Exceptional

by Dick Cheney

  We also know that Saddam Hussein had the technology, equipment, facilities, and scientists in place to construct the world’s worst weapons. We know he intended to reconstitute these programs as soon as the international sanctions regime collapsed. He had an advanced nuclear program in place prior to Operation Desert Storm. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that had his efforts not been derailed by Desert Storm, he could have had a nuclear device by 1992.

  In 1998, Saddam kicked the international weapons inspectors out of Iraq. He violated every one of the seventeen UN Security Council resolutions passed against him.

  Critics of the liberation of Iraq would do well to read about his 1988 chemical weapons attack on Halabja, particularly the accounts telling of the babies and children who died slow, painful deaths in bomb shelters where they had sought refuge with their families. The shelters became, as Saddam knew they would, gas chambers. The lesson of Halabja and perhaps two hundred other villages and towns that Saddam attacked with chemical weapons is that Saddam had no compunction, no moral compass, no hesitation to use the world’s worst weapons, even against his own people.

  Saddam’s was a reign of terror characterized by torture, rape rooms, the murder of parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents, and the oppression of the Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Shi’ites. George W. Bush captured it well when he wrote that Saddam was “a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD and supporting terror at the heart of the Middle East.”

  Against the weight of historical evidence, some critics claim that the Bush administration manufactured or exaggerated the intelligence about Saddam’s weapons programs. The charge doesn’t stand up against the facts. Both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Robb-Silberman Commission issued bipartisan reports concluding there was no politicization of the intelligence or pressure on analysts to change their judgments about Iraq’s WMD. In fact, intelligence assessments about Saddam’s weapons programs stretched back at least a decade:

  • A 1993 National Intelligence Estimate found that international support for sanctions was eroding but judged that even if they remained in place, Saddam Hussein would “continue reconstituting Iraq’s conventional military forces” and “will take steps to re-establish Iraq’s WMD programs.”

  • A 1994 Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee report assessed that “the Iraqi government is determined to covertly reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.”

  • In 2000, a National Intelligence Estimate judged, “Despite a decade-long international effort to disarm Iraq, new information suggests that Baghdad has continued and expanded its offensive BW [biological weapons] program by establishing large scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production capability. We judge that Iraq maintains the capability to produce previously declared agents and probably is pursuing development of additional bacterial and toxin agents. Moreover, we judge that Iraq has BW delivery systems available that could be used to threaten U.S. and Allied forces in the Persian Gulf region.”

  • In late 2000, one of the first intelligence reports that the newly elected president and vice president received was titled “Iraq: Steadily Pursuing WMD Capabilities.”

  The Bush administration wasn’t alone in reading the intelligence reports. Others who did, going back to 1998, recognized the danger Saddam posed and urged action—though they later changed their views when it seemed politically expedient to do so. Some of these individuals include:

  JOHN KERRY: “When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat to our security.”

  HILLARY CLINTON: “Saddam Hussein is a tyrant who has tortured and killed his own people” and “used chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds and Iranians. . . . Intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program.” Saddam “has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members.”

  JOE BIDEN: “Ultimately, as long as Saddam Hussein is at the helm, no inspectors can guarantee that they have rooted out the entirety of [his] weapons program,” and “the only way to remove Saddam is a massive military effort led by the United States.”

  JAY ROCKEFELLER: There is “unmistakeable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . Saddam’s government has contact with many international terrorist organizations that likely have cells here in the United States. . . . September 11 changed our world forever. We may not like it, but it is the world in which we live. When there is a grave threat to Americans’ lives, we have a responsibility to take action to prevent it.”

  NANCY PELOSI: “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region,” and “he has made a mockery of the weapons inspections process.”

  BILL CLINTON: “Heavy as they are, the costs of action must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world, and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. . . . Mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.”

  In 1998, Congress had passed and Bill Clinton had signed into law the “Iraq Liberation Act,” making regime change in Iraq the policy of the United States. A few months later, President Clinton had launched air strikes against Saddam’s WMD capabilities.

  Saddam’s support for terrorists; his willingness to use the world’s worst weapons; his intent to reconstitute his own programs, including nuclear ones, using scientists, technology, equipment, and facilities that he kept on hand; and his thwarting of the international community for more than a decade by repeatedly defying UN Security Council resolutions all combined to form the toxic mix that made Saddam a grave threat to the United States. We were right to invade and remove him from power.

