In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  As I left the meeting room I was surprised to learn from my staff that the conversation I thought had been private had actually been broadcast into an adjacent room, where Hu’s staff gathered around a speaker to listen. The Chinese, apparently, aren’t fans of one-on-one meetings.

  DON RUMSFELD AND Tommy Franks came to the White House on May 10, 2002, with a status report on the military planning process. Part of the discussion focused on timing. The logistics of any major military operation are exceedingly complex, and though we were still hopeful that war would not be necessary, we worried that Saddam might launch an attack on us or our allies before we had sufficient forces in place. No one wanted us to be embroiled in a conflict at a time of Saddam’s choosing rather than ours.

  I was concerned about a number of contingencies. How did our war plan deal with weapons of mass destruction? How did we intend to discourage Saddam from using these weapons, and what preparations were we making to protect our troops if he did? If we were successful at getting the inspectors back into Iraq, how effective did we believe they could be? Could we insist on placing U.S. inspectors on the teams? How could we deny Iraq the ability to launch Scud missiles at Israel, as Saddam had done during the first Gulf War? How was Saddam likely to respond to our actions? What would it take for us effectively to defend the Kurds against the Iraqi forces massed in the north?

  Throughout the process Congress would be very important, and I wanted to know if we had a strategy to ensure that key members were briefed on how we would conduct the war if it came. We also needed to ensure that Congress and the American public understood the consequences of an unconstrained Saddam. With his tremendous oil resources and the fraying sanctions, failure to bring him under control or act against him would simply give him time to advance his WMD programs and perhaps develop a nuclear weapon.

  THROUGHOUT MAY AND MUCH of June, we debated our policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. In meetings of the Principals Committee and the National Security Council, I urged that we move beyond Yasser Arafat. The record was clear, in my view, that he could not be part of trying to establish peace.

  Our policy debates culminated in the president’s Rose Garden speech on June 24, 2002, in which the United States called for the first time for new Palestinian leadership. The president said that the Palestinian people needed to elect new leaders “not compromised by terror” if they were to achieve the independent state that they deserved. He called on the Israelis to withdraw to their September 2000 positions as the Palestinians made security improvements and said that “Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories must stop.” It was a bold and courageous speech that committed America to active leadership toward the goal of peace—but only if the Palestinian people chose new leaders who renounced terror.

  BY THE SUMMER OF 2002, the anthrax attacks that had followed shortly after 9/11 had not been solved, and I had received numerous reports about terrorist interest in dangerous biological and chemical substances. In Principals Meetings we had discussed threats that might emanate from Russia’s former biological weapons program, whether from loose stockpiles of biological warfare agents or unemployed scientists. The war in Afghanistan had given us access to sites in that country that showed al Qaeda’s work on biological weapons to be further along than had been suspected.

  My staff and I spent significant time on response measures, such as whether and how to produce, stockpile, and administer vaccines for anthrax and smallpox. We discussed vaccination against bioterrorist threats, a very controversial subject, even when applied to a well-defined segment of the population—such as the American military. There had been only limited use of the anthrax vaccine during the first Gulf War, and critics claimed it risked adverse side effects. I was among those who believed the risk was well worth taking, particularly for troops going into areas where the development of biological weapons had been reported. It seemed to me, however, that if the men and women of our armed forces were going to have to act on that belief, I should, too, and I received the vaccine series. I received a smallpox vaccine, as well.

  Smallpox was a concern not only because it is disfiguring and deadly but because so many Americans were unprotected. Routine vaccination had ceased in 1972 after the disease was eradicated in the United States, but even those who had been vaccinated before were not necessarily safe because acquired immunity gradually declines.

  During our first months in office, Scooter Libby and others on my staff had studied the results of an exercise, called “Dark Winter,” that had simulated the effect of a smallpox attack on the United States. A group of distinguished Americans acted the parts of the National Security Council, with former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn playing the president. The scenario they were given posited terrorist attacks with smallpox in Oklahoma City, with the infection spreading rapidly around the country and beyond. Despite the best efforts of exercise participants, sixteen thousand people were infected within two weeks, with seventeen thousand more expected to fall ill in the twelve days after that. These numbers represented just the first two generations of the disease. In the fourth generation, it was estimated, there might be as many as three million infected, with as many as one million dying.

  One of the primary problems faced by exercise participants was a shortage of vaccine, which was, in fact, the situation in the United States in early 2001. My office began pressing the Department of Health and Human Services to get more vaccine produced and to make plans for its distribution. In October 2001 the department announced plans to increase the stockpile of U.S. smallpox vaccine to 300 million doses—one for every American.

  On July 17, 2002, I flew to Atlanta with Scooter and my homeland security advisor, Carol Kuntz, for a daylong series of briefings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I met with the CDC smallpox experts, toured their anthrax laboratory, and received a briefing on biological warfare countermeasures. The men and women of the CDC, including the new director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, were an impressive group and would play an important role in fighting terrorism during the time I was in office. I also came to have great respect for the knowledge and wisdom of Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He, too, was a key figure in improving the security of the country against biological attacks.

