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 Editorials | July 2005 
The Rush to Invade Iraq - the inside story | Part 3
 AlJazeera.com
| | The Bush admins aim was to find any links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. |
In his book, 'Against All Enemies', Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism coordinator for Presidents Clinton and Bush, tells of a far stronger impulse to go after Iraq among senior Bush-administration officials in the days after September 11.
Rumsfeld began pushing for retaliatory attacks against Iraq almost immediately, Clarke recalled. "We all said, ' ... No, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.'" At one point, Clarke said, "the president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now, he never said, 'Make it up,' but the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this.'"
According to Clarke, together with CIA and FBI experts, he wrote a report that found no connection. When he submitted it to the president, he said, "It got bounced by the national-security advisor, or deputy. It got bounced and sent back, saying, 'Wrong answer... Do it again.'" Clarke doesn't know if the president saw his report. "I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't (or) wouldn't like the answer."
On September 20, British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington for a meeting at the White House. Until now, many assumed early talks between him and Bush had been limited to the coming war in Afghanistan. In fact, they also spoke of Iraq.
At a White House dinner, attended also by Colin Powell, Condaleezza Rice, and the British ambassador to the U.S., Sir Christopher Meyer, Bush made it abundantly clear that he was determined to topple Saddam.
"Rumors were already flying that Bush would use 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq," Meyer remembers. "On the one hand, Blair came with a very strong message-don't get distracted; the priorities were al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, the Taliban. Bush said, 'I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.'"
As the war in Afghanistan erupted, Wolfowitz, Perle, and their neocon colleagues kept their sights trained on Saddam. For them, the Holy Grail became anything that might link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda, or any other group. Wolfowitz, for example, remained intrigued by a theory, advanced by Laurie Mylroie, a former Harvard professor and American Enterprise Institute fellow, that Saddam had been behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center-though the idea had been dismissed by most experts, including those at the FBI. and CIA.
In the wake of 9/11, Wolfowitz dispatched Jim Woolsey, the CIA director from 1993 to 1995, to London to look for evidence in British intelligence files that might confirm her thesis.
Nothing came of Woolsey's trip, but that didn't stop right-wing pundits from aggressively trying to link Iraq to 9/11 and other attacks. The most controversial case involved the Czech intelligence report that Powell refused to include in his speech. Woolsey chimed cited the supposed Prague meeting in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece in October 2001.
Two and a half years later, the report has yet to be confirmed.
The advocates of regime change in Iraq realized that, for any American invasion to enlist support, both domestically and internationally, links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda needed to be proved. In October 2001, Doug Feith claims, he set up a small intelligence operation inside the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. It was tasked to comb the vast existing databases of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for evidence of links between Middle Eastern nations and Muslim political groups, Feith says. Many media reports called this unit the Office of Special Plans and claimed that it had a far larger mandate. But according to Feith, The Office of Special Plans' job was policy planning for the war and its aftermath.
The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group's first head was neocon David Wurmser. By the end of 2001, Wurmser was ready to make a presentation to Wolfowitz and other senior Pentagon officials in which he argued that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the loss of funding from the KGB, many groups in the Middle East had begun to band together: the PLO; Hezbollah; Saddam Hussein's Iraq; and Iran. All, Wurmser argued, had shown themselves ready to lay aside their doctrinal differences to work together against the United States. The natural place to attack this consortium, Wurmser argued, was the nation with which war could most easily be justified: Iraq.
Wurmser's ideas were controversial, and met with fierce resistance at the CIA and elsewhere, where analysts could see little more than nominal links among the groups he cited. The view inside the CIA was that Saddam's secular government would never have anything to do with religious groups.
In early 2002, Chris Carney, a DIA reservist and a political-science professor at Penn State University, took over the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and "unearthed" old reports which suggested that Iraqi intelligence agents had worked with al-Qaeda for more than a decade. In August, Feith says, he twice took Carney to the CIA's headquarters to make presentations to Tenet and a few of his analysts. According to Feith, Tenet bought some of his findings, and with his blessing they later found their way into speeches by Bush and testimony by Tenet to Congress.
But the CIA analysts' reception was chilly. They already knew the information and had weighed it in their intelligence reports. Most of it, they deemed, was not credible. Feith eventually put the information in a memorandum to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Although its contents were highly classified, they were leaked to The Weekly Standard, a journal closely associated with the neoconservatives.
"If you don't understand how intelligence works," a Pentagon official told The New York Times, "you could look at this memo and say, 'Aha, there was an operational connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.' But intelligence is about sorting what is credible from what isn't, and I think the best judgment about Iraq and al-Qaeda is that the jury is still out."
Feith and his staff insist that the special Pentagon intelligence unit never dealt directly with information supplied by Ahmad Chalabi's INC, or debriefed any sources. However, much of the supposedly new intelligence which crossed the desks of Rumsfeld and Cheney originated with the INC, a group the CIA had long distrusted. In the fall of 2001, and for much of the next year, Chalabi's people produced a series of men and women termed "defectors" from Iraq, and they were accorded disproportionate influence.
At least two, who were interviewed by the DIA and whose information was taken very seriously by the Pentagon and vice president, brought with them hair-raising stories of Saddam's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The most important, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, claimed that Saddam had secret labs making biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons hidden in underground wells, under villas, and beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad.
To date, no trace of such facilities has been found.
By winter, this and other stories achieved wide currency in the media; with several finding their way into speeches given by administration officials. However, by then the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information from Chalabi's defectors "was of little or no value... Several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence" by the INC "invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program."
The fall of Kabul in November 2001 unleashed a torrent of press speculation over where America would strike next. Countries such as Yemen, Somalia, and Syria were all named as candidates. Iraq was mentioned as well, but by Christmas, with no clear indication from the White House where the "War on Terror" would next head, much of the talk began to die down.
Inside the White House, however, the focus on Iraq sharpened as staff members prepared President Bush's State of the Union address in January 2002. The president's top speechwriter, Michael Gerson, gave David Frum, a Canadian who would actually write the speech, pointed instructions: "Make the best case for war in Iraq," Gerson said, "but leave exit ramps."
Looking for ways to categorize the states believed to be "active supporters of terrorism", they first decided to term Iran, North Korea, and Iraq an "axis of hatred." By the final draft that had become "axis of evil."
During his speech, Bush suggested for the first time that his administration would, in certain circumstances, be prepared to launch pre-emptive wars: "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
As Paul Wolfowitz listened to Bush's words, a single thought ran through his head: This president really gets it.
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