On the morning of September 11, Mohammed Aldouri arrived early to the sandstone townhouse on East Seventy-Ninth Street that housed Iraq’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. He had moved to Manhattan earlier that year to succeed Nizar Hamdoon as the highest-ranking Iraqi official posted in America. Aldouri was not a member of the Baath Party and had never met Saddam Hussein. He had earned a doctoral degree at the University of Dijon in France and later joined the law faculty at the University of Baghdad. He was a protégé of Naji Sabri, a former English professor whom Saddam had recently appointed as foreign minister.
Shortly before 9:00 a.m., an Iraqi colleague flipped on the office television to follow a shocking news event. A passenger jet, American Airlines Flight 11, had smashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, less than six miles to the south of the Iraqi mission. Aldouri gathered with several employees. Black smoke rose above the city as news anchors speculated about the cause. At 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower and erupted into flames. “That’s not an accident—that is war,” Aldouri said. “We are probably going to be blamed.”[1]
As the crisis unfolded that day, Aldouri had to manage the symbolism of the Iraqi flag, which billowed above the mission. American rescue workers extinguished fires and dug through wreckage to recover remains at three attack sites—the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania where United Airlines Flight 93 had crashed after its passengers revolted against their hijackers. That afternoon, President Bush ordered American flags to be flown at half-staff at federal facilities “as a mark of respect for those killed by the heinous acts of violence perpetrated by faceless cowards.” Foreign embassies across Washington and at U.N. missions in New York voluntarily lowered their own flags.[2]
Aldouri hesitated. Spies from Iraq’s intelligence services monitored him and reported home about his every move. One of the ambassador’s colleagues telephoned Saudi Arabia’s U.N. mission to ask what they did with their flag in such circumstances. (Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers responsible for the September 11 attacks came from Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally. The others were from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon—also all U.S. allies. No Iraqis were involved.) The Saudi flag—like the Iraqi flag after a 1991 redesign by Saddam Hussein—contained the name of Allah in Arabic script. The Saudis believed it was therefore unacceptable to lower the banner to half-staff. When America was officially in mourning, a diplomat explained, “we just take the flag down and put it in storage, leaving only an empty pole.” But when Aldouri contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, he was told, as his colleague later summarized the message, “If that flag goes down, you will go down with it.”[3]
The flag waved on. That day, loose bands of protesters gathered on East Seventy-Ninth Street, shouting and denouncing Iraq. By evening, the Bush administration had confirmed that al-Qaeda—the stateless terrorist organization headquartered in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan—had carried out the attacks. Yet the Seventy-Ninth Street protesters seemed to believe that Iraq should be held accountable. They turned up for another day or two, then faded away.
Saddam Hussein’s diplomats also had to consider the public ritual of expressing condolences. After any large-scale loss of innocent life, diplomats around the world routinely express condolences on behalf of their governments. On September 11, Saudi Arabia denounced the “regrettable and inhuman bombings and attacks,” and the kingdom’s council of religious scholars called them “a form of injustice that is not tolerated by Islam.” Many other governments of Muslim-majority nations spoke out in kind.[4]
In Baghdad, Saddam’s cabinet discussed the matter and recommended a statement “condemning the terrorists and offering condolences to the people of the United States, despite American hostility toward Iraq,” according to Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, then the deputy prime minister. But Saddam rejected this advice. He later explained to a visitor that if he expressed condolences to President Bush, “it will mean that I do not respect my people, because Bush is the president of the nation declaring war on us and attacking us in a despicable terrorist manner.” He did authorize Tariq Aziz to write “personal letters denouncing the attack” to a few American individuals.[5]
Al-Qaeda’s strike—the first large-scale surprise attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor—touched off the greatest domestic emergency since at least the 1960s and shaped what would become the most consequential pivot in American foreign policy since the early Cold War. Saddam grasped the event’s shock waves and even its transformational impact on the U.S. He watched satellite news and followed the international press. He and his aides thought that al-Qaeda’s terrorism might draw the United States closer to Iraq, in common cause against religious radicalism. Yet Saddam had no apparent sense of his vulnerability to false accusations about his own responsibility for the attacks. He took no steps to assuage the Bush administration or American public opinion or to create any record of public statements that might get him off the hook—as he had done quickly and even obsequiously in 1987 after an Iraqi jet struck the U.S.S. Stark.
