26. BUSH (II) FUMBLES THE BALL

BUSH'S "DEMOCRATIC NATION-BUILDING" IN IRAQ

While the operation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban had been building in Afghanistan (and Pakistan), Bush's thoughts had never been far away from the perceived dangers coming from Iraq and its dictator, Saddam Hussein.  Indeed, one of the things that marked the Bush presidency from its earliest days was the great antipathy that the Bush White House had to Saddam Hussein, and its determination to remove Saddam from power.  Pushing this idea strongly was the formidable neoconservative (or "neocon") team of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld's Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.  But Bush himself was also largely in line with this point of view.

The neocons represented the old tradition of Democratic Idealism, but a hawkish Idealism pushed by all-out force rather than by the dovish Idealism promoted through diplomatic appeasement.  According to neo-con thinking, Saddam was a dictator, an evil dictator, and he needed to go.  With his disappearance the Iraqis would have a wonderful opportunity to come to Democracy on their own.  And this Iraqi Democracy would stand in stark contrast to the repressive Arab regimes that surrounded it.  Iraq would become a beacon of democracy offering hope to the rest of the Arab or Muslim world.  This fit well with Bush's concept of compassionate conservatism.  A strongly compassionate neoconservative stand on behalf of global democracy was the very thing that supposedly dignified America.  It had long been (at least since the days of Woodrow Wilson a century earlier) a key part of America's "compassion" with respect to the rest of mankind. And thus the title "compassionate neoconservative" was a name that these White House neo-cons intended to wear proudly.

With the events of 9/11, the neocon team jumped at what they saw was the opportunity to connect Saddam with the terrorist attack.  In accordance with the new Bush Doctrine, any country (except obviously Pakistan!) giving sanctuary or aiding in any way the terrorists of 9/11 the Bush White House in its War or Terror was bound to take down.  Obviously (obvious to Bush and the neocons, anyway) Saddam must have been guilty of at least such support ... placing Saddam into the category of "terrorist enemy."  The neocons felt that they finally had in this anti-terrorist logic all the justification they needed to go after Saddam.

However, CIA chief George Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice were very hesitant about going after Saddam. To their understanding, the war in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda had to take precedence over any attack on Iraq to remove Saddam; there was little evidence that Saddam was connected with the 9/11 events; and failing to be able to demonstrate such a connection, America would not likely get the support from its allies that it would need to conduct effectively an attack on Saddam in Iraq.  And there was always the question of what to do with Iraq if and when Saddam fell.

Cheney had quite conveniently forgotten about his 1994 "quagmire" comment concerning Iraq, an earlier insight resulting from his having served Bush Sr. as Secretary of Defense.  But Tenet, Powell and Rice still saw Iraq in that very same light.  To go crashing into Iraq to overthrow the Saddam regime and put in place there a "democracy" was guaranteed to throw America into a quicksand of chaos, which would prove immensely expensive to then try to bring some degree of order there, and for which America itself would ultimately derive no visible benefit.

But that kind of insight was lost to Bush and the neocons, who were determined to go anyway.

Thus in his State of the Union address in January of 2002 Bush drew Iraq into his list of America's enemies in their "War on Terror" by describing an "Axis of Evil" of North Korea, Iran and Iraq, constituting a growing threat to the world.  Then too, the question of Saddam's role in this War on Terror would frequently be brought up at press conferences.  Clearly the War on Terror had not only bin Laden and al-Qaeda in its gun sights, but also Saddam Hussein.

However, as time went on and it increasingly appeared that there was no way to connect Saddam with 9/11, a new approach to the Saddam question began to be looked at with greater interest by the Bush cabinet.  Saddam boasted a lot about his contempt for the UN's restrictions and sanctions concerning biological and chemical weapons that he was supposed to get rid of, and of nuclear development that was forbidden to Iraq.  Boasting was one of the ways that Saddam attempted to keep a tight lid on Iraqi politics and a firm grip over the various ethnic sub-communities that made up Iraq.  Such boasting however gave the neocons the "proof" they needed that Saddam was indeed developing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), in violation of a number of U.N. resolutions.  Therefore, America now clearly had moral grounds for taking action against Saddam – or so they hoped.

