The Longest War (25 page)

As we have seen, after Saddam’s forces invaded Kuwait, bin Laden immediately
volunteered the services
of his “holy warriors,” who had recently returned from fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, to defend Saudi Arabia. The fact that bin Laden was willing to lead his own troops into battle against Saddam hardly suggested a desire to ally himself with the Iraqi dictator—rather, it underlined the contempt that bin Laden had long felt for him.

Bin Laden’s visceral dislike of the Baathist secular socialism of Saddam’s regime did not abate over the years. Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist who has interviewed the Saudi terrorist a number of times, says that when he interviewed bin Laden in the late 1990s the al-Qaeda leader passionately condemned Saddam, saying, “
The land of the Arab world
, the land is like a mother and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother.”

Iraqi officials and al-Qaeda members were certainly in contact while the terrorist group was headquartered in Sudan between 1991 and 1996. Cofer Black, the CIA’s station chief in Sudan during the mid-1990s, says, “
I’m personally aware
of contacts between Iraq and members of al-Qaeda. The real question is the comprehensiveness of this. Was there holding of hands? You betcha.” This is hardly surprising. The then de facto ruler of Sudan, Hassan
Turabi, was closely allied to Saddam, while he was also playing host to terrorist groups from around the Middle East. But al-Qaeda’s desultory contacts with Iraqi officials stopped after bin Laden’s departure from Sudan for Afghanistan in May 1996. Roger Cressey, a counterterrorism official who served at the National Security Council under President Clinton, says, “I don’t recall any intelligence reporting of Iraqis going to Afghanistan or vice versa, and if there was such reporting it was
never deemed credible
.” However, in October 2002, CIA director George Tenet wrote a letter to Senator Bob Graham, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying that the CIA had “
solid reporting
of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade.” This was a seriously misleading construction. The contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq did date back a decade, but they did not continue past the mid-1990s.

The investigation into the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, at the time the largest overseas investigation ever mounted, found
no Iraqi connection
. The investigation into the USS
Cole
attack found
no evidence
of Iraqi complicity. And the most wide-ranging criminal inquiry in history, involving chasing down half a million leads and interviewing 167,000 people, uncovered no Iraq link to 9/11. The congressional intelligence committees and the bipartisan 9/11 inquiry that exhaustively investigated the attacks on the Trade Center and Pentagon also found no Iraqi connection. In September 2003, more than two years after the attacks, even President Bush himself tersely conceded for the first time that there was “no evidence” that Saddam played any role in the 9/11 atrocities.

Yet the belief that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States was an article of faith within the Bush administration, a conviction that was successfully sold to the American public and then embroiled the United States in a costly war in Iraq, so it’s fair to ask: Where did this faith come from?

An important element of that faith originated with the research of an obscure academic named Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie possessed an array of credentials that appeared to certify her as an expert on the Middle East and Iraq. She had held faculty positions at Harvard and the U.S. Naval War College and had served as some kind of adviser on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. Until this point there was little controversial about Mylroie’s career. That would change with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the first time that a group of jihadist terrorists had struck inside the United States. The Trade Center attack would launch Mylroie on a quixotic quest to prove
that Saddam’s regime was the most important source of terrorism directed against the United States.
Mylroie laid out her case
for Iraqi involvement in the 1993 attack in
Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America
, a book published a year before 9/11 by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the right-wing think tank.

It was not an accident that the AEI published Mylroie’s book, since it was at the AEI in particular that the idea took shape that overthrowing Saddam should be a fundamental goal of U.S. foreign policy. Neoconservative hawks such as Richard Perle, a key architect of President Bush’s get-tough-on Iraq policy, had a long association with AEI. Still, not one of the thinker/operatives at AEI, or indeed any of the other Iraq hawks such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, was in any real way an expert on the country or had served in the region. Moreover, the majority of those in and out of government who were Middle East experts had grave concerns about the wisdom of invading Iraq and serious doubts about claims that Saddam’s regime posed an urgent threat to American security. What, then, gave neoconservatives like Wolfowitz and Perle such abiding faith in their own positions?

A good deal of their certainty came from Mylroie’s findings that Saddam was the central source of anti-American terrorism going back a decade.
Study of Revenge
makes it clear that Mylroie and the neoconservatives worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 Trade Center bombing. Richard Perle glowingly blurbed the book as “splendid and wholly convincing.” I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, later Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, was thanked in the acknowledgments for his “
generous and timely assistance
.” Wolfowitz was also instrumental in the genesis of
Study of Revenge:
“At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult,” Mylroie wrote.

None of this was out of the ordinary, except for the fact that Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast terrorist conspiracy against the United States against virtually all evidence and expert opinion. In what amounted to the discovery of a unified-field theory of terrorism, Mylroie wrote that Saddam was not only behind the 1993 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 to the attack on the USS
Cole
two years later.

Mylroie’s influence could be seen in the
Bush cabinet’s reaction
to 9/11. As we have seen, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bush, and Cheney immediately jumped
to the conclusion that Saddam was implicated. This was far from an obvious conclusion to arrive at, as every significant anti-American terror attack of the past decade had been the work of the al-Qaeda network, while the U.S. State Department’s counterterrorism office had concluded in its comprehensive, yearly report for 2000 that “[Iraq] has not attempted an anti-Western attack since its failed attempt to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 in Kuwait.” In other words, it was the
official conclusion
of the U.S. government by the time of the 9/11 attacks that Iraq had not been involved in any anti-American terrorism for almost a decade.