Saddam had never met Osama bin Laden and considered him “no different than the many zealots that came before him.” Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 plot, as the C.I.A. quickly concluded after the attacks, and as subsequent investigations have made indisputable. But Saddam did not explicitly distance himself from al-Qaeda or bin Laden. He initially seemed uncertain about whether to believe America’s claim that bin Laden was responsible. More importantly, the September 11 attacks realized a scenario that Saddam had talked about with visitors for years—suicide bombers on American soil, and payback for the humiliation of Iraqis and Palestinians. Saddam identified with the attackers—their strike was like his own bold decision to launch Scud missiles against Israeli cities in 1991.[6]
As America’s most persistent enemy, he felt entitled to lecture about what September 11 meant. He became a kind of pundit that autumn, speaking at length to diverse audiences, speculating and arguing like one of those talking heads on satellite-beamed Arabic-language TV channels. He saw the attacks in light of his lifelong critiques of Israel and American “imperialism.” He adopted the podium voice familiar to his comrades—rambling and undisciplined, at times shrewd and amusing, at other times ignorant and unhinged, and periodically laced with antisemitism and mind-twisting conspiracy theories. That autumn, not for the first or last time, he would have benefited from a cabinet of advisers who were not afraid to contradict him, or who were at least willing to provide gentle coaching—in this case, to suggest that the president might want to cool his rhetoric while America mourned its dead. Instead, Saddam made a display of his satisfaction over America’s suffering and grief.
“The American people should remember that, throughout history, no one crossed the Atlantic to come to them, carrying weapons against them,” Saddam said on state television on September 12. “The United States reaps the thorns that its leaders have planted in the world . . . [and] has become a burden on all of us.”
“America needs someone to tell her about her mistakes,” he told a delegation from Tunisia two days later. “America brought to itself the hatred of the world. . . . The person who does not respect the bloodshed of people makes it difficult for the people to respect his bloodshed.”[7]
On September 15, he composed an “open letter from Saddam Hussein to the American people, the people in the West, and their governments,” a document of more than 1,500 words. He called the finding that al-Qaeda was responsible a “premise” that was “uncorroborated,” but one that he tentatively credited nonetheless. He blamed American and Western policies for “the lack of stability in the world” and asked, “Isn’t the evil inflicted on America as a result of the event of September 11, 2001, . . . the result of this?” He urged the U.S. to “avoid an emotional reaction and not pursue the same old methods that America used against the world.” He continued:
If America would only disengage itself from its evil alliance with Zionism, which has been scheming to exploit the world and plunge it in blood and darkness, by using America and some Western countries. What the American people need now is someone who mostly tells the truth bravely . . . so they can experience a real awakening. . . . We say to the American people that what happened on September 11, 2001, should be compared to what their government and their armies are doing in the world.
American missile and aerial attacks on Iraq since 1991 had been launched “from a distance . . . as if they are playing an amusing game,” whereas the suicidal hijackers on September 11 “willingly gave their lives.” Americans should seek to understand why.[8]
Saddam’s comments did not receive much media coverage in the United States. Yet some of these biting words—including his remarks on September 12—were captured by U.S. monitoring and intelligence services and distributed to Bush’s cabinet. (Many other of Saddam’s remarks apparently went unheard in Washington.) As the Bush administration and its allies in Congress built a case against Baghdad alongside think tanks and the media, they turned Saddam’s sound bites against him.
On the day Saddam completed his letter to America, George W. Bush convened his national security cabinet at Camp David.
George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., and General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, laid out plans to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Nobody at the meeting doubted that al-Qaeda had carried out the hijackings, but Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz insisted, without providing evidence, that there was at least a 10 percent chance, and perhaps a 50 percent chance, that Saddam Hussein had also been involved. The plans proposed by the C.I.A. and the Pentagon to strike al-Qaeda were too narrow: “We really need to think broader,” Wolfowitz said. “We’ve got to make sure we go ahead and get Saddam out at the same time—it’s a perfect opportunity.”
Bush eventually blew up, according to Shelton. “How many times do I have to tell you we are not going after Iraq right this minute?” the president asked Wolfowitz.
