The Assassins' Gate (7 page)

Bush's two key appointments were Cheney and Rumsfeld. Neither man brought particularly original thinking to the discussion of America's role in the world after September 11; their influence lay in position and force of character. Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford's defense secretary, had been a businessman for almost a quarter century; his most passionate interest on returning to government was missile defense and, more broadly, the transformation of the military into a high-tech fighting force. He was an unmatched bureaucratic infighter, but if he had any well-considered foreign-policy views, he kept them to himself. During the Afghanistan War that followed September 11, he became the administration's most visible face, handling the press with great panache, and when the Taliban fell more quickly and easily than the experts predicted, Rumsfeld became the strategic genius no one dared to doubt. But the aftermath of that war provided a clue to the administration's thinking about postwar Iraq: The American commitment to securing and rebuilding Afghanistan was so thin that the government of Hamid Karzai controlled little of the country outside Kabul. Senator Joseph Biden, the Democrat from Delaware who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, told me in December 2003, “My bet from day one—I hope I am wrong—has been that the dominant element of this administration was going to be the neorealists, Cheney and Rumsfeld, who no more are committed to nation building than this table is committed to go home with me in my back pocket. And so I look at Afghanistan as a template. That's the canvas on which you paint Iraq's future.” No one at the top level of the administration was less interested in the future of Iraq than Donald Rumsfeld. Yet he would demand and receive control over the postwar, and he would entrust it to his more ideologically fervent aides, in whom he placed the same incurious confidence that the president placed in Rumsfeld.

The administration's great mystery was Cheney. With the possible exception of Rumsfeld, no one had a darker, more Hobbesian vision of international affairs. But he had a talent for keeping his thoughts to himself, and as George H. W. Bush's secretary of defense he seemed, publicly at least, to hold the same moderate Republican views as his boss. Unlike Wolfowitz, he never doubted the wisdom of how the Gulf War ended. Kenneth Adelman, Cheney's old colleague and friend, who had introduced him and Rumsfeld to Wolfowitz in 1981, said, “Cheney didn't reconsider leaving Saddam in place in '91. It bothered Paul, not Dick.” Adelman added that Cheney wasn't particularly engaged in foreign-policy debates in the nineties. Cheney sharply criticized the interventions of the Clinton years, but otherwise he was occupied running the oil-services giant Halliburton in Dallas, where, for obviously mercenary reasons, he advocated lifting sanctions on Iran. His name didn't even appear on the PNAC letter.

When Cheney came back to power as vice president, Iraq was nowhere near the top of his agenda in the first months of 2001, and spreading democracy around the world didn't make the list. But September 11 confirmed Cheney in his essential instinct about the nature of the world. His speeches after the terror attacks conveyed almost a sense of relief that here finally was a global enemy on the scale of communism. The Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, written by former Cheney aides who were all back in the new Bush administration, had laid the framework for a post–September 11 foreign policy a decade earlier. Cheney now emerged from his self-created obscurity as its godfather and the hardest of hard-liners on Iraq. Though he never let the nation in on his change of mind, he had reversed his own position on the end of the Gulf War. Richard Perle said of Cheney, “Nine-eleven was a turning point with respect to tolerating the risk of leaving Saddam unmolested. And how far behind that this caboose of democratization was placed on the train, I'm not sure.” Once Cheney had Saddam and Iraq in his sights, he never blinked.

Like Rumsfeld, Cheney surrounded himself with ideologues for aides. Unlike Rumsfeld, after September 11 he took a serious interest in what they thought. He invited intellectuals to the White House to talk about the future of the Arab-Muslim world. He showed a relish for grand strategy (without ever abandoning his disdain for the messy details of postwar reconstructions in which Clinton had gotten bogged down). Still, his role in shaping policy remained elusive to almost everyone who encountered him. “I've never seen anything like it,” said a senior official who had occasional dealings with Cheney and his staff. “He comes to meetings, sits there, never says a word, or asks one or two really good questions—you never knew where they were standing, you never knew what their viewpoint was, except occasionally when you would rub them wrong on something like Taiwan. But most often they disguised it marvelously well. And then twenty-four hours later, forty-eight hours later, ninety-six hours later, you thought a decision had been made—and all of a sudden policy was being implemented 180 degrees opposite that decision.”

