Over a year later, in October 2003, the CIA vindicated Burns on the important points. The burgeoning resistance that American troops faced in Iraq, which Rumsfeld had indignantly refused to characterize as guerrilla war, would become a civil war. Its combatants would be not foreign jihadis but Iraqis fighting a foreign army as well as one another. That was the judgment of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that the intelligence agencies issued a year after another one of its reports became a tool that Bush compelled and Tenet delivered to drive the United States into Iraq.
To the State Department and the CIA, such assessments were the first step to prevent or mitigate such a disaster. But to the Bush administration, Burns’s memo and the October 2003 NIE were acts of subterfuge by the usual coterie of Security State bureaucrats who failed to appreciate that redressing 9/11 required the profligate use of American power—unsurprising, they added, considering that this wise cohort had failed to thwart 9/11 itself. Such criticism revealed not only a strategic failing, but a lack of faith in American exceptionalism. Those leveling it would have to be dominated.
Among the legacies of the U.S. invasion was a presidency’s willingness to treat the Security State as an obstacle to its ambitions, even as it needed the Security State to make those ambitions real. Another was using intelligence to manufacture a fiction—multiple fictions—justifying a war of aggression. Lying about a war is of course nothing new. But lies and delusions inflected every aspect of what would become an agonizing foreign occupation that U.S. elites resisted ending.
The right would cheer lustily for the war, and later denied its many failures, since it believed doing so ensured its power. But the Security State, much of which understood the disaster about to enfold, accepted being used instead of resisting. A marine general on the Joint Staff, Gregory Newbold, and a counterterrorism coordinator in the White House, Rand Beers, were marquee resignations over the Iraq war, and both were obscure. The embodiment of everything the Security State believed it was, national hero Colin Powell, became the most important validator for the sort of war he had devoted his career to preventing the United States from fighting.
Despite the Security State’s acquiescence, the right accused it of threatening the constitutional order. It of course was threatening the constitutional order, through its surveillance, torture, indefinite detention, securitized immigration enforcement, and other aspects of the apparatus of counterterrorism, but those were all things conservatives applauded. Conservatives’ grievance was that the Security State threatened the right’s hold on power by contradicting what Bush had proclaimed about the war. “Modern history is filled with intelligence bureaus turning against their own governments, for good or ill,” wrote columnist Robert Novak. “The CIA is a long way from those extremes, but it is supposed to be a resource for—not a critic of—the president.”
None of the factions that clashed over the Iraq war took into account how an American war of aggression in the heart of the Middle East might actively metastasize global jihad. The Iraq occupation did so not only by supplying the jihad with new recruits but by providing it with motive and opportunity to evolve into something more virulent and more ambitious. Through their compounding errors, the Americans made al-Qaeda in Iraq, which did not exist before the invasion, into the most powerful jihadist franchise in the world. The War on Terror was already a conceptual failure, compounded by the disaster at Tora Bora. But Iraq proved the War on Terror generated its own futility.
Bush had said after Tora Bora that he was unconcerned about bin Laden. That was an understatement. The day after 9/11 he asked White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke to investigate any complicity that Saddam Hussein might have had in 9/11. Clarke responded that the attack was bin Laden’s work. “I know, I know,” Clarke recounts Bush responding, “but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.” When Bush assembled his national security team at Camp David that weekend, Secretary of State Colin Powell was compelled to argue that including Iraq in reprisals for 9/11 would cost the United States whatever international support for a military response existed. Rumsfeld agreed to table Iraq, but as an official at the time noted, “He hasn’t given up on it.”
It remains a matter of dispute when exactly Bush decided to attack Saddam. Bureaucratic machinations in that direction from both the Pentagon and Cheney’s office were underway soon after the attack. Shortly after Christmas 2001, Bush’s team assembled at his Texas ranch to hear CENTCOM’s Franks outline a plan for what the general billed as “regime change” with a force of more than one hundred thousand troops. Three months later, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was meeting with three senators at the White House when Bush popped his head in to say, “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”
Though the outcome was never in doubt, throughout 2002 Bush and his aides publicly denied that they had taken any decision to invade Iraq or overthrow Saddam. They did so even as cable news filled with endless speculation, bordering on enthusiasm, about whether Bush would finally move against the Iraqi leader, whose survival throughout the Clinton years was viewed as an unacceptable defiance of America. In October MSNBC debuted a show literally called Countdown: Iraq and a few months later canceled Phil Donahue’s program, which had been a rare venue on cable news for war skepticism. The default tone of coverage treated war as inevitable—the wisdom of it debatable within narrow, tactical parameters, but its justice taken for granted. “The part that makes me uncomfortable,” pundit Tucker Carlson said on CNN in June, “is that the details of it are being discussed in public. Saddam Hussein watches this. He knows that, having committed to it, the United States must follow through and must topple him.” Carlson’s guest that day, Pentagon adviser Kenneth Adelman, answered his questions about al-Qaeda and Saddam’s relative importance by insisting that “the preponderance of evidence is in favor that Iraq was involved” in 9/11—a lie—before predicting overthrowing Saddam would be “a cakewalk.”
