I made a series of panicked phone calls to Washington and got Steve Hadley on the phone. He called the Pentagon and learned that during a “routine” overflight of Iraqi airspace we’d gotten, as he put it in his understated way, “a little close to the air defenses of Baghdad.” We had, it seemed, set off every air-raid siren within shouting distance of the city. There wasn’t much time for a full accounting of exactly how that had happened. We hurriedly wrote press guidance that explained that the United States, as a part of its obligations under the armistice terms that had ended the Persian Gulf War in 1991, was flying patrols to keep Saddam Hussein from using his aircraft against his own people or his neighbors. They were called “no-fly zones.”
The press conference was a disaster. The President gamely made his points about the importance of U.S.-Mexican relations, our respect for Mexican democracy, and his desire for partnership with Vicente Fox. No one was listening. “Why are you bombing Baghdad?” “Are you going to war?” “Did you tell President Fox that you were going to war?” I remember feeling sick from the afternoon heat, which was suddenly very pronounced. And I was so embarrassed by what was happening. The two presidents finished the press conference, and we said our good-byes.
The relationship between Fox and Bush never really reached its full potential. There were many reasons for that, including outsized Mexican expectations about immigration reform and our inability to deliver any change on this critical issue, despite the President’s deep desire to do so.
There were also disappointments on both sides after September 11, 2001, shifted our focus and required from Fox support of U.S. priorities that he could not give. Indeed, 9/11 occurred just days after the Mexican state visit later in the year, which had included an historic joint meeting between the two countries’ cabinets. The relationship with Mexico seemed destined to be overshadowed. Yet I have to think that that first encounter left its mark and contributed to the sense of lost opportunities that would follow.
That night we went to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. We were all a little shell-shocked. The television stations were playing the “attack” over and over, and Saddam Hussein, who was a master of public relations, Middle East style, had trotted out as many bloody bodies and scenes from hospitals as he could muster. The strikes against the air defenses had taken place near Baghdad, but it was unlikely that they had resulted in the civilian casualties now chronicled on the news. The President said, “I’m going to call Dick,” perhaps seeking reassurance from an old foreign policy hand. The Vice President said that from his point of view it had been a good message, showing that we’d be tough on Saddam Hussein. I thought that it showed, once again, the United States’ arrogance toward our Mexican hosts.
The next morning I was astonished to see that the New York Times had taken the line that the Vice President had predicted. The air strikes had “sent a timely signal,” the paper said, that the new administration would “not shy away from using force to contain any new Iraqi military threat.” The Washington Post called the strikes “a welcome reinvigoration of an existing policy that had been allowed to slide.” I walked into breakfast with the President. “Mr. President,” I said, “I want you to know that I know the difference between lucky and good.”
We returned to Washington and conducted a postmortem on what had happened. A few days before departing for Mexico, the air force briefed Steve Hadley and me about an upcoming no-fly-zone mission. The general who briefed us did so in a very matter-of-fact way. Because it was our first experience with no-fly zones, we failed to ask a few key questions, such as “How routine is a mission of this type?” and “How close will it come to Baghdad?” The answers would have been “Not very routine” and “Very close.” Even so, I doubt that the general would have said that we were likely to get into a “hot” fire exchange with weapons being fired. I blamed myself for not asking those questions. I should have known, I thought. How many times in my previous White House role had I seen the impact of unforeseen events involving military force? How many times had I taught about unintended consequences? That episode was an invaluable lesson.
The incident in Mexico was a reminder of the festering problem of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and its threat to our interests. Almost from the very beginning Iraq was a preoccupation of the national security team. Our focus was not, as common wisdom now has it, on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Rather, the early efforts were aimed at trying to strengthen the containment regime that had been put into place after the Gulf War. That war had ended inconclusively with Iraqi forces expelled from Kuwait but the regime still in power. The assessment of the George H. W. Bush administration in 1991 that Saddam was so weakened that he would either fall from power or stay in his box turned out to be wrong.
The no-fly zones were just one part of a complex web of constraints that the international system relied upon to keep Saddam from attacking his neighbors and his people and prevent him from rebuilding his weapons of mass destruction (WMD). And those constraints were being undermined on multiple fronts. For example, the Chinese were building a fiber-optic system in and around the capital, making it harder to track Iraq’s military communications. Saddam was finding new ways to shield his forces.
At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, the international community had learned that Saddam’s WMD capabilities were far more advanced than expected. When inspectors had arrived after Saddam’s defeat, they had found that he was a little more than a year away from possessing a crude nuclear device. He had, of course, twice used chemical weapons, first against Iran and then against the Kurds, in both instances killing thousands of innocent civilians. The 1990s had been dominated by efforts to prevent him from restoring his capabilities. Resolution after resolution—sixteen in all—had demanded better access for weapons inspectors. But over the years, the inspection regime had been softened in myriad ways. Saddam wanted inspectors from the United States and Great Britain to be replaced by a mélange of nationals, some of whom had little experience in the WMD field. By the end of the 1990s, the Security Council would give in to his demands. The inspections themselves had at times lost the element of surprise when Saddam had insisted upon and gotten prior notification at designated sites. (Even when they could get in, inspectors often found themselves harassed by Saddam’s forces.) The international community was slowly slipping into a posture of “respect for Iraqi sovereignty.”
