Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  Speaking about this at the Council on Foreign Relations nearly three years after the invasion of Iraq, Pillar was asked by a journalist why Bush hadn’t made the real case for war and sought support for reshaping the geopolitics of the region. “It’s a lot harder,” Pillar replied, “to make a case based on that…than it is to make a case built on fear, based on fears of weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds and dictators putting WMD in the hands of terrorists…. That is a debate I wish we had…. The American people have a right to know the real reason we make major initiatives like going to war.”

  “Then he lied,” a questioner asserted.

  “Your word, not mine,” Pillar quietly said.

  Whatever Bush and his aides actually believed about Saddam, his weapons, and his alleged ties to al-Qaeda, they didn’t review the existing intelligence assiduously to validate those beliefs. And they were hardly careful in how they represented that intelligence to the public, often embellishing the data. When intelligence collided with their beliefs, they blew it off. Not surprisingly, Doug Feith later suggested that after September 11 the case for war in Iraq was self-evident and that the administration shouldn’t have gotten bogged down in the details of WMDs. “My basic view,” he said in 2006, “is, the rationale for the war didn’t hinge on the details of this intelligence even though the details of the intelligence at times became elements of the public presentation…. The administration sold it the way it sold it. That’s history.”

  Downplaying the postinvasion challenges was another essential part of the sales pitch. Worse, though, was that the Bush White House appeared to believe its own rhetoric: that there would be no need for a large and costly occupation force after the war, that Iraqi oil revenues would finance reconstruction, that Iraqis would be ever grateful to the Americans. Bush and his top aides neglected to plan seriously for the problems—almost all of which had been predicted—that followed the invasion. But had the White House acknowledged prior to the war that hundreds of thousands of troops would have to stay in Iraq after the invasion, that Iraq might well be racked with sectarian violence, and that the cost of the war would surpass hundreds of billions of dollars, the public might have been less supportive of the invasion. The desire to sell a war of choice trumped prudent planning and public candor about the difficulties ahead.

  NOT long before Rove was let off the hook, Zarqawi was killed, and Congress debated the war, Bush held a joint press availability with Prime Minister Tony Blair in the White House. Both men hailed what they claimed was progress in Iraq. In his opening comments, Bush noted that there had been “missteps” and “mistakes.” As this short Q&A session was about to end, a reporter asked both leaders what “missteps and mistakes in Iraq” they regretted most.

  When Bush was asked two years earlier at a press conference to name a specific mistake he had committed, he had frozen: “You know, I just—I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hasn’t yet.” In a speech in December 2005, he had said his administration had “fixed what has not worked” in Iraq—a slight admission of mistakes. And in April 2006 Bush had acknowledged there were some “tactics…that we could have done differently,” without detailing them. This time Bush responded quickly with an example of a misstep: “Saying ‘bring it on,’ kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner—you know, ‘wanted dead or alive,’ that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that.”

  Bush said nothing about his own decision making. Nothing about any policy choices. Nothing about how he had depicted the supposed WMD threat. Nothing about the planning for the postinvasion period. Blair then noted, “We could have done the de-Baathification in a more differentiated way.” But Bush had no reflection to offer on that strategic error or the disbanding of the Iraqi Army—or on the issue of troop levels. The only mistake that he had made was rhetorical.

  WHEN Bush had campaigned for governor in the early 1990s, he had flown about on a plane called Accountability One. When he ran for president in 2000, Bush claimed accountability as one of his campaign themes, and his aides dubbed his campaign jet Responsibility One. But there has been no accountability for those who were wrong about Iraq—about the threat or about what would come after the invasion. Bush fired no one. Nobody resigned in disgrace. There were no consequences.

  Dick Cheney continued on as the most influential vice president ever, never publicly conceding that he had repeatedly overstated the intelligence on Iraq’s WMDs and the purported Saddam–al-Qaeda connection. In a June 2006 interview, Cheney stood by his claim of a year earlier that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes.” He also said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we’ve encountered,” wiping from history the Army War College report of January 2003 warning that “ethnic, tribal and religious schisms could produce civil war” after Saddam fell.

  Donald Rumsfeld stayed at the Pentagon, even after he came under attack from former generals who assailed him for his arrogant ways and for overseeing the biggest screwups of the war. Rumsfeld was still in charge of a war against an insurgency that he hadn’t prepared for and that he had at first refused to recognize as a threat. Paul Wolfowitz, who miscalculated key elements of the war, was awarded the Medal of Freedom by Bush and then handed a plum job: president of the World Bank. (After delivering a speech on trade issues in December 2005, Wolfowitz was asked, “How do you account for the intelligence failures regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?” He replied, “Well, I don’t have to…. We relied on the intelligence community.”) Condoleezza Rice, who failed to broker the critical intelligence disputes before the war began and didn’t even read the NIE, was promoted to secretary of state after Colin Powell left. Powell, the reluctant warrior who had allowed himself to be the pitchman for the administration’s shoddy case for war, went on to join a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley and became a board member of Revolution Health Group. Doug Feith, who believed that he and his analysts were perceptive enough to see the hidden al-Qaeda–Saddam conspiracy missed by the rest of the intelligence community, resigned from the Pentagon, became a fellow at the Hoover Institute and a cochair of a task force on fighting terrorism at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and started writing a memoir about his participation in the war on terrorism. He was named a visiting professor and “distinguished practitioner in national security policy” at Georgetown University.