  America’s liberation of Iraq also sent a clear message to others in the region that we would take military action if necessary. Within a few days of our capture of Saddam, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi announced he would like to turn over his nuclear program. He feared he would suffer the same fate as Saddam. Shortly after that, we were able to dismantle the nuclear proliferation network established by A. Q. Khan, Qaddafi’s supplier of nuclear technology. Khan was put out of business and placed under house arrest in Pakistan. Those who say we should not have taken action in Iraq should spend a moment contemplating what the so-called Arab Spring might have looked like with a nuclear-armed Qaddafi in power in Tripoli, or what we might be facing today if Libya’s weapons were in the hands of militant Islamists.

  The war to liberate Iraq was indisputably difficult. It included tragedy and challenges we did not foresee. Every war does, but these tragedies and challenges do not detract from the rightness of our cause. The question is what to do in the face of setbacks. History has proved that President Bush’s decision to surge forces into Iraq and adopt a counterinsurgency strategy under the command of Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno worked.

  Success in Iraq was also secured by the skill of people like Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Stanley McChrystal. The methods McChrystal and our special operators developed in Iraq—taking down a terrorist target, exploiting the information found at the site, moving immediately to act on the leads and take down other terrorists—were honed over a number of years. In April 2004, McChrystal has written, special operators ran a total of ten operations in Iraq. That August they conducted eighteen. By 2006, his teams had improved their methods to the point where they could average more than three hundred operations per month, “against a faster, smarter enemy and with greater precision and intelligence yield.”

  Such operations, a critical tool in the war on terror, stand in s
tark contrast to the Obama administration’s actions in Benghazi, Libya, for example. The administration did not move quickly in the aftermath of the attack on our facility and the murder of our people to uncover critical intelligence and capture or kill those responsible. Instead they spent eighteen months building a legal case before they moved to capture Ahmed Abu Khattala. Once they had him in hand, they read him the Miranda warnings.

  When President Obama took office in January 2009, al Qaeda in Iraq had been defeated. Iraq was a stable nation moving toward true democracy, allied with America in the heart of the Middle East. The real proof that things were in good shape as President Obama took over is that his administration immediately set about trying to claim credit for the situation. Vice President Joe Biden memorably predicted in 2010 that Iraq “will be one of the great achievements of this administration.” President Obama repeatedly claimed, “We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, self-reliant Iraq,” as he set about withdrawing all U.S. forces.

  President Obama failed to understand that Iraq’s security, sovereignty, and stability were fragile. It is a tragedy that he abandoned Iraq, sacrificing the gains secured by American blood and treasure. We have not yet begun to see the full cost of that decision.

  AT THE DAWN OF the age of terror, the United States was once again faced with an enemy committed to the destruction of freedom and the worldwide spread of a deadly ideology. We dedicated ourselves, for seven and a half years after the attacks of 9/11, to preventing further attacks on the homeland. We built up our defenses, improved our intelligence capabilities, put programs in place to detain and effectively interrogate the enemy, and took the fight to them. The United States recognized that this was not a fight that could be won on defense.

  Few suggested, in the days when the attack was fresh in our minds, that we would be safe if we just withdrew from the conflicts of the world. The feebleness of that line of thinking was obvious against the backdrop of the smoldering ruins of the twin towers, the smoke rising from the Pentagon, and the burning wreckage in a field in Pennsylvania. Comforting as isolationism might seem to some now, all these years later, it is no more serious an option than it was then. Neither America, nor our allies, nor the cause of freedom will be safe if we retreat within our borders, ignore rising threats, and hope for the best.

  Nine days after the attacks, when President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress, he talked of the grief and loss we all felt, and the memories we would forever carry with us of that September day. He said, “Even grief recedes with time and grace. But our resolve must not pass.” In words as true now as they were then, he described our obligation:

  Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom—the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time—now depends on us. Our nation—this generation—will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.

  PART TWO

  The Era of Obama

  The Apology Tour

  I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation.

  —SENATOR BARACK OBAMA, JUNE 3, 2008

  The claims made by Senator Obama the night he declared victory in the Democratic presidential primary were extraordinary. His election as president would not only end a war and ensure the nation’s security, it would affect the rise of the oceans and the health of the planet. The new nominee’s level of self-regard was apparent, as was his underlying belief that America had played a malign role in the world. If the election of a new American president could alleviate all these problems, then America must have been largely responsible for creating them.

