I still agreed with this formulation. Otherwise, if Saddam concluded that all we wanted was his scalp, he would have no incentive to comply with the disarmament demand. We did not want to fight through whatever nefarious defenses he might be able to muster just so we could occupy Baghdad, which would present us with all the problems attendant to administering a restive population. Those of us who had been involved in the first Gulf War had concluded before Desert Storm that there was little to be gained, and much potentially lost, in invading Iraq and pushing all the way to Baghdad. That assessment still held in early 2003.
In A World Transformed, which President George H. W. Bush coauthored with Brent Scowcroft, and published in 1998, they explained it best:Trying to eliminate Saddam . . . would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. . . . We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq . . . there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.
Regrettably, as we have discovered, the instincts of the former president and his national security adviser were prescient.
But in his speech to the world, George W. Bush included a statement that could be interpreted by Saddam only as a direct personal threat. “Tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.” Not simply promising the disarmament of Iraq as he had in his recent speeches, the president now stated outright his intention to rout Saddam from power, and to kill or capture him. It was an unwise thing to say. It made whatever strategy we adopted for Iraq that much more dangerous because it so blatantly telegraphed our next move and our ultimate goal.
A week after the State of the Union address, on February 5, 2003, Powell appeared before the U.N. Security Council and dramatically detailed the American case against Saddam—and the case for war. The next day, even many liberal pundits were persuaded by his theatrical performance. I had heard a different speech, however. So had a longtime colleague of mine, retired Colonel Pat Lang, a bona fide specialist in the region and a highly decorated senior intelligence official. He concluded from all the inferences and lack of specificity in Powell’s charges that there was simply no convincing case in the matter of weapons of mass destruction. Artists’ renderings of trucks are not evidence. Satellite photos of buildings are not evidence. Cryptic recordings of conversations are not evidence.
But I heard something different still. Unlike Pat, what I heard Powell unwittingly say was that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 was working. After all, he and the president both made clear that the scientists responsible for doing the research and development of Iraq’s WMD had either been secreted in neighboring countries, or else threatened with death if they cooperated with the inspectors. In either case, they were clearly not able to work on their programs. Others involved in the programs, we were told, were busy cleaning up suspected sites. If they were spending all their time cleaning, then they were not filling artillery shells with prohibited chemicals. U.N. inspectors had recently returned to Iraq and were roaming through Saddam’s factories and palaces at will, Powell told us. We were watching everything Saddam’s people did—flash to a satellite photo. We were listening to everything they said—cut to the audio recording of a conversation between two soldiers. The bottom line for people in the disarmament business is that disruption indicates a significant measure of success, and we were without doubt disrupting Saddam’s programs. Thus, I concluded from Powell’s speech that since 1441 was indeed working, there was no need to immediately undertake an extraordinarily high-risk, low-reward war.
Most newspapers and commentators were convinced otherwise. Headlines blared “Case Closed,” lauding Powell for his compelling indictment. In retrospect, his performance was, as retired State Department intelligence analyst, Greg Thielman, put it, “a low point in his distinguished thirty-five-year career.” For the previous two years, there had been a running debate on Powell in Washington. Some observers, myself included, felt that Powell was the one person standing in the way of the true believers and keeping them from completely taking over the government. Others had concluded that he was simply the kinder, gentler face of an extremist administration. After his speech at the U.N., I reluctantly moved to the second camp.
Powell utterly repudiated the carefully thought-out doctrine of force that has borne his own name since Desert Storm and failed the troops he had been privileged to lead for so many years. The Powell doctrine defined how and when to wield the blunt instrument of war; it laid out what conditions should be met prior to launching military action. It stated that military action should be used only as a last resort, and only if a clear risk to national security exists; that the force should be overwhelming and disproportionate to that of the adversary; that it should be used only if the general public stands in strong support of the campaign; and that an exit strategy has to have been devised.
In this case, war was not the last resort; there was no clear risk to our national security, and, as we know now at this writing in early 2004, there were no weapons of mass destruction and there never was a satisfactory exit strategy, only a precipitous cut-and-run approach geared to the presidential election calendar. Essentially, Powell took his lofty 82 percent national approval rating and threw it behind the neoconservative juggernaut.
The results were immediate. At speaking engagements over the several months previous to Powell’s speech, I had noted in audiences considerable ambivalence about war with Iraq. There had been a slight bias in favor of the president’s position, but it was not the strong support that the Powell doctrine insisted upon as a prerequisite. In fact, the support derived mostly from the residual anxieties of 9/11. It reflected the desire that our president succeed in his role as protector-in-chief. Boosting support, as well, was Americans’ confusion over the nature of the threat, and particularly in the false impression administration officials had assiduously fostered that Saddam was somehow responsible for the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Yet it was Powell’s credibility that finally put public opinion over the top.
