The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  As a result, there was little sense of urgency in the region about Saddam, and even less interest in supporting a military effort against him. “At age 74, Mubarak remains proud, cautious, and deeply preoccupied with stability at home and in the region,” I wrote in one cable after a conversation with the Egyptian leader. Mubarak repeatedly warned me about the complexities of Iraqi society, the unpredictability of a post-Saddam world, and the negative regional consequences of any eventual use of force.6 “Burns,” the Egyptian president would say, “you must not underestimate how much trouble those Iraqis can be. They spend their whole lives plotting against each other.” Most other Arab leaders were far more worried about the images of Palestinians being killed in the West Bank and stories of Iraqi civilian hardships under sanctions than they were about a near-term threat from Saddam. Broader international opinion was similarly unfocused on any immediate Iraqi threat. Even in London, where Prime Minister Tony Blair was determined to stay close to President Bush after 9/11, there was a strong sense that it would take time and considerable effort to build a legitimate case for Saddam’s removal.

  At the State Department, we were at first lulled into thinking that our arguments were getting traction. Before 9/11, the new administration’s episodic interagency discussions about Iraq were long and painful, the kind of bureaucratic purgatory that exists when issues are being sharply debated but everyone knows there is neither the political will nor urgency to resolve them. Civilian officials from the Pentagon, often allied with the vice president’s growing and increasingly independent national security staff, would press for more radical steps against Saddam. A particular favorite was to create a safe zone in southern Iraq, similar to the zone protecting the Kurds in the north, that could provide a launching pad for Iraqi oppositionists to undermine Saddam. Most of these ideas foundered on the obvious concerns—lack of internationally legitimate grounds for acting; lack of enthusiasm in the region; the potential military consequences; and the opportunity costs for other priorities on the early Bush 43 agenda.

  The wiliest, most active, and least trustworthy of the Iraqi oppositionists agitating for American intervention to overthrow Saddam was Ahmed Chalabi. I had first met him in Amman in the early 1980s. An Iraqi national from a well-connected Baghdad family, he had fled the country after Saddam took power. In Amman, he ran the Petra Bank and was a large fish in the relatively small pond of Jordanian high society. Smooth and smart, Chalabi established himself as a leading figure among exiled Iraqi oppositionists during the 1990s, based mostly in London, but spending increasing amounts of time working the halls of Congress. He became head of the main umbrella opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, in 1992, and was one of the principal architects of the Iraq Liberation Act.

  Always a fertile source of ideas and information, much of it contrived but all of it delivered with conspiratorial enthusiasm, Chalabi cultivated particularly close contacts at senior levels of the Pentagon and the White House. He kept a disdainful distance from the Powell State Department, an attitude we reciprocated. “That guy is a weasel,” Rich Armitage said, in the least earthy description he could manage. “And he will only lead us into trouble.”

  9/11 provided the opening for regime change proponents. Powell mentioned to me on September 12 that Rumsfeld had raised the threat posed by Saddam at the previous evening’s NSC meeting, and Wolfowitz pressed the issue again at a principals meeting at Camp David a few days later. President Bush was intrigued enough to ask the NSC staff for a quick investigation of whether Saddam had a role in the 9/11 attacks. The answer was an unambiguous no. The president made clear that the immediate priority would be action against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the idea of a preemptive strike to topple Saddam was slowly gathering steam. In November, with the president’s blessing, Rumsfeld instructed CENTCOM to update contingency planning for Iraq, with the aim of “decapitating” the Iraqi leadership and installing a new provisional government.

  Before a White House meeting that same month, I sent a note to Armitage emphasizing that it was the “wrong time to shift our focus from Afghanistan.” I explained that we needed “to show that we will finish the job [and] restore order, not just move on to the next Moslem state.”7 I added that the case for war was extremely weak. There was “no evidence of an Iraqi role” in 9/11, “no [regional or international] support for military action,” and “no triggering event.” There was a “relatively weak internal opposition [in Iraq],” and little clarity on what might happen on the day after. Other than that, it made perfect sense.

  But the drumbeat only grew louder after the president’s State of the Union speech at the end of January, when he took aim at the “axis of evil”—Iraq, North Korea, and Iran. That killed the diplomatic channel that Ryan Crocker had so skillfully developed with the Iranians. The headline role for Iraq was hardly a surprise, and a preview of the case for preemption that was building. Frustrated by the inconclusive evidence offered up by the intelligence community of Iraqi complicity in 9/11 and continuing WMD activities, senior civilians in the Pentagon and the vice president’s staff probed even harder for any shred of information or analysis that would fit their predispositions. An “independent” intelligence unit was set up at the Pentagon under Doug Feith, charged with ferreting out the real story. As Armitage later put it, the war party within the administration was “trying to connect dots which were unconnectable.”8

  Despite efforts of Pentagon civilians and the vice president’s office to lead the witnesses, many in the intelligence community continued to offer honest analysis, however unsatisfying it was to administration hawks. At State, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research reported repeatedly to Powell that it saw no firm evidence of reconstitution of Iraqi WMD. In the spring of 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency forcefully and convincingly labeled one of the main sources for information on continuing Iraqi WMD activities to be a fabricator. In early 2002, a former State Department colleague, Joe Wilson, went to Niger on the CIA’s behalf to track down a story that Saddam was trying to obtain yellowcake for an alleged covert uranium enrichment program, but found no corroboration.

