The Twilight of the Bombs
Page 34
But did Iraq in fact have any functioning WMD programs? Ritter thought it highly unlikely, and explained why:
From 1994 to 199814 Iraq was subjected to a strenuous program of ongoing monitoring of industrial and research facilities that could be used to reconstitute proscribed activities. This monitoring provided weapons inspectors with detailed insight into the capabilities, both present and future, of Iraq’s industrial infrastructure. It allowed UNSCOM to ascertain, with a high level of confidence, that Iraq was not rebuilding its prohibited weapons programs and that it lacked the means to do so without an infusion of advanced technology and a significant investment of time and money.
Given the comprehensive nature of the monitoring regime put in place by UNSCOM, which included a strict export-import control regime, it was possible as early as 1997 to determine that, from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq had been disarmed. Iraq no longer possessed any meaningful quantities of chemical or biological agent, if it possessed any at all, and the industrial means to produce these agents had either been eliminated or were subject to stringent monitoring. The same was true of Iraq’s nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities. As long as monitoring inspections remained in place, Iraq presented a WMD-based threat to no one.
Ritter proceeded to summarize each of Iraq’s WMD programs to demonstrate that the country had been qualitatively disarmed, “a meaningful, viable capability to produce or employ weapons of mass destruction” eliminated, even if every last weapon, component, or “bit of related material” had not been accounted for—that is, even if “quantitative” disarmament was indeterminable. When he came to nuclear weapons, Ritter drew his conclusions from personal experience as an inspector in Iraq:
Responsibility for overseeing15 the disarmament of Iraq’s nuclear weapons capability was given to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Often overlooked in the debate about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities is just how effective the IAEA was at destroying, dismantling, or rendering harmless Iraq’s nuclear weapons capability. Despite every attempt by Iraq to retain some level of nuclear weapons capability, the massive infrastructure Baghdad had assembled by 1991 to produce a nuclear bomb had been eliminated by 1995. Al Atheer, the nuclear weaponization facility, had been destroyed—blown up under IAEA supervision—and all other major facilities related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program had either been dismantled or were subjected to one of the most stringent forms of ongoing monitoring and verification inspections ever implemented under a disarmament accord.
By 1996, the IAEA had established a seamless monitoring-based inspection regime that provided absolute certainty Iraq would not be able to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program short of acquiring a complete nuclear weapon abroad.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian attorney who was Hans Blix’s successor at the IAEA, took a similar view. “By December 1998,”16 he would tell the U.N. Security Council—“when the inspections were brought to a halt with a military strike imminent”—i.e., Desert Fox—“we were confident that we had not missed any significant component of Iraq’s nuclear program. While we did not claim absolute certainty, our conclusion at that time was that we had neutralized Iraq’s nuclear weapons program and that there were no indications that Iraq retained any physical capability to produce weapon-usable nuclear material.”
Yet further confirmation of Iraq’s disarmed status had come to Charles Duelfer in the months before Desert Fox from the Iraqis he dealt with in organizing inspections:
From an Iraqi perspective,17 it was difficult to comprehend why the vaunted CIA did not know the diminished status of their WMD programs, especially after they had been forced to reveal so much and there were so many defectors. On several occasions, senior Iraqis would say something like, “Mister Duelfer, we understand you must know the true extent of the programs. They are obliterated, and your people must know this. Why must you keep denying that?”
Duelfer’s confidants’ confusion reflected the hall of mirrors that Iraq had become for both sides:
Our continued insistence18 that they might have WMD led to some strange questions that I would be asked, very confidentially. These questions suggested that even some very senior Iraqis thought that while they had absolutely no evidence that Iraq retained WMD, if the CIA was convinced that Iraq indeed had WMD, then maybe there was some very secret reserve that only Saddam and the CIA knew about.
To make an atomic bomb, Iraq would have needed natural uranium and the large-scale, easily detectible facilities drawing megawatts of power—centrifuges, EMIS magnets and tanks, gaseous-diffusion cascades—necessary to enrich it to weapons-grade. Alternatively, Iraq would have needed an operating nuclear reactor to breed plutonium and a reprocessing facility to separate it. Across the decade, the IAEA had either destroyed or removed all that Iraq had accumulated of such facilities and materials. Even if it acquired a new supply of uranium—and there was plenty of ore available domestically in Iraq—it lacked the equipment necessary to enrich it or use it to breed plutonium. Despite the absence of continuing inspections, that is, the world had little to fear from Iraq so far as the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction were concerned. It would have taken years for Iraq to reconstruct even such limited nuclear facilities as it had previously been operating, and the effort would have been obvious to overhead surveillance. Nor is it plausible that any other nation or subnational entity would have risked the world’s wrath by supplying Iraq with plutonium or enriched uranium, much less a finished bomb.
