U.S. Decision On Iraq Has Puzzling Past

washingtonpost.com 
U.S. Decision On Iraq Has Puzzling Past 
Opponents of War Wonder When, How Policy Was Set 

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 12, 2003; Page A01 


On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the attacks on the World Trade 
Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2½-page document 
marked "TOP SECRET" that outlined the plan for going to war in 
Afghanistan as part of a global campaign against terrorism.

Almost as a footnote, the document also directed the Pentagon to 
begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq, senior 
administration officials said.

The previously undisclosed Iraq directive is characteristic of an 
internal decision-making process that has been obscured from public 
view. Over the next nine months, the administration would make Iraq 
the central focus of its war on terrorism without producing a rich 
paper trail or record of key meetings and events leading to a formal 
decision to act against President Saddam Hussein, according to a 
review of administration decision-making based on interviews with 
more than 20 participants.

Instead, participants said, the decision to confront Hussein at this 
time emerged in an ad hoc fashion. Often, the process circumvented 
traditional policymaking channels as longtime advocates of ousting 
Hussein pushed Iraq to the top of the agenda by connecting their 
cause to the war on terrorism.

With the nation possibly on the brink of war, the result of this 
murky process continues to reverberate today: tepid support for 
military action at the State Department, muted concern in the 
military ranks of the Pentagon and general confusion among relatively 
senior officials -- and the public -- about how or even when the 
policy was decided.

The decision to confront Iraq was in many ways a victory for a small 
group of conservatives who, at the start of the administration, 
found themselves outnumbered by more moderate voices in the military 
and the foreign policy bureaucracy. Their tough line on Iraq before 
Sept. 11, 2001, was embraced quickly by President Bush and Vice 
President Cheney after the attacks. But that shift was not 
communicated to opponents of military action until months later, 
when the internal battle was already decided.

By the time the policy was set, opponents were left arguing over the 
tactics -- such as whether to go to the United Nations -- without 
clearly understanding how the decision was reached in the first place. 
"It simply snuck up on us," a senior State Department official said.

The administration has embarked on something "quite extraordinary 
in American history, a preventive war, and the threshold for 
justification should be extraordinarily high," said G. John Ikenberry, 
an international relations professor at Georgetown University. But 
"the external presentation and the justification for it really seems 
to be lacking," he said. "The external presentation appears to mirror 
the internal decision-making quite a bit."

Advocates for military action against Iraq say the process may appear 
mysterious only because the answer was so self-evident. They believe 
that Bush understood instantly after Sept. 11 that Iraq would be the 
next major step in the global war against terrorism, and that he made 
up his mind within days, if not hours, of that fateful day. "The most 
important thing is that the president's position changed after 9/11," 
said a senior official who pushed hard for action.

"Saddam Must Go" 
A small group of senior officials, especially in the Pentagon and the 
vice president's office, have long been concerned about Hussein, and 
urged his ouster in articles and open letters years before Bush 
became president.

Five years ago, the Dec. 1 issue of the Weekly Standard, a conservative 
magazine, headlined its cover with a bold directive: "Saddam Must Go:
A How-to Guide." Two of the articles were written by current 
administration officials, including the lead one, by Zalmay M. 
Khalilzad, now special White House envoy to the Iraqi opposition, and 
Paul D. Wolfowitz, now deputy defense secretary.

"We will have to confront him sooner or later -- and sooner would be 
better," Khalilzad and Wolfowitz wrote. They called for "sustained 
attacks on the elite military units and security forces that are the 
main pillar of Saddam's terror-based regime."

In an open letter to President Bill Clinton in early 1998, Wolfowitz, 
Khalilzad and eight other people who now hold positions in the Bush 
administration -- including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- 
urged Clinton to begin "implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's 
regime from power."

Many advocates of action were skeptical that Hussein could be 
contained indefinitely, even by repeated weapons inspections, and they 
viewed his control of Iraq -- and his possible acquisition of weapons 
of mass destruction -- as inherently destabilizing in the region. 
Many were also strong supporters of Israel, and they saw ousting 
Hussein as key to changing the political dynamic of the entire Middle 
East.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush and Cheney's position was 
not as clear-cut.

In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," about one year before the 
Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney defended the decision of George H.W. Bush's 
administration not to attack Baghdad because, he said, the United 
States should not act as though "we were an imperialist power, willy-
nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down 
governments." In the current environment, he said, "we want to 
maintain our current posture vis-à-vis Iraq."

