Up to that point, my own participation in the debate had been limited to my involvement at the American Turkish Council symposium and to some private discussions with former colleagues who had formed a small organization, the Alliance for American Leadership. Its mission was to bring together policy makers from previous, mostly Democratic, administrations to discuss the direction in which the country was headed. This group, mirroring the roiling emotions within the country, was divided on the question but generally supported the notion that we should use our military to take out Saddam. His horrible behavior had so soured American policy makers of both parties that the desire to see him removed overwhelmed serious discussion about whether he constituted a real threat to our national security. Nor did the Alliance ponder the potential unintended consequences of an ill-considered military action.
I tried to share my concerns about the difficulties we might face in getting to Baghdad and in occupying it once we got there, but it was to a mostly indifferent audience. The consensus was that opposing the administration was a losing cause. Politics trumped sound policy.
The head of the Alliance, former ambassador to Morocco, Marc Ginsberg, had frequently appeared as a pundit on various FOX news programs. Despite our different views, he arranged for me to make guest appearances on a couple of them over the summer of 2002. On those occasions, I pointed out that Iraq posed one legitimate national security threat to the United States, and that was from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. A series of U.N. Security Council resolutions passed before and after the first Gulf War recognized that threat and had sought to deal with it through the intrusive inspections. That enforcement mechanism of inspections had collapsed when the international inspection teams were withdrawn in 1998 just prior to the Clinton administration’s four-day “Desert Fox” cruise missile attacks on suspected WMD sites. They had not returned since.
International support, both for inspections and for the ongoing economic sanctions, had waned. Key members of the U.N. Security Council, notably the French and the Russians, were meanwhile actively seeking to normalize relations with Iraq, and it was clear that reinvigorating the international will to monitor Saddam’s programs would be difficult. Kenneth Pollack, in his acclaimed book The Threatening Storm—the definitive case that to disarm Saddam we would have to militarily overthrow him—concluded that it would be all but impossible to regain an international consensus to coercively contain Saddam, and that it was too dangerous to ignore him.
Brent Scowcroft was becoming increasingly concerned that perhaps his earlier optimism had been misplaced. No longer certain that the administration would shun the neoconservative path, he wrote a piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 15, 2002. He warned of potential disaster if we tried to deal with Saddam militarily. Former Secretary of State James Baker III, too, was cautionary; he wrote in the Washington Post that whatever we decided had to be underpinned by an international consensus and coalition.
Former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke followed suit in another op-ed, and the debate was joined, albeit somewhat feebly, by other informed public officials who worried about the consequences of taking unilateral military action. While both Baker and Holbrooke entertained the possibility of a war for regime change, they each favored working with the international community, which virtually guaranteed that any U.N. resolution would surely stop short of authorizing the invasion of a member state, however deplorable. Meanwhile, I continued to grouse privately and to make occasional appearances on little-watched cable television outlets.
I made an early summer appearance on CNN’s American Morning with Paula Zahn and repeated my point that we needed to be wary of a regime-change war as the best way to achieve the disarmament objective. Paula could not have been sweeter as she delivered a classic brush-off: “Thank you very much, Ambassador Wilson. That is one man’s opinion.” I heard nothing more from her producers for several weeks, as the pro-regime-change war rhetoric dominated the broadcast debate.
Friends of both political persuasions grew tired of my whining about the direction in which the policy was headed, prompting one, Anita Sharma, the talented director of the Conflict Resolution Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, to suggest bluntly that if I didn’t like the course the administration was pursuing, I should write an article laying out my alternative views. Do something about it or shut up! Enough complaining, she said; and she was right. It is never enough to just sit on the sidelines and kvetch. Democracy asks us, requires us, to be engaged with issues, to become involved and not to accede to the loudest voices without questioning them.
I wrote my first newspaper article for the San Jose Mercury News Perspective section on October 13, 2002, arguing that although the disarmament of Iraq was a legitimate international goal, the president would need a credible threat of force behind his diplomacy if he ever hoped to persuade Saddam to comply. However, I said, we had to be very careful about setting up regime change as our military objective. My personal experience with Saddam and his henchmen had persuaded me that he would engage in every dirty trick in the book if he believed that the goal of military action was to topple him. On the other hand, I added, he might value his personal survival more than his WMD, and not resist disarmament if he thought that might enable him to survive. The trick was to make clear to him that he was going to be disarmed one way or another; however, should he use WMD to defend himself against coalition actions, military or otherwise, or if he should use them against any of his neighbors or against Israel, that would be justification to destroy him and his regime. I made the point, furthermore, that this was not a question of war versus no war, but a choice between smart military action for the right reasons and a misguided war fought for dumb reasons.