Yet despite Scott Ritter’s informed analysis and the IAEA’s firm conclusion, the U.S. intelligence community, shamed by its failure to identify Iraq’s WMD threat prior to the first Gulf War, convinced itself that the Middle Eastern nation was reconstituting its WMD. Robert Einhorn, Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, summarized the Clinton administration’s post-1998 view of Iraq in congressional testimony in March 2002:
How close is the peril19 of Iraqi WMD? Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors (albeit attacks that would be ragged, inaccurate, and limited in size). Within four or five years it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing fissile material produced indigenously—and to threaten U.S. territory with such weapons delivered by nonconventional means, such as commercial shipping containers. If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner.
The Middle Eastern dictatorship was a hollow threat after 1998, but the United States was both uncertain of that fact and no longer willing to tolerate Saddam’s belligerence. If Clinton was exhausted from his personal battles, unwilling to spend much of the $97 million Congress authorized with the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 to foment Saddam’s overthrow, George W. Bush arrived fresh at the front lines, convinced that victory over Saddam would set him up for a triumphant presidency. This time the boy would do something on his own.
YET EVEN BUSH WAS skeptical initially of refighting the first Gulf War. Iraq was the subject of his first National Security Council meeting on 30 January 2001, ten days after his inauguration. Paul O’Neill, his treasury secretary, would recall the meeting in detail to the journalist Ron Suskind. As Suskind summed up O’Neill’s recollection, “The opening premise,20 that Saddam’s regime was destabilizing the [Middle East], and the vivid possibility that he owned weapons of mass destruction—a grainy picture, perhaps misleading, but visceral—pushed analysis toward logistics: the need for better intelligence, for ways to tighten the net around the regime, for use of the U.S. military to support Iraqi insurgents in a coup.” Toward the end of the meeting, when Bush was handing out assignments, O’Neill recalled him telling Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that they “should examine our military options.”21 Those would include, Suskind pa
raphrased, “rebuilding the military coalition from the 1991 Gulf War,” but only in the context of “examining ‘how it might look’ to use U.S. ground forces in the north and the south of Iraq [i.e., under the no-fly zones] and how the armed forces could support groups inside the country who could help challenge Saddam Hussein.”
If Saddam’s destabilizing of the Middle East was one reason for regime change in Iraq, another reason, which Rumsfeld articulated at a second NSC meeting, was to make an example of the country, to demonstrate to minor states such as North Korea and Iran what would happen to them if they continued to pursue asymmetric power in the form of weapons of mass destruction. A Rumsfeld memo on the subject concluded, “The risk to US and Alliance22 security is increasing as the US fails to respond effectively and decisively to asymmetric threats likely to characterize the first quarter of the 21st century.” But how to transform Iraq, how to force regime change, was not yet clear. “From the start,”23 O’Neill told Suskind, “we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it.”
What solved everything was September 11, the attacks by Al Qaeda on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, using commercial jetliners, eight months into George W. Bush’s first term. The attacks struck fear in the hearts of the president and vice president who were the nation’s responsible leaders—fear that more were coming, then fear that they would be repeated, fear that the young administration’s political capital would be laid waste. Bush had been told of the first attack just as he arrived that September morning at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, for a photo-op appearance with a group of schoolchildren. The White House’s Situation Room director, Deborah Loewer, a Navy captain and part of Bush’s entourage, took a call from one of her assistants in Washington and passed the news personally to Bush as he emerged from his limousine that a plane had “impacted the World Trade Center.”24
In an interview two months later, Bush conflated his experiences before and after his classroom appearance. Though he had watched the first footage of the burning towers on a school television set before he left Booker Elementary (no footage of the planes themselves was broadcast until the following day), as he recalled it, “I was sitting outside the classroom25 waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly myself, and I said, well, there’s one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there, I didn’t have much time to think about it.”
