In 1997, Rolf Ekéus accepted an offer to become Sweden’s ambassador to the United States. Tariq Aziz assured him that the job he was leaving as the U.N.’s chief weapons hunter “was like a surgical operation without anesthesia: no sane person would want to prolong it.” Ekéus did not feel that way, but he did believe that the Special Commission had largely fulfilled its mandate. Iraq’s nuclear-, chemical-, and biological-weapons programs, as well as its longer-range missiles, had been discovered and dismantled—not beyond all reasonable doubt but well enough.
The Swedish embassy in Washington was situated in a modern, stone-and-glass building on the edge of Georgetown, with striking views of the Potomac River. In America’s access-obsessed capital, Swedish diplomats found an edge by cultivating relationships with influential Americans who had ancestral ties to Scandinavia. Ekéus inherited a connection to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, whose paternal grandparents had emigrated from Sweden. Rehnquist had in turn introduced the embassy to Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court’s first female justice, and in January 1998, O’Connor invited Rolf Ekéus to a dinner in the court’s mahogany-walled, high-ceilinged chambers, a heavy and traditional space decorated with friezes and busts of past justices.
Former president George H. W. Bush and his sons George W. and Jeb were among the guests. The chambers housed a Baldwin piano, and before dinner, Ekéus performed a few Gershwin pieces. Later, George H. W. pulled him aside and called over George W., who was then serving his second term as governor of Texas. He already looked like a frontrunner to be the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2000.
The elder Bush asked Ekéus for his analysis of Saddam’s threat to the Middle East. George W. seemed “clearly interested,” Ekéus recalled. The Swede said that Iraq’s nuclear program was now “under control” and that its massive chemical-weapons complex “had been destroyed.” He described “the great prize,” the biological-weapons program, to which Iraq had finally confessed two years before.
“So the weapons are eliminated,” the elder Bush said, clarifying the main point. But George W.’s eyes now darted around the room, and he appeared visibly skeptical about this conclusion, Ekéus surmised. Of course, the governor might have just been bored.[1]
The Clinton administration did not believe that the Special Commission’s work was finished. Nor did Charles Duelfer or Scott Ritter, the American inspectors at the U.N. They reported now to Ekéus’s successor, Richard Butler, an Australian politician and arms-control specialist.
Duelfer and Ritter were gung-ho, physically robust characters. Duelfer was lean and long-faced, a skydiving enthusiast with a thick, reddish mustache. Ritter stood six foot four and weighed more than two hundred pounds, a self-described “alpha dog” who told colleagues that he conducted inspections with “tail held high.” Duelfer was Ritter’s supervisor and by far the more polished Washington operator. They were aligned on the need for inspections conducted like unarmed combat missions, but tensions were growing between them.
“Ritter was a character I found appealing,” Duelfer recalled. “But he was high maintenance; key people in Washington thought he was not reliable.” For his part, after their dustup over the C.I.A. eavesdropping operation in 1996, Ritter worried that Duelfer was more loyal to Langley than to the U.N. commission on which they served.
The pair had persuaded Ekéus to conduct the investigations that directly targeted Saddam’s “concealment mechanism,” which referred mainly to the Special Security Organization responsible for Saddam’s personal security. This plan had a grounding in logic. Hussein Kamel had revealed in 1995 that Saddam relied on the S.S.O. to hide illicit WMD equipment. By launching surprise inspections of presidential offices and palaces that the S.S.O. protected, and then monitoring how the bodyguards reacted, Duelfer and Ritter believed they might learn how Saddam’s bodyguards hid contraband. As Ritter put it, “The entire purpose was to start stressing the system of concealment.”[2]
On a visit to Washington, Duelfer tried to explain their approach to Sandy Berger, the national security adviser. He asked Berger to imagine a world where Scott Ritter might “show up at the West Wing gate demanding to search your safe.” Berger struggled to see how this escalation would ever end. Either the inspectors would develop full confidence that the Iraqis “really do not have and will not rebuild WMD,” Duelfer said, or Saddam would “eventually throw us out,” triggering an international crisis. Berger signed off; tough inspections remained a centerpiece of Clinton’s policy.[3]
To agitate the regime, Ritter led searches of the Special Security Institute, where Saddam’s bodyguards trained, and the Mukhabarat Academy, where prospective spies studied. Those inspections triggered little reaction, but at other sensitive sites, the S.S.O. panicked and scrambled to remove items—or else blocked the inspectors from entering altogether. Ritter concluded that these inspections proved “they were concealing” prohibited weapons or documentation.[4]
They failed to grasp what the S.S.O.’s anxious behavior really meant. Saddam was hiding something from the inspectors, as the arms-control scholar Gregory Koblentz later concluded, but “it wasn’t WMD; it was the secret to how he stayed in power.” The “concealment mechanism” conceived of by the U.N. team was in fact there to secure the presidential protection system whose overriding purpose was to keep Saddam Hussein safe. As the U.N. inspectors assessed the S.S.O.’s behavior, they fell under the sway of “confirmation bias,” the tendency of humans to interpret new evidence in a way that reinforces emotionally charged beliefs they already hold.
