The Story (24 page)

As Vice President Cheney stressed in public statements and interviews, America had to act to thwart such threats if there was only a “one percent chance” that Al Qaeda might get a nuclear bomb or a germ weapon of mass destruction.
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The two of them began each day in the Oval Office with a parade of potential horribles: the CIA's “Presidential Daily Brief.” The
PDB's terrifying tips, reports, and rumors of plots about to unfold, many of them involving WMD, seemed “a frighteningly real possibility,” Bush wrote. Between 9/11 and the middle of 2003, the CIA reported an average of four hundred specific threats a month and tracked more than twenty alleged large-scale plots against American targets. FBI Director Robert Mueller told Bush in late September 2001 that there were 331 potential Al Qaeda operatives inside the United States.
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Less than three weeks after 9/11 came the anthrax letter attacks, which Bush feared might be the start of Al Qaeda's “second wave”—a “sickening thought,” he wrote. One of the “best intelligence services in Europe” had told them that the letters might be the work of Saddam. While others suspected Al Qaeda, what terrified Bush was the realization that the intelligence community had no clue about the perpetrator's identity.
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In October 2001 the detection of the presence of deadly botulinum toxin by White House biodetectors, for which there was no reliable antidote—though a false alarm—had further upset senior officials. That month, CIA director Tenet told Bush and Cheney that Pakistan had arrested two nuclear scientists who had been in contact with Osama bin Laden, possibly to help Al Qaeda build a bomb—“heart-stopping news,” as
Times
reporter Peter Baker would later call it. In December, Richard Reid, a British citizen, tried to blow up an American Airlines flight carrying 197 people from Paris to Miami by detonating an explosive in his shoes.

George Tenet later called his community's intelligence reports chilling enough to “make my hair stand on end.” In his memoir, he wrote that the daily PDBs for the White House were more “assertive” than the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD capabilities.
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Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, an NSC expert on biological and nuclear threats for the Bush administration who had also worked for Clinton, said that if anything, the administration had downplayed the dire warnings the CIA delivered each day after 9/11 and the anthrax letters. She called the PDB daily warnings “bone-chilling scary.”

“What haunted the president,” Michael Anton, a former NSC official, agreed, years after the war, “was the prospect of a nuclear 9/11: WMD terrorism.”

Such intelligence reports, false alarms, and foiled plots, coupled with Iraq's continued stonewalling of UN WMD inspectors, led Bush to reevaluate the threat posed by Saddam. “Virtually every major intelligence agency in the world,” Bush wrote, was convinced that Saddam was hiding unconventional weapons and programs to make them. After 9/11, he wrote, “the stakes were too high to trust a dictator's word against the weight of the evidence and the consensus of the world.” The lesson he had drawn from 9/11, Bush wrote, was “if we waited for a danger to fully materialize, we would have waited too long.”

Support for such preventive action was strong, too, on Capitol Hill, and not just among Republicans. Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, called the intelligence exchanged at the weekly breakfast meetings that Bush, Cheney, and senior staff held with the Republican and Democratic leadership terrifying. “It's easy to forget a decade later the mood after 9/11,” he told me years later. “We all feared there would be another attack, possibly with WMD. The chilling reports of Al Qaeda activities—throughout Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia—gave us goose bumps. All of us were focused on doing everything we could to prevent such an attack—whatever was necessary.”

Prominent Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and Al Gore, among others, agreed with the neocons and now their new convert, President Bush, that Saddam had to go. “We know that he has stored away secret supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country,” Gore said in February 2002. “We are perfectly capable of staying the course in our war against Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network while simultaneously taking those steps necessary to build an international coalition to join us in taking on Saddam Hussein in a timely fashion,” he said in September 2002. Bush had to be “prepared to go the limit” against Saddam, Gore declared. “Failure cannot be an option.”
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Bush's speech at West Point in June 2002 endorsing preventive war was formalized in the fall of 2002 in a new national security strategy. The thirty-three-page document asserted that the United States would “not hesitate to act alone” and “preemptively” to thwart dangers from hostile states or terrorist groups “armed with, or seeking, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.”
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After the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a rift had developed within the administration over whether the global war on terror's next target should be Iraq. Hardliners clearly thought so. Among the most influential were Cheney and his staff, as well as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his two neocon deputies, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith; Richard Perle, then chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an important advisory post; several other senior national security officials; and, most critically, the president himself. Nowhere else were US planes being fired upon as they enforced the no-fly zone. Saddam had not only invaded and bullied his neighbors but also used chemical weapons against his own people. He had tried to kill President Bush's father. Finally, as Peter Baker wrote, “the last time America went to war with him, intelligence agencies discovered that he was further along in his nuclear program than they had known.”
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Secretary of State Colin Powell and his senior staff feared that ousting Saddam, who was not responsible for 9/11, risked a protracted war and an occupation of an Arab country with unpredictable and possibly dire consequences. Iraqi threats could be contained. Though Powell warned the president about some of them in a private dinner in August 2002, he did not oppose an invasion explicitly but, rather, urged Bush to let the UN try to resolve the problem before resorting to war.
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By the summer of 2002, I concluded that the hardliners had won. My notes do not contain a single interview or conversation in which I was specifically told that Bush had decided on war if Saddam refused to disarm and honor his other pledges, and in his memoir, he asserts that he did not decide to invade Iraq until the spring of 2003. But soon after 9/11, a giant map of Iraq appeared on the wall of Cheney's conference room during foreign policy and terrorism discussions, recalled a White House communications official on Cheney's staff.
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And the president, in his public statements, his body language on TV—his post-Afghanistan swagger—seemed ever more determined.

