The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  Hussein continued to pursue a confrontational policy toward the West throughout the decade that followed. He repeatedly violated the terms of the Desert Storm cease-fire arrangement and continued to pursue an active WMD program, albeit ineffectively. Despite determined Iraqi obstructionism, UN inspectors uncovered evidence of a far-ranging effort to acquire chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Hussein’s efforts to hamper the inspectors gave the clear impression that he had something to hide. Ultimately, he threw out the UN inspectors altogether. He also repeatedly challenged allied efforts to enforce the UN-approved no-fly zones over Iraq by firing on patrolling allied combat aircraft—some seven hundred times in 1999 and 2000, and more than one thousand times more by September 2002 (see map 1.1).5 He even tried to have his Desert Storm nemesis, the first President Bush, assassinated in 1993 while the former president was on a personal visit to Kuwait.6

  Source: CENTAF

  Throughout the eight years of the administration of President Bill Clinton, the United States pursued a series of measures that were more symbolic than determined either to force a change in Hussein’s behavior or to terminate his transgressions once and for all. Those measures, which included cruise-missile attacks against unoccupied government buildings in the dead of night and the limited-objectives Operation Desert Fox air strikes that were conducted for four nights in 1998, served to reinforce Hussein’s assessment of the United States as weak-willed and irresolute. In Secretary Rumsfeld’s opinion, the Iraqi dictator “came to believe that the United States lacked the commitment to follow through on its rhetoric. He saw America as unwilling to take the risks necessary for an invasion of Iraq. As he would explain to his interrogators after his capture in December 2003, Saddam had concluded that America was a paper tiger. He interpreted the first Bush administration’s decision not to march into Baghdad as proof that he had triumphed in what he called ‘the mother of all battles’ against the mightiest military power in history.”7

  Saddam Hussein was thus arguably fated for a decisive showdown with the United States. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, almost certainly sealed Hussein’s fate by fundamentally altering the Bush administration’s assessment of the WMD threat, whether direct or indirect, posed by Ba’athist Iraq. The attacks also made it that much easier for the administration to persuade the American people of the merits of invading Iraq. The combination of the most consequential terrorist attack on U.S. soil in American history and Hussein’s persistent defiance of UN resolutions prompted an ultimate conviction—right or wrong—among the administration’s principals, most notably President Bush himself, that the Iraqi ruler had to be dealt with decisively before another event of the magnitude of September 11 occurred as a result of his malfeasance. As early as September 17, 2001, less than a week after the terrorist attacks, the president signed a memorandum directing the U.S. defense establishment to begin planning not only an offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but one against Iraq as well.8 As the Department of State under Colin Powell continued to pursue resolutions to enforce Iraq’s compliance with the UN’s edicts, the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld began preparing for war.

  Laying the Groundwork

  Even before the first combat moves took place in Afghanistan in early October 2001, senior Bush administration officials already had their sights set on Hussein as a perceived problem to be dealt with at the earliest opportunity in the rapidly unfolding global war on terror. On the very afternoon of the September 11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld broached the idea of going after Iraq as an early possible response when he wrote a note to himself asking whether to “hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time—not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].”9 Immediately thereafter he directed Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to enlist the assistance of the Pentagon’s legal staff in determining a possible Iraqi connection with bin Laden.

  At a gathering of the president’s emerging war cabinet the next day, Rumsfeld asked whether the terrorist attacks had presented an “opportunity” to go after Iraq.10 Two months later, with Operation Enduring Freedom in full swing, President Bush followed up on that query. He pulled Rumsfeld aside after a National Security Council meeting on November 21 and asked him: “What kind of a war plan do you have for Iraq? How do you feel about the war plan for Iraq?”11 He also asked Rumsfeld if a buildup for such a war could be initiated in a manner that would not be clearly apparent as such. With respect to this early attention to Iraq on the administration’s part, Rumsfeld later attested to the almost instant crystallization of a sense among key administration leaders that the nation could no longer deal with terrorist threats from a defensive posture alone: “You can’t defend at every place at every time against every technique. . . . You have to go after them. And you have to take it to them, and that means you have to preempt them.”12

  In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, Bush referred for the first time to what he called the “axis of evil” comprising Iraq, Iran, and North Korea (with the latter two reportedly included in part to make Hussein feel that he was not being singled out). The president added that the quest for WMD by these three countries and their known trafficking with terrorists had made for an intolerable convergence. Mindful of the September 11 precedent, he swore: “I will not wait on events while dangers gather.”13 Columnist Charles Krauthammer later characterized the speech as “just short of a declaration of war” on Iraq.14

  On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed an intelligence order directing a regime change in Iraq and empowering the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to support the pursuit of that objective by granting the agency seven new tasks: to support Iraqi opposition groups, to conduct sabotage operations inside Iraq, to work with third countries, to conduct information operations, to run a disinformation campaign, to attack and disrupt regime revenues, and to disrupt the regime’s illicit purchase of WMD-related materiel.15 The following month, CIA director George Tenet met secretly with Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, the leaders of the two main Kurdish groups in northern Iraq. The Kurds were still simmering over the failure by the previous Bush administration, in the early aftermath of Desert Storm, to follow through on its promise to support a Kurdish uprising, as a result of which Hussein’s troops slaughtered thousands of Kurdish rebels. Tenet’s message to the two Kurdish leaders was clear: this time the American president meant business. Saddam Hussein was definitely going down.16