Until Biden's invitations to the White House stopped coming in the buildup to war with Iraq, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would meet with the president in the Oval Office, and Bush would listen and nod, seeming convinced by Biden's arguments for more troops in Afghanistan or more money to secure Russian nuclear material, while Cheney sat mute and motionless, “like a big bullfrog on a log.” Suddenly, the vice president would open his mouth and croak, “No, Mr. President, that's not right.” Soon the meeting would end, and Biden would realize that his arguments had gone nowhere. “I underestimated Cheney's power,” Biden admitted. His power came not just from the dependence of a new president on his far more experienced number two, but on Cheney's character. He had what Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, called “great presence at table. Cheney is shrewd, a quick thinker, a good arguer, the best I've ever seen. So much better than the Democrats.” Compared with Democrats, Gelb said, Cheney and the other top Bush officials “are far more ruthless. They scare the shit out of Democrats and the foreign-policy establishment, the same way the Committee on the Present Danger did in the late 1970s—by talking about threats.” Cheney's ruthlessness made him a formidable partisan. He didn't just want to win; he wanted to destroy the opposition as well.

If Cheney and Rumsfeld were the bureaucratic heavyweights, the leading intellect of the post–September 11 policy was Wolfowitz. In the weeks after the terror attacks, there was a surprising convergence between the former oilman president, whose favorite philosopher was Jesus and who could mock his own submediocre academic record because it didn't matter when your last name was Bush, and his brilliant deputy secretary of defense, a secular Jew with a Cornell BA in mathematics and a Chicago PhD in political science, whose influences were Albert Wohlstetter, Leo Strauss, and Allan Bloom. Bush and Wolfowitz—both of them now free of the stifling authority of Bush's father—saw the world in the same way. They believed in the existence of evil, and they had messianic notions of what America should do about it. Bush once said of Saddam, “He tried to kill my dad,” but on Iraq it was Bush himself who seized the chance to cast off the Oedipal burden and prove that he was his own man, better able than his father to deal with an old enemy.

In January 2002, at his first State of the Union address, Bush set down a rhetorical marker for the coming year: Iraq, he declared, belonged to an “axis of evil.” In February, he ordered General Tommy Franks of the Central Command to begin shifting forces from Afghanistan to the Gulf. In March, he interrupted a meeting between his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and three senators: “Fuck Saddam,” the president said. “We're taking him out.” By the early spring of 2002, a full year before the invasion, the administration was inexorably set on a course of war.

Throughout the spring, Richard Haass, the director of policy planning in the State Department, began to hear more and more “bureaucratic chatter” about a war, but he didn't take it too seriously until, in June, he went to see Condoleezza Rice at the White House for their regular meeting on key foreign-policy issues. When they came to Iraq, Haass began to give the State Department's reasons for misgivings about a war. “Save your breath,” Rice interrupted. “The president has already made up his mind.” This was news to Haass. Everyone at the top level of the administration could recite the arguments on either side by heart; the question was how to weigh them. Now the policy had been set without the weighing ever taking place. “It was an accretion, a tipping point,” Haass said. “A decision was not made—a decision happened, and you can't say when or how.”

When we met for coffee, Makiya didn't know this yet. But there was talk in the air. He had just spoken at a conference at Brandeis University on the Islamic world and the West after September 11. At the conference, Makiya raised the possibility of regime change in Iraq, only to be told by the other participants that the subject was out of bounds. The consensus among “progressive” intellectuals was also set: War with Iraq was unspeakable. “They wouldn't let me talk about it,” Makiya said in his mild, nervous way. This bewildered rather than angered him. He seemed slightly breathless, as if he were suppressing excitement. Something was happening. The lonely dream he'd pursued for so many years in Cambridge was suddenly converging with history. Such chances did not occur often in life, and Makiya was determined to make the most of this one. He was already in touch with members of the administration, in the vice president's office and the Pentagon. They were receptive to his talk about democracy in Iraq.