The first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. Eastern time; the second hit the south tower at 9:03, while Bush was in the classroom listening to the second-graders read aloud in singsong unison to the click of teacher Sandra Kay Daniels’s baton beating time against her desk. The White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, whispered the news of the second attack into Bush’s ear, but the president stayed in the classroom another ten minutes until the children finished their reading, and even allowed the excited scrum of media to depart the room first. Despite the possible danger—the school had been picked for its proximity to Sarasota-Bradenton Airport, to save the president time—he remained at the school long enough to watch the television coverage, begin making calls, and deliver a brief speech at a planned 9:30 a.m. press conference. “Today, we’ve had a national tragedy,”26 he said. “Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. I have spoken to the vice president, to the governor of New York, to the director of the FBI, and I’ve ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.” Echoing his father’s first public statement in reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, he added, “Terrorism against our nation will not stand.” Then he asked for a moment of silence, finishing with, “May God bless the victims, their families and America.”
(Osama bin Laden found occasion to ridicule George Bush’s dilatory comprehension of the attacks. “And for the record,”27 bin Laden sneered in a videotaped speech broadcast by the Al Jazeera network just before the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, “we had agreed with the Commander-General Muhammad Atta, Allah have mercy on him, that all the operations should be carried out within 20 minutes, before Bush and his administration notice. It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would abandon 50,000 [sic] of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone, [at] the time when they most needed him. But because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers, we were given three times the period required to execute the operations—all praise is due to Allah.”)
The terrible sequence of events continued to play out through that bright, sun-filled September morning: The two World Trade Center towers burned like vast torches, their dense black smoke billowing southwest over New Jersey; American Airlines Flight 77, the third of four commercial jetliners entombed with passengers, crashed into the Pentagon; the World Trade Center south tower collapsed in an eruption of choking dust; United Flight 93 drove itself downward at full speed into an open field near Shanksville in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, shredding the aircraft and all the lives on board; the World Trade Center north tower imploded. Nineteen highjackers died in the attacks, as did 2,954 victims.28
Speaking from the White House that night, Bush told the American people, “The search is under way for those who are behind these evil acts.… We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Afterward, at a meeting of what would become his war cabinet, among the participants Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and the CIA director, George Tenet, Bush called the attacks “a great opportunity.”29 Cheney commented that Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s home base, lacked good targets after decades of war. Rumsfeld repeated Bush’s observation in his earlier speech that countries that supported terrorism were as much a part of the problem as Al Qaeda.
Bush went to bed later than his usual early hour, around 11:30 p.m. Before then he dictated an entry in his sometime diary. “The Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first30 century took place today,” the president dictated. “We think it’s Osama bin Laden. We think there are other targets in the United States, but I have urged the country to go back to normal. We cannot allow a terrorist thug to hold us hostage. My hope is that this will provide an opportunity for us to rally the world against terrorism.” In his speech earlier that night Bush had spoken of a “war on terrorism.” The phrase was still taking shape. In a few days he would have it right.
FIFTEEN THE HARD STARE INTO THE ABYSS
DONALD RUMSFELD HAD BEEN thinking about Iraq even as the Pentagon burned, the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward has reported. “At 2:40 p.m. that day,”1 Woodward wrote of September 11, “with dust and smoke filling the [Pentagon] operations center as he was trying to figure out what had happened, Rumsfeld raised with his staff the possibility of going after Iraq as a response to the terrorist attacks, according to an aide’s notes. Saddam Hussein is S.H. in these notes, and UBL is Usama”—an alternative transliteration of bin Laden’s first name favored by the intelligence community—“bin Laden. The notes show that Rumsfeld had mused about whether to ‘hit S.H. @ same time—not only UBL’ and asked the Pentagon lawyer to talk to [assistant secretary of defense] Paul Wolfowitz about the Iraq ‘connection with UBL.’” The next day, Rumsfeld raised the question of including Iraq in the American response to September 11 in a meeting of the president’s advisers, calling it an “opportunity.”2
Two months later, Bush had changed his mind, telling Donald Rumsfeld on 21 November, a few days before Thanksgiving, “Get Tommy Franks looking6 at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to.” Why Bush revised his priorities has not yet been fully explained. Attacking Iraq carried far more risks than pursuing Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, as subsequent events would demonstrate. What new circumstance convinced Bush that taking those risks was necessary?