Adelman’s representation was characteristic of the fabrications and delusions presented to Americans by the war’s architects and supporters. They confidently portrayed Saddam as allied with al-Qaeda and voiced the baseless fear that he would give bin Laden a deadly arsenal they were baselessly certain he possessed. “You can’t distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the War on Terror,” Bush said in September. The president’s choice of “terrorism” as the enemy rather than al-Qaeda aided his argument. Saddam indeed nurtured ties to terrorist groups, but they were Palestinians fighting Israel, not al-Qaeda; and he had never given them chemical agents even when he had maximal stockpiles and freedom of international action. By September 2003 a Washington Post poll found 69 percent of Americans believed Saddam was complicit in 9/11, a claim Bush himself stopped short of making.
George Tenet, weakened by 9/11, observed the administration’s efforts and, characteristically, attempted accommodation. In June 2002 his head of analysis, Jami Miscik, prepared a “purposefully aggressive” analysis “seeking to draw connections” between Saddam and al-Qaeda because neoconservative ideologues in the Pentagon and vice president’s office insisted both that a connection must exist and that the CIA couldn’t be trusted to find it. The result was something called “Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship,” which suggested a link the CIA had previously written off as unlikely. Miscik had to ignore the agency’s Mideast analysts to get there. Cheney’s team was hardly appeased. His chief of staff, Scooter Libby, called Miscik to demand she withdraw her insufficient paper. Her successor, Mike Morell, called it “the most blatant attempt to politicize intelligence that I saw in 33 years in the business, and it would not be the last attempt by Libby to do so.”
It was not enough merely to reject the CIA’s conclusions. Neoconservatives had an explanation for why they were right and the skeptics within the agency and the State Department were wrong. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer, wrote in The Week
ly Standard that both institutions were proving to be outright obstacles to the entire post-9/11 project. “The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have stubbornly refused to see the big picture of Islamic militancy,” Gerecht charged. “Our actions toward Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or Iran should not, in this view, radically change because of September 11.” The subheadline purported to lay out “how the CIA unintentionally aids terrorism.” His argument had an old pedigree. A conservative intellectual tradition rooted in the dawn of the Cold War considered the State Department and the CIA’s analytical arm to be institutional redoubts of liberalism at its most craven. Laurie Mylroie, a conspiracist influential with Wolfowitz who insisted Saddam was tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, claimed the CIA was “trying to stop the War on Terror.” Mylroie, outdoing Cheney, noted that “no one has been held accountable” at the CIA for missing 9/11. A substantial cohort on the right contended that the analytic institutions of the Security State were not only untrustworthy but fundamentally hostile.
Within the Pentagon, under the auspices of the neoconservative undersecretary Douglas Feith and allied with Cheney’s office, something ominously called the “Office of Special Plans” aimed to bypass the CIA by replicating its function. Asked after 9/11 if he thought Iraq was implicated, Wolfowitz offered a vague answer about how “everyone has got to look at this problem with completely new eyes in a completely new light.” The Office of Special Plans was their new lens.
Established in August 2002, the Office of Special Plans went beyond Miscik’s “deliberately provocative” paper. It reinterpreted dubious or dismissed material to create enough of an association as to be useful to validate the desired war. The neoconservative David Wurmser, an Office of Special Plans official who apprised Cheney’s office on its work, conceded that mapping those connections “looked like that scene in A Beautiful Mind” where a delusional man visually depicts an impenetrable mathematical proof. But to Wurmser, the implication of those connections was obvious. Given that the CIA had so much raw intelligence indicating possible contacts, wouldn’t it be irresponsible to discount it, in the wake of 9/11? And if the CIA persisted in pointing to the contradictory evidence as being more substantial, wasn’t its judgment suspect, since the agency opposed overthrowing Saddam? Shouldn’t someone be reappraising its work? As Wurmser explained to reporter Barton Gellman, “I was more laboring against obsolete assumptions, rather than cherry-picking.” By September Rumsfeld spoke of “bulletproof” evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda.
Visiting Langley personally, Dick Cheney pelted junior analysts with questions when they presented information insufficiently conducive to invading. Paul Pillar, the senior intelligence officer for the Mideast at the time, observed later that the administration, obsessed with alleged weapons of mass destruction and supposed terrorism links, never asked CIA analysts to forecast the repercussions of an invasion. “[I]ntelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made . . . ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and . . . the intelligence community’s own work was politicized,” Pillar wrote, describing a sense inside the CIA that Bush had decided on war by mid-2002, rendering contrary analysis futile. That was also the impression of MI6 director Richard Dearlove, who briefed colleagues in the UK government after a June 2002 visit to Washington that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Tyler Drumheller, a CIA operations officer, stated that the administration dismissed a September 2002 warning from Tenet that Saddam’s foreign minister, desperate to avert war, assured his secret CIA handlers there were no illicit weapons stockpiles. But the weakened Tenet buckled again. By October the agency’s intelligence products became more alarming, in time for Congress to vote for war. As the weapons analysis moved further up the analytic chain, Tenet and his deputies sanded down their doubts into a National Intelligence Estimate, an intelligence product with the aura of rigor, that was full of deceptive language implying surety. Key aspects of the CIA’s report on Saddam’s alleged biological weapons came from a defector, code-named Curveball, whose German handlers had long dismissed him as unreliable. Curveball later admitted fabricating his account so the United States would invade. “You want it real bad, you sometimes get it real bad. And the Iraq WMD estimate falls in that category,” a senior State Department intelligence chief involved in producing the NIE later reflected.