The following day, Vice President Dick Cheney told a television interviewer that the administration was not targeting Saddam: “At this stage, the focus over here is on al-Qaeda. . . . Saddam Hussein’s bottled up at this point.” He added that there was no evidence linking Iraq to the attacks on New York and Washington.[9]
Yet Bush privately made clear to close allies and his cabinet that he thought Wolfowitz was likely right, just premature. “I believe Iraq was involved,” he said at a White House meeting on September 17. “But I’m not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.” Around the same time, he told Tony Blair, “When we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.”[10]
On September 26, Bush asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to speak with him alone in the Oval Office. The president “leaned back in the black leather chair behind his desk,” as Rumsfeld recalled, and “asked that I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iraq.” Bush wanted something “creative,” and he wanted the review kept quiet.
Rumsfeld did not think that Bush had made up his mind to go after Saddam, but the significance of the request was not lost on him. The secretary of defense was still ambivalent about what to do about Iraq. Even after September 11, he thought that “an aggressive diplomatic effort, coupled by a threat of military force” might persuade Saddam to give up power voluntarily. Rumsfeld wrote a note to himself: “At the right moment, we may want to give Saddam Hussein a way out for his family to live in comfort.”[11]
For years, Bush had reflected on his father’s presidency. The failure to remove Saddam after the liberation of Kuwait was certainly seen in some Republican Party circles as a blemish on George H. W. Bush’s legacy. The realm of Bush father-son psychology is long on easy speculation and short on reliable evidence. Clearly, however, September 11 now offered the son an opportunity to make his own mark.
Bush and many others in his war cabinet—including Cheney and the C.I.A.’s George Tenet—assumed reasonably that al-Qaeda must be planning follow-on attacks. When evidence surfaced that autumn that bin Laden had met with Pakistani nuclear scientists in Afghanistan, they even worried that al-Qaeda might have the capacity to pull off an atomic strike. “I could only imagine the destruction possible if an enemy dictator passed his WMD to terrorists,” Bush wrote later.[12]
He assumed that Saddam secretly possessed such dangerous weapons. His logic might also apply to the regimes in North Korea, Libya, Pakistan, and Iran, depending on one’s definition of “enemy dictator.” But only Iraq was already fighting a low-grade, decade-old war with the United States. Almost viscerally, George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein each seemed to embrace the September 11 attacks as an episode in their ongoing conflict.
During the autumn of 2001, Saddam met with his cabinet as often as twice a week to review such matters as adjustments in pay for college professors, partnerships between business and government, and a self-sufficiency drive in the pharmaceutical industry. He visited military and industrial sites and gave speeches. He received his usual array of visitors from the margins of global politics, such as Vojislav Šešelj, leader of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, and Akhmad Kadyrov, a Chechen politician. He often spoke in these private settings about September 11. Yet he never mentioned Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda. He spoke approvingly of Palestinian suicide bombing at times, but he never spoke about jihadist terrorism outside the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As an advanced student of conspiracies, Saddam was susceptible to emerging internet and Arab media discourse that 9/11 was an inside job, perhaps organized by the C.I.A. or Israel to justify a new American war against the Muslim world. He had considered such scenarios before. In 1993, a loose network of Afghan War veterans inspired by a radical Egyptian cleric detonated a car bomb in a parking garage of the World Trade Center, killing six Americans. Saddam speculated with colleagues at the time about whether the attack had been orchestrated by the C.I.A. Yet even he had doubts about whether the C.I.A. could be that cynical and ruthless: “They had losses,” he noted, meaning the United States. “So how [could] American intelligence do such a thing even though they knew there would be American human losses?”[13]
Saddam remained an uncompromising rejectionist, committed to Israel’s military defeat and destruction. His backing of Palestinian resistance, including its suicide bombers, was often aligned with mainstream Arab opinion, yet he remained fixated on racist caricatures of Jews, and in his private remarks and novels, his grotesque antisemitism was often inseparable from his calls to arms against Israel. At the same time, his critique of America’s post-9/11 foreign policy aligned with some mainstream democratic-left opinion in Europe, and similar opinions could be heard that autumn in university coffeehouses across the U.S. as well. His was a common perspective across Arab societies. “No one supports terrorism,” he assured Kadyrov, his Chechen visitor. Yet, “there were no Islamic or Arab people that were not happy when they saw the attack, before they knew where it came from,” because the killings “let America see fire like the kind it is causing in Palestine and Iraq.”