  In Senator Obama’s view, America’s sins were both of omission and commission. Explaining the rise of radical Islam, for example, he said in an interview on July 13, 2008, “There has been a shift in Islam that I believe is connected to the failures of governments and the failures of the West to work with many of these countries in order to make sure opportunities are there, that there’s bottom-up economic growth.”

  Previously, in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama had taken a longer look back. He assessed the last fifty years of American foreign policy through the lens of Indonesia, a nation he called “the land of my childhood.” With a nod to “our role in liberating former colonies” and establishing international institutions to “help manage the post World War II order,” the broad outline of America’s effect on the world consisted, he said, of

  [o]ur tendency to view nations and conflicts through the prism of the Cold War; our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism and multinational corporations; the tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption, and environmental degradation when it served our interests; our optimism once the Cold War ended that Big Macs and the Internet would lead to the end of historical conflicts; the growing economic power of Asia and the growing resentment of the United States as the world’s sole superpower.

  Where some see an exceptional nation, unmatched in the history of the world in our goodness and our greatness, in our contributions to global freedom, justice, and peace, Barack Obama sees a nation with at best a “mixed” record. Yes, there was a successful outcome to the Cold War, but it brought us, he writes, “the distortions of politics, the sins of hubris, the corrupting effects of fear,” not to mention “an enormous military buildup” that has, in his view, warped the way U.S. leaders view the world. That buildup, of course, was essential to our winning the Cold War.

  In the early months of the Obama administration, the president embarked upon a world tour, during which he made sure that people in foreign capitals knew he believed that much was wrong with America. In Strasbourg, France, on April 3, 2009, he said, “America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” Noting that generations of Americans and Frenchmen had “fought and bled to uphold [our] values,” President Obama then explained that the detention facility at Guantánamo was a “sacrifice of [our values] for expedience sake” and announced that that was his reason for closing it. Returning to the topic later at the same event, Obama said:

  In dealing with terrorism, we can’t lose sight of our values and who we are. That’s why I closed Guantánamo. That’s why I made very clear that we will not engage in certain interrogation practices. . . . When you start sacrificing your values, when you lose yourself, then over the long term that will make you less secure. When we saw what happened at Abu Ghraib, that wasn’t good for our security—that was a recruitment tool for terrorism. Humiliating people is never a good strategy to battle terrorism.

  As he issued a call to avoid humiliating terrorists who slaughter innocents, President Obama also perpetuated a falsehood that America’s critics were peddling—that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad represented official policy, that it had something to do with or was related to America’s enhanced interrogation program. His eliding these things together was utterly irresponsible, particularly since he did it on foreign soil.

  During the Q&A session following his remarks, President Obama also explained his view that if America would just cut the size of its nuclear arsenal, Iran and North Korea would be convinced to abandon their nuclear ambitions. “I would like to be able to say that as a consequence of my work,” he explained, “we drastically lessened the threat of not only terrorism, but of nuclear terrorism.” This meant that America needed to “take serious steps to actually reduce our stockpiles.” Doing so “would give us greater moral authority to say to Iran, don’t develop a nuclear weapon; to say to North Korea, don’t proliferate nuclear weapons.” The obstacle to effective diplomacy with rogue states,
in President Obama’s view, was that America’s nuclear arsenal was too big.

  The next day in a press conference following a NATO meeting on Afghanistan, President Obama was asked “whether you subscribe, as many of your predecessors have, to the school of American exceptionalism that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy?” Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

  President Obama’s next stop was Prague, where he focused his remarks on nuclear proliferation. Once again the first step in his plan toward seeking a “world without nuclear weapons” was to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal. “To put an end to Cold War thinking,” he said, “we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same.”

  With respect to Iran, the world’s chief state sponsor of terror, ruled by a regime with American blood on its hands, Obama explained that he would “seek engagement with Iran based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” This engagement would facilitate Iran taking “its rightful place in the community of nations, politically and economically.” Although never mentioning Iran’s support for terrorism, the president did say that Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile activity posed a real threat. “The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles,” he said.

  Five months later, President Obama abruptly canceled the very missile defense system he had praised in Prague’s HradČany Square. Russia objected to the system, and the administration canceled it a week before Obama was scheduled to meet Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. The announcement also came on the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, adding insult to injury to our European allies.