Saddam’s bodyguards did not lose their cool during the great majority of the U.N.’s inspections. Between April and October 1997, the Special Commission carried out more than 870 visits and were blocked only six times, according to a study by Koblentz. Yet when the inspectors bore down on offices or palaces where Saddam Hussein might be present or where he might choose to visit in the future, the S.S.O. went into fight mode. In those cases, Iraq tried to block access more than four times out of five, the study found.[5]
Ritter believed that the S.S.O. was hiding WMD in presidential compounds. An alternative explanation was that the bodyguards saw the U.N.’s intrusive inspections as a threat to Saddam’s safety because the inspectors might collect intelligence to aid future assassination or coup attempts. All U.N. operatives in Iraq should be considered spies, Saddam had long cautioned. “If we had simply recognized at the time that we’re getting pretty close to the regime here, and regime survival is the most important thing in a dictatorship, we might have realized what the Iraqi motivation was,” Bill McLaughlin, a retired American special-ops soldier who worked with Ritter, said later.[6]
The practices of Saddam’s police state compounded the confusion. Saddam did not want U.N. inspectors to find contraband or embarrassing documents, yet he worried about how well his massive weapons bureaucracy of the 1980s had cleaned up its offices, plants, and military bases. He forced Iraqi military officers and scientists to sign pledges that they possessed no material from Iraq’s historical programs. “If we violate the rules,” declared a “Statement of Commitment” demanded of air force personnel, “we will be responsible for all the legal consequences.” That was a euphemism for possible arrest, torture, and execution.
When U.N. inspectors did find stray files touching on WMD, Baathist authorities launched investigations into how the mistake had occurred and who should pay. This heavily incentivized S.S.O. officers to block weapons inspectors from searching buildings for which they were responsible. As Koblentz put it, why allow “foreign spies” into sensitive sites if a successful inspection might result in an S.S.O. officer’s arrest and execution?[7]
Tariq Aziz threatened to cease cooperation as Ritter’s aggression mounted. “Iraq is not a defeated country,” he told Richard Butler. “UNSCOM is not an army of occupation, and you are not General MacArthur!”[8]
By early 1998, another violent confrontation between the United States and Saddam seemed imminent. The U.N.’s secretary-general, Kofi Annan, put himself forward as a negotiator. On February 16, as American warships churned in the Persian Gulf, Bill Clinton called Tony Blair.
“Because of European public opinion and Arab public opinion, we don’t want to look bloodthirsty,” Clinton said. “Kofi Annan would love to go in and save the day, which is fine with me,” as long as any deal he negotiated did not “undermine the integrity of the inspections.”[9]
Clinton asked King Hassan II of Morocco, an ally of Washington, to telephone Saddam and assure him that aggressive inspections of presidential palaces were not part of some American assassination plot. “I have no interest in killing him or hunting him down,” Clinton told the king. “I’m not fooling with him. I just don’t want his chemical and biological program going forward.” But given the history of C.I.A.-backed coup plots, including recently, it was hard to see why Saddam would trust this secondhand message.[10]
Annan flew to Baghdad on a private jet provided by France. He negotiated a memorandum of understanding with Tariq Aziz that would create new rules for inspections of presidential sites. Diplomats appointed by Annan would now accompany Scott Ritter and the alpha dogs. Annan met with Saddam to seal the deal. The secretary-general said later that he was impressed with Saddam’s “decisiveness” and felt “we did have a good human rapport.”[11]
Clinton pored over the draft agreement and concluded that, with a few tweaks, it was good enough. But Charles Duelfer and colleagues at the Special Commission watched Annan’s diplomacy with dismay. Saddam had won unacceptable concessions, they felt, such as stripping the Special Commission of the exclusive right to appoint inspectors.
