War Stories (7 page)

Within months of the Safwan Cease Fire Agreement, despite economic sanctions imposed by UN Resolution 687, critical infrastructure was being rebuilt, new presidential palaces were under construction, and new weapons were being purchased on the black market. And though dozens of UN inspectors were now wandering through his arsenals, Saddam continued to acquire and build more weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, and nuclear.

In August 1991, UN Resolutions 706 and 707 established what came to be known as the Oil-for-Food Program, allowing Iraq to sell fixed amounts of crude oil in exchange for food and medicines, ostensibly for consumption by the starving Iraqi people. This noble idea was doomed from the start.

First, the program had to rely on Iraqi administrators—who just happened to be members of the Baath Party. The result was that desperately needed food and medicines were dispersed through the Baath Party apparatus based on loyalty to Saddam. The people
quickly learned the new rules: Turn in your neighbor as an opponent of the regime and you eat. Speak out against the rampant inflation or the building of a new palace and your children starve. Second, the amount of oil that the UN resolutions permitted to be sold, though adjusted several times over the years, was never close to Iraq's maximum production output. The Western world was willfully blind when it came to Iraq's excess oil capacity. With oil prices above $20 a barrel, a lucrative black market soon developed via a pipeline through Syria and overland by truck through friendly Jordan and the territory of two enemies, Turkey and Iran.

The new source of “secret” revenue emboldened the Iraqi dictator. When President George H. W. Bush was defeated in his bid for reelection, Saddam claimed it was because Iraq had beaten the Americans in the “mother of all battles.” He then ratcheted up the obstacles in his game of cat and mouse with the UN weapons inspectors. The black market black gold also gave him the cash to line his own pockets and start financing new adventures.

In late April 1993, an assassination plot was discovered—a plan to kill former president George H. W. Bush while he visited Kuwait. Explosives hidden in a Toyota Land Cruiser were to be detonated when the former president's motorcade passed by. The Kuwaiti Security Service intercepted the vehicle and arrested seventeen people in connection with the scheme. Confessions by the perpetrators and FBI forensic work traced the conspiracy to Saddam's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat.

In retaliation, President Clinton ordered an air strike on Baghdad—not aimed at Saddam Hussein but at the Mukhabarat's headquarters. Twenty-three cruise missiles later, six low-level Iraqi government employees were dead and Saddam was thumbing his nose at “American impotence,” and continuing his game of hide-and-seek with the UNSCOM (UN Special Commission) inspectors.

Then, in August 1995, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, the head of Iraq's Ministry of Defense Industries and the man responsible for all of Iraq's banned weapons, defected to Amman, Jordan. Before Kamil had a change of heart and returned to Iraq to be murdered by Saddam, he told British intelligence all he knew about Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. Using information supplied by Kamil, the UNSCOM inspectors found a treasure trove of information about Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs.

In October 1997, Saddam accused the U.S. personnel in UNSCOM of being spies and ordered them out of the country. Richard Butler, the tough Australian heading the UN mission, withdrew the rest of his investigators. But when the Clinton administration dispatched a carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf, Saddam said it was all just a misunderstanding, and the inspectors returned only to find that most of the monitoring equipment they had left behind had been destroyed by Baghdad's “concealment team.”

For the next year, the on-again, off-again inspections continued. The Clinton administration threatened the use of force again in early 1998 but backed down when polls showed public opinion overwhelmingly opposed fighting another war in Iraq.

By the summer of 1998, the Clinton administration was deeply embroiled in scandal, and Saddam was able to play the White House like a harp. On August 5, he threw all the UNSCOM inspectors out of Iraq and announced that they would not be allowed back into the country. A few days after this announcement, an Iraqi defector, Dr. Khidir Hamza, formerly the head of Saddam's nuclear weapons program, appeared on my radio show. In response to a listener's call, he said, “Saddam will do anything necessary to keep his ‘special'
weapons. It's all he has to keep him in power. It's too bad this White House doesn't know what needs to be done.”

Once again the UN dithered over what to do, and the Clinton administration, by now enmeshed in the Monica Lewinsky affair, deployed U.S. forces to the region—an action that some say was only intended to divert attention from his impeachment proceedings. On December 16, as the U.S. House of Representatives prepared to vote to impeach him, President Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox—a twenty-four-hour-long aerial assault with guided bombs and cruise missiles—aimed at Republican Guard garrisons throughout Iraq. It didn't change a thing. At the end of the day Bill Clinton was impeached, Saddam Hussein was still in power, and the UNSCOM inspectors never returned to Iraq.