  At the end of my visit to the CDC I spoke to staff members gathered in the auditorium. I thanked them for the tremendous contribution they were making in defending the nation. I wanted to make sure they knew they had an advocate in the White House.

  ON AUGUST 5 WE had a National Security Council meeting to review the latest iteration of the war plan. Tommy Franks was refining and modifying the plan in order to shorten lead times. We were all more comfortable with a plan that gave Saddam less time to plan and prepare counterattacks. In a discussion about postwar planning, there was a brief exchange about the military requirements for postwar security operations. The president looked at CIA Director Tenet and asked him point-blank what the Iraqi people’s reaction would be to an American military overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Tenet didn’t skip a beat: “Most Iraqis will rejoice when Saddam is gone,” the CIA director responded.

  I WORKED OUT OF Wyoming for a good part of August, attending meetings back in Washington by SVTS, with the equipment set up in my upstairs office. On August 10 I was scheduled to confer via SVTS with a visiting delegation of Iraqi exiles opposed to Saddam Hussein. They had gathered in the ornate Cordell Hull Conference Room in the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. All of them had taken their places and were waiting for me to appear on the screen, when, unbeknownst to me, my four-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth, wandered into my office. The Iraqis were treated to images of Elizabeth jumping around in a pink princess outfit and making faces at herself as she watched her performance reflected back on the two-way video hookup. She was hustled off by my personal aide, Brian McCormack, before I arrived on the scene. I sat down in front of the camera and Scooter
Libby sat down just outside of view. Unaware of the performance that had just taken place, I said to the delegation: “Greetings from Wyoming. I’m here with my chief of staff.” It was only after the meeting that someone explained why the Iraqis found that so funny.

  Since January 2002 Scooter had been urging the State Department to get the major Iraqi opposition groups together for an international conference to begin planning for a post-Saddam government, but a conference had been repeatedly delayed while Secretary Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage warned about too much engagement with Saddam’s opponents. They were “externals,” or so the argument went, who had left Iraq during Saddam’s reign and would not have credibility with Iraqis who had stayed. Therefore, the State Department argued, they should not be actively involved in our postwar planning. I’ve reflected on this assessment and its consequences many times in the years since as I have watched so-called externals play a crucial role in Iraq’s democratic government. The prime minister of Iraq today, Nouri al Maliki, lived in exile until 2003, as did Ayad Allawi, whom Maliki narrowly defeated in the 2010 national elections.

  The idea that we shouldn’t work closely with opponents of Saddam who were living in exile slowed us down. I think we would have done a better job in the wake of Saddam’s ouster if we had had a provisional government, made up of externals and internals, ready to take over as soon as Saddam fell. This would have put Iraqis in charge of Iraq and helped avoid the taint of occupation that we began to experience under the Coalition Provisional Authority.

  A question that came up early and often in our discussions of a government to follow Saddam was whether we were committed to establishing a democracy in Iraq. I believed we had no alternative. Any provisional government would have to agree to early, free, and fair elections. Critics on the left have accused the United States of attempting to impose democracy at the point of a gun, but I see it differently. If the United States took military action and removed Saddam from power, we had an obligation to ensure that what followed reflected our values and belief in freedom and democracy. It may well have been easier simply to handpick another Iraqi strongman and install him in one of Saddam’s palaces, but that would have been inconsistent with American values and, in my view, immoral.

  IN MID-AUGUST FORMER National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal urging us not to attack Iraq. “It is beyond dispute that Saddam is a menace,” he wrote, noting that Saddam brutalized his own people and had launched wars on two of his neighbors. Scowcroft also thought it a settled matter that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but he thought it “unlikely” that Saddam would provide WMD to terrorists, overlooking the fact that Iraq had already provided safe haven, training, and material support to terrorists. Brent went on to argue that we could rely on the UN Security Council and international inspections to contain the threat posed by Saddam, overlooking the fact that Saddam had repeatedly ignored the United Nations since Brent and I served together eleven years earlier in the first Bush administration.

  As I read Brent’s piece, I found myself thinking that it reflected a pre-9/11 mind-set, the worldview of a time before we had seen the devastation that terrorists armed with hijacked airplanes could cause. We had to do everything possible to be sure that they never got their hands on weapons that could kill millions.

  Brent was very close to the president’s father, and he and I had been good friends since the Ford administration. He’d had a hand in recommending me to be secretary of defense in the previous Bush administration. He obviously had major disagreements with the policies of the second Bush administration, and he didn’t hesitate to express those differences publicly.

  Brent was quoted later saying he believed I had changed since we’d worked together in the first Bush administration. In reality, what had happened was that after an attack on the homeland that had killed three thousand people, the world had changed. We were at war against terrorist enemies who could not be negotiated with, deterred, or contained, and who would never surrender. This was not the world of superpower tensions and arms control agreements in which Brent had served.