  George Tenet, after canceling one lucrative book contract, landed another, and he joined the board of Guidance Software and became an adviser to the Analysis Corporation, which tracks potential terrorist threats. John McLaughlin received a fellowship at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and became an on-air analyst for CNN. Tommy Franks resigned from the military, wrote a book, hit the speakers’ circuit, and joined the corporate boards of Bank of America and Outback Steak-house. Paul Bremer wrote a book, too, and served as chairman of the advisory board of a company that said it “secures the homeland with integrated products and services.” Stephen Hadley replaced Rice as national security adviser. Scott McClellan resigned as White House press secretary in May 2006. Bush press aide Adam Levine left the White House to work as a vice president for corporate communications for Goldman Sachs and then later as a managing director of Public Strategies, an Austin-based lobbying and communications firm whose vice chairman, Mark McKinnon, had been the president’s chief media adviser. Karl Rove remained in the White House. Only Scooter Libby had to leave. He joined the conservative Hudson Institute as a senior fellow focusing on terrorism. The Washington Post reported that his salary would be close to the $160,000 he had received yearly at the White House.

  Ahmad Chalabi never explained how all those INC-connected defectors had gotten it wrong�
�and expressed no public regrets about the fabricated intelligence they had passed to the U.S. government and the media. In February 2004, The Daily Telegraph of London reported that in an interview Chalabi “shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled U.S. intelligence” and said, “We are heroes in error.” Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute in the fall of 2005, Chalabi, then a deputy prime minister of Iraq, denied having made that comment. “The fact that I deliberately misled the U.S. government, this is an urban myth,” he added. Asked where the WMDs were, he said, “It is not useful for me to comment on it…. We are not engaged in this debate in Iraq.” Shortly before his visit to the AEI, The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI’s investigation of Chalabi’s alleged leaking of U.S. secrets to Iran had been halfhearted. Though fifteen months had passed since the inquiry was launched, Chalabi had yet to be questioned. “The investigation just went away,” CIA officer John Maguire later noted. Despite the serious charge that Chalabi had passed top secret U.S. intelligence information to Tehran, on this swing through Washington he had no problem arranging meetings with Rice and Treasury Secretary John Snow.

  But Chalabi didn’t fare as well as he had hoped to in the new Iraq. In the December 2005 election, his party (a renamed version of the Iraqi National Congress) garnered less than 1 percent of the vote and failed to win any seats in the new Iraqi Parliament. At that point, he lost his post as a deputy prime minister, and months later he had to give up his position as interim oil minister. Longtime Chalabi watchers, though, cautioned that no one should ever count him out.

  In the summer of 2006, Laurie Mylroie, the academic who had claimed Saddam was the real power behind al-Qaeda, was an active participant on an INC e-mailing list. She was still an AEI adjunct fellow. She expressed no concerns her theories had not proven right. As she had once told Newsweek, “I take satisfaction that we went to war in Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein. The rest is details.”

  Judy Miller left The New York Times in November 2005. After the huge legal battle with Fitzgerald, she and her editors were drained and distrustful of each other. And her departure wasn’t without conflict. Miller had been under consideration to receive a $1 million prize endowed by a Romanian-born Israeli businessman and philanthropist named Dan David. But the Times editors refused to endorse her nomination for the award, concluding that a $1 million gift from an Israeli foundation to a Times correspondent who had covered the Middle East raised ethical concerns. The paper’s decision ended Miller’s chances to win the money. After leaving The New York Times, the journalist considered starting a blog but instead continued writing as a freelancer. In May 2006, she wrote a two-part piece for The Wall Street Journal on the CIA’s success in persuading the Libyan government of Moammar Qaddafi to give up its weapons of mass destruction program. The article supported the Bush administration’s contention that the war in Iraq had persuaded Qaddafi to forego his WMD programs. Jacqueline Shire, a senior analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security (which had challenged the articles Miller had cowritten on the aluminum tubes), criticized Miller for overstating the case and making it seem that Libya had been closer to developing a nuclear bomb than it had been. After the whole WMD controversy, Miller still spoke favorably of Chalabi, describing him as one of the “smartest people” she had ever met.

  Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister who had passed the word to the CIA that Saddam had no active WMD programs, in 2006 was teaching journalism as an assistant professor at Qatar University.

  In the summer of 2006, Robert Novak broke his silence about the CIA leak case. In a July 12 column, he revealed for the first time that he had named his sources in an interview with Fitzgerald and had testified before the grand jury in early 2004. He said that when he had appeared before the grand jury he had read a statement saying he was discomforted by having to disclose confidential conversations with his sources. He defended his decision to testify, noting, “It should be remembered that the special prosecutor knew their identities and did not learn them from me.” Novak still wasn’t naming Armitage. He insisted that Valerie Wilson’s “role in initiating Wilson’s mission” had been “a previously undisclosed part of an important news story.”