“There's a kind of relationship between the United States and Iraq that's become incestuous, incestuous,” Makiya said to me once during that decisive year 2002. “For eleven years it's grown. A country of 250 million, the only superpower in the world, and this tin-pot little dictatorship by comparison (Iraq is no Germany), this nothing little country by contrast, is essentially at the center of world politics. It's totally disproportionate. It's completely bizarre. And they're locked in this embrace that the first Gulf War created, and therefore it becomes natural for Iraqis now to see in the resolution of this incestuous relationship a future.”

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WHY DID THE UNITED STATES
invade Iraq? It still isn't possible to be sure—and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War. Richard Haass said that he will go to his grave not knowing the answer. It was something that some people wanted to do. Before the invasion, Americans argued not just about whether a war should happen, but for what reasons it should happen—what the real motives of the Bush administration were and should be. Since the invasion, we have continued to argue, and we will go on arguing for years to come. Iraq is the
Rashomon
of wars.

The answer has something to do with September 11. But what, exactly?

The debate over Iraq began with the wounds of the terror attacks still open. Through the winter of 2002 into spring, while the blasted graveyard of city blocks downtown was cleared by excavation crews working twenty-four hours a day, I took part in endless conversations about how the world had and hadn't changed. After years of trivial, bitterly partisan politics, September 11 had reopened large questions in a way that was both confusing and liberating. A natural response would be to fall back into familiar postures, and many people in America did this. But extraordinary times called for new thinking. Searching for a compass through the era just begun, I was drawn to people who thought boldly.

One of them was the writer Paul Berman, who was working out a theory about what was now being called the war on terrorism. Some of his thinking took place aloud in the midnight hour over food and drink at a bistro in the Brooklyn neighborhood where we both lived. Berman, in his early fifties, lived alone in a walk-up apartment that was strewn with back issues of the
Anarcho-Syndicalist Review
and volumes of French literature and philosophy in the original. He lived above a Palestinian grocery store half a block from Atlantic Avenue, where there was an established Middle Eastern community, with Syrian antiques shops and Yemeni restaurants and bookstores that carried Arabic literature, including the works of some of the great Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century. After September 11, Berman explored the neighborhood bookstores and began to read the works of Sayyid Qutb, the leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who was hanged by Nasser in 1966. Qutb's writings about Islam, the West, and global jihad inspired other Islamist thinkers, such as the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, who in turn inspired Osama bin Laden. (In the late eighties the U.S. headquarters of al-Qaeda's predecessor organization, the Afghan Service Bureau, occupied a storefront at 566 Atlantic Avenue, next to a Moroccan textile shop; until they closed down after September 11, there were also radical mosques on Atlantic Avenue that followed the blind Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, spiritual leader of the worldwide jihad, who was convicted in 1995 of plotting to bomb New York's bridges and tunnels.)

Qutb's ideas confirmed the theory that Berman had begun to develop, which was this: The young Arab men who had steered those four airplanes to apocalyptic death were not products of an alien world. They weren't driven by Muslim tradition, or Third World poverty, or the clash of civilizations, or Western imperialism. They were modern, and the ideology that held them and millions of others across the Islamic world in its ecstatic grip had been produced by the modern world—in fact, by the West. It was the same nihilistic fantasy of revolutionary power and mass slaughter that, in the last century, drove Germans and Italians and Spaniards and Russians (and millions of others across the world) to similar acts of apocalyptic death. This ideology had a name: totalitarianism. Its great explainers were Orwell, Camus, Koestler, Arendt, Solzhenitsyn. In Europe its feverish mood had long since broken by 1989, but in the Islamic world, where modernity failed successive generations, the sickness had been spreading. Berman was saying that the Islamist movement is one that Westerners should be able to recognize—except when they are so blinded by a wishful belief in rationality that only an event on the scale of September 11 alerts them to its existence. Even then, for some, the urge not to see remains overpowering.