“Well,” Cheney countered, “we want regime change in order to disarm Saddam Hussein, not the other way around.”
That approach, while understandable, would be disastrous, Blair said. The Americans and the British couldn’t tell the world that they didn’t care whether Saddam was armed, they just wanted him out. Justifying that position would be next to impossible. They would be back struggling with the question: Why Saddam? There were other armed enemies, so why attack one that could be neutralized without war?
“Now, you may have objections to a U.N. resolution, but actually, I believe we might need two,” Blair said. “One to set the conditions and one to take action if those conditions weren’t meet.”
He looked at Bush. “Our message should be either the regime must change in response to U.N. pressure and to U.N. resolutions,” Blair said, “or it would be changed by military action.”
Bush suppressed a smile. Blair’s performance was impressive. Cheney could be an intimidating figure, but Blair wasn’t taking any guff. He was knocking the vice president back, without batting an eye.
Boy, Blair has cojones, Bush thought.
He could see the virtues of Blair’s position, Bush said. There could be victory without war.
“If, by chance, Saddam accepted and implemented the terms of a new resolution,” he said, “we would have succeeded in changing the very nature of the regime.”
His smile broke through. “We would have cratered the guy,” he said.
• • •
The aides waiting in the other room were summoned to the president’s study. Bush asked the British officials for a briefing about the staff’s discussions.
Alastair Campbell, a senior Blair aide, spoke directly to Bush. The administration, Campbell said, had to consider the importance of sending out a clear message of its benevolent intent.
“I feel like you really have to get the anti-Americanism in Europe and the Middle East,” he said. “A lot of it is jealousy and some of it resentment that they felt obliged to feel sympathy and solidarity post-9/11.”
But there were other important factors feeding into anti-Americanism that could not be shunted aside. Some of the disdain for the United States, Campbell said, came from a fear of its power. That was why the British officials were worried about the language that members of the Bush administration were using in their public statements.
A look of anger flashed across Cheney’s face. “You mean we shouldn’t talk about democracy?” he snapped.
Campbell faced the vice president. “Not if what people take out of it is not a message about democracy, but a message about Americanization,” he said.
Bush nodded. Whatever Cheney’s thoughts, Bush, it seemed, got it. There was a break in the discussion and Blair headed to the restroom.
“Hey, big guy!” Bush called out to Campbell.
Campbell walked over. A few of Bush’s aides were beside him.
He looked at Campbell, an amused look on his face. “I’ll say this,” Bush said, “and I don’t want it on the record, and with apologies to the mixed audience, but your guy’s got balls.”
• • •
The meeting resumed, and Bush took control.
“I’ve decided to go down to the U.N. and put down a new Security Council resolution,” he said. “But I can’t stand by. At that point we’ve got to say to Saddam, ‘Okay, what will you do?’ ”
Blair and his aides breathed a sigh of relief. They had won the day. When Bush gave his speech on Iraq to the U.N. in four days, he would be declaring his preference for diplomacy before military action. Cheney had been checked.
• • •
Dinner than night was anticlimactic. The vice president ate his meal in near silence, and Blair, suffering from severe stomach cramps, barely ate at all.
Bush held forth, filling the group in on a dispute unfolding at the Augusta National Golf Club about whether women could be admitted as members. It was a silly battle, Bush said. The club was going to have to let women in at some point, so why not just accept the inevitable?
A member of the British contingent commented that, while the rest of the world wanted the Iraq issue to be resolved a step at a time, Americans would probably question why Bush was seeking a diplomatic solution at the U.N., rather than just sending in the troops. Cheney smiled across the table. Without saying a word, everyone understood—that was his question.
As dinner wrapped up, Blair excused himself and headed to his cabin. Bush accompanied Campbell out the door. “I suppose you can tell the story of how Tony flew in and pulled the crazed unilateralist back from the brink,” he joked.
• • •
After 9:30 the next morning, Rumsfeld was in his Pentagon office reviewing an intelligence report. He had asked a few weeks earlier for an assessment by the Directorate of Intelligence Joint Staff of what the United States did and did not know about an Iraqi program for weapons of mass destruction. Although the analysis had been completed four days earlier, this was the first time Rumsfeld had laid eyes on it.
The findings were disconcerting. The opening page cautioned that all of the assessments of Iraq’s arsenal were based heavily on analytic assumptions. There was very little hard evidence.
“Our knowledge of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program is based largely—perhaps 90%—on analysis of imprecise intelligence,” the report said.
As for biological weapons, the intelligence officers could not confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produced, tested, or stored them. And while they believed that Iraq had seven mobile production plants for such weapons, they could not locate them.
In every category, the information was sketchy. The analysts didn’t know if Iraq had the processes in place to produce chemical devices, and they couldn’t confirm the identity of any Iraqi sites used to produce the final agents needed for a weapon. While Saddam had short-range ballistic missiles, they doubted that he could produce longer-range weapons. Information about staging and storage sites for ballistic missiles was “significantly lacking,” the report said.