I sent my article to Scowcroft, Baker, and the president’s father out of courtesy, because in it I referred to the lessons learned in the diplomacy of the first Gulf War. In particular, I cited the Baker-Aziz meeting in Geneva in January 1991 and Secretary Baker’s unmistakable message to Tariq Aziz: If Saddam did not withdraw his troops from Kuwait peacefully by January 15, then the coalition armed forces would drive Iraq’s forces back across its border; should Saddam use WMD against our action, then Baker made it clear that we would destroy the regime, the implication being that we might even use nuclear weapons in response to a chemical attack. If Saddam had been considering using WMD, the tactic worked; he was deterred.
By contrast, I believed that the current regime-change rhetoric ensured that Saddam would use every weapon in his arsenal, for there was nothing to deter him from doing his worst. Offering a way out allowed at least the possibility that we would not provoke precisely what we were trying to avoid—a chemical, biological, and potentially nuclear war in the Arabian desert.
Brent called me when he received the article. He kindly asked if he could “take it over to the White House,” only about two blocks from his downtown office. He said that he thought senior officials ought to read the views of somebody who actually had experience in Iraq and with Saddam’s government. By this, I took him to mean that he intended to share it with the national security adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, or her deputy, Stephen Hadley. Dr. Rice, a Scowcroft protégée, had been brought into the National Security Council during the first Bush administration. At the time of the first Gulf War, she had been in charge of Soviet Affairs. While we had never met during that period, I assumed that she knew who I was because of my frequent cables from Baghdad, especially since the U.S. was then working so closely with the Russians.
At that time, President Gorbachev had sent his special envoy, Yevgeny Primakov, to Baghdad twice to try to convince Saddam to quit Kuwait rather than suffer a military defeat. Primakov had emerged from his second meeting with Saddam saying that he had “been mildly encouraged by what he had not heard from the Iraqi dictator.” What he had not heard was mistakenly interpreted as a hint that Saddam was showing some flexibility. (“Thin gruel, indeed,” wa
s the tart observation by Frank Wisner, U.S. ambassador to Egypt.) Surely Dr. Rice had to have followed these developments and the names of those reporting from the field. I had no misplaced desire for notoriety in this: even if she didn’t recognize my name, my experiences in Baghdad were clearly described in the article.
Later, when the administration stumbled in its pronouncements after my New York Times op-ed column on July 6, I could not understand what Rice thought she was accomplishing by leaving interviewers with the impression that she had no idea who I was. Perhaps she has a poor memory, although I find that as improbable as her claim later that she had simply forgotten about the CIA memoranda dealing with the vital question of purported uranium sales from Niger to Iraq.
Several days after the call from General Scowcroft, I received a letter from former President Bush. It was a warm note, not unexpected in light of the many communications I had received from him over the years. My relationship with the former president, even though contact was infrequent, is one that I shall always cherish. His concern for me and for every other American citizen in harm’s way during the first Gulf War, as well as the personal attention he afforded me when so many other demands were competing for his time, guarantees my unqualified personal affection. In the note, he said he “agreed with almost everything” I had written.
A few weeks later, I also received a letter from Secretary Baker, in which he kindly offered that “the administration seems to have taken your advice.”
By the time I received Baker’s letter, President Bush’s rhetoric had undergone a decided shift, largely due to efforts of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to reframe the issue as one of disarmament. Gone from the president’s public statements were references to regime change. Instead, he was making statements to the effect that either “he will disarm or we will disarm him.” When later asked if the language represented a change in approach, senior officials scoffed at the notion. If Saddam disarmed, then the regime had by definition changed, they explained.
A number of Web sites that aggregate and distribute via E-mail important articles, such as Truthout.org, Buzzflash.com, Common-dreams. org, and Alternet.org, were evidently interested in mine, and their electronic distribution of it generated some new invitations for me to appear on television. I began to field calls from producers for programs including Hannity & Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor on FOX and Buchanan and Press on MSNBC. A producer from Paula Zahn’s show even called and invited me back.
I welcomed the opportunity to participate, because I honestly believed that insights I had drawn from my experience in Iraq would contribute to our understanding of the potential consequences of the war being contemplated. Disarmament was a legitimate objective to pursue, particularly as it had been supported by the international community on repeated occasions. I simply disagreed with the need to invade, conquer, and occupy Iraq in order to arrive at a high degree of confidence that it had been disarmed.
As to the other justifications for war, I stated on TV that Iraq’s operational ties to international terrorism “with a global reach,” to use the president’s phrase, were debatable and, at a minimum, inconclusive. The suggestion that Saddam might give WMD to international terrorists was always specious. Director of the CIA George Tenet testified to Congress and advanced the widely accepted view, which I shared, that the only time Saddam might let go of his WMD would be in the final throes of a defeat, in a desperate attempt to inflict a posthumous last laugh on his enemies. Saddam was nothing if not a control freak; control of his WMD, if he still had them, the crown jewels of his rule, would be his highest priority. To contend that he would surrender that control to an unaccountable group of nihilistic terrorists had always been absurd.
