The Longest War (28 page)

Why did the Bush administration cling so tenaciously to the fiction of the Saddam–al-Qaeda alliance, given the fact that the bipartisan 9/11 Commission had concluded by June 2004 that there was no operational relationship between them? Part of the answer could be found in the fact that six months earlier, David Kay, the head of Iraq Survey Group, had admitted publicly to the world what was already painfully obvious: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (Three months earlier, Bush had already obliquely acknowledged this at the annual Radio & TV Correspondents black-tie dinner in Washington, where he joked about how no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. At one point Bush showed a photo of himself searching under the furniture in the Oval Office, saying “Nope.
No weapons over there
.”)

On January 28, 2004, Kay testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying, “
We were all wrong
” about Saddam’s WMD. Needless to say this was something of a surprise to the American public, which, following all of the Bush administration’s rhetoric about smoking guns and mushroom clouds, had been expecting there would be truckloads of WMD uncovered by American inspectors. Instead there was nothing, and instead of being greeted with flowers, as promised in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, by now American soldiers were being greeted with IEDs, and hundreds of U.S. servicemen had already died.

In an interview around the time that Kay was telling the world there was no WMDs in Iraq, Vice President Cheney asserted, “
We haven
’t really had the time to pore through all those records in Baghdad. We’ll find ample evidence
confirming the link; that is, the connection if you will between al-Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence.” But no documents were ever unearthed in Iraq proving the Saddam–al-Qaeda axis despite the fact that, like other totalitarian regimes, Saddam’s government kept meticulous records. The U.S. military had by 2006 translated
34 million pages of documents
from Saddam’s Iraq and found there was nothing to substantiate a “partnership” between Saddam and al-Qaeda. And two years later the Pentagon’s own internal think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), concluded after examining 600,000 Saddam-era documents and several thousand hours of his regime’s audio- and videotapes that there was
no “smoking gun
(in other words, evidence of a direct connection between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaeda).”

IDA did find a document from 1993 in which Iraqi intelligence agents wrote that they had agreed to renew relations with Egypt’s Jihad Group, then led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, and also to continue to support financially
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
, an Afghan warlord long allied to al-Qaeda. By the time of the Iraq invasion a decade later, nothing had come of those relationships and they were long defunct. And the IDA found nothing that substantiated any of the prewar claims about al-Qaeda’s relations with Saddam.

After the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military did, however,
discover a memo
from the office of Saddam Hussein to his Mukhabarat intelligence organization, dated August 17, 2002. The letter asked the director of the Mukhabarat to be on the lookout for al-Qaeda associates who might have entered the country and to give the matter “extreme importance” and search “hotels, residential apartments and rented houses.” Attached to the letter was a photo of a man named “Ahmed Fadel al-Khalaylah,” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s real name. This letter showed that rather than having any kind of relationship with Zarqawi, Saddam’s regime was
trying to find him
before the war and had instructed its intelligence agency to conduct a thorough search of all the accommodations that he might have been conceivably staying in.

In June 2008, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded, as every other investigation had before, that there was
no “cooperative relationship”
between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The committee also found that “most of the contacts cited between Iraq and al-Qa’ida before the war by the intelligence community and policy makers have been determined not to have occurred.” The only meeting that had actually taken place was eight years before the invasion of Iraq, between Farouq Hijazi, a senior Iraqi intelligence official, and bin Laden in Sudan in early 1995. Once he was in U.S. custody, Hijazi told
his American interrogators that he had been admonished by Saddam before the meeting not to negotiate or promise anything to the al-Qaeda leader but “only to listen.” Bin Laden asked to open an office in Baghdad and for military training for his men. Those requests were turned down flat by Saddam.

The only matter that Saddam’s agents and bin Laden did agree upon was for Iraq to
broadcast the speeches
of Salman al-Awdah, a cleric revered by bin Laden because he was sharply critical of the Saudi royal family. It is not clear if those speeches were ever broadcast. The sum total of the much-vaunted Saddam–al-Qaeda “relationship” that had been relentlessly touted by the Bush administration turned out to be an eight-year-old agreement to broadcast the speeches of a fiery Saudi cleric, something that, in any event, may have never happened.

Obviously, the American public would hardly have supported a war to interrupt a supposedly growing relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda that boiled down to a decade-old discussion about some nonexistent radio broadcasts.

There is always an easy
solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

—H. L. Mencken

I
n his State of the Union speech of January 29, 2002, President Bush laid out a new doctrine of preemptive war, which went well beyond the long-established principle that the United States would go to war to prevent an adversary launching an attack that imminently threatened the country. The new doctrine, by contrast, meant that Bush could launch a war whenever the United States might be threatened by another country at any point in the future, a determination the president reserved to himself. “
I will not wait
on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons,” Bush declared.

Bush identified those dangerous regimes as an “axis of evil” that comprised Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, echoing the United States’ wars against the Axis states of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Quite how this axis functioned was never explained, since in reality, Iran and Iraq had fought a bitter war throughout much of the 1980s, while Iranian involvement in the
conference held in Bonn a month before Bush’s speech had helped to install the new American-backed interim government in Afghanistan.