Rumsfeld decided that General Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, needed to see this report immediately. Just after 9:45, he addressed an e-mail to Myers, attaching a copy of the report.
“Please take a look at this material as to what we don’t know about WMD,” he typed. “It’s big.”
BOOK THREE
THE THREAT
12
Three Yemeni men emerged from a five-story building in a Karachi housing project and walked across the street toward an outdoor food stall.
A detachment of paramilitaries rushed out from behind cars and doorways, pointing AK-47s and handguns at the men. Without a word, the squad of Pakistani soldiers tackled the Yemenis, yanking back their arms and pushing their faces into the concrete.
It was shortly after seven o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2002. Since the previous afternoon, a group of Army Rangers, police officers, and operatives from the ISI—Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency—had been conducting surveillance of the building. Just fifteen days before, American intelligence had informed the ISI that it had intercepted a call from Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top al-Qaeda terrorist and 9/11 plotter. The CIA determined that the call came from Karachi but couldn’t narrow down the location. The ISI took over the hunt, but without more information, the chances that its agents would locate bin al-Shibh were slim.
Then, a breakthrough. Police and ISI agents had raided an apartment in the suburb of Bahadurabad, where they believed a group of Arab terrorists was hiding out. The suspects had already fled, but the gatekeeper at the complex knew where they had gone and led authorities to Building 63C in a project called Commercial Area Phase 2.
Now, thirty-six hours later, the appearance of the three Yemenis on the street was the first confirmation that the ISI had found a terrorist safe house. After cuffing the men’s hands, the soldiers pulled them off the ground, dragging them away from 63C.
Fighting
his captors, one of the men turned his head, looking up to the building’s fifth floor. “Brothers!” he screamed. “Arm yourselves!”
The paramilitaries subdued the man, but it was too late. They had lost the element of surprise. They had to launch the raid immediately.
Rangers and ISI officers fanned out, surrounding the building. Without warning, machine-gun fire sprayed from the fifth-floor windows. As some soldiers and officers took cover, another team blitzed the building, rushing up its single stairwell. Just as the officers passed the third floor, they saw two Arabs and grabbed them. The men shouted to their compatriots, who threw grenades down the stairs. Withering gunfire chopped at the ground as police struggled to pull two injured officers out of harm’s way.
A pitched battle had begun, and despite their superior numbers, the authorities were heavily outgunned; rifles and pistols were no match for automatic weapons. The Pakistanis needed heavily armed reinforcements.
More than two thousand Rangers and local police flooded the area. The authorities cordoned off a square kilometer around the building, evacuating residents and shopkeepers from what had become a war zone.
As the hours passed, the air was thick with the smell of cordite. Bullet holes pockmarked the building. Some of the men inside the apartment climbed up to the roof, shielding themselves under a low cement barrier as they fired at the authorities. The police tried to root them out with tear gas; the canisters bounced off the walls and landed on the officers below.
Rangers in full body armor rushed toward the building under the cover from smoke grenades, then took up positions beneath an overhang on the ground floor. Before they moved again, there was a lull in the gunfire.
“You cannot get away!” someone yelled.
“Allahu Akbar!” came the response. God is great.
Inside the apartment, one of the militants had been badly wounded and was bleeding profusely. He made his way to the kitchen wall and smeared a message in his own blood: There is no God but Allah, Mohammed is his messenger.
About noon, five Rangers stormed the building, praying as they ran. They bolted up the stairs and into the apartment, where they found survivors crouching in a windowless kitchen, armed only with a rifle.
“Surrender!” a soldier called out.
“Bastard! Bastard!”
One of the extremists leaped to his feet and darted out; he was shot dead. The man with the rifle took aim at a Ranger and pulled the trigger. A click, then nothing—the gun had jammed. He and a surviving companion grabbed whatever they could—forks, bottles, pans—and hurled them at the soldiers. Then the men held knives to their own throats, threatening to kill themselves rather than be taken into custody. The Rangers fired tear gas and the two men stumbled out of the kitchen, gasping, their hands raised.
Suddenly one of them lunged for a Ranger’s gun, and the paramilitaries jumped on them. Both men struggled as the soldiers physically pinned them down.
“You’re going to hell!” one screamed. “You’re going to hell!”
• • •
It was all over by one o’clock. Shell casings and chunks of concrete littered the street; the building’s roof was smeared with blood. Seven of the terrorists survived; two were dead.
The men were blindfolded with rags and led outside. Bin al-Shibh, one of the survivors, thrust his hand in the air just before he was thrown into a waiting vehicle.
Searching the apartment, the police found more than twenty remote radio detonators, documents belonging to members of the bin Laden family, laptop computers, mobile phones, and records of terrorist plots, including an attack planned for that very day—killing Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, by shooting rockets at him as he attended a defense exhibition in Karachi.