Duelfer drafted a resignation letter. The discovery of Iraq’s advancing nuclear-weapons program after the war over Kuwait had shown that “ineffective monitoring may be worse than nothing,” he wrote. A White House aide warned Duelfer about what his resignation would mean: “You’ll never work in this town again.” He held off, but his pique reflected a larger reality: the Great Power consensus that had allowed weapons inspectors to box Saddam in since mid-1991 was falling apart.[12]
Jafar Dhia Jafar still worked mainly as a presidential adviser on electricity and other civilian projects. He remained the editor in chief for all written submissions or reports about the history of the nuclear program, however, and he met with I.A.E.A. inspectors periodically. After Hussein Kamel’s defection, Saddam asked him to rewrite once more Iraq’s formal declaration about the defunct program’s past—to admit secrets previously withheld, such as those concerning the “crash program” to build a bomb after the invasion of Kuwait.
Jafar submitted an updated Full, Final, and Complete Declaration to the I.A.E.A. in March 1996. The agency’s inspectors questioned him extensively about “silly” matters, as Jafar saw it. He rewrote the document three times, handing over what he hoped was a final version in July 1997.[13]
The I.A.E.A. “has for some time been at a point of diminishing returns” in its investigations, Hans Blix told the I.A.E.A. board around this time. Between 1991 and the end of 1998, the I.A.E.A. would conduct 512 inspections in Iraq. Yet there always seemed to be technical matters holding up a clean bill of health. It seemed to Jafar that the endless questions about history amounted to a “scheme” to prolong the sanctions and weaken Iraq in every possible way.
“Isn’t it time to tell the Security Council the truth?” he asked Garry Dillon, an I.A.E.A. team leader from Britain.
Dillon complained to Tariq Aziz, who sought out the physicist. “You did well,” Aziz assured him.[14]
Saddam kept alive the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission that had provided cover for the bomb program in the 1980s. Fadhil al-Janabi became its chairman in 1996. He organized commission meetings and occasionally hosted a beaming Saddam for a briefing or a ribbon cutting. As a signatory to the Nonproliferation Treaty, Iraq was still entitled to conduct peaceful nuclear research. But in Washington and London, the Atomic Energy Commission’s continued visibility, and the privileges granted to former weapons scientists, looked like evidence that Saddam intended to reconstitute his bomb program at the first opportunity. Who wanted to take that risk again?[15]
Bill Clinton’s understanding was that “the inspectors are closer to finishing on the missile and nuclear side than on the biological or chemical side,” as he told Boris Yeltsin in late 1997. Yet Clinton did not regard Saddam’s all-but-confirmed nuclear disarmament as a turning point. This was partly because he remained deeply worried about Iraq’s history with biological and chemical weapons.
“No other country in the world has a major chemical and biological program and has actually used it against others as the Iraqis have used it on Iran and the Kurds,” Clinton told Yeltsin. “He could sell it to terrorists or to American, European, Japanese or Russian organized crime networks.” Just a tiny amount “can do a lot of damage, as we saw in the Tokyo subway attack a couple of years ago.” He was referring to an attack in 1995 by Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult and terrorist group, which released sarin gas on the metro, killing a dozen people and injuring hundreds. More than three years before the 9/11 attacks, Clinton’s fears and his framing of the threat Saddam posed to world peace anticipated the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq.[16]
The president also believed that Saddam’s treatment of the U.N. inspectors proved that he was, in fact, hiding chemical and biological arms—he had just not been caught yet. “I’ve reached the conclusion after eliminating all possible alternatives that Saddam still has the makings of a chemical and biological program he doesn’t want to give up,” Clinton told Tony Blair.[17]
Clinton had absorbed briefings about how lethal amounts of biological weapons could be made in very small facilities. “Most people, even in our own country, have not thought much about the facts . . . and how little space it takes to produce them,” he told Blair. If Saddam was determined to possess such poisons, it would be all but impossible to be certain that Iraq had not secreted away a single tiny lab in a nation of twenty-two million people spread out over 169,000 square miles. The danger of terrorists using chemical and biological agents was credible and terrifying, but Clinton’s fears set up a policy toward Iraq with no clear exit, other than Saddam’s departure from power. Yet Clinton, like George Tenet at the C.I.A., was by now losing faith in covert action to oust Saddam.