In October 2002 Congress authorized the use of force. The vote was 296 to 133 in the House, including 81 Democrats. The Senate vote was 77 to 23, with 29 Democrats in favor of war.
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The decision for war triggered a second internal battle within the administration. Powell and fellow “realists” fought a rear-guard action not to stop the war but to make it more legally legitimate.
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They criticized Bush's preemption doctrine against WMD threats—his preventive war
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strategy—and his stated willingness to go it alone if necessary. They pushed for a return to the UN to seek another resolution authorizing the use of force if Saddam would not readmit international inspectors and abide by his pledges.

The realists won—at least on the key tactical choice of the path to war.
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Bush embraced Powell's argument that the United States needed another UN resolution to enforce the sixteen earlier ones. Senior officials later wrote that Bush overruled Cheney and the other hardliners and backed the realists partly because British prime minister Tony Blair had warned that his government would not support the war without explicit UN support.
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The decision to adopt a multilateral approach through the UN, however, locked Bush into justifying the war based largely on alleged violations of Iraq's WMD disarmament pledges: nine of the sixteen Security Council resolutions focused on Baghdad's apparent violations of its WMD commitments.
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As a result, most of Secretary Powell's nearly three-hour speech to the UN concerned Iraq's alleged violations of international law. Powell would later publicly regret the speech as filled with errors and unintentionally misleading. But at the time, Powell and the realists downplayed other justifications for removing Saddam: his well-documented support for militant Palestinian and other terrorist groups, his murder and repression of domestic opponents, and other violations of human rights. Also downplayed was a favorite neocon theme: the need to promote stability in the region by spreading the rule of law and democracy as an alternative to the secular autocracies whose repressive iron rule fed Islamic militancy. Though “neoconism,” as scholar Frank Harvey later called the theory that a powerful neoconservative cabal had pushed the country to war, would prove stubbornly enduring, on the key issue of why and how to go to war, the neocons lost; the realists prevailed.

I don't recall precisely when I first concluded that war with Iraq was inevitable. I remember telling Gerald Boyd in early February 2002 that I was convinced President Bush was preparing to confront Saddam. After dozens of telephone interviews and rushed coffees with Pentagon, State Department, and White House sources at what was known as the “NSC Starbucks” a half block away from the Executive Office Building, I told Gerald that not only the neocons but also many officials I interviewed did not consider killing or dispersing Al Qaeda's leadership and ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan sufficient “payback” for 9/11. To deter future attacks, they said, the administration would have to topple a rogue state with WMD.

Mostly I just connected the dots, as did many other reporters. An early indicator was the State of the Union address in late January 2002. After citing America's rapid overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, President Bush warned that even if Bin Laden was killed or captured, the broader war on terror would not end. He focused specifically on states that constituted an “axis of evil,” which could provide unconventional weapons to terrorists. He would not “wait on events while dangers gather.”

Another early indication came in early February 2002 at dinner in New York with the leader of a delegation of Kuwaiti parliamentarians. Muhammad Jassem al-Saqer, chairman of the Kuwaiti Parliament's foreign affairs committee, whom I had known since Cairo, praised President Bush for vowing to act against Iraq, Iran, and North Korea for developing WMD. Calling Iraq the “richest, most dangerous state” in his region, he told me that he had urged officials in Washington to act quickly. “The longer you wait, the more dangerous Saddam will become.”

Based on his conversations in Washington with Secretary Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, al-Saqer was convinced that Bush would oust Saddam. That assessment got my attention. My story about his impressions appeared deep inside the paper.
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The administration's public pronouncements became ever more bellicose, particularly those of Vice President Cheney. In late March he told CNN—incorrectly, it turned out—that Saddam was “actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.” He told a group of Republican senators
that the question was no longer if the United States would invade Iraq, but when. Then in June came the president's commencement address at West Point: “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” America, Bush promised, “will act.”

The president's warning was not missed or misinterpreted by the media, as some would later contend. The
Times
described it as a “toughly worded speech that seemed aimed at preparing Americans for a potential war with Iraq.”

Once I concluded that the president was probably set on war, I decided to concentrate on trying to learn why administration officials seemed sure that Saddam posed so grave a threat. What intelligence was driving this choice? Were the collapsing UN sanctions deepening Bush's concern about how long Saddam could be “contained”? Was new information about Saddam's weapons activities responsible?

I also decided to position myself to ensure that I would not be excluded from covering the next Iraq war as I had been during the 1991 Gulf War. Despite my extensive experience in the Middle East and decade-long focus on terrorism, the news stories that I had broken before the 1991 invasion, and the publication of a bestselling book on Saddam's regime that I had coauthored, I had been sidelined. It would not happen again if I could help it.

I was in New York on April 8, 2002, when the Pulitzers were announced. The jury awarded the
Times
an unprecedented seven prizes for its coverage in 2001—half of all the prizes it gave that year. Our stories on Al Qaeda's global network and the government's underestimation of its threat, which I had coauthored with a small team of reporters and Steve Engelberg, who had edited the series, won the coveted prize for “explanatory” reporting.

It was the most satisfying day of my professional life. The militant Islamist threat I had been so determined to highlight, the stories I had struggled so hard to research and write, were recognized. The award went to the “staff” of the paper, not to the lead writers by name. But Steve assured me that our early stories on Al Qaeda had been dispositive in the Pulitzer
jury's decision. Until the day the
Times
abandoned its historic home at 229 West Forty-third Street, a photo display of those of us who had produced the series hung on the paper's Pulitzer row flanking the editorial writers' offices on the tenth floor. The prize, an unassuming crystal triangle, still sits proudly on my bookshelf.