Over and over again, I was told “Colin Powell wouldn’t lie to us.” After his speech and the press analysis of it, Americans were persuaded that the “last resort” of war now was the only course to take. Powell’s support for invading Iraq with a pseudo-coalition was essential, and he deserves at least as much of the responsibility for the subsequent situation that we find ourselves in as anybody else in the administration, because, more than anyone else, it was his credibility and standing among the American people that tipped the scales.
In the wake of the increasingly bellicose rhetoric from the administration, and so-called experts, I began to speak openly about the hidden imperial agenda of the war proponents and to raise concerns about what a post-invasion Iraq might look like. Up to that point, my reason for being in the debate had been primarily to ensure that the fate of our troops be fully discussed before we sent them into battle. My agenda continued to grow, as I hoped to elucidate more fully the reasons, justified or not, that the administration was about to ask our sons and daughters in uniform to kill and die in our name.
In February, I had lunch with David Corn, the articulate and determined critic of the war. I had become acquainted with him when we kept bumping into each other in the “green room” at FOX. I shared with him my concerns about the imperial nature of the administration’s drive to war, and he asked me to write an article for The Nation. He felt that my “establishment” credentials would lend
credibility to the point of view espoused by the magazine—a point of view, I hasten to add, that, by and large, I had come to share. I agreed, and the piece, entitled “Republic or Empire,” was published in mid-February. In it, I argued that we had, for the most part, already succeeded in our efforts to contain and disarm Saddam. Moreover, with new basing agreements for the U.S. military from Yemen to Afghanistan, we had established a dominant presence astride strategic oil reserves that would enable us to respond to crises in the region much more quickly and effectively in the future than we had ever been able to in the past. Thus, the conquest of Iraq would not materially improve our influence from southern Asia to the Horn of Africa.
In President Bush’s much-ballyhooed February 26 speech on democracy in the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute, the home of the neoconservative leadership, he made his clearest statement yet about his vision for a future Iraq. He said:A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.
It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world—or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim—is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life. Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.
With those words, the presidential seal of approval was stamped on a war to liberate an oppressed people and to redraw the political map of the Middle East. In the president’s vision, the goal of American policy in the region was to foster Western-style democracy, thereby making it a safer place for us and for our friends in the Arab world. It was hard to disagree with the president that exporting democracy and freeing people from dictatorial regimes are laudable goals. But I also knew that that is not what we’ve structured the U.S. military to do for our country. Notwithstanding administration promises of a cakewalk in Iraq, I was concerned it would be enormously difficult, costly, and time-consuming to impose democracy there at the barrel of a gun, requiring, above all, a grateful and compliant population. If we didn’t succeed, we would be forever blamed for the havoc we wrought in trying.
The publication of my article in The Nation led to a further series of appearances on more substantive news programs. On NOW with Bill Moyers on February 28, I was given a platform to more fully explain my unease with the administration’s policy. I used my twenty minutes with Moyers to point out some of the pitfalls I saw in the president’s vision of democratization as the panacea for our security concerns in the region. I told Bill:I’ve done democracy in Africa for twenty-five years. And I can tell you that doing democracy in the most benign environments is really tough sledding. And in a place like Iraq, where politics is a blood sport and where you have these clan, tribal, ethnic, and confessional cleavages, coming up with a democratic system that is pluralistic, functioning, and, as we like to say about democracies, not inclined to make war on other democracies, is going to be extraordinarily difficult.
And let me just suggest a scenario. Assuming that you get the civic institutions and a thriving political culture in the first few iterations of presidential elections, you’re going to have Candidate A, who is likely going to be a demagogue, and Candidate B, who is likely going to be a populist. That’s what emerges from political discourse.
Candidate A, Candidate B, the demagogue and the populist, are going to want to win elections for the presidency. And the way to win elections is to inflame the passions of your population. The easy way for a demagogue or a populist in the Middle East to inflame the passion of the population is to define himself or herself by their enemies.
And the great enemy in the Middle East is Israel and its supplier, the United States. So it’s hard to believe, for me, that a thriving democracy, certainly in the immediate and near-term and medium-term future, is going to yield a successful presidential candidate who is going to be pro-Israel or pro-America.