At the graduation ceremony for West Point cadets on June 1, 2002, Bush elaborated on his preemptive war doctrine, saying, “
If we wait for threats
to fully materialize we have waited too long.” By then Bush had already decided on war with Saddam.
A few weeks later
, when Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State Department, was attending one of his regular meetings with Condoleezza Rice, he started to raise concerns about the possible war. Rice cut him off, saying, “Save your breath. The president has already made up his mind.”

In the fall of 2002, Rand Beers was working at the White House as one of Bush’s top counterterrorism advisors. Beers, who had fought in Vietnam as a Marine officer and had served in administrations going back to Nixon, found the Bush administration’s unilateral rush to war in Iraq quite alarming, as he believed it was both distracting from the unfinished conflict in Afghanistan and would simply confirm bin Laden’s master narrative about America’s negative role in the Muslim world. He had noticed during the winter of 2002 that the number of White House meetings held on Afghanistan had dropped to around one a week, while those held about Iraq were now averaging around five a week.

In December 2002, Beers attended a meeting at the White House that crystallized his gathering concern about the looming Iraq War. At a cabinet meeting that included the president, the issue was tabled about how best to delegitimize bin Laden. Beers remembered that CIA director George Tenet raised the issue first. Then the Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, generally seen as a hawk, said, “We need to think really hard about this.” Beers remembers that then “the president says, ‘Stop! Victory will take care of that issue! Victory in Iraq will take care of that issue!’” Beers was taken aback, thinking, “
He doesn
’t get it. He somehow thinks that the use of power in so effective a fashion will … show how powerful we are and then we didn’t have to think about that issue—of delegitimizing bin Laden—because our power would be so clearly visible and dominant.”

While it is difficult to decipher precisely why Bush was so convinced that Iraq needed to be attacked—by any rational standard, the country did not pose a real threat to the United States—what Bush said at this cabinet meeting shows that he believed that there would be a “demonstration effect” in destroying Saddam’s regime that would deter groups like al-Qaeda or indeed
anyone else who might be inclined to attack America. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith confirmed this when he explained the thinking of senior Bush administration officials: “
What we did after 9/11
was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack.”

Five days before the invasion of Iraq, Beers quietly
tendered his resignation
, something almost unheard-of for a senior member of the National Security Council staff in a time of war. Beers recalls his thinking at the time: “We were taking our eye off bin Laden and we were going to pay for it, both with respect to the capture, kill, dismantle, neutralize effort against al-Qaeda and equally, or more important, our longer-term effort to delegitimize him and his movement.”

Just as bin Laden made a large strategic error in attacking the United States on 9/11, so too President Bush—having presided over the campaign in Afghanistan that came close to destroying al-Qaeda—would make his own deeply flawed decision to attack Iraq, which breathed new life into bin Laden’s holy war.

On March 19, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, President
Bush issued the order
for war: “For the peace of the world and the benefit and freedom of the Iraqi people, I hereby give the order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom. May God bless the troops.” The next day the American-led invasion of Iraq began. Within three weeks U.S. forces controlled Baghdad and the famous images of the massive statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled from its plinth were broadcast around the world. After a stunning military victory the United States quickly lost the ensuing peace. First, the American military stood by as the country’s government buildings were looted, which implied—rightly, as it turned out—that chaos would replace Saddam’s iron fist. Second, instead of handing the baton of control to an Iraqi interim administration, as had happened in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, the country was subjected to a full-blown American occupation under the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

The CPA would prove to be one of the more inept imperial administrations in modern history, preoccupied by fantasies such as turning Iraq’s sclerotic socialist economy into a free-market paradise by
privatizing state industries
, ending fuel and food subsidies, and introducing a flat tax.

CPA order number 1, on May 16, 2003,
mandated the removal
of some thirty thousand members of Saddam’s Baath party from whatever positions they had once held. In one stroke the CPA had swept the board of Iraq’s most experienced administrators in government ministries, universities, hospitals, and state-run industries, many of whom had joined the Baath party for personal gain or simple survival, a common story in totalitarian states. But a much more serious error was CPA order number 2, which dissolved all of the Iraqi military, including the army, intelligence service, Republican Guard units, and their respective ministries. At least four hundred thousand men lost their jobs, many of them Sunnis.

Colonel Derek J. Harvey, a cerebral, Arabic-speaking intelligence officer serving as the head of the U.S. military cell examining the resulting insurgency, concluded after talking with a number of insurgent leaders that those decisions were pivotal to fueling the insurgency. The Iraqi military and Baath party were dominated by Sunni Iraqis who largely ran the country under Saddam, and the CPA dismissal of them had “
flipped the social
, economic and political order on its head,” creating a large group of disenfranchised men willing to take up arms against the new rulers of Iraq.

Simultaneously, the U.S. military
did not secure the massive weapons caches
that the Iraqi army had stashed around the country, estimated to amount to
one million tons
. Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commanding general in Iraq, remembers that there were hundreds of weapons stashes in Baghdad alone and thousands of other ammunition dumps around the country, some of which “covered areas that were measured in kilometers.” There were not enough American soldiers on the ground to secure and destroy the weapons and ammunition sites, a task estimated by the U.S. military to take three to five years to complete. Sanchez recalls that by May 2003 “the Iraqis began holding
open-air bazaars
that sold everything from small handguns to rocket-propelled grenades.”