Early in 1998, Clinton and Vice President Al Gore welcomed Tony Blair to the Oval Office.
“We are getting new pressures, especially from Capitol Hill, to go after Saddam’s head,” Gore reported.
“That approach is nowhere near as simple as it sounds,” Clinton said.[18]
Nineteen ninety-eight was shaping up to be a terrible year for the president. The Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in January. Republicans threatened Clinton with impeachment. In Baghdad, Saddam and his advisers—even the America watcher Tariq Aziz—were befuddled by the Lewinsky matter, records of their discussions show. Yet they gathered that Clinton was under serious political assault.
For once, Saddam had a passingly accurate grasp of how domestic American politics might affect him. If Clinton did not strike Iraq militarily, his Republican opposition “will embarrass him,” he explained to advisers. “Those in power know very well they are unable to oust” the Iraqi regime, he went on. The Republicans, in particular, knew “that the regime cannot be ousted.” They agitated about regime change nonetheless, “to make it difficult for Clinton.”
Saddam had concluded that “Zionism is in agreement with the idea of ousting the regime,” which was his way of saying that it didn’t really matter what Bill Clinton thought—regime change would be America’s policy, and therefore, there would be no sanctions relief or clean bill of health on WMD forthcoming.[19]
By the summer of 1998, Scott Ritter had grown disgusted by the Clinton administration. Several grievances animated him. He continued to object to what he regarded as Charles Duelfer’s collusion with the C.I.A. He objected to a C.I.A. decision to restrict the sharing of U-2 photographs with Israel. He objected to Richard Butler, his Australian boss at the Special Commission—“more of a car salesman than a diplomat”—because he seemed to Ritter to bend to the will of the Clinton administration.
On August 26, 1998, Ritter resigned and proclaimed in a blistering letter that the U.N. Security Council—and by extension, the Clinton administration—had become a “witting partner” in Saddam’s campaign to weaken inspections. Ritter soon shared his detailed critiques of C.I.A. infiltration of the U.N. Special Commission with reporters at The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and other major media outlets. His passionate dissent fired up Republicans in Congress. They summoned the square-jawed, straight-talking former U.S. Marine officer—a Washington whistleblower from central casting—to testify at hearings. This generated yet more headlines about Clinton’s alleged fecklessness just as the drive to impeach the president over the Lewinsky matter approached its climax. Saddam Hussein did not require a graduate degree in American politics to understand that the upheavals in Washington meant that an opportunity to expel the U.N. inspectors had at last arrived.[20]
At the end of October, Iraq announced that it would end all cooperation with the Special Commission. Military action again loomed. Clinton spoke with Jacques Chirac. He reported that he had warned Saddam that he was out of line and might be hit. “But in truth I’m afraid we are working here with an unarmed gun,” Chirac said. “I think it’s in his own interest to be bombed.”
“You think even though it wouldn’t help him get the sanctions lifted, the people would, in their adversity, be more supportive of him?” Clinton asked.
“Yes, naturally, of course. That explains his attitude. . . . He wants two things today: He wants to regain control of his own people, and look like a martyr in the eyes of Arab public opinion. And secondly, he wants to get rid of UNSCOM once and for all, and the I.A.E.A., and he wants to be able to go about his business as he pleases. And that’s why we’re in somewhat of a trap here. We have nothing to offer. . . . He’s a man who doesn’t know anything about the outside world, but he knows his own country very well.”[21]
Clinton was out of ideas. During his years in office, the president had changed his policy toward Iraq several times, without calling much attention to his evolution. During his first term, he had clung firmly to containment. On the eve of his reelection campaign, he had turned to the C.I.A., hoping to foster Saddam’s removal from power, only to be embarrassed. Finally, while confronting impeachment and a hawkish Congress, Clinton had openly embraced regime change in Baghdad, even though he had no plan to carry it out.