But here too, to get the international community behind such a move, Bush would need some kind of direct testimony from Iraqis themselves concerning Saddam's criminal activities.  Besides the Saddam boasting, all that they had was the testimony of a group of Iraqi expatriates who called themselves the Iraqi National Congress (INC) – who had gathered around the leadership of Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi had a deep hatred for Saddam, in great part because of Saddam's horrible persecution of the Iraqi Shi'ites, (Chalabi was a Shi'ite).

As an expatriate mathematician (with a Ph.D. in mathematics) and businessman living in the West since 1956, Chalabi had cultivated politicians in Washington (including the neocons Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz) who believed that he could be the very person to replace Saddam, should the dictator fall.  But Chalabi's personal background was troubling.  Some CIA reports indicated that he could not be exactly trusted at his word – and that he might even be a double agent working with the radically Shi'ite Iranian (Islamic Republic) government.  Powell's State Department did not trust him either, finding no support for him, or even knowledge of him, in Iraq – and also wondering what happened with all the money that had been handed to him to support the INC.

But Rumsfeld and Cheney paid more attention to Chalabi's claim to have knowledge of the development of WMDs going on in Saddam's Iraq than they did to the hesitations of the CIA and State.  Chalabi had given them exactly what the neocons wanted to hear.

Powell however was balking at the neo-con position, which he felt was moving faster than the rest of America's allies were ready to move. He was afraid of a developing "unilateralism" on this matter ("forget the rest of the world; we can do this ourselves if need be").  Powell would get much appreciated support for his position when British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington.  Blair made it clear that Britain would gladly support an anti-Saddam action – but only if it got U.N. approval for action.  That of course would require well-demonstrated violations by Saddam of the restrictions placed on him by the U.N.

And so on September 12, 2002 (almost exactly one year after the 9/11 event) Bush went before the United Nations to lay his case for the necessity of an invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam.  He listed WMDs as the danger that faced the world if it did not act with the U.S. in deposing this dictator.

But some of America's traditionally strongest allies, France, Germany, Canada and New Zealand had strong reservations about the matter.  They viewed the anti-Saddam move as a distraction from the real business at hand in Afghanistan. They worried about what would happen to Iraq if Saddam were suddenly removed from the political scene.  Then there was also the major principle that would be violated in invading another country without major compelling reasons.  Saddam was a nuisance.  But a threat to the world necessitating his and his government's elimination?  Where was the American case for that?  Where was the hard evidence that pointed to the need for the kind of action that the Americans were requesting?

Finally in November, the U.N. Security Council arrived at a compromise (Resolution 1441) which called for renewed inspections by a U.N. inspections team – and the threat of "serious consequences" if Saddam did not accept this decision.  But both Russia and France let Bush know that "serious consequences" was not to be automatically interpreted as the right of America to invade Iraq.  And so the U.N. inspectors were sent off to Iraq to search for WMDs.  It was not exactly what Bush wanted.  But it was a start.

Now it was time to get Congress's backing.  Bush put before Congress in October a request for a resolution authorizing the use of U.S. armed forces against Iraq.  At this point Tenet was brought before the Senate to testify about what the CIA had to say about the situation.  But he confessed that the CIA had no intelligence estimate (study or report) on Iraqi WMDs!  The Senators were astonished.  Here the White House was clearly trying to move the country toward some kind of military engagement against the Iraqi government – and the CIA had no information to offer on the subject?  Tenet confessed that the Agency was busy in Afghanistan and had not found the time to do a study on the subject!  Actually, Tenet knew that the CIA had no firm data to back up the White House's WMD claims and was trying to skirt the subject.  But the Senate insisted that he come up immediately (within two weeks) with a complete Iraqi estimate.