  Valerie Wilson left the CIA at the end of 2005. In July 2006, she and her husband filed a civil lawsuit in federal court against Cheney, Rove, Libby, and unnamed White House officials. The Wilsons argued in the legal complaint that these officials had violated their constitutional rights by conspiring to “discredit, punish, and seek revenge against them.” Valerie Wilson was also writing a memoir, tentatively titled Fair Game—the term Rove had used with Chris Matthews to describe what he considered her.

  ON A Saturday morning in late spring 2006, John Maguire sat in a booth at a diner in suburban Virginia. He was just back from Iraq. He was no longer a covert warrior for the CIA. He was a business consultant—oil, Internet services, airplane sales. And he had been trying to drum up deals in Iraq. Not in Baghdad but in the north, the Kurdish area, from where he had once run secret anti-Saddam operations. Baghdad was too dangerous.

  Maguire, who had helped craft the secret plan for sabotage and assassination in Iraq, was dispirited about the way things were going in the country he had tried to set on the right path. “It’s so fucked up,” he said. “We have everything working against itself. It’s chaos there.” Iraqis couldn’t get to work. Government ministries were not functioning. U.S. security consultants and bodyguards, retained by various U.S. military and civilian agencies, were too high profile. Some had recently shot at a crowd to make Iraqis back up. Scores of Iraqi civilians were being killed each day in sectarian violence. The fabric of society had been ripped apart. “There are young guys living like they’re in a Mad Max movie, robbing members of their own tribes,” Maguire bemoaned. “How do you come back from complete chaos and lawlessness?”

  A chance to get Iraq right, he noted, had been lost—by big blunders. “The White House says we made tactical mistakes,” he remarked. But it was more than that: “We made huge strategic errors.” De-Baathification, dissolving the army, refusing to recognize the immediacy of the insurgency, not preparing postinvasion plans for running a government and maintaining the critical infrastucture—the Bush administration had botched all of this. “People led us into the abyss,” Maguire said. And, he added, Bush was “totally responsible. He’s the guy. His team has failed him.”

  The original error, he noted, was how the war had been sold: weapons of mass destruction. For more than a decade, Maguire had been working on and off to get rid of Saddam—because, he thought, Saddam was a monstrous dictator who had brutalized his own people and been a destabilizing force in the region. If regime change in Iraq could be achieved, he believed, the dynamic in the entire Middle East could shift. For Maguire, that was enough of a reason for war. This view hadn’t been far from that of the neoconservative hawks. But he parted with some in the administration when it came to using WMDs to justify an invasion of Iraq. Before the war, he had feared that this argument would be counterproductive. “It seemed very risky to base a war on an issue that you would have to prove the minute you entered the country,” he explained. “We believed there would be a ton of WMDs. But we thought, ‘I hope we find a shitload when we come in. If we don’t find a warehouse of weapons, it will be ugly as hell.’ ”

  And, in Maguire’s view, it had also been just as big a mistake for the administration to claim that Saddam’s regime was supporting al-Qaeda. “We never had anything that said that,” he noted. Sure, Maguire said, the Iraqi intelligence service had tracked al-Qaeda—just the way any intelligence service would. And yes, there had been occasional meetings. That’s what intelligence agencies do. But “the way this was cast [by the White House] created a picture that was different than reality.”

  Before the war, as they plotted to overthrow Saddam, Maguire and his partner Luis would have long soul-searching discussions about the enterprise they were about to undertake. They occasionally
wondered if the whole project was a bridge too far. “This was a huge task of enormous magnitude,” Maguire said. He admired Bush for having embraced such a grand endeavor. But after the invasion, he was frustrated that there was “nobody sitting in the driver’s seat” who understood just how big the job was and how much time and effort it would take to make a post-Saddam Iraq work.

  He angrily recalled attending two meetings at the Pentagon around the end of 2002 or the start of 2003, at which forty to fifty people from various government agencies assembled to discuss postinvasion matters. He and others asked a series of questions: How could Baghdad be secured? How would the United States respond to an insurgency, if one emerged? How would the American occupiers make sure the power grid and water system worked? “The Pentagon people”—Feith, his assistant Bill Luti, and others—“said, ‘We’ve got it covered,’ ” Maguire remembered. The CIA people weren’t invited to subsequent sessions. “This was the part that interested them the least,” Maguire said. “And it was the most important part, the hardest part. There was no question we’d get to Baghdad in no time. We better have a plan for when we get there. But we had nothing but four PowerPoint pages. It was arrogant. We used to joke about the Ph.D. club—Wolfowitz, Feith. They knew best.” Iraq, he noted, was now indeed a central front in the war on terrorism—“and we set the conditions for how that happened. This is a self-inflicted mess.”