On March 5, I participated in a Nightline town meeting debate moderated by Ted Koppel, the title of which was “War in Iraq, Why Now.” James Woolsey, Senator John McCain, and Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention debated Senator Carl Levin, the Reverend Susan Thistlethwaite of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and me. It was clear from the opening remarks that the other side had thoroughly rehearsed what they were going to say. In fact, the next day Randy Schoeneman, head of the Iraqi Liberation Foundation, told me that they had conducted a mock debate before the town meeting. Our side certainly had not prepared. When we got to the set, Carl Levin told me that he was going to emphasize the need for multilateral as opposed to unilateral action. I replied that I was going to stress the need for our actions to be related to the WMD threat we all agreed we faced. Neither he nor I had met Ms. Thistlewaite before; she proved to be a passionate and articulate voice, but we were disadvantaged by our comparative lack of preparation.
It was an unpleasant evening from the beginning. Land reflected the views of the one part of the American population that was gungho for the war from the beginning. The Christian Right, with its literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, had become increasingly strident in promoting war in the Middle East as necessary for the return of Jesus and the subsequent “rapture” promised on Judgment Day.
When I was making the point that we could achieve disarmament without resorting to occupation—not the best idea, given the potential for negative outcomes, I was about to say—John McCain interrupted me and likened my attitude to appeasement. I take great offense at having my patriotism questioned by anyone. John McCain’s service to his country is unimpeachable but that does not give him a monopoly on loyalty, nor is it equatable with wisdom on national security issues.
McCain was ill-advised to echo the hard-right neoconservatives who were driving the war juggernaut. After all, who should know better than an officer-turned-POW, who so valiantly insisted that others be repatriated from the Hanoi Hilton before him, that the time to debate the serious issues of war and peace is before, not after, troops have been put in harm’s way? He knew well what it would mean to send 130,000 soldiers to war without a clear mandate or exit strategy. Put simply, soldiers are unnecessarily exposed to lethal danger. To insist that that point be raised before our troops find themselves in that position is certainly not appeasement; it is an essential part of the national debate.
When I later noted that the democratization of Iraq would be a stiff challenge, Woolsey accused me of racism by twisting my words to suggest that I believed Arabs were not up to the task. He seemingly did not know, or want to acknowledge, that I had done democratization in the field on behalf of the U.S. for close to twenty years and was an ardent supporter of the work. Woolsey, on the other hand, had led the classic Washington-insider life. His accusation was an outrageously provocative insult and was seen as such by an audience made up of a number of African Americans, several of them members of the House of Representatives who had known me from my White House days managing Africa Affairs. The remark went over with a thud and was subsequently dropped from the standard set of neoconservative talking points spouted at me.
At the end of the evening, despite the vitriol hurled at us by the other side, Ted Koppel turned to McCain, Woolsey, and Land and said, “You have made some important points, gentlemen, but you have not made your case that war with Iraq now is necessary.” If that had made us victors, it was a pyrrhic win. Unfortunately, of course, the one person whom we would have liked most to influence by our arguments—George W. Bush—was probably already asleep. But then, as he later told Brit Hume of FOX, he gets his information straight from his advisers rather than from newspapers and broadcast outlets.
After the debate, I waded into the audience and was warmly receive
d by, among others, a small group of Iraqi Americans, who, for all their desire to see Saddam go, were concerned about the violence soon to be visited upon their country and their people. I was touched when they invited me to spend an evening with them at their center in Arlington, Virginia. We agreed to March 17, a few weeks later. The center was run by a Shia cleric but committed to Iraqis of all faiths, uniting them in their national identity rather than in religious affiliation. I took Valerie with me and was very pleased to have the opportunity to introduce my wife to people of the nationality among whom I had spent such a pivotal time of my life. This meeting took place, coincidentally, on the night that President Bush spoke to the nation and gave Saddam forty-eight hours to capitulate, thus making it clear that the U.S. was going to occupy Baghdad either peacefully or by force. The emotions in the social hall ran high. The die had been cast, war was at hand, and all we could do was pray for our troops and the innocent Iraqis who would surely suffer in the coming conflict. It was a poignant evening, and I was gratified to be spending it here, with Valerie, among people whose destiny my country was about to decide.
Two days later, America would be at war in the Gulf again.
Chapter Sixteen
What I Didn’t Find in Africa
ON MARCH 7, 2003, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, told the U.N. Security Council that documents belatedly submitted by the administration relating to the purported sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq were not authentic. In fact, as one widely reported statement from his deputy, Jacques Baute in Vienna, pointed out, the forgeries were so obvious that a twenty-minute Google search would have exposed their flaws. The next day, a State Department spokesman was quoted as saying, “We fell for it.”
The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity Page 33