Privately, Clinton seemed to lack conviction about any of his choices. Iraq was “the most difficult of problems because it is devoid of a sensible policy response,” he told his advisers. He had expended effort year after year and had little to show. “The constant crises, the weekly Iraq principals meetings, the diversion of attention from more important priorities . . . and the constant carping from the Republican-controlled Congress—all took their toll,” recalled Martin Indyk.
The Pentagon and Britain’s military nonetheless readied another round of air and missile strikes—a “ritual bloodletting,” as Duelfer sardonically called these kinds of strikes. At the last hour, Saddam said he would allow the weapons inspectors back in. Clinton withdrew his attack order while the bombers were in the air. But even Saddam had lost patience with this game. Almost as soon as the inspectors returned, Saddam signaled that he was done—the Special Commission would be expelled, this time for good.[22]
On December 14, Clinton called Blair. By banishing the inspectors, Saddam was all but inviting a military attack again. “I don’t see we have any choice but to act,” Clinton said.
The timing was inconvenient. Ramadan would begin soon; they did not want to bomb during that time. They could squeeze in an attack beforehand, but the U.S. House of Representatives was about to open Clinton’s impeachment trial. If Clinton waged war now, he would be accused of trying to cynically divert the public’s attention. “There won’t be a single living soul in America who won’t believe I did this because of the impeachment,” he told his war cabinet. Nonetheless, he went ahead. “My instinct is we gotta go,” the president told Blair on December 15. “I will get a world of shit over here, that I jiggered the timing—but I didn’t.”[23]
Operation Desert Fox launched the next day. U.S. Navy bombers from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise and U.S. Air Force jets flying from Oman and the island of Diego Garcia struck about one hundred Iraqi targets over four days. The British Royal Air Force also took part. Only thirteen targeted facilities were believed to be involved with Iraq’s WMD programs. Half were regime leadership or military sites. These included Saddam’s Radwaniyah estate and Special Security Organization targets. The strikes were more extensive than some past attacks, but the Pentagon noted that they would only “degrade” Saddam’s capabilities.[24]
As the bombs fell, Clinton spoke again to Chirac, who asked the essential question: “When the strikes against Iraq are over, what are we going to do?” It seemed doubtful that weapons inspectors would be allowed to return, perhaps not ever.
“I don’t know,” Clinton said. He thought they should “say we would like to do it,” meaning restore a credible U.N. inspection and disarmament program.
Tony Blair, a skilled practitioner of strategic communication, said that they had to persuade the public that Desert Fox had really hurt Saddam’s WMD development, that this round of bombing was not just more symbolic violence. “If we were in a position to announce that we put back his military capability by several years, I think people would be supportive,” Blair assessed.
“We’ve got to have our military and intelligence folks as a guide,” Clinton cautioned. “It has to be fact driven.”
Clinton and his aides had worked up talking points, which the president tested out privately on Blair. They would restate “redlines,” promising Saddam more attacks if he threatened his neighbors, developed WMD, or attacked Iraqi Kurdistan. They would advocate for the return of inspectors, but only if Saddam would definitely cooperate. And as a sweetener, Clinton wanted to enlarge Oil-for-Food, which would enrich Saddam’s regime but also improve the welfare of the Iraqi population. Blair approved of all these ideas.
The Special Commission would soon yield to a successor organization, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC, but this was little more than an office in New York. Saddam did not budge—the inspectors were no longer on the ground in Iraq, and he preferred it that way.[25]
Just as “confirmation bias” misled America, it caused Saddam to misread Washington’s claims about his WMD. He assumed that an all-powerful C.I.A. already knew that he had no nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. A C.I.A. capable of getting such a big question dead wrong on the facts was not consistent with Saddam’s bedrock assumptions. Since America knew the truth but nonetheless faked claims that he was still hiding illicit arms, he reasoned, what did this imply? It meant that the Zionists and spies lined up against him were using the WMD issue cynically to advance their conspiracy to oust him from power. He saw no reason to play their game or deal with their prying inspectors.