  While hosting British prime minister Tony Blair and his family at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, on April 6, 2002, Bush declared to a reporter during a televised interview: “I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go. That’s about all I’m willing to share with you.” When pressed for further details, the president replied firmly: “That’s what I just said. The policy of my government is that he goes.” Bush added: “The worst thing that could happen would be to allow a nation like Iraq, run by Saddam Hussein, to develop weapons of mass destruction, and then team up with terrorist organizations so they can blackmail the world. I’m not going to let that happen.” When asked how he intended to forestall such a dire development, Bush replied: “Wait and see.”17

  The major combat phase of Operation Enduring Freedom had barely ended in April 2002 before the administration began radiating indications that planning was under way for a major offensive against Iraq to begin sometime in early 2003. In his commencement address at West Point two months later President Bush declared: “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.”18 The president also unveiled his emerging idea of preemptive warfare, telling the assembled cadets: “The war on terror will not be won on the defensive.”19 Soon thereafter, Vice President Dick Cheney told the crew of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis operating in the Arabian Sea: “The United States will not permit the forces of terror to gain the tools of genocide.”20

  On September 1, 2
002, Bush told his national security principals that he wanted to secure a resolution by Congress to support military action against Iraq. Toward that end, he invited eighteen key members of the Senate and House of Representatives to the White House on September 12 and reminded them that Congress had declared as far back as 1998, by an overwhelming majority, that a regime change in Iraq was essential. He further stressed that his administration had embraced that view with even greater conviction after September 11. He added: “Doing nothing is not an option.”21 Bush gave a speech to the UN General Assembly that same day emphasizing Iraq’s repeated noncompliance with a succession of Security Council directives. While preparing for that speech he had told his speechwriter: “We’re going to tell the UN that it’s going to confront the [Iraq] problem or it’s going to condemn itself to irrelevance.”22

  In a major speech on October 7, 2002, Bush declared that Iraq “gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place.” He added: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that would come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”23 Two days thereafter, following two days of intensive debate, the House of Representatives passed a resolution empowering the president to use force in Iraq “as he deems to be necessary and appropriate.” The resolution passed by a vote of 296 to 133, gaining 46 more votes than President George H. W. Bush had garnered in support of Operation Desert Storm in 1990. The following day the Senate approved the same resolution by a vote of 77 to 23.24

  On November 8, 2002, the UN Security Council voted 15 to 0 in favor of UN Resolution 1441, which held Iraq in material breach of previous resolutions and ruled that if Hussein continued to violate his disarmament obligations he would face “serious consequences.”25 Such a resolution had been one of Prime Minister Blair’s requirements before the United Kingdom would agree to participate in a war against Iraq, and he had already made that clear to Bush. Later, facing an imminent vote of confidence in Parliament, Blair urged Bush to seek a second UN resolution supporting action in Iran. In the end, the president elected not to do so, on the understandable ground that the 15-to-0 vote that had been registered for the first resolution would now be regarded as the expected bar, and that seemed unattainable a second time around.

  In his third State of the Union address, on January 28, 2003, the president went further yet in putting the world on notice that the United States was determined to nip any assessed Iraqi threat in the bud: “Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option. . . . We will consult. But let there be no misunderstanding. If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.”26 The two most insistent charges presented by the Bush administration in justification of these threats were Iraq’s alleged (and later discredited) ties to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network and its suspected WMD program. In its Key Judgments section, a ninety-two-page National Intelligence Estimate flatly asserted that “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons,” even though the estimate’s supporting text was reportedly more ambivalent.27

  As the United States edged ever closer to war, palpable tensions arose among Bush’s national security principals, with “Powell the moderate negotiator and Rumsfeld the hard-line activist.”28 Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward called Wolfowitz “the intellectual godfather and fiercest advocate” for a forceful end to Hussein’s regime and portrayed Vice President Cheney as “a powerful, steamrolling force” throughout the lead-up to the war against Iraq.29 Even before President-elect Bush was inaugurated—and nearly eight months before the September 11 attacks—Cheney had approached the outgoing secretary of defense, William Cohen, and indicated that he wanted to get Bush “briefed up on some things,” to include a serious “discussion about Iraq and different options.”30

  Framing a Plan

  In consonance with the administration’s thinking in the early aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Secretary Rumsfeld directed that all regional combatant commanders review their contingency plans from the ground up, starting with the most basic assumptions. Rather than merely fine-tuning existing plans, he said, “we’re going to start with assumptions and then we’re going to establish priorities.” At the same time planners were to make every effort to compress the planning cycle dramatically.31