He added, “We consider jihad against the Jews to drive them out of Palestine is not terrorism, so any other killing or fighting against foreign occupiers is acceptable, as long as they are fighting to free themselves from the occupiers.” The Americans were the true terrorists, and the embargo against Iraq was a form of terrorism, he concluded.
Saddam had been making pronouncements along these lines in public and private for several decades. He did not think to moderate his critique just because America was wounded, enraged, and mobilizing for military retaliation.[14]
On October 7, in a nationally televised address, George W. Bush announced America’s war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He issued a warning: “Today, we focus on Afghanistan, but the battle is broader. Every nation has a choice to make. . . . There is no neutral ground.”[15]
The president’s speechwriters clearly had Saddam in mind, but the Iraqi president gave no indication that he understood. Dozens of NATO and other American allies joined or supported the initial war in Afghanistan, including Muslim-majority nations such as Turkey and Pakistan. For his part, Saddam denounced America’s intentions and predicted failure. “If America established a new government in Kabul according to its desires, do you think this will end the Afghan people’s problems?” Saddam asked at a cabinet meeting. “No. This will add more causes for so-called terrorism, instead of eliminating it.”
The charge that he had not done the honorable thing by offering public condolences immediately after September 11 clearly grated on him, but he remained defensive. “I do not believe that your administration deserves to receive condolences from Iraq,” he said, addressing Bush, “unless you first make condolences to the Iraqi people [for] the 1.5 million Iraqis you killed, and apologize to them. . . . Any person who does not want to see his crops burn should not throw fire on other people’s crops.”[16]
“It was not our wish that [America] would become the enemy of the people,” he told Šešelj, his Serbian visitor. “America used to behave somewhat normally some fifteen years ago,” he said, referring to his days of cooperation with the C.I.A. “But now look.”[17]
The United States was both reckless and weak: “Americans are living in a pessimistic state, not an optimistic state,” he opined at a cabinet meeting. “How can the American citizen live optimistically when he is living in a world that hates him? He can’t travel the world [and] they have closed their embassies several times, fearing for the lives of their citizens.”[18]
Samir Vincent, the Iraqi-born American who had worked on the Oil-for-Food negotiations, hoped to revive diplomacy between Washington and Baghdad. During 2001, Vincent was in touch with Frank Carlucci, the former Reagan administration secretary of defense now at a private equity firm. He had also gotten to know Jack Kemp, a former Republican congressman who had been Bob Dole’s vice presidential running mate in the 1996 campaign.
On September 23, in Baghdad, Vincent met Tariq Aziz and high-ranking Iraqi intelligence officials. He urged his hosts to explore a dialogue with the Bush administration. Aziz encouraged him. Vincent soon asked Carlucci to test “whether a dialogue was possible.”
Carlucci spoke with William Burns, the undersecretary of state responsible for the Middle East. Burns relayed a message for Tariq Aziz that Iraq “should stop firing at our planes” in the no-fly zones and “join the battle against terrorism.” Burns added that unless Saddam changed his policies, the U.S. would have “no interest in a dialogue.”
Aziz sent back an unsigned memo outlining Iraq’s “official position.” The paper reached Burns on September 27. Aziz wrote that Iraq’s position was defensive in nature, and he expressed his “hope” that America would end the no-fly patrols “due to its involvement in other tasks” after 9/11. Such a gesture could “open the door to new opportunities between Iraq and the United States.”[19]
The exchange languished, but at Vincent’s urging, Kemp picked up the effort. On October 23, he visited Colin Powell at the State Department. He relayed a suggestion from Vincent that if U.S. warplanes patrolling the no-fly zones refrained from firing on Iraqi targets, this “could be a positive signal” to Saddam.
Powell said that if a dialogue with Iraq could be established, it might help him counter “hawks” and “pundits” who were pushing to attack Iraq, according to contemporaneous notes of what Kemp told Vincent. Yet Powell was nervous. He asked Kemp to tell Vincent “not to speak via the phone to ‘friends’ over there [in Iraq] and specifically not to mention the Kemp-Powell connection.” The implication was that if U.S. or other eavesdroppers picked up such chatter, it might backfire on the secretary of state.[20]
On October 30, Kemp met Powell at the State Department a second time. Powell said that If Iraq “agrees to invite U.N. inspectors back into the country for a limited time and scope, there will be an immediate and positive response from the U.S.” If Tariq Aziz indicated that Iraq was ready to do this, he could meet in New York with John Negroponte, the Bush administration’s ambassador to the U.N.