Why was it then that key members of the Bush administration believed that Iraq had been deeply involved in anti-American terrorism for many years? For that we must turn in more detail to Laurie Mylroie, who claimed to have discovered something that everyone else had missed: that the mastermind of the 1993 Trade Center plot, a man generally known by one of his many aliases, “Ramzi Yousef,” was
an Iraqi intelligence agent
. Mylroie wrote that sometime after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Yousef assumed the identity of a Pakistani whose family lived in Kuwait, named Abdul Basit, in order to disguise his real identity as an Iraqi agent. Mylroie came to that deduction following an examination of Abdul Basit’s passport records and her discovery that Yousef and Abdul Basit were apparently four inches different in height. On such wafer-thin pieces of “evidence” Mylroie built her case that Yousef must have therefore been an Iraqi agent and that therefore Iraq had masterminded the 1993 Trade Center attack. However, U.S. investigators had long ago found that the man Mylroie described as an Iraqi agent was in fact a Pakistani born in Kuwait who had ties to al-Qaeda. The FBI, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, the CIA, and the State Department
had all found no evidence
implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack.

It is possible, of course, that the neoconservatives did not find Mylroie’s research to be genuinely persuasive, but rather that her findings simply fit conveniently with their own desire to overthrow Saddam. But there are reasons to think that they actually were persuaded by her research. Given that she was the one member of the neoconservative team with any real credentials on Iraq, Mylroie’s opinions would naturally have carried special weight. That she was a genuine authority, whose “research” confirmed their worst fears about Saddam, could only have strengthened their convictions.

After 9/11, Wolfowitz pressed top Justice Department officials to declare Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first Trade Center attack, who was
jailed in Colorado, an “
enemy combatant
.” This would have allowed Yousef to be transferred from federal prison into U.S. military custody. Wolfowitz apparently believed such a move might get Yousef to finally confess that he was indeed an Iraqi intelligence agent. Wolfowitz’s request was turned down by Justice officials. A veteran CIA official specializing in al-Qaeda said that throughout late 2002 and early 2003 he and his colleagues were
constantly being asked
to provide briefings to Bush administration officials about Mylroie’s theory that both the 9/11 operational commander Khalid Sheih Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef were Iraqi agents.

On July 8, 2003, Mylroie appeared as an “
expert witness
” before the 9/11 Commission. She testified: “There is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds [of both the 1993 and 2001 Trade Center attacks] are Iraqi intelligence agents.” Mylroie explained that this had not been discovered by the U.S. government because “a senior administration official told me in specific that the question of the identities of the terrorist masterminds could not be pursued because of bureaucratic obstructionism.” We were expected to believe that the Bush administration officials whom Mylroie knew so well could not find anyone in intelligence or law enforcement to investigate the supposed Iraqi intelligence background of the mastermind of 9/11, at the same time that 150,000 American soldiers had just been sent to fight a war in Iraq under the banner of the war on terrorism.

Saddam was guilty of many crimes, not least the genocidal policies he unleashed on the Marsh Arabs, Shia, and Kurds of Iraq, but there is no evidence linking him to acts of anti-American terrorism since the failed 1993 attempt to assassinate President George H. W. Bush in Kuwait. Unfortunately, Mylroie’s research proved to be more than merely academic, as her theories swayed key opinion makers in the Bush administration, who then managed to persuade seven out of ten Americans that the Iraqi dictator had a role in the attacks on Washington and New York. So Mylroie’s specious theories of Iraq’s involvement in anti-American terrorism became part of the zeitgeist in the United States and were an important factor in leading America into the costly war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, in November 2003, Mylroie observed: “
I take satisfaction
in the fact that we went to war with Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein. The rest is details.” Now she tells us.

A few weeks after 9/11, Mike Maloof, a Defense Department official who specialized in high-tech export controls, was asked by Douglas Feith, the
number-three official at the Pentagon, to investigate the exact nature of the supposed Iraq–al-Qaeda connection. Maloof, who had worked for Richard Perle in Reagan’s Defense Department together with David Wurmser, a neoconservative scholar known for his
close ties to the Israeli right
, set up a two-man office at the Pentagon known as the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (PCEG), which reported to Feith.

Both Feith and Wurmser were longtime advocates of overthrowing Saddam. Together with Richard Perle, in 1996 they even wrote
a position paper
for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that made the bizarre suggestion that Israel should encourage the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan “to control Iraq.” In 1999, Wurmser, then at the American Enterprise Institute, had written a book,
Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein
, which argued that
Saddam’s fortunes had revived
since the mid-1990s after the U.S. government had withdrawn its backing from the neoconservatives’ favorite Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi, and his Iraqi National Congress. Wurmser, who subsequently became Dick Cheney’s Middle East expert, was hardly a disinterested observer when it came to reviewing the case for the connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam.

Between October and December 2001, Maloof and Wurmser, who called themselves “Team B,” combed through a decade of CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) files looking to find hitherto-overlooked connections, particularly between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda. Maloof said, “
We did not leave any dot unconnected
. We took the information from CIA and DIA, material that was overlooked. They were missing a lot because they had a preconceived idea that secular and religious groups would not work together. Anything that didn’t fit that theory was just disregarded.”

In an unusual arrangement, some of Team B’s information came directly from Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC), rather than from U.S. intelligence. Maloof says, “I found that information was useful and I never found it inaccurate” (in fact much of the INC-supplied information turned out to be false). Once they had completed their analysis, Maloof and Wurmser presented their findings to Feith. Maloof says Feith “expressed amazement at what we found.” Team B concluded that there was “consultation, training, financing and collaboration” between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The fruits of Team B’s labors were eventually distilled into a
150-page slide presentation
that was made available to senior Bush officials.