Bush, during the campaign, focused more on the dangers of nuclear 
proliferation than on the removal of Saddam Hussein. In a December 
1999 debate among GOP presidential contenders, Bush backtracked when 
he said he'd "take 'em out" if Hussein had weapons of mass 
destruction. Asked by the moderator whether he had said "take him 
out," Bush replied, "Take out the weapons of mass destruction."

"Transformed by Sept. 11" 
In the early months of the Bush administration, officials intent on 
challenging Hussein sought to put Iraq near the top of the 
administration's foreign policy agenda. Many felt frustrated by the 
interagency debate. Defense officials seethed as the State 
Department pressed ahead with a plan to impose "smart sanctions" 
on Iraq and, in their view, threw bureaucratic roadblocks in the 
way of providing funds to the Iraqi opposition.

"Even relatively easy decisions were always thrown up to the 
presidential level," said a Defense official.

Meanwhile, at the White House, officials worked on refining the 
administration's Iraq policy, focusing especially on how to implement 
the official U.S. stance of "regime change" articulated by the Clinton 
administration. Bush was informed of the deliberations, but nothing 
had been settled when the terrorists attacked the Pentagon and World 
Trade Center.

"Certainly, different people at different times were arguing for a 
more vigorous approach to Saddam," one senior official said. "But 
nobody suggested that we have the U.S. military go to Baghdad. That 
was transformed by Sept. 11."

Iraq, and its possible possession of weapons of mass destruction, 
was on the minds of several key officials as they struggled to 
grapple with the aftermath of Sept. 11. Cheney, as he watched the 
World Trade Center towers collapse while he was sitting in front 
of a television in the White House's underground bunker, turned to 
an aide and remarked, "As unfathomable as this was, it could have 
been so much worse if they had weapons of mass destruction."

The same thought occurred to other senior officials in the days that 
followed. Rumsfeld wondered to aides whether Hussein had a role in 
the attacks. Wolfowitz, in public and private conversations, was an 
especially forceful advocate for tackling Iraq at the same time as 
Osama bin Laden. And within days, national security adviser 
Condoleezza Rice also privately began to counsel the president 
that he needed to go after all rogue nations harboring weapons of 
mass destruction.

But these concerns were submerged by the imperative of dealing first 
with Afghanistan. "I remember the day that we put the map on the 
table, and the color drained from everybody's face," one official 
said. "Afghanistan is not the place you would choose to fight."

The Pentagon, while it was fighting the war in Afghanistan, began 
reviewing its plans for Iraq because of the secret presidential 
directive on Sept. 17. On Sept. 19 and 20, an advisory group known 
as the Defense Policy Board met at the Pentagon -- with Rumsfeld in 
attendance -- and animatedly discussed the importance of ousting 
Hussein.

The anthrax attacks, which came soon after Sept. 11, further 
strengthened the resolve of some key administration officials to 
deal with Iraq. Cheney, in particular, became consumed with the 
possibility that Iraq or other countries could distribute biological 
or chemical weapons to terrorists, officials said.

Though Cheney's aides said the vice president has been consistently 
concerned about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, others 
perceived a shift. "To his credit, he looked at the situation 
differently after Sept. 11 than he did before," one senior official 
said.

Because the culprit behind the anthrax attacks has not been found, 
some administration officials still are convinced that Hussein had 
a role in the anthrax attacks. "It's hard to get away from the 
feeling that the timing was too much of a coincidence," one official 
said.

Officials close to the president portray the Iraq decision as a 
natural outgrowth of concerns Bush raised during the presidential 
campaign, and they say he very quickly decided he needed to 
challenge Iraq after the terrorist attacks. 

But he didn't publicly raise it earlier because, in the words of 
one senior official, "he didn't think the country could handle 
the shock of 9/11 and a lot of talk about dealing with states that 
had weapons of mass destruction."

"What a Fixation" 
In free-wheeling meetings of the "principals" during October and 
November, Rumsfeld and Cheney emphasized their suspicions of ties 
between rogue states, such as Iraq, and terrorists. Some of the 
conversations were prompted by intelligence, later discounted, 
that al Qaeda may have been on the verge of obtaining a "dirty 
bomb" that would spread radioactive material.

By early November, Wayne Downing, a retired Army general who headed 
counterterrorism in the White House, on his own initiative began 
working up plans for an attack of Iraq, keeping his superiors 
informed of his progress. A Pentagon planning group also kept hard 
at work on possible options.

