Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  Surely, this was not the first time these people had considered this problem. One interesting thing about those at the meeting is that no one present or in the background had any substantive knowledge of the Middle East. It is one thing to have traveled to the area as a senior government official. It is another to have lived there and worked with the people of the region for long periods of time. People with that kind of experience in the Muslim world are strangely absent from Team Bush. In the game plan for the Arab and Islamic world, most of the government's veteran Middle East experts were largely shut out. The Pentagon civilian bureaucracy of the Bush administration, dominated by an inner circle of think-tankers, lawyers and former Senate staffers, virtually hung out a sign, “Arabic Speakers Need Not Apply.” They effectively purged the process of Americans who might have inadvertently developed sympathies for the people of the region.

  Instead of including such veterans in the planning process, the Bush team opted for amateurs brought in from outside the Executive Branch who tended to share the views of many of President Bush's earliest foreign-policy advisors and mentors. Because of this hiring bias, the American people got a Middle East planning process dominated by “insider” discourse among longtime colleagues and old friends who ate, drank, talked, worked and planned only with each other. Most of these people already shared attitudes and concepts of how the Middle East should be handled. Their continued association only reinforced their common beliefs. This created an environment in which any shared belief could become sacrosanct and unchallengeable. A situation like this is, in essence, a war waiting for an excuse to happen. If there is no “imminent threat,” one can be invented, not as a matter of deliberate deception, but rather as an artifact of group self-delusion. In normal circumstances, there is a flow of new talent into the government that melds with the old timers in a process both dynamic and creative. This does not seem to have happened in the Bush 43 administration. Instead, the newcomers behaved as though they had seized control of the government in a silent coup. They tended to behave in such a way that civil servants were made to feel that somehow they were the real enemy, barely tolerated and under suspicion. There seemed to be a general feeling among the newcomers that professional intelligence people somehow just did not “get it.” To add to the discomfort, the new Bush team began to do some odd things.

  Information Collection

  Early in the Bush 43 administration, actions began that clearly reflected a predisposition to place regime change in Iraq at the top of the foreign-policy agenda. Sometime in January 2001, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the opposition group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, began receiving U.S. State Department funds for an effort called the “Information-Collection Program.” Under the Clinton administration, some money had been given to Iraqi exiles for what might be called agit-prop activities against Saddam's government, but the INC (Chalabi) had not been taken very seriously. They had a bad reputation for spending money freely with very little to show for it. The CIA had concluded that Chalabi and his INC colleagues were not to be trusted with taxpayers' money. Nevertheless, Chalabi had longstanding ties to a group of well-established anti-Saddam American activists who were installed by the Bush administration as leading figures of the politically appointed civilian bureaucracy in the Pentagon and in the Office of the Vice President.

  Those ties paid off. The Information-Collection Program, launched in the early months of the Bush administration, was aimed at providing funds to the INC for recruiting defectors from Saddam's military and secret police, and making them available to American intelligence. But what the program really did was to provide a steady stream of raw information useful in challenging the collective wisdom of the intelligence community where the “War with Iraq” enthusiasts disagreed with the intelligence agencies. If the President and Congress were to be sold the need for war, information had to be available with which to argue against what was seen as the lack of imagination and timidity of regular intelligence analysts. To facilitate the flow of such “information” to the President, a dedicated apparatus centered in the Office of the Vice President created its own intelligence office, buried in the recesses of the Pentagon, to “stovepipe” raw data to the White House, to make the case for war on the basis of the testimony of self-interested émigrés and exiles.

  At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, I was the defense intelligence officer for the Middle East in the Defense Intelligence Agency. This meant that I was in charge of all DIA substantive business for the region. In discussions at the time of the victorious end of that campaign and the subsequent Shiite and Kurdish revolts in Iraq, it became abundantly clear that the same people who later made up the war party in the Bush 43 administration were not completely reconciled to the failure of U.S. forces to overthrow the Saddam regime. In spite of the lack of UN sanction for such an operation and the probable long-term costs of the inevitable American occupation of Iraq, the group later known as the neocons seemed deeply embittered by the lack of decisive action to remove the Iraqi dictator. Soon after the dust settled on Operation Desert Storm, the first Bush administration helped launch the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The INC was initially an umbrella of anti-Saddam groups largely composed of Kurdish and Shiite organizations. In the beginning, the CIA provided seed money as a result of presidential direction, and a private consulting firm, the Rendon Group, provided the initial public-relations support. To this day, one of the Rendon advisors to the INC, Francis Brooke, serves as the INC's chief Washington lobbyist.

  Chalabi's American connections played a dominant role in the INC's evolution over the next dozen years. At the University of Chicago, Chalabi had been a student of Albert Wohlstetter, a hard-line Utopian nuclear-war planner who had been the dissertation adviser to another University of Chicago Ph.D., Paul Wolfowitz. Wohlstetter had also been a mentor to Richard Perle. In the summer of 1969, Wohlstetter arranged for both Wolfowitz and Perle to work for the short-lived Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, a Washington-based group co-founded by two icons of American cold war policy, Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze. Wolfowitz and Perle remained close collaborators from that time forward.