Clinton assured the public that America’s “long-term strategy is clear,” but in truth it was a muddle. His administration had not thought through the consequences of the Special Commission’s demise. Now that the inspectors were banished, the United States would have no eyes on the ground to watch for signs that Iraq might be rebuilding its dangerous weapons. Even while highly trained specialists conducted hundreds of short-notice or no-notice inspections each year, backed by the ability to test samples in laboratories and fly U-2 spy planes overhead, it had proved impossible to confirm to America’s satisfaction that Saddam had no WMD. How could they ever have confidence that Iraq had no WMD now?[26]
Ahmad Chalabi sought to revive his place as an indispensable figure in Iraq’s exiled opposition. With help from Warren Marik and Linda Flohr, two retired C.I.A. officers, he started a fundraising and publicity campaign in America. Like other flimflammers, Chalabi never apologized; he just kept telling his stories, insisting he had been wronged. Because he was willing to spill secrets about highly classified C.I.A. operations against Saddam, journalists flocked to him, and Chalabi was able to rewrite the narratives of the Iraqi National Congress’s failures in Kurdistan on the front page of The Washington Post and during a prime-time documentary broadcast nationally on ABC News, among other outlets. He seized upon the growing interest in ousting Saddam shown by Republicans and hawkish Democrats in Congress.
“When Chalabi showed up, those of us who wanted to see Saddam’s regime brought down regarded him as a very important find,” recalled Richard Perle, a Pentagon official during the Reagan administration. Perle was a ringleader of Washington’s “neoconservatives,” as they would become known, often pejoratively. Certainly, they were not conservative, if that implied caution or an inclination to conserve traditions. They were activists, a loose network of like-minded internationalists who advocated for an assertive post–Cold War foreign policy that would advance American power by expanding democracy and by challenging tyranny all around the world. Many were also firm supporters of Israel. They traced their intellectual heritage to figures such as Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary, as well as Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, editors of The Public Interest. That generation advocated for human and civil rights as a moral imperative and as a means to undermine the Soviet Union. Their successors during the Clinton years included Perle and other former Reagan administration officials, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Bill Kristol, Irving’s son, then The Weekly Standard’s editor in chief. They attracted allies such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney—business executives, cabinet-level leaders, and conservative nationalists, but not really men of ideas—on questions such as what to do about Iraq. They signed joint letters and published articles in journals. They formed an impressive-sounding but modestly funded entity called the Project for the New American Century to organize petition drives and develop policy planks for the 2000 presidential campaign.[27]
Saddam brought all sorts of American hawks together and created a unifying cause. He had a record of mass killings and reckless aggression, he had lobbed missiles at Israel, and he was too weak to retaliate dangerously if attacked. Iraq was an easy case relative to WMD-minded dictatorships like North Korea, which, if assaulted, could wreak terrible destruction on South Korea. It was also an easier case than Iran, whose hydra-headed government would be hard to decapitate, among other challenges.
Early in 1998, Perle, Rumsfeld, and such relative moderates as Richard Armitage signed an open letter to Clinton scolding him for not overthrowing Saddam. Eliminating “the possibility” that Iraq might be able to use or threaten to use WMD, they wrote, required “a willingness to undertake military action, as diplomacy is clearly failing.”[28]
Here Chalabi stepped in with warmed-over ideas about how to get the job done. Around this time, Wolfowitz and Khalilzad wrote in Kristol’s journal that the United States should “arm and train opposition forces” and be “prepared to provide military protection for Iraqi units defecting from Saddam,” a suggestion that traced back to Chalabi’s proposals from 1995. The generals commanding American forces in the Middle East regarded these ideas as implausible, even crackpot. “It was the siren song of the nineties,” as Anthony Zinni, then a U.S. Marine four-star leading CENTCOM, put it later. “No blood. We can do it on the cheap. . . . This wasn’t even a viable movie plot, let alone reality.”[29]
Chalabi and his wife put about $150,000 a month of their own money into the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi sought to raise millions more. Through an offshore corporation, he bought a townhouse in Georgetown. Perle invited him to bull sessions in which he impressed with his intelligence and educational achievements; Wolfowitz and Khalilzad, too, had earned doctorates at the University of Chicago. He had a pitch-perfect ear for Washington’s hubristic foreign policy discourse. He cast himself as an Iraqi Charles de Gaulle, a principled exile whose sharp elbows and uncompromising insistence on total victory over Saddam might alienate some onlookers, but whose clarity and fortitude would be vindicated by history. In a capital where knowledge of Baathist Iraq ran very thin—only a handful of American officials had even visited the country since 1991—Chalabi got away with his posturing, even though he had no demonstrated following inside Iraq and, unlike de Gaulle, no experience in Iraq’s military or government.[30]
The neoconservatives’ demand for intervention in Iraq was a talking point for the 2000 presidential election campaign—as much a debate or cable TV zinger as anything else. Just before Desert Fox, Republicans on Capitol Hill advanced the Iraq Liberation Act to enshrine the goal of Saddam’s overthrow in federal law and to fund the Iraqi National Congress. Clinton signed the bill into law, less because he believed in it than because he and his party needed its political cover.