After Operation Desert Fox, in December 1998, the Clinton administration did its best to simply ignore Saddam Hussein. Smarting under criticism from its liberal allies about the cruelty of sanctions, the administration sought to describe the “new” U.S. policy toward Iraq as “containment.” It involved little more than U.S. and British aircraft based in Kuwait and Turkey, and on carriers in the Persian Gulf, making daily flights over Iraq to enforce expanded no-fly zones. Little or nothing was said or done about Iraq's illicit oil sales, which financed Saddam's WMD programs and personal enrichment. One U.S. Navy pilot described it to me this way: “Saddam ships oil to Bahrain in the UN Oil-for-Food Program. We buy the oil from the UN and refine it into jet fuel. We put the jet fuel in my F-18 and I go bomb Iraq for violations of UN resolutions. It's nuts.”

It might have stayed that way had George W. Bush not been declared the victor in the much-contested 2000 presidential election. Less than a month after he took office, Iraqi anti-aircraft missiles fired on a routine U.S. aerial patrol. The next day, after a hasty conference call between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain,
a twenty-five-plane U.S.-British air strike took out five Iraqi air defense sites. In the aftermath, the new president ordered an immediate review of U.S. policy toward Iraq. And in another dramatic shift from the prior administration, the Pentagon, not the State Department, was assigned the role of “lead agency.”

By the summer of 2001 the debate was fully engaged in Washington, with the State Department doves pitted against the Pentagon hawks. When stories in the press described George Bush as leaning toward action to get rid of Saddam once and for all, congressional critics of the new president sought to depict him as a reckless cowboy. Then a series of leaked intelligence reports indicated that Saddam had reinstituted his nuclear weapons program while other reports accused Saddam of harboring terrorists, such as the assassins Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas, the mastermind of the
Achille Lauro
hijacking. Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress who had been exiled to London by the Clinton administration, was invited back to Washington. After learning that the CIA and the State Department had only dispensed $5 million of the $97 million that Congress had appropriated in 1998 for the Iraqi Liberation Act, the Pentagon was put in charge of the funding for Iraqi resistance activities. All of this might have remained a war of words but for an event that would change America forever: September 11, 2001.

When nineteen Islamic terrorists seized four U.S. airliners and killed at least 2,731 people on American soil that terrible Tuesday, I was on Northwest Airlines flight 238 headed into Reagan National. While we were en route to Washington's closest airport, American Airlines Flight 77, which had been hijacked as it departed Dulles Airport a few minutes earlier, slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon at 0937. My flight was immediately diverted to Dulles, and I eventually arrived at the FOX
News studios in Washington hours later. By the time we finally finished broadcasting that night around midnight, questions were already being raised about what role Saddam might have played in the attack.

A month later, I was aboard the USS
Bataan
with the Marines who were preparing to make a heloborne assault into Kandahar, Afghanistan, to take on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, and those questions were still being asked. A short while after I returned home, other U.S. forces found evidence that bin Laden had been trying to acquire nuclear material. Could he have gotten some from Iraq?

And in February 2003, seventeen months after the Twin Towers in New York were brought down into two terrible piles of rubble and bodies, as U.S. and British forces prepared in Kuwait to attack Iraq, the answer still is not known.

What is known is that Saddam Hussein had once again defied the United Nations weapons inspectors. The hapless Hans Blix finally gave up even the pretense of being able to conduct a realistic investigation into what Saddam may or may not have done with his tons of poison gas, chemical warheads, anthrax, and nuclear materials. Without credible human sources inside Iraq, no U.S. or British intelligence agency knows for certain either. But in the aftermath of September 11, the fear of Saddam using any of these—or giving them to others to use in a terrorist attack—was palpable in the governments of the United States and Great Britain. Not so elsewhere.

In his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush described Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as “an axis of evil.” He was derided for that depiction.

In his September 12, 2002, address to the United Nations, President Bush chronicled all of Saddam's past abuses and asked for a resolution with a clear deadline for compliance. France and Russia refused to pass the resolution.

In Congress it was different. On October 10, a bill authorizing the president to use military force against Saddam passed the House by a vote of 296 to 133, and in the Senate by 77 to 23.

Shortly before Christmas, the first U.S. Marine contingent arrived in Kuwait prepared to go to war in the land between the two rivers.

PREFACE

   
HQ, 3RD BATTALION, 66TH ARMORED REGIMENT 4TH INFANTRY DIVISION