  Chalabi, an Iraqi Shiite Arab, had fled Iraq in 1958, just after the overthrow of the royal Hashemite government. His father and grandfather had held cabinet posts in the British-installed Hashemite regime. Before coming to the United States to obtain a doctorate, Chalabi lived in Jordan, Lebanon and Britain. He returned to Beirut after obtaining his doctorate, but in 1977, he moved to Jordan and established a new company, the Petra Bank, which grew into the second largest commercial bank in the country. Twelve years later, the Jordanian government took over the bank and charged Chalabi, who fled the country, with embezzling $70 million. In 1992, Chalabi was tried and convicted in absentia and sentenced to 22 years at hard labor. One of the persistent stories concerning this scandal is that Chalabi's Petra Bank was involved in arms sales to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, and that Saddam Hussein discovered this and pressured King Hussein of Jordan to crack down on Chalabi.

  Shortly after his hasty departure from Jordan, Chalabi, with the backing of his neocon allies in Washington, most notably, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton, helped launch the INC. Chalabi had first been introduced to Perle and Wolfowitz in 1985 by their mutual mentor, Albert Wohlstetter. Bernard Lewis met Chalabi in 1990 and soon thereafter asked his own allies inside the Bush 41 administration, including Wolfowitz's Pentagon aide Zalmay Khalilzad, to help boost the Iraqi exile. Another future Bush 43 Iraq War player also met Chalabi about that time. General Wayne Downing was first introduced to Chalabi in 1991, when Downing commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  In November 1993, Chalabi presented the newly inaugurated Clinton administration with a scheme for the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime. Dubbed “End Game,” the plan envisioned a limited revolt by an insurgent force of INC-led Kurds and Shiites in the oil regions around
Basra in the south and Mosul and Kirkuk in the north. The “End Game” scenario: at the first sign of revolt against Saddam, there would be a full-scale insurrection by military commanders, who would overthrow the Saddam clique and install a Washington-and Tel Aviv-friendly, INC-dom-inated regime in Baghdad. The plan was based on a belief that Iraq was ripe for revolt and that there were no units in the armed forces that would fight to preserve Saddam's government. Since the same units had fought to keep Saddam in power during the Kurdish and Shiite revolts of a few years before, it is difficult to see why the sponsors of End Game would have thought that. A limited effort to implement End Game ended in disaster in 1995, when the Iraqis did fight to defeat the rebels and the Iraqi Army killed over 100 INC combatants. From that point on, both the CIA and DIA considered Chalabi “persona non grata.” The CIA also dropped all financial backing for Chalabi, as the INC, once an umbrella group of various opposition forces, degenerated into little more than a cult of personality, gathered together in London, where Chalabi and his small group of remaining INC loyalists retreated.

  In spite of this, neoconservatives inside the United States, largely in exile during the Clinton administration, succeeded in influencing the Congress enough to obtain passage of the “Iraq Liberation Act of 1998,” largely to revive Chalabi's End Game scheme. Now retired, Gen. Downing, along with retired CIA officer Duane “Dewey” Clarridge of Iran-contra fame, became military “consultants” to Chalabi's INC and then drafted their own updated version of the Chalabi plan, now dubbed “the Downing Plan.” It was different in name only. The Downing-Clarridge plan insisted that a “crack force” of no more than 5,000 INC troops, backed by a group of former U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers (Green Berets), could bring down the Iraq Army. “The idea from the beginning was to encourage defections of Iraqi units,” Clarridge insisted to The Washington Post. “You need to create a nucleus, something for people to defect to. If they could take Basra, it would be all over.” It is difficult to understand how a retired four-star army general could believe this to be true.

  In subsequent congressional testimony, then-Central Command head General Anthony Zinni (USMC) denounced the Downing scheme in no uncertain terms, warning that it would lead to a “Bay of Goats,” adding that, by his most recent counts, there were 91 Iraqi opposition groups. None of them had “the viability to overthrow Saddam.” Elsewhere he mocked Chalabi and the INC as “some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London.” Despite CIA and uniformed military repudiation of End Game, the Downing Plan and other variations on the same theme, the neoconservative group continued to crank out advocacy for Chalabi's proposed revolution.

  On February 19, 1998, a group of neocons calling themselves the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf issued an “Open Letter to the President” (this was before the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act) calling for the implementation of yet another revised plan for the overthrow of Saddam. The letter was remarkable in that it adopted some of the very formulations that would later be used by Vice President Cheney and other current administration officials to justify the preventive war in Iraq that commenced on March 20, 2003. The letter stated:

  Despite his defeat in the Gulf War, continuing sanctions, and the determined effort of UN inspectors to root out and destroy his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein has been able to develop biological and chemical munitions …. This poses a danger to our friends, our allies, and to our nation.

