The Assassins' Gate (10 page)

The president's “axis of evil” speech, coming just weeks after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, signaled the next stage in the war on terrorism and the basis for further action. The speech dramatically expanded the theater of the war, but it did so on relatively narrow grounds. As Wolfowitz told an interviewer after the fall of Baghdad, WMD was the least common denominator: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.” Wolfowitz suggested that he himself had bigger ideas—a realignment of American power and influence in the Middle East, away from theocratic Saudi Arabia (home to so many of the 9/11 hijackers), and toward a democratic Iraq, as the beginning of an effort to cleanse the whole region of murderous regimes and ideologies. This would have been a much broader case for war than WMD and closer to the arguments of influential people outside the administration, such as Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, and Robert Kagan. Resting on a complex and abstract theory, it would also have been much harder to sell to the public.

Throughout the year, WMD remained the administration's rationale for a war it had in all likelihood decided upon as early as November 2001. (There was a recurring locution that expressed the diplomatic doublespeak of the prewar period and that officials continued to use up to the very brink of invasion, as if the administration were being dragged against its will into hostilities with Iraq that it was doing everything possible to avoid: “If or when war becomes necessary…”) Having settled on WMD as the cause for war—if or when there was to be a war—the administration was stuck with the limits of its own argument. In July 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, Britian's head of foreign intelligence, reported back to Tony Blair and his top officials about meetings in Washington. According to a secret memo made public in May 2005, Sir Richard told his colleagues: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

So when, in the late summer and fall of 2002, a high-profile campaign to convince the American public of the need for a preemptive war against Iraq began, the rhetoric had the quality of protesting too much. Just a year earlier, Iraq had been viewed as an outlaw state that was beginning to slip free of international constraints and might present a threat to the region or, more remotely, the United States in five years or so. Now, suddenly, there wasn't a day to be lost. In late August, Dick Cheney surprised Colin Powell and other Iraq skeptics when he declared before the Veterans of Foreign Wars that the Saddam Hussein regime without a doubt possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had “reconstituted” its nuclear weapons program. Within a year, Saddam could possess a nuke—and Cheney wasn't shy about suggesting that the Iraqi dictator might well hand one over to al-Qaeda.

It didn't matter that there was no strong evidence to back up the doomsday prognosis. A possible medium- to long-term threat had become a “grave and gathering danger.” Condoleezza Rice came up with an ominous metaphor, and Bush used it in a warlike speech in Cincinnati in October: the smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud. The campaign of persuasion proceeded by rhetorical hyperbole, by the deliberate slanting of ambiguous facts in one direction, and by a wink-and-nod suggestion that the administration knew more than it could reveal. Conflicting and inconclusive intelligence about Saddam's weapons programs was selected and highlighted for the worst-case analysis favored by the White House. A shipment of aluminum tubes that experts in the Department of Energy doubted could be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium were, Condoleezza Rice asserted in a television interview, suitable for nothing else. Documents recording the sale of yellowcake uranium from Niger to Iraq kept being cited by top officials, including the president, long after they had been discredited as fraudulent. A group of civilians at the Pentagon under the direction of Douglas Feith and William Luti was culling through raw data on Saddam's possible ties to al-Qaeda in order to produce the desired result that the established intelligence community, including the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, would not provide. Outside the government, war advocates like Perle, Kristol, and Kagan warned that time was running out. It was as if the administration were working around the clock to head off a nuclear Pearl Harbor and simultaneously prove that it was about to happen. One didn't need special expertise in the fields of intelligence or proliferation to smell something wrong. The administration had boxed itself in by deciding to go to war before it knew exactly why.

Even as Bush and his war cabinet made their particular case on Iraq, they laid out a far-reaching grand strategy for the use of American power in the world. The president began to articulate it in a series of speeches to the military academies. Rice codified it in a document prepared under her supervision and titled “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.” The first draft, written by Richard Haass, was too long and mild for Rice's taste, and she turned over the revision to Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor who had been her colleague on the NSC under the first President Bush. Zelikow produced a short, eloquent statement of principles with a new passage on preemptive war, which, when the document was released in September, was immediately taken as a justification for war with Iraq. It was as if that earlier and almost forgotten bureaucratic document, the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted near the end of the administration of the first President Bush, had been put in a deep freeze for safekeeping during the long exile of the Clinton years, to be restored to life a decade later after September 11 in the second Bush presidency by some of the same players who had written, directed, and approved the original. The new document announced a new Bush Doctrine. This doctrine promised “a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests.” It would seek to promote “a balance of power that favors human freedom.” Bush and his national security adviser Rice seemed to be splitting the difference between the realism of Bush's father and
his
national security adviser, Rice's mentor Brent Scowcroft, and the idealism of the neoconservatives who were now ascendant. But in fact, the new document's high-flown language and, even more, its substance marked a decisive break with the foreign-policy establishment. The “balance of power” was out; in the new era, the old Cold War policies of containment and deterrence no longer applied. Rogue states and global terrorists could not be deterred. America, preeminent and without rivals, would ensure the peace in part by preempting threats to peace. It would do so within the existing international framework if possible but with ad hoc “coalitions of the willing” if necessary, or even alone. American might did not make America right; America was right by virtue of being America. But American might would uphold the right across the globe. And this is where the new post–September 11 strategy differed from the old post–Cold War strategy of the Defense Planning Guidance: After the terror attacks, the world's superpower could no longer be neutral toward the politics practiced inside other countries, where “stability” might actually be a dangerously advanced form of decay. America would now actively promote freedom around the world. “Freedom” was the key word of the 2002 document, whose opening lines are these: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”

In its long struggle for the soul of the Republican Party and American foreign policy, neoconservatism had finally triumphed. The first chance to test the creed was coming up fast, in Iraq.