Over time, the Iraqis also became less and less compliant with even the scaled-back inspections, leading to multiplying questions about what was going on in Iraq. That ultimately led President Bill Clinton to order a military strike on suspected sites in December 1998. Just before the attack, inspectors left the country, not to return until 2002, and the Iraqi regime remained uncooperative.
Iraq had been, since 1991, under a comprehensive set of sanctions on prohibited items that could be used to rebuild military capabilities, including a prohibition against selling oil. That meant that there was no revenue to provide for basic goods such as food and medicine for the people. The effects on the population were growing increasingly harsh, with malnutrition rates exceeding 20 percent in the late 1990s. The Oil for Food program, which was created in 1996, permitted Iraq to sell a prescribed amount of oil. The money was then put into escrow, and food and medicines were purchased with that account. Compliance was the exception, however, not the rule. Saddam proved to be a master at developing front companies and shadow financing schemes to make illicit purchases. His bribery and cunning made the sanctions almost totally ineffective as he diverted funds to the priorities of the regime.
In an interview in early January, President Bush had talked about this situation and said that the sanctions against Saddam had become “Swiss cheese.” Thus our first NSC meeting reviewed the state of the sanctions regime and also examined the problem of how to make the no-fly zones more effective. I prepared a memorandum for the Principals Committee summarizing the situation in Iraq as unsustainable and proposing a plan of action. The ap
proach was adopted that day.
The State Department was tasked with the first issue, developing a program of “smart sanctions” that would target fewer items but really deny those that might benefit the regime and its efforts to rebuild its military capabilities.
Unfortunately, that would lead to a totally unsatisfying result. The effort was launched by the United States and Great Britain but quickly deadlocked over disagreements, for example, about whether to allow Iraq to have hechts (trailers for trucks), which, we argued, could be retrofitted for tanks. In fact, the Russians and to a lesser extent the French opposed any significant tightening of the sanctions.
Indeed, French and Russian companies were benefiting from the status quo. The United Nations’ independent investigation into the corruption and mismanagement exposed this fact. The Oil for Food investigation found Iraq had subverted the program’s controls and reaped nearly $13 billion in illicit income from kickbacks, surcharges, and oil smuggling. The investigation described the regime’s “explicit policy” to sell oil to countries “friendly” to Iraq, particularly “if they were permanent members of the Security Council in a position potentially to ease the restrictions of sanctions.” According to the report, Russian and French companies were, respectively, the largest and second largest purchasers of oil from Iraq under Oil for Food.
Beyond the challenge of forging international consensus, strengthening the sanctions to prevent Saddam from rearming was made more difficult because chemical or biological weapons can be made from items that may also have legitimate industrial uses. Chlorine is used both to purify swimming water and to produce lethal nerve agents. Not surprisingly, the effort to make the sanctions smarter was maddeningly slow, and determining a single U.S. government position, let alone an international one, took the Deputies—and sometimes the NSC Principals—hours and hours.
This issue was so divisive that we once had a Sunday-afternoon NSC meeting with the President in the chair to decide whether or not to support a Security Council resolution that State had negotiated with the French, British, Russians, and Chinese. (Together with the United States, those countries are the permanent five Security Council members, who hold a veto on any action.) The resolution set the terms for “smart sanctions.” Don and the Vice President believed that the resolution was too weak. I wasn’t able to find consensus, so we met with the President.
Colin was instructed to do better, but the Russians had already made clear that they would veto the introduction of more robust sanctions. He could not overcome their resistance, and two days later we accepted essentially the same resolution that we’d rejected that Sunday.
While State labored at “smart sanctions,” the Defense Department was asked to examine ways to improve the no-fly zones. U.S. and British pilots, flying from Kuwait and Turkey (though Ankara had begun to severely limit the number of missions) patrolled several times a week to keep the Iraqi air force grounded. Even though Saddam’s air defenses were no match for high-performance aircraft, the Iraqis routinely fired on our planes, and there was a growing fear that they might bring a pilot down with a “lucky shot.” Don Rumsfeld was told to develop options should this occur, including what the response might be if a pilot were taken hostage.
We also decided to intensify U.S. efforts, principally through intelligence channels, to build the capabilities of the opposition figures in exile and to help them unite. Frustrated with Saddam’s constant flouting of his obligations under the armistice, Congress had passed and President Clinton had signed into law the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998 that had put most of the machinery and funding into place. But the exiles were a mixed bag, ranging from the well-organized Kurds, who were already living and governing in the north of Iraq, to the Shia and Sunnis, who were scattered from Syria to Iran and from London to New York, with minimal indigenous support.