  Equally striking were the recommendations in the letter. Chapter and verse, the document called for the implementation of the Downing Plan with a few added wrinkles. After demanding that the Clinton administration recognize a “provisional government of Iraq based on the principles and leaders of the Iraqi National Congress (INC),” the letter called for the creation of INC-controlled “liberated zones” in the north and south of the country; the lifting of sanctions in those areas and the release of billions of dollars of frozen Iraqi government funds to the INC; the launching of a “systematic air campaign” against the Republican Guard divisions and the military-industrial infrastructure of Iraq; and the prepositioning of U.S. ground-force equipment “so that, as a last resort, we have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq.”

  The letter was co-authored by former Congressman Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.) and Richard Perle. The signers included some people merely sympathetic to the cause of Iraqi freedom and a pantheon of Beltway neocons, many of whom would form the core of the Bush administration's national security apparatus: Elliot Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney, Fred Ikle, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Bernard Lewis, Peter Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, Gary Schmitt, Max Singer, Casper Weinberger, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser, and Dov Zakheim. Some of these gentlemen may have had cause to reconsider their generosity in signing this document. This was in February 1998. A month after the release of the letter, Paul Wolfowitz and Gen. Wayne Downing briefed a group of U.S. senators on the INC war scheme. The senators at the meeting may also have cause to regret their subsequent sponsorship of the Iraq Liberation Act. This law clearly set the stage for renewed fighting in the Middle East in 2003.

  The Bush-Cheney “Clean Break”

  A core group of neoconservatives, including Vulcans Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, came into the Bush administration fully committed to the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad as the number-one foreign-policy priority for the United States, but they found it necessary to spend much of the first nine months in bureaucratic combat with the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA, all of whom remained unconvinced that Saddam posed any serious threat to American strategic interests. At the first NSC meeting of the new administration, Colin Powell argued that the existing sanctions regime against Iraq was ineffective, and he promoted the idea of a change to “smart sanctions.” These would zero in on vital military technologies that might enable Saddam to rebuild his military machine, which had been devastated by Desert Storm, a decade of sanctions, no-fly-zone bombing sorties, six years of UN inspections, and the 1998 Operation Desert Fox 70-hour bombing campaign.

  Arguments like this were hard to deal with for those completely convinced of the necessity of a new government in Baghdad. But Colin Powell cast a mighty shadow on the American political scene, and his military credentials were formidable. If there had not been a cataclysmic event that tipped the balance, it is possible that the war party would never have won the struggle to have their point of view accepted as policy. It was the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, that provided the neocons with the opportunity to turn dreams into reality. In a war-cabinet meeting at the presidential retreat at Camp David four days after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made an appeal for an immediate American military invasion of Iraq in retaliation for the terrorist attacks. Wolfowitz argued that attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain. He worried about 100,000 American troops getting bogged down in mountain fighting in Afghanistan indefinitely. In contrast, he said, Iraq was a brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily. He said that Iraq was “doable.” He estimated that there was a 10–50 percent chance Saddam was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks (this, of course, is a judgment that he was not involved). The United States “would have to go after Saddam at some time if the war on terrorism was to be taken seriously.” Wolfowitz's pitch for war against Iraq, rather than against the Afghan strongholds of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, was rejected at the Camp David session, and two days later, on September 17, President Bush signed a two-and-a-half page directive marked “TOP SECRET,” which spelled out the plan to go to war against Afghanistan. The document also ordered the Pentagon to begin preparing military options for an invasion of Iraq.

  Instantly, the neocon apparatus inside the Pentagon and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney seized upon the opportunity represented by the authorization. On
September 19, 2001, the Defense Policy Board (DPB) convened a closed-door meeting to discuss Iraq. Vulcan Richard Perle chaired the DPB. In the past, the board had been recruited from defense experts from both parties and with a broad range of views. In contrast, Perle's DPB had become a neocon sanctuary, including such leading advocates of war on Saddam as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), former CIA Director James R. Woolsey (a Democrat, but nevertheless a longstanding member of the neocon group), former arms control adviser Ken Adelman, former Under Secretary of Defense Fred C. Ikle, and former Vice President Dan Quayle. Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attended the September 19 session. The speakers at the event, who aggressively advocated U.S. military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein, were Ahmad Chalabi and Princeton professor Bernard Lewis.

  One consequence of the DPB meeting was that former CIA Director Woolsey was secretly dispatched by Wolfowitz to London to seek out evidence that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks and the earlier 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Part of Woolsey's mission involved making contact with INC officials to get their help in further substantiating the link between hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. This theory was the brainchild of Laurie Mylroie, a scholar completely “in tune” with neocon thinking. According to news accounts at the time, Woolsey's actions drew the attention of police officials in Wales, who contacted the U.S. embassy to confirm that Woolsey was on “official U.S. government business,” as he claimed. It was only then that Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director Tenet found out about Woolsey's mission.