  After yet another trip to the Middle East in February, I told Powell that there was still no regional enthusiasm for any near-term military effort against Saddam. I was particularly struck by my conversations with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ) and other Emirati leaders. They warned that if the images on Al Jazeera showed American tanks occupying Iraq alongside Israeli tanks sitting atop the Palestinians, “it won’t take long for anger to boil.” MbZ concluded our meeting by putting the stakes in sharp relief: “You have an opportunity to do a very good thing for the region by overthrowing Saddam—or a very bad thing if the outcome is messy, Iraq breaks apart, or other regional problems are left untouched afterwards. You and we will either benefit or suffer from the consequences for many years to come.”9 He made no secret of which outcome he thought was the most likely.

  And he wasn’t alone. Mubarak, King Abdullah, and other Arab leaders worried “that [the United States] will come in, create a mess, and then leave them to deal with the consequences.” Their anxiety reflected “a cold calculation that the risks posed by the uncertainties of regime change outweigh the current threat from Saddam.” I noted that “the current Iraqi opposition is fractured, feeble, and incapable of organizing itself, much less bringing security, stability and civil society to a post-Saddam Iraq.” I emphasized again my conviction, which I knew Powell shared, that “getting into Iraq would be a lot easier than getting out”—that the post-conflict situation would be a far bigger problem than the initial military operation.10 In the face of such risks, I told a meeting of NEA ambassadors that February, “That’s exactly why we would never go at this alone.”

  Unpersuaded by what we were reporting about attitudes in the region, and keen to underscore the gravity of the administration’s concerns about Saddam, Vice President Cheney deci
ded to travel to the Middle East himself in March. I joined his delegation as the senior State Department representative. The vice president, who combined a quiet, even-tempered exterior with a sharp intellect and rigid views, was gracious toward me throughout the ten-day trip. He included me in most meetings and welcomed my participation, if not always my perspective. I had a faint hope before the trip that firsthand exposure to the reluctance of regional leaders, and their preoccupation with quieting Israeli-Palestinian violence, would help convince the vice president that thoughts of war should wait until we had a better case and a better regional environment. Armitage was skeptical, and proved to be right. If anything, the trip seemed to solidify Cheney’s view that early, forcible regime change would be the key to transforming the regional environment, not the other way around.

  It didn’t help that several of the Arab leaders appeared more restrained in their comments about Iraq than they had been with me. Arab political culture is full of winks and nods, and the message conveyed to Cheney in a number of capitals was essentially “Do this if you must, but do it right, and wake us when it’s over.” In London, Cheney said bluntly that the president was determined to overthrow Saddam, leaving the British unsettled about his willingness to go it alone if necessary. “A coalition would be nice,” the vice president said, “but not essential.”

  For the rest of the spring and early summer, interagency debate continued. The NSC staff ran a process that tended to paper over sharp differences, mainly between Powell on one side and Cheney and Rumsfeld on the other, and at least from our point of view indulge the vice president’s staff and the Pentagon civilians. Rumsfeld made no real attempt to conceal his contempt for the process, often claiming that he hadn’t had time to read papers for major meetings and obfuscating or retreating into Socratic questions when he didn’t want to show his hand.

  We still thought we could “slow the train down,” as Powell used to put it, but the truth was that it was gathering speed. I used a different, and equally mistaken, metaphor in a note to the secretary before an April 2002 meeting with the president. I urged him to “play ‘judo’ with the crazier assertions from OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense]” and hope that by exposing the risks of war and its aftermath we could gain leverage.11 That tactic had only marginal effect, especially in that post–9/11 moment when there was a bias for action, and prudence looked like weakness. In early June, the president gave a speech at West Point that underscored his growing impatience and sense of purpose. In the post–9/11 world, offense was the key to security, not defense. On Iraq, that meant that preventive action would be the default position. It was a deeply misguided prescription, but one that was far easier to sell within the administration and to the American public.

  We took one last run later that summer at the argument for avoiding war—summarizing, all in one place, the profound risks of an ill-prepared and ill-considered conflict. David Pearce, a Foreign Service classmate then serving as head of the Iraq/Iran office in NEA, produced an initial draft outlining everything that could go wrong if we went to war. Ryan and I joined him in what quickly became the most depressing brainstorming session of our careers. The resultant memo, revised by David, was more a hurried list of horribles than a coherent analysis, a hastily assembled antidote to the recklessly rosy assumptions of our bureaucratic antagonists.