"The issue got away from the president," said a senior official who 
attended discussions in the White House. "He wasn't controlling the 
tone or the direction" and was influenced by people who "painted 
him into a corner because Iraq was an albatross around their necks."

After some of these meetings at the White House, Secretary of State 
Colin L. Powell, skeptical of military action without the necessary 
diplomatic groundwork, would return to his office on the seventh 
floor of the State Department, roll his eyes and say, "Jeez, what 
a fixation about Iraq," State Department officials said.

"I do believe certain people have grown theological about this," 
said another administration official who opposed focusing so 
intently on Iraq. "It's almost a religion -- that it will be the 
end of our society if we don't take action now."

"Axis of Evil" 
Much of this activity -- and these concerns -- were hidden from the 
public eye. Bush barely mentioned Iraq in his address to the nation 
nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks. In fact, the administration 
did not publicly tip its hand until Bush made his State of the 
Union address on Jan. 28, 2002. Even then, officials did their best 
to obscure the meaning of Bush's words.

Listing Iraq, Iran and North Korea, Bush declared, "States like 
these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, 
arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of 
mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. 
They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means 
to match their hatred."

"I will not wait on events, while dangers gather," Bush warned.

State Department officials puzzled over drafts of the speech and 
ultimately concluded the words did not represent a policy shift, 
though some were worried the rhetoric would have diplomatic 
consequences. Powell "thought it rang an alarm bell since it would 
send waves out there to colleagues around the world," a State 
Department official said.

Powell expressed concerns about the language to the White House, 
he said. "But he didn't push it hard."

Briefing reporters at the White House, officials played down the 
importance of the "axis of evil." One senior White House official 
advised "not to read anything into any [country] name in terms of 
the next phase" of the war against terrorism. "We've always said 
there are a number of elements of national power" in the U.S. 
arsenal, the aide added, including diplomacy and sanctions. "This 
is not a call to use a specific element" of that power.

Yet, in this period, Bush also secretly signed an intelligence 
order, expanding on a previous presidential finding, that directed 
the CIA to undertake a comprehensive, covert program to topple 
Hussein, including authority to use lethal force to capture the 
Iraqi president.

Speculation continued to run high in the media that an attack on 
Iraq was imminent. But within the administration, some of the 
advocates were becoming depressed about the lack of action, 
complaining that it was difficult to focus attention on Iraq, 
especially as the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians 
spiraled out of control. In March, Cheney toured the Middle East 
on a trip dominated by questions from Arab leaders about the Israeli-
Palestinian violence. But he also stressed the administration's 
contention that Iraq was a problem that needed to be addressed.

"I Made Up My Mind" 
Then, in April, Bush approached Rice. It was time to figure out 
"what we are doing about Iraq," he told her, setting in motion a 
series of meetings by the principals and their deputies. "I made 
up my mind that Saddam needs to go," Bush hinted to a British 
reporter at the time. "That's about all I'm willing to share with 
you."

At the meetings, senior officials examined new but unconfirmed 
evidence of Iraq's programs to build biological, chemical and 
nuclear weapons and considered connections between Baghdad and 
Palestinian terrorism. They argued over which elements of the 
Iraqi opposition to back, ultimately deciding to push for unity 
among the exiles and within the U.S. bureaucracy.

By many accounts, they did not deal with the hard question of 
whether there should be a confrontation with Iraq. "Most of the 
internal debate in the administration has really been about tactics," 
an official said.

Powell sent his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, who had signed the 
letter to Clinton urging Hussein's ouster, to many of the meetings. 
As a way of establishing Powell's bona fides with those eager for 
action, Armitage would boast -- incorrectly, as it turned out -- 
that Powell first backed "regime change" in his confirmation 
hearings.

Serious military planning also began in earnest in the spring. 
Every three or four weeks, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of 
U.S. Central Command, would travel to the White House to give Bush 
a private briefing on the war planning for Iraq.

On June 1, Bush made another speech, this time at West Point, 
arguing for a policy of preemption against potential threats. "If 
we wait for the threats to fully materialize, we will have waited 
too long," Bush said. That month, two major foreign policy headaches 
-- a potential war between India and Pakistan and the administration's 
uncertain policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- were also 
resolved, freeing the White House to turn its full attention to 
confronting Iraq.

Only later did it become clear that the president already had made 
up his mind. In July, the State Department's director of policy 
planning, Richard N. Haass, held a regular meeting with Rice and 
asked whether they should talk about the pros and cons of confronting 
Iraq.

Don't bother, Rice replied: The president has made a decision.

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