• • •
Later that day, a sheaf of papers arrived at Number 10 Downing Street from the White House. It was a draft of the Iraq speech that Bush was preparing to deliver the following morning at the U.N. General Assembly Hall. And Blair was alarmed as he read it.
There was no call for a new U.N. resolution. The draft read as though it had been written by Cheney and Rumsfeld—bursting with bluster and saber rattling, and not much else. This had to be a mistake. The president had made a commitment to Blair that he was going to seek diplomatic action through the U.N. And Bush had never gone back on his word before.
With less than twenty-four hours to go, Blair decided to inject himself into the administration’s debate once again. If White House policy makers and speechwriters couldn’t figure out what to say, then Blair would do it.
He handwrote a short passage for insertion into the speech and gave it to David Manning, his foreign policy advisor. Manning transmitted it to Condoleezza Rice and then telephoned her. She told him that the words would be included, but later British officials heard disturbing rumblings that called her assurances into question. Cheney had launched a last-ditch offensive urging Bush to ignore the calls for a new U.N. resolution, and Colin Powell had joined the fray, challenging the vice president’s advice as dangerously misguided.
By day’s end, the battle within the administration seemed to have been resolved. Manning was told that there was no doubt: Bush would be calling for the resolution.
• • •
At 10:35 the next morning, Bush ascended the green marble podium in the vast U.N. General Assembly Hall and walked to the large wooden lectern. He looked out on the applauding crowd of delegates seated in the auditorium. On each side of the podium, semitransparent mirrors reflected the teleprompter screen below. The words from the speech scrolled forward.
“Mr. Secretary General, Mr. President, distinguished delegates and ladies and gentlemen,” Bush began, “We meet one year and one day after a terrorist attack brought grief to my country and brought grief to many citizens of our world.”
He paid homage to the mission of the U.N. and its commitment to human dignity and collective security. He called for peace in the Middle East, reaffirming his support for an independent Palestine.
“Above all,” he said, “our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions.”
Terrorists were lurking within many nations, he said. The threat that rogue regimes could provide them with weapons to kill on a massive scale was a dreadful reality.
“In one place—in one regime—we find all of these dangers in their most lethal and aggressive forms,” he said.
• • •
In London, Tony Blair watched the speech on television. So far, everything was going as planned. Bush was describing the history of the efforts by U.N. weapons inspectors and Saddam’s flouting of the body’s resolutions.
“We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country,” Bush said. “Are we to assume that he stopped when they left?”
That’s good, Blair thought. The public reaction to this would almost certainly be favorable.
• • •
The words continued to scroll by on the teleprompter mirrors. Bush was reaching the critical point, where he would declare his commitment to a renewed U.N. diplomatic effort to disarm Iraq.
“My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge,” Bush said. “If Iraq’s regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account.”
He glanced at the teleprompter, looking for the phrase calling for a new resolution.
It wasn’t there.
The purposes of the United States should not be doubted . . .
That was the next sentence on the teleprompter—an attestation to the country’s might and willpower. There was nothing about diplomacy. The words that had been the subject of such great debate had simply disappeared.
Bush took a breath. And then he winged it.
“We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions . . .” he began.
Resolutions? That’s odd.
Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador, was flummoxed by Bush’s use of the plural. Blair had been pushing for two resolutions, of course, but Bush had always demurred. Now, after all the fighting over whether to accept even one, the president announced he would go for two? Without warning?
It was almost as if Bush had reached his decision at the last second. Meyer had no way of knowing that he had just witnessed the president of the United States announce what seemed to be a major international initiative by mistake, owing to a technical flub.
• • •
Slips of the tongue don’t establish national security policy, and so the calls went out quickly to inform allies that the president had misspoken. He wanted one resolution, not two.
Rice delivered the message to the Blair government in a phone call to David Manning. There had been a slipup, she explained, and Bush had gone further in his statements than he had intended.
“We gave the president the wrong text,” she said. “He was ad-libbing.”
• • •
Early on September 15, a bespectacled, balding man arrived at the thirty-nine-story Secretariat Building at U.N. headquarters in Manhattan. He was Hans Blix, head of the international body’s commission in charge of disarming Iraq and monitoring the country’s compliance.
The group—the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known universally as UNMOVIC—had been unable to check Iraq’s activities since its formation in 1999; Saddam had thrown out a group of weapons inspectors the previous year.
Blix—a Swedish diplomat with a long pedigree promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy—had come out of retirement in 2000 to become the new head of UNMOVIC at the request of the U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan. If weapons inspectors went back into Iraq, it would be Blix who led them. Now, just days after the Bush speech, Annan had summoned Blix to his office for an urgent Sunday meeting. The news was breathtaking—Saddam had blinked.
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