Vincent flew again to Baghdad, carrying Powell’s messages. He met Tahir Jalil Habbush, Saddam’s latest head of intelligence. “It became obvious” to Vincent on this visit that Habbush and Iraqi intelligence had taken charge of Iraq’s policy toward Washington.
On November 5, Habbush handed Vincent a letter in Arabic. It was signed by four members of the Revolutionary Command Council—not including Tariq Aziz—and reportedly reflected a discussion with Saddam Hussein. It made unrealistic demands: The U.S. should lift economic sanctions and end the no-fly zones. If this happened, Iraq would be “prepared to deal with all U.S. concerns in a constructive manner.” The document was silent on Powell’s suggestion that Saddam invite back U.N. weapons inspectors.
Habbush nonetheless told Vincent that Iraq was “very serious about starting a dialogue with the U.S. . . . with no conditions, to resolve all outstanding problems between the two countries.” He admitted that Iraq had “misunderstood and misjudged the U.S. in the past.” He blamed cultural differences and asked Vincent if he could help the regime understand “the nature and habits of Americans.” Speaking of American political leaders, he complained: “The way they talk, we cannot read any subtle messages that might be there. . . . They often come across as blunt and arrogant.”[21]
Vincent returned to Washington, where he again hit a wall. If Iraq would not allow the return of inspectors, there was no hope for diplomacy.
On Monday, October 29, Charles Duelfer, who had been the deputy chief of U.N. inspections during much of the 1990s and was now an unpaid consultant at the C.I.A., visited Ahmad Chalabi at an address in Knightsbridge, London. The Iraqi National Congress occupied offices filled with “scruffy” furniture, “a bit like used IKEA,” Duelfer recalled. Staffers bathed the rooms in cigarette smoke.
Chalabi had moved decisively after September 11 to fill the void in hard intelligence about Iraq available to the Bush administration. In London that day, he turned to Arras Karim Habib, who trafficked in information from Iraqi defectors. In 1997, during Duelfer’s U.N. days, Habib had provided him with an implausible report that Iraq “retained three nuclear weapons,” Duelfer recalled. He now claimed that in 1999, Saddam had shipped two tons of precursor chemicals for the nerve agent VX to Osama bin Laden. The idea that Saddam would provide VX precursors to a Saudi radical living in Afghanistan—a fanatic who no doubt regarded Saddam as an apostate—was absurd, Duelfer thought.[22]
Yet this was the sort of “intelligence” that Chalabi brokered to any American official, researcher, or journalist who would listen during the fall of 2001. Chalabi had run C.I.A.-funded propaganda operations against Baghdad. He now turned those techniques on the Bush administration and Congress “by providing false information through defectors,” as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence later concluded. Some of it was deliberately fabricated, as in the case of a supposed colonel who claimed to have trained hijackers on a derelict Boeing 707 plane parked at an Iraqi facility called Salman Pak. (The plane was well known to U.N. inspectors; Iraq said it was used for training commandos to stop hijackings.) The defector’s story broke in an October column in The Washington Post. It was then retold in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and other outlets.
The I.N.C. next produced an Iraqi civil engineer who had documents purporting to describe underground hiding places in Iraq for chemical and biological weapons. He talked to a reporter for The New York Times, and the paper published a lengthy story. In December, the I.N.C. successfully promoted the testimony of a third defector named Muhammad Harith. He claimed to know of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda and of mobile biological-weapons labs—inventing and planting a tale that would later become a staple of Bush administration indictments of Iraq. Harith told his lies to a prime-time national audience on 60 Minutes. Two of the I.N.C. defectors who deceived major news organizations—Harith and Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri—reportedly passed polygraph tests. Credible-seeming Chalabi allies in Washington, such as James Woolsey, President Clinton’s first C.I.A. director, also vouched for them.