In truth, the patchwork of measures to enforce the armistice terms of 1991 had frayed badly. Although it is easy to forget now with the controversy surrounding the subsequent Iraq war, concerns had been growing for a decade, shared by the international community and both sides of the aisle in the United States that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was again emerging as a major threat to the Middle East. The air strike that President Clinton launched in December 1998 garnered a House vote of 417–5, resolving that the United States should “support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government.” Democratic senators such as Robert Byrd, Joseph Biden, and Dianne Feinstein all voiced their support for the Clinton administration’s military action. Saddam held celebrations of his 1991 “victory” on the tenth anniversary of the Gulf War in 2001 and alarmingly continued to speak of Kuwait as a province of Iraq. That led Colin Powell to publicly reassure Kuwait that the United States and its friends would defend its freedom. Nonetheless, the use of U.S. military force to overthrow the regime was not, as I remember, even mentioned in our first NSC meeting or in subsequent ones in 2001.
The issue of North Korea, another rogue regime seeking weapons of mass destruction, came onto the agenda early as well. Days after the inauguration, South Korea requested a meeting for its president, Kim Dae-jung, with President Bush, forcing us to review where we stood on the North Korean issue.
During the campaign, we’d been critical of the Clinton administration’s Agreed Framework between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name. After North Korea turned away weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog group, and threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1993, the Clinton administration began on-and-off diplomatic negotiations with North Korea that would eventually last a year and a half and result in the 1994 Agreed Framework. Signed on October 21, 1994, the Agreed Framework aimed to eliminate North Korea’s ability to make nuclear arms. It called on North Korea to suspend the construction and operation of nuclear reactors suspected of being part of a covert nuclear weapons program in exchange for U.S. fuel aid and assistance in building two reactors that would not further North Korea’s ability to produce weapons. The two sides would then move toward full normalization of political and economic relations.
We’d been aware that the Clinton administration had been working in the last months to get a breakthrough deal with North Korea. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s somewhat infamous visit to Pyongyang (complete with the stadium presentation of more than one hundred thousand North Koreans in a “cultural” performance) was intended to achieve enough to allow President Clinton to visit the “Hermit Kingdom.”
Shortly after the election was decided, Colin received a call from Madeleine asking if he and I would take a briefing on their effort. In early January I accompanied the President-elect to Washington from Texas to begin the transition. After landing at Dulles, I broke off from the entourage and went directly to Colin’s house. There, in Colin’s dining room, Wendy Sherman, the counselor to the secretary, and Jack Pritchard, the senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, told us of their plans. We didn’t comment because President-elect Bush was adamant that there would be one President at a time. We did not communicate our skepticism either privately or publicly. In the end, the effort to get a common agenda for the meeting—including the North Koreans’ promises to cease missile tests and development in return for U.S. compensation—failed, and President Clinton did not go to Pyongyang.
That was by far the most detailed policy encounter between the foreign policy advisors during the transition. When later there were claims of extensive briefings concerning al Qaeda during the transition, I recalled that North Korea, not terrorism, had been the Clinton administration’s most pressing business with the incoming team.
The meeting with President Kim was set for March 7, 2001. Kim Dae-jung was a revered figure in many ways. He’d been a prisoner during the military regime of South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan in
the 1980s. His life had quite literally been spared by U.S. entreaties to the authorities. A mild-mannered, aging statesman, Kim was also an idealist who believed that engagement with North Korea, through what he called the “Sunshine Policy,” might eventually change the nature of the regime. The policy was built on large-scale assistance to the North with little demanded in return. South Korean policy and U.S. efforts to impose stricter requirements under the Agreed Framework were often at odds. One sensed that Kim Dae-jung simply wanted to avoid conflict with Kim Jong-il at almost any cost.
The day before Kim’s arrival, we held a Principals meeting to go over the administration’s approach. We all agreed that we would not publicly criticize the “Sunshine Policy” but that we would make it clear to Kim that the United States was looking for a different approach to North Korea. No one wanted to embarrass the South Korean, but he had to understand that we would not pursue the Agreed Framework. I walked down to the Oval that afternoon and reported our deliberations to the President. He concurred.
The next morning at five the phone rang in my temporary apartment on 7th Street in downtown Washington. It was before I resumed the practice of daily morning exercise that I’d established in California, and I was sound asleep. The apartment was tiny, but I had to get out of bed and go into the living room to answer the phone. The President had called directly, as he often did throughout the years. I was flattered to be on his speed dial, but I was robbed of that moment with the operator—“The President is calling”—to get my thoughts together. “Have you seen the Washington Post?” he demanded.
“No, Mr. President, I haven’t,” I said.
“Go outside and get it.” He was speaking in short, declarative sentences—a sure sign that he was really upset.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 5