While the administration suborned the intelligence agencies, it also amassed political capital for the Republican Party. Rove had urged Republicans to “go to the country” on the War on Terror “because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job protecting and strengthening America’s military might and therefore protecting America.” By the fall, it won one Senate race with a television ad that juxtaposed triple-amputee Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, who supported Bush on the war, with images of Saddam and bin Laden. Such successes, buoyed by terrorism anxiety and Bush’s commanding approval ratings, created a dynamic where Republicans outdid themselves to back the war. “Some people seem to think there has got to be some new dramatic bit of evidence to justify our action, but frankly the president has stated the facts and they are sufficient for me to support a regime change,” judged a nativist Alabama senator, Jeff Sessions. Such sentiments carried over into the broader culture. Supporting the war was not only respectable but came to be regarded as a test of an upstanding person’s character. After one of the most popular country-music groups, the Dixie Chicks, expressed shame in their fellow Texan George W. Bush, they suffered a career-shattering backlash, complete with orgiastic public destruction of their CDs.
Unscrupulous people predictably exploited the war fever. “I’m not sure things are any tougher. They sound tougher, but I’m not sure if they are tougher in terms of security,” Donald Trump told Howard Stern on the first anniversary of 9/11. Stern asked if Trump supported invading. Trump answered, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
Neoconservatives convinced themselves that the war would be a grand act of liberation. The Iraqi émigrés they consulted stoked their American exceptionalism by assuring them that, as Bernard Lewis wrote, “there are democratic oppositions capable of taking over and forming governments” in Iraq and Iran. Wolfowitz spoke in the Arab American community of Dearborn of Iraqis’ “dream of a just and democratic society”; admirers like Hitchens called Wolfowitz “a revolutionary.” For his part, Bush implied that opponents of the war believed that Arabs must not be civilized enough for democracy: “Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism?” When the French government became an obstacle to invasion, two Republican congressmen had the cafeteria menus in the House office buildings offer only “Freedom Fries.” One of them, Walter Jones of North Carolina, would soon become one of the premier GOP war skeptics. But that was after Jones said the culinary change was a matter of honor swelling from his respect for the troops in his district. “As I’ve watched these men and women wave goodbye to their loved ones, I am reminded of the deep love they have for the freedom of this nation, and their desire to fight for the freedom of those who are oppressed overseas,” said Jones, who also made the cafeterias advertise “Freedom Toast.”
During the peak of the war fever, the neoconservatives moved against the nativists. David Frum, a Bush speechwriter, assailed the Buchananites as “self-described conservatives who see it as their role to make excuses for suicide bombers.” Those who practiced “uninhibited racial nationalism” were now deemed to be “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” Frum wrote in a National Review cover story, reversing an attack the nativists typically aimed at the often Jewish neoconservatives. “In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them,” he wrote. Such was the promise of the War on Terror: it could adjudicate
which factions were and were not authentically American.
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IN SUCH AN ENVIRONMENT, perhaps the only voice whose opposition might have prevented the war chose instead to market it. Colin Powell would not be the last eminence of the Security State to convince himself that his complicity in a disaster was in fact internal resistance to it. A Vietnam veteran from the South Bronx, an architect of America’s Gulf War victory over Saddam, and the first Black person to serve as national security adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell was a beloved national figure. A social conservative, Powell retired from the army disgusted with what he considered Clinton’s blithe willingness to commit soldiers to solve complex foreign problems but withdraw them at the first, inevitable sign of trouble. The Republicans wanted him to run against Clinton for the presidency, but he declined. His influence was such that Bush made Powell, who considered himself a statesman, his chief diplomat.
Cheney had hated Powell since they clashed over the management of Desert Storm, and was eager to marginalize him. Powell, whose established steadiness diplomats trusted, provided cover in nervous foreign capitals for Cheney’s radicalism. They came to know that Powell did not truly speak for Bush. Powell emphasized multilateralism and restraint when discussing a war Bush treated as a matter of American exceptionalist principle. Tragically, in an attempt to avert war, Powell convinced his counterparts on the United Nations Security Council that fall to reestablish an extensive weapons-inspections regime for Iraq. Powell had warned Bush that if he broke Iraq, he owned it, and considered the weapons inspections an alternative to invasion. But the move implied the legitimacy of using military force should Saddam commit a “material breach,” thereby virtually ensuring war by making a disarmed Saddam look intransigent.
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