on five Iraqi air defense sites, destroying them.
^*

Though Iraq was discussed occasionally at the senior levels of the administration, by the summer of 2001, U.S. policy remained essentially what it had been at the end of the Clinton administration—adrift. I decided to bring my questions about our inherited Iraq strategy to the members of the National Security Council to seek some clarity and presidential guidance.

In July, I sent a memo to Cheney, Powell, and Rice asking that we hold a principals committee meeting to discuss Iraq. In the document I raised two scenarios that could have the effect of forcing the President to make a decision on Iraq under unfavorable circumstances. The first involved its neighbor Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, which would dramatically change the balance in the region and possibly spark a regionwide arms buildup. Second was the possibility that “Somebody, whether Iran, Iraq, or Usama Bin Laden, could take out the royal family in one or more of the Gulf states and change the regime and the balance, perhaps inviting Iranian or Iraqi troops in to protect them.” I also noted that some event totally unforeseen by us and out of our control could force a U.S. decision on Iraq. I argued that we would be better off developing a policy well ahead of events that could overtake us. On the broader subject of Iraq, I outlined a range of possibilities for consideration:

I thought a diplomatic overture on Iraq from the Bush administration—a “Nixon goes to China” approach—was worth suggesting to the President. As I wrote in my memo to the NSC principals, echoing my thoughts of some twenty years earlier when I visited Baghdad, “There ought to be a way for the U.S. to not be at loggerheads with both of the two most powerful nations in the Gulf—Iran and Iraq.” Though the Iran-Iraq War had ended more than a decade earlier, the regimes in Tehran and Baghdad still viewed each other with hostility. Despite that animosity, both still had poor relations with the United States. I wondered if the right combination of blandishments and pressures might lead or compel Saddam Hussein toward an improved arrangement with America.
^*
While a long shot, it was not out of the question.

The National Security Council never organized the comprehensive review of U.S.-Iraq policy I requested in the summer of 2001. We can't know how the Bush administration's Iraq policy might have evolved if 9/11 had not occurred, but that event compelled our government to make terrorism a focus of intense attention. It demanded that American officials reexamine national security policy comprehensively in light of the vulnerabilities the attack exposed. It forced the still new administration to recognize the special danger posed by nations that both supported terrorist groups and possessed or pursued weapons of mass destruction.

Though intelligence did not report that Saddam was tightly connected to al-Qaida or that he was involved in the 9/11 attack, Iraq was included in almost any analysis of state supporters of terrorism. Iraq had been on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terror since 1990. The regime's links to individual terrorists and terrorist groups earned Iraq its place on the “axis of evil” list.
¹⁴

When I was queried by reporters on links between Iraq and terrorists, I referred to an unclassified written statement I had requested of George Tenet and that was subsequently prepared by the CIA. The paper was taken directly from Tenet's unclassified conclusions provided to Congress, which stated:

• We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida going back a decade.
  
• Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression.
  
• Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad.
  
• We have credible reporting that al-Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.
  ¹⁵
  

Tenet, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration were certainly not the only ones thinking about possible linkages. A few hours after the 9/11 attack, James Woolsey, CIA director under President Clinton, raised the question of whether Saddam was involved.
¹⁶
ABC News, the
Guardian
newspaper, and other media outlets floated similar questions prominently. Their queries were not unreasonable. At the time Saddam was offering twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonuses to the families of suicide bombers to encourage them to attack Israel. He allowed terrorist groups such as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the Palestine Liberation Front, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Arab Liberation Front to operate within Iraq's borders.
¹⁷
During the 1990s, terrorists supported by Saddam struck in Rome and Vienna, killing Americans and Israelis. Saddam gave refuge to terrorists on the run, like Abu Nidal, whose group was responsible for some nine hundred deaths and casualties, including a number of Americans, in attacks in more than twenty countries.
¹⁸
Abu Abbas, who hijacked the cruise liner
Achille Lauro
and murdered an American citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, was living openly and safely in Baghdad.