  Many of the arguments in the memo, which we entitled “The Perfect Storm,” look obvious in hindsight.12 We highlighted the deep sectarian fault lines in Iraq, on which Saddam had kept such a brutal lid. We emphasized the dangers of civil unrest and looting if the Iraqi military and security institutions collapsed or were eliminated in the wake of Saddam’s overthrow, and the risk that already badly degraded civilian infrastructure would crumble. We noted the likelihood that regional players would be tempted to meddle and take advantage of Iraqi weakness. Iran could wind up as a major beneficiary. With no tradition of democratic governance and market economics, Iraq would be a hard place to test the upbeat assertions offered by Paul Wolfowitz and other advocates of regime change. If the United States embarked on this conflict, and especially if we embarked on it more or less on our own, and without a compelling justification, we’d bear the primary responsibility for post-conflict security, order, and recovery. That would suck the oxygen out of every other priority on the administration’s national security agenda.

  Looking back, we understated some risks, like the speed with which Sunni-Shia bloodletting in post-Saddam Iraq would fuel wider sectarian conflict in the region. We exaggerated others, like the risk that Saddam would use chemical weapons. Yet it was an honest effort to lay out our concerns, and it reflected our collective experiences and those of our generation of State Department Arabists, seared by the memory of stumbling into the middle of bloody sectarian conflict in Lebanon in the 1980s.

  What we did not do in “The Perfect Storm,” however, was take a hard stand against war altogether, or make a passionate case for containment as a long-term alternative to conflict. In the end, we pulled some punches, persuading ourselves that we’d never get a hearing for our concerns beyond the secretary if we simply threw ourselves on the track. Years later, that remains my biggest professional regret.

  I gave the memo to the secretary late one day in mid-July. I don’t think he ever forwarded the paper to the White House, but he later told me he used it in the dinner conversation that he had with the president and Condi Rice on August 5, when he laid out his reservations bluntly. As he later recounted to journalist Bob Woodward, Powell warned the president that if he decided to go to war, he’d wind up as “the proud owner of twenty-five million people….This will become your first term.” He stressed the risks of regional destabilization, the difficulty of encouraging democracy in Iraq, the unpredictability of postwar politics in such a deeply repressed society, and the potential for damage to the global energy market. In light of all those dangers, he repeated his case for building pressure on Saddam deliberately through the United Nations, first attempting to get weapons inspectors back in, and then obtaining an authorization to use force if necessary.

  At least for a while, the president took Powell’s concerns to heart and approved an effort to obtain a new UN Security Council resolution to test Saddam. The reality, however, was that we had shifted from trying to avoid war to trying to shape it. In a note to Powell later in August, I acknowledged that we were past the point of arguing with others in the administration about “whether the goal of regime change makes sense; now it’s about choosing between a smart way and a dumb way of bringing it about.”13

  We had only marginally greater success in this next phase than we had in the first. Having lost the argument to avoid war, we had two main goals in shaping it and managing the inevitable risks. First, we sought to internationalize as much as possible the road to war. That was less about the military necessity of a coalition and more about the need for international support and involvement in postwar Iraq. If this meant delay and difficult diplomacy, it was worth it. In a read-ahead memo prior to a Principals Committee meeting in January 2003, I highlighted to Powell the gulf between State and the Pentagon: “DOD’s plan calls for a military government with a civilian face, run out of OSD, lasting months or years, then turning control from U.S. to Iraqis. Our plan calls for U.S. handover ASAP to an interim international authority which monitors development of Iraqi institutions.”14

  To complement a push for international legitimacy and buy-in, the second concern was about domestic legitimacy in post-Saddam Iraq. Skeptical of Chalabi and some of the other external oppositionists, we argued vociferously with staffers in the Pentagon and the vice president’s office against their preference, which was essentially to “have the U.S. government install a member of the external opposition as a Karzai-like figure in post-Saddam Iraq.” I argued that “some oppositionists favored by Washington are largely despised by the Iraqi public.” I emphasized that Iraqis “would resent not having a
significant voice in choosing new leadership” and that “ensuring the cooperation and support of Iraqis inside the country will be critical.” Armitage noted in the margin, “Exactly right.”15

  We began as early as March 2002 to try to organize a number of Iraqi exiles and technocrats around an effort to consider all the challenges of post-Saddam Iraq, and how best to cope with them. It was born in large part of Ryan Crocker’s experience in post-Taliban Afghanistan, when he saw the urgent need to mobilize exiled oppositionists and technocrats to help build effective governance in Kabul. Dubbed the “Future of Iraq” project, this effort resulted over the following months in a seventeen-volume set of planning documents. They ranged from the future of Iraq’s agricultural sector, to dealing with immediate security challenges, to a framework for a national consultative process for putting together a provisional government.

  Chalabi saw the Future of Iraq project as a threat to his interest in monopolizing post-Saddam planning, and worked with his advocates in Washington to sideline it. The Pentagon mounted its own planning operation and ignored the work we had done. When Saddam was toppled, those seventeen volumes continued to gather dust.