Chalabi would later be credited with conning America into war. Yet he was pushing on an open door. To overestimate his importance risks scapegoating a foreigner with an accent and ignoring the responsibility—even eagerness—of Republican and Democratic members of Congress, aspiring cabinet members, and think-tank writers. Chalabi was a prop for ideologues who sought to expand the uses of American military power after the Cold War, as well as for politicians who identified Iraq as a winning campaign issue.
Clinton endorsed regime change on paper but regarded Chalabi as a losing bet. As the president explained in early 1999 to Jordan’s King Hussein, “Congress is carried away with the external Iraqi leadership, which we think will fail.” The State Department slow-rolled release of Iraq Liberation Act funds. Ultimately, the I.N.C. received about $33 million from twenty-three different contracts. Most of the money was directed toward propaganda operations aimed at Iraq, but some “information collection” programs funded by State during this period helped Chalabi feed false stories about Saddam’s WMD programs to American media, Iraq hawks in Congress, and other receptive audiences—a form of “blowback” propaganda that would prove to be astoundingly influential.[31]
The Clinton White House again quietly reviewed whether there was, after all, any practical way to overthrow Saddam. At the National Security Council, the former C.I.A. analyst Kenneth Pollack joined colleagues to explore alternatives, such as having American and British aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones respond to Iraqi attacks on aircraft by “targeting assets of higher value to the regime,” to raise pressure on Saddam. After some effort, in Pollack’s judgment, “we were able to begin putting together a reasonable, coherent plan” to pursue Saddam’s overthrow. But in the end, Sandy Berger and the national security cabinet never even met to consider the possibilities.
By a certain logic, Clinton had two options. He could continue to slow-roll regime change, effectively allowing Saddam to remain in power, pinched by sanctions but no longer subject to weapons inspections. Or he could overthrow him by a full-on, Desert Storm–scale American military invasion. Yet the idea of an invasion was a nonstarter at the time, even among Republican hawks in Congress. Nothing about Saddam seemed to require such a costly, tumultuous project in 1999 or 2000. The American economy was booming; American global military power was unchallenged. The World Wide Web had burst to life, connecting the world, powering productivity growth, and creating vast fortunes overnight. Why would America set all of that aside to mount a neo-imperial tank invasion across the deserts of Iraq?[32]
Arguably, Bill Clinton had achieved the goals that he and Tony Lake, his first national security adviser, had laid out in 1993. They had isolated and contained Saddam, albeit at a high cost in military expenditure, distraction, and human suffering within Iraq. They had avoided a full-scale war, despite Saddam’s many provocations. Through ardent support for the Special Commission, they had enabled U.N. inspectors to dismantle Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs. There was no modern precedent for such large-scale coercive disarmament by unarmed inspectors. Unfortunately, Clinton did not understand how successful the Special Commission had been—and nor did the commission itself.
After parrying Saddam for so long, and after confronting al-Qaeda’s mass-casualty terrorism during his second term, Clinton had come to regard WMD as a singular danger of the post–Cold War world. In September 2000, he met Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin, at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. “It may turn out that the biggest threat in the next ten years isn’t going to be state-to-state war,” Clinton told him. “Rather, it may be terrorists with smaller chemical and biological weapons and even small nuclear weapons, which dogs in airports won’t be able to sniff out. . . . We should see Iraq as a precursor of the larger problem we face over the next twenty years.”
“I basically agree,” Putin answered.[33]
Clinton’s remarks were uncannily prescient. He anticipated 9/11, the transformational event of the decade to come, but he did not imagine that simple box cutters might be enough to achieve the impact he feared. In highlighting for Putin the dangers of uncontrolled WMD leaking from Saddam’s Iraq, he anticipated how George W. Bush—and also many Democrats and liberal internationalists like Clinton and Tony Blair—would interpret the meaning of the 9/11 attacks.