  In its planning for dealing decisively with Hussein, CENTCOM had the advantage of ten years of uninterrupted involvement in the region as a result of its mandate to enforce the southern no-fly zone. Effective intelligence preparation of the battlefield was thus less acute than it would have been had the command faced a totally new theater of operations, as had been the case for Afghanistan the year before. Because Iraq’s main vulnerabilities and centers of gravity were well known and understood, discriminating and effective targeting could be conducted from the earliest moments of any campaign. On this point, the CIA had recently concluded that major military force would be required to topple Hussein’s regime because any attempt to foment a coup by covert action from within would simply play to the regime’s greatest strengths.32

  While the major combat phase of Operation Enduring Freedom was still under way in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld called Franks on November 27, 2001, and told him that the president wanted the defense establishment to look at military options for Iraq. (Rumsfeld later recalled that the president had asked him on November 21 about the status of U.S. contingency options against Iraq. Rumsfeld had replied that there was already a plan in hand, but not one that the president would wish to implement. “Get one,” the president countered.)33 Rumsfeld also asked Franks for the status of CENTCOM’s planning in that regard. Franks replied that his command’s existing Operations Plan (OPLAN) 1003-98 for Iraq was essentially just Desert Storm II and characterized it as “stale, conventional, predictable,” and premised on a continuing U.S. policy of containment.34

  The basic OPLAN 1003-98 was roughly two hundred pages long. More than twenty annexes on logistics, intelligence, and individual component operations added an additional six hundred pages.35 The plan had last been updated after the conclusion of Operation Desert Fox in 1998, yet it remained troop-heavy and did not account for subsequent advances in precision attack and command and control capability. It outlined an assault on Iraq intended to overthrow Saddam Hussein by an invading force of 500,000 troops, including 6 Army and Marine Corps divisions, to be led by air attacks and followed by a surfeit of armor. Rumsfeld characterized the plan in his memoirs as essentially “Desert Storm on steroids.”36

  In response to Rumsfeld’s incessant prodding for more imaginative alternatives, Franks developed a new approach that was dominated by a matrix of seven so-called lines of operations and nine “slices,” the latter a concept that had been suggested earlier by Rumsfeld.37 The lines of operations embraced various ways of influencing Iraqi behavior, either singly or in combination. The “slices” sought to define the assumed centers of gravity of Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. The underlying idea of this new approach was to exploit not just military force but all elements of national power in going simultaneously after all identifiable regime vulnerabilities.

  Franks’ proposed seven lines of operations were intended to minimize the amount of brute force that would be needed to bring down the regime. They included kinetic operations consisting of precision attacks by both air- and surface-delivered firepower; unconventional warfare involving Special Operations Forces (SOF) activities throughout Iraq; operational maneuver by high-speed and high-mobility Army, Marine Corps, and British ground forces; influence operations involving information and psychological warfare; support for opposition groups, to include the Kurds and disaffected Shia groups; diplomacy, including civil operations after the major fighting was over; and humanitarian assistance to Iraqi civilians.

  Franks described the nine slices of Iraqi vulnerabilities in his proposed concept of operations as “a series of pillars, a kind of Stonehenge that supporte
d the weight of the Ba’athists and Saddam Hussein.”38 The slices entailed leadership, notably Saddam Hussein, his two sons, and his innermost circle; internal security, including Iraq’s Special Security Organization, Fedayeen Saddam (Saddam’s Martyrs), with a strength of between 20,000 and 40,000 fanatic paramilitary troops, the Iraqi intelligence service, the Directorate of General Security, and the command and control network; and finally Iraq’s WMD infrastructure, Republican Guard forces, regular army, land and territory, civilian population, and commercial and economic infrastructure.

  These two overlapping constructs—the lines of operation and the slices—produced a matrix of combat options and Iraqi vulnerabilities consisting of sixty-three intersections that ranged over the full spectrum of identified military, diplomatic, and economic instruments that the United States and any allied coalition could employ in an effort to topple Hussein’s regime (see figure 1.1).

  Franks further proposed three generic force employment options as a basis for a more detailed weighing of alternatives. His robust option assumed unrestricted combat and combat-support operations conducted from Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Persian Gulf states. It further assumed freedom for CENTCOM to stage forces from forward operating locations in Central Asia, as well as from Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, and from U.S. aircraft carriers operating in the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, and North Arabian Gulf. This option offered the advantage of simultaneous or near-simultaneous operations. As Franks put it to Rumsfeld: “Simultaneous operations, not separate air and ground campaigns, represent optimum mass.”39 Franks’ second alternative, the reduced option, assumed participation by fewer supporting countries, reduced staging and support, a less concurrent introduction of forces, and a more conventional sequencing of force employment, with initial air attacks followed by a ground offensive. His third alternative was the unilateral option, which would rely solely on U.S. aircraft carriers and on bases in Kuwait. The pattern of force employment would be absolutely sequential, with ground forces introduced only gradually after a prolonged air-only offensive. The unilateral option was, said Franks, “not an option we would want to execute.”40 In all three cases Franks envisaged the required buildup of allied forces in the region as an ebb and flow of assets under the cover of Operations Northern Watch, Southern Watch, and Enduring Freedom, so as to minimize the likelihood that Iraqi intelligence would detect an undeniably threatening trend.