The worm in the apple, the seed of future trouble, is easier to see in retrospect. The leading figures of the Bush war cabinet had all worked at high levels in at least one previous administration; some of them had served in three or four. No Democratic contemporary could claim anything like their experience. Counting his years in Congress, Dick Cheney had been an influential insider under every Republican president since Nixon. Except for the Clinton years, Paul Wolfowitz's career in government extended through every administration from Nixon to the second Bush. George W. Bush's foreign-policy advisers were vastly experienced, they were aggressively self-confident, and they were peculiarly unsuited to deal with the consequences of the Bush Doctrine.

They entered government in the aftermath of the trauma in Vietnam, and they were forged as Cold War hawks. They devoted their careers to restoring American military power and its projection around the world. Through the three decades of their public lives, the only thing America had to fear was its own return to weakness. But after the Cold War ended, they sat out the debates of the 1990s about humanitarian war, international standards, nation building, democracy promotion. They had little to say about the new, borderless security threats—failed states, ethnic conflict, poverty, “loose nukes” in post-communist Russia, and global terrorism. Clinton's foreign policy was feckless; once they got back into power, they told themselves, they would do everything differently. Cheney, the hardest of hard-liners, expressed contemptuous disapproval of every intervention of the decade. Rumsfeld hadn't formed a new idea since opposing arms control as Gerald Ford's secretary of defense. Powell and Rice were deep skeptics of open-ended military commitments on behalf of “soft” ideals. Bush himself came into office with no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that his predecessor had entangled America in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests. Wolfowitz alone among them supported the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, but his worldview left even him unprepared to deal with or even to acknowledge a stateless organization with an ideology of global jihad. When September 11 forced the imagination to grapple with something radically new, the president's foreign-policy advisers reached for what they had always known. The threat, as they saw it, lay in well-armed enemy states. The answer, as ever, was military power and the will to use it.

3

E
XILES

IN APRIL
2002, with the Pentagon already deep into planning for a war, the State Department realized that it had better start thinking about a postwar. The department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs recruited Iraqi exiles with expertise in various fields and organized them into seventeen committees that would draft reports on subjects of importance for administering Iraq after Saddam—technical reports on topics like electricity, health, transitional justice, and policing. Among those Iraqis whom State invited to participate in its Future of Iraq Project was Kanan Makiya. But Makiya declined.

He had been publicly advocating the overthrow of Saddam ever since shedding his pseudonym at the end of the Gulf War in March 1991, but Makiya distrusted the State Department's whole approach to the question. In his view, the department's officials, and especially the Arabists at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, were bulwarks of the Middle Eastern status quo—the kind of bureaucrats who had always favored leaving Saddam in charge of Iraq for the sake of “stability.” They were compromised by their accommodation with the Sunni Arab dictators of the Middle East, Makiya thought, and disbelievers in the possibility of Arab democracy. In the sinister new light of September 11, they were part of the problem. Now that regime change in Iraq was not just official American policy but the focus of intense pressure and planning in Washington, Makiya worried that State—and the ideologically sympathetic CIA—would try to guide the policy toward “a Musharraf-like figure, a reformist-minded, Western-orientated, military-type figure,” in the mold of the Pakistani general who had seized power in 1999. In other words, a friendly strongman—not democracy. Makiya wanted no part of that kind of regime change. He particularly distrusted the “facilitator” of the Future of Iraq Project, a bureau official named Thomas Warrick. At a meeting in Detroit, Makiya heard Warrick singing the praises of an Iraqi ex-general who had compared democracy to a well-functioning army.

“Some people are talking about democratic change,” Makiya told me late that year, referring to the neoconservatives at the Pentagon and the vice president's office, who ardently supported Makiya's friend Ahmad Chalabi, the State Department's bête noire. “But they're only some people, and there are other people who think that's all a pile of garbage, that that's nonsense. They really are out there. They're in the State Department and they're in the CIA today. They are very powerful players.”

The Future of Iraq Project's various workshops began to meet in July. In early August, Makiya took his family camping outside Washington, D.C. At some point he found time to venture from the campsite to the capital, where he met with State Department officials, including the head of the Iraq desk at Near Eastern Affairs, a veteran foreign service officer named Ryan Crocker. Makiya found that the rhetoric had changed; the officials were now talking about democracy in Iraq. Would Makiya reconsider?

He decided to call their bluff. “I was trying to hoist them on their own petard,” he explained later, “and get something out of this that I could then use to pin the U.S. government with.” Makiya agreed to join the project's Democratic Principles Working Group, and he suggested putting the group's final report up for consideration at a planned conference of the Iraqi opposition in exile. The Americans readily agreed. There were thirty-two Iraqis on the committee, most of them sent as representatives of the various exile political parties and groupings. “Some of them were political hacks,” Makiya said, adding that this suited the State Department, which wanted an inoffensive document that would make no hard choices and offend no one. “I hated writing this in committee. I'm not a politician really. I'm going to do these things, say these things that other people think don't get said, and let it be, let the chips fall where they are. That's what the Iraqis who support me like me for, and that's in my nature, that's what all my books in one sense or another are about. I'm not going to stop doing that. But it'll never make me a politician truly, for this very reason.”