Further justification for the invasion lay in the frequently asserted need to liberate and democratize the Iraqis after thirty years of tyranny that included, as we heard repeatedly, mass graves and barbaric human rights violations, including Saddam’s use of chemical weapons. Who can forget the poignant sight of Secretary of State Colin Powell at the mass graves of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja in September 2003? But do we remember that the same Colin Powell was national security adviser in the first Bush administration when the gassing of those Kurds had occurred? It had long been legitimate to accuse Saddam of genocide against his own population; but previous administrations, notably those in office when he was committing the most egregious of his murderous activities, had never before seriously sought to punish his behavior. These violations of human rights had not elicited much opprobrium from the United States government, back when relations with Saddam had served as a useful counterweight in our dealings with Iran.
One mechanism to condemn the murderous aspects of Saddam’s rule would have been to use the International Convention on Genocide, which provides legal underpinning for action against murderous regimes. While after the 2003 invasion the Bush administration would inveigh even more vociferously against his brutality, exercising the terms of the genocide treaty was never seriously discussed, either domestically or at the U.N., by an administration so averse to the multilateralism this would have required.
At the time of my first Mercury News piece, however, Congress was in the midst of its debate on a resolution that, if passed, would give the president broad powers to take action against Iraq, including military action if he deemed it necessary. The resolution enjoyed the broad support of the Republican Party, especially in the House of Representatives, where Majority Leader Tom DeLay guaranteed total discipline among his troops. In the Senate, the support was more considered, and certain changes were made in the resolution, though none that imposed significant restraint on the president. Democratic Senators Robert Byrd (with superb eloquence), Edward Kennedy, Carl Levin, and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, made a concerted effort to impose some limits on the “blank-check resolution,” so called for the latitude it would give the president.
President Bush argued—disingenuously, as it turned out—that he needed the resolution not to go to war, but to be able to negotiate a strong disarmament resolution at the United Nations. Absent the threat of the U.S. going it alone, the president claimed that the U.N. would never reconstitute an intrusive inspections regime. Republicans increased the pressure on Democrats by making it clear that if they did not get their resolution language quickly, they would accuse Democrats of being soft on national security in the upcoming midterm elections. This was a killer charge in the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, even though it was unfair and untrue. In the end, both chambers submitted to the president’s insistence that America’s national security was at stake and passed the war resolution.
In a bitter irony, the Republicans ran a “soft on terrorism” campaign against Georgia Senator Max Cleland anyway. Senator Cleland—who had lost his two legs and an arm fighting for his country in Vietnam—tried to prevent the administration from using the Homeland Security Act as a vehicle for gutting traditional civil-service protections for federal workers under the new Homeland Security Department. For that, Cleland’s Republican opponent ran attack ads that literally put him alongside Osama bin Laden. It was one of the most despicable Senate campaigns ever, and the Vietnam veteran lost his seat to a candidate who had never served in the military. It was shameful treatment of a true patriot.
On November 8, 2002, armed with his use-of-force resolution from Congress, the president’s strategy paid off when the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441. Iraq would be given one last chance to comply with all the previous resolutions and was required to submit an updated declaration of everything it had produced in the way of programs, weapons, missiles, precursors—essentially everything regarding its weapons of mass destruction—within thirty days, or face the consequences.
Even before the due date of the Iraqi declaration was reached, the hard-liners began declaring that anything Saddam delivered would, by definition, be a lie and that we should invade Iraq as soon after
the deadline as possible. If the neoconservatives had been angry before the U.N. deal—and they were—they were truly furious afterward. The ink on the resolution was barely dry before they launched attacks on Colin Powell for having led the president down the wrong path, one in which he was placing his faith in what they said was a feckless international community.
Attacks on Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat who headed the U.N. inspection effort, followed soon after. They turned very personal and came from a very senior level in the administration. Vice President Cheney claimed on several occasions that Blix and his International Atomic Energy Agency counterpart, Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, had been fooled by Saddam in the past and, by implication, would be again. Critics of the U.N. said the U.S. should never allow a bunch of foreigners to prevent the administration from doing everything in its power to defend the country in the war on terror. The message was clear: the war party would not be denied its fight by some meddlesome international bureaucrats, even if the WMD threat did not merit war and there were no clear links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. They simply would not accept any outcome but war.
With the deadline looming, chicken hawks, including Ken Adelman, James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, and Richard Perle, claimed that since Saddam would never declare all of his weapons, President Bush, to be credible, would have to act no more than a few days after the Iraqi declaration.The war would kick off before Christmas—if not by then, no later than mid-January, they solemnly intoned.
Reading from the neocons’ script, no sooner had the declaration landed at the U.N. in New York than the administration proclaimed that it was full of holes. By December 19, the State Department had published a fact sheet with its version of Iraq’s inconsistencies listed. I did not see the fact sheet at the time, but I learned later that the first iteration contained a reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger. The reference was apparently scrubbed soon after, and the Niger charge was removed—at least for a time. News reports after the fact suggested that the neoconservative mole in the State Department, John Bolton, the under secretary for Arms Control, had slipped the reference into the first version, but someone at State had caught the mistake and deleted it.
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