Meanwhile Rumsfeld's Pentagon intelligence service (the Defense Intelligence Agency or DIA) came up with its own "smoking gun" evidence: proof that the African country Niger had sold yellow cake uranium to Saddam.  Saddam, according to the DIA, was indeed working on nuclear energy development in violation of all U.N. resolutions – with the clear intent of developing a nuclear bomb.  This and other documents had been sent on to the CIA and other intelligence services by the Italian intelligence service – but had been dismissed by the CIA as likely forgeries.  But then the DIA published its own intelligence assessment describing the yellow cake sales and also the discovery of some aluminum tubes designed to be used in centrifuges employed in enriching uranium. The CIA had been upstaged by Rumsfeld's DIA.

At this point Tenet did what no true intelligence officer should ever do, which is to come up with the "facts" that he knows others want to hear.  But that is exactly what he did.  Rumors of aluminum tubes that were part of nuclear development that had been spotted in Iraq and mobile truck units possibly carrying biological weapons were now certified as being more than rumors but indeed hard fact (which Tenet knew was not the case).  The sure and certain existence of WMDs in Iraq now become the official stand of Tenet.  He had fallen in line with the neocons Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz.

And thus Congress on October 16th gave Bush the much-wanted authorization to go to war against Saddam.  It was just weeks before a Congressional election and few Congressman, not even the Democrats, were eager to appear to go on record as being opposed to a war against a known evil dictator.  The support was overwhelmingly in favor: 297 for (215 Republicans and 81 Democrats) and 133 against (6 Republicans, 126 Democrats and 1 Independent) in the House and 77 for (48 Republicans and 29 Democrats) and 23 against (only 1 Republican, 21 Democrats and 1 Independent) in the Senate.

However, the harder Bush tried to make a case, the harder some of America's allies, most importantly France, worked to head off the move that Bush was clearly intent on making.  The situation for America was not being helped any by reports from the U.N. inspectors in early 2003 that so far, their search had revealed no WMDs.  They had discovered some materials and problem areas in Iraqi reporting.  Saddam was not being cooperative.  But the inspectors themselves had nothing yet that pointed to actual WMD production or even possession.

By now heavy pressure was being exerted on Powell as Secretary of State not only to be brought into the Cabinet "circle of the willing," but to stake his unimpeachably high international reputation in going before the world community to explain the American case in a final effort to get our allies on board with us.  The event that finally got Powell on board was an inexcusably rude treatment of Powell by the French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.  Powell was now ready to go.

On February 6, 2003, Powell went before the U.N. Security Council – complete with photos, drawings and illustrations of what U.S. intelligence had "confirmed" as pointing to WMDs.  He also tried to draw a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda claiming the existence of a training camp in Iraq under al-Qaeda operative Zarqawi.  The tragedy was that none of this information that had been passed on to Powell to present at the U.N. had been verified by normal intelligence gathering standards.  Almost all of it would soon prove itself to have been either totally false or simply hyped in order to achieve the desired effect.  But in any case, the presentation did not move Russia, China, France or Germany away from their strong skepticism, even growing opposition, about the American program.  A week later the U.N. inspectors' chief reported that the Iraqis were becoming more cooperative – and that there were serious problems with a number of Powell's assertions.

In fact outside of America, the support for America's attack on Iraq was quite weak.  On February 15 an internationally organized anti-war protest turned out somewhere between six to ten million people in approximately 800 cities around the world.  Even in Britain itself, where the Blair government was supportive of America, clearly the British people were not.  Tragically for Blair, the Iraqi war in fact would prove to be the political undoing of a British prime minister who up until then had one of the highest popularity ratings ever with his people.

Nonetheless, toward the end of February, America, with its allies Britain and Spain, presented the proposal for a new U.N. resolution certifying that Saddam had not cooperated fully under the terms of Resolution 1441.  Thus, as America saw things, it was time to kick into gear the "serious consequences" portion of 1441. Passage of this new resolution would have given some kind of support to American actions in Iraq.  But it became apparent that the proposal was supported only by its three sponsors plus Bulgaria.  France, Russia and Germany were strongly opposed.  Seeing that failure in a vote would be worse than no vote, the proposal was withdrawn.  These were not good signs for Bush.