When it circulated intelligence reports about Iraq in 2001 and 2002, the C.I.A. largely ignored Chalabi’s sources because the agency had written off the I.N.C. leader. (The agency endorsed what proved to be false information about Iraq’s weapons programs derived from other sources.) Chalabi’s false defector stories nonetheless made their way into White House press releases, presidential speeches, and a National Intelligence Estimate.[23]
Chalabi was later candid about his success: “We didn’t go to the Bush administration,” he recalled. “They came to us.” As early as October, John Hannah, an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, met Chalabi at a Starbucks near the White House. “The administration is looking for people who know about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” Hannah said. “Can you introduce us to any?”[24]
Hannah’s reported solicitation reflected a larger pattern visible by late 2001, according to Paul Pillar, a political scientist and career C.I.A. analyst who was then the national intelligence officer for the Middle East. The Bush administration used intelligence reports about Iraqi WMD as exhibits in a drive to influence public and congressional opinion. The reliability of any one report mattered less than the overall impact of the publicity campaign. Intelligence “figured prominently in the selling” of the war but played “almost no role” in the eventual decision to invade Iraq, as Pillar put it, because, essentially, that decision was already made, if not by late 2001, then certainly by mid-2002.[25]
In Baghdad, Saddam paid no attention to Chalabi’s propaganda. Throughout the 1990s, Saddam had faced accusations that he knew to be lies. He had no WMD, yet America, Britain, and others insisted that he was hiding weapons. Therefore, Saddam could fairly reason, American officials surely knew they were making false accusations but did so cynically so as to pursue his overthrow.
Complacent and defiant, Saddam continued to back uprisings and terrorist bombings by Palestinians against Israel, as he had before 9/11. That winter, Wafa Idris, a twenty-six-year-old Palestinian woman wearing a suicide vest, detonated herself in Jerusalem, killing an elderly man and wounding about one hundred others. She was the first known female suicide bomber in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Saddam ordered a monument erected in her honor. He soon pledged $25,000 to “the family of any person who performs a suicide mission in Palestine.”[26]
Saddam Hussein meant what he so often said: he considered Iraq to be at war with Israel and America; he was not afraid to fight by unconventional means; and he rejected America’s definitions of terrorism.
The Taliban regime in Afghanistan collapsed in late November, defeated by American-led bombing and Afghan opposition forces armed and funded by the C.I.A. In early December, Osama bin Laden escaped and disappeared, presumably into Pakistan.
Late in the Afghanistan War, George W. Bush again asked Donald Rumsfeld about plans to invade Iraq. As Michael Morell, the C.I.A. officer who met with Bush every morning to present classified intelligence briefings, later wrote: “The president’s thinking on Iraq was motivated by the soul-crushing impact of 9/11 and the legitimate fear that as bad as 9/11 had been, things could be much worse—if Saddam got it into his head to either use his weapons of mass destruction as a terrorist tool against the West, or provide those weapons to an international terrorist group.” These dire scenarios were “unlikely,” U.S. intelligence analysts believed, yet Bush concluded that they were “risks he could not ignore.”[27]
As the Taliban crumbled, Tony Blair’s advisers worried about “a real danger that we will part company with the Americans on what comes next,” as Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, wrote to the prime minister. The “real test,” cabled Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador in Washington, will be “whether we can . . . stop the Americans doing something self-defeating in Iraq or elsewhere.”
Blair spoke with Bush by phone on December 3. The prime minister said that he was open to regime change in Iraq but that this would require “an extremely clever plan.” Blair sent the president a paper the next day. “My strategy is to build this over time until we get to the point where military action could be taken if necessary,” he wrote. Meanwhile, they should “bring people towards us, undermine Saddam, without so alarming people about the immediacy of action that we frighten the horses, lose Russia and/or half the E.U. and nervous Arab states.” The note could be read as recommending secret planning for a war while options were explored and political conditions set. That was the course Bush had already chosen.[28]
A few days after Christmas, at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, the president listened as General Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, presented the latest secret invasion plan. Franks identified “centers of gravity” in Saddam’s regime. These included Saddam and his two sons; the Iraqi leader’s intelligence services and bodyguards; and the Iraqi population. The general recommended a stepped-up propaganda campaign: “You’ve got to create in the minds of the people an overwhelming urge to get rid of Saddam,” he said, as if this urge had not already been amply demonstrated in 1991.
Appearing by video, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, interjected to say that American betrayals had left Iraqis skeptical. “You can build all these thoughts,” Tenet