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  DURING AUGUST I BECAME concerned that too much emphasis was being placed on getting UN inspectors back into Iraq. One proposal talked about in the White House was for an “aggressive” inspection regime—a set of inspections so intrusive they might result in toppling Saddam. National Security Advisor Rice advanced this idea, and the president and Tony Blair discussed it. I didn’t buy it. It seemed fanciful to me. Saddam Hussein, who had faced so much worse, was not going to be ousted by teams of UN inspectors, no matter how insistent they might be.

  Inspections, I thought, could too easily be a source of false comfort, allowing us to think that we were doing something significant about the threat Saddam posed, when, in fact, we were not. I decided to press the issue in a speech I gave to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002. Saddam had “made a science out of deceiving the international community,” I said to the audience assembled in Nashville, Tennessee. I recalled how surprised analysts were after the Gulf War to find that he was perhaps within a year of acquiring a nuclear weapon. I also cited what had happened in the spring of 1995:

  The inspectors were actually on the verge of declaring that Saddam’s programs to develop chemical weapons and longer-range ballistic missiles had been fully accounted for and shut down. Then Saddam’s son-in-law suddenly defected and began sharing information. Within days the inspectors were led to an Iraqi chicken farm. Hidden there were boxes of documents and lots of evidence regarding Iraq’s most secret weapons program.

  Inspectors subsequently discovered that Saddam had deceived them “about the extent of his program to mass produce VX, one of the deadliest chemicals known to man,” I said. And he had not shut down his prohibited missile programs, but had “continued to test such missiles, almost literally under the noses of UN inspectors.”

  Given this record, a return of inspectors to Iraq did not ensure Saddam’s compliance with UN resolutions, but it would give him time to plot and plan and eventually acquire “the whole range of weapons of mass destruction.” I emphasized the need, in facing such a threat, to proceed with “care, deliberation, and consultation with our allies.” And we should keep in mind, I said, that for all the dangers we were facing, there were also opportunities:

  With our help, a liberated Iraq can be a great nation once again. Iraq is rich in natural resources and human talent, and has unlimited potential for a peaceful, prosperous future. Our goal would be an Iraq that has territorial integrity, a government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic group are recognized and protected.

  All who sought justice and dignity in Iraq, I concluded, “can know they have a friend and ally in the United States of America.”

  WHEN THE NATIONAL SECURITY Council met at Camp David on Saturday, September 7, 2002, one of the topics on which we spent a good deal of time was the president’s upcoming speech at the United Nations. He was going there, as presidents often do, for the opening of the General Assembly. I was a strong advocate of using the speech to challenge the United Nations. The president should point out that the Security Council had passed sixteen resolutions aimed at removing the danger posed by Saddam. When he repeatedly violated them, the UN had responded with yet more resolutions. I argued that the time had come to confront the United Nations, hold the organization accountable, and make clear that if the Security Council was unwilling to impose consequences for violations, the UN would become irrelevant. What I hoped we wouldn’t do was what we’d done for the last twelve years—simply adopt yet one more meaningless resolution.

  Underlying the debate over the speech and UN resolutions was the issue of military force itself. The president had not yet made a decision, but in neither this meeting nor any other I attended did any of the president’s advisors argue against using military force to remove Saddam from power. Nor did anyone argue
that leaving Saddam in power, with all the risks and costs associated with that course, was a viable option.

  When we finished our NSC meeting, the president hosted Tony Blair in his office in Laurel Lodge. I joined the two of them, and we talked through the need for United Nations involvement. Blair was tough. He understood the stakes and the importance of acting against Saddam, and he was clear that he would be with us no matter what—and that was likely to include strong opposition from within his own party.

  Blair argued that a UN resolution was necessary to achieve maximum international cooperation. He was very persuasive, and I understood that the president wanted to support his friend. There was no legal obligation for us to pursue a resolution, but there were some in the United States and many more in Europe who felt it would legitimize military action, and a resolution would also speak to their concerns. The president told the prime minister he would go forward with a resolution.

  I knew the president was no more interested than I was in an endless round of inspections and deception in Iraq, and in the days that followed, I recommended inserting into the resolution a requirement for Saddam to submit within thirty days a declaration disclosing his WMD capacity and holdings. This would lay down a marker, set a deadline for assessing one final time whether action against Saddam was required.

  AS WORK WENT FORWARD at the United Nations, we also sought congressional authorization for the use of force. Several members of Congress requested that the intelligence community produce a National Intelligence Estimate, a document that reflects the consensus view of U.S. intelligence agencies. The judgments contained in the 2002 NIE were of a piece with the briefings the president and I had been receiving. “Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions,” the report said. “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” Most agencies assessed that “Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that UNSCOM inspectors departed—December 1998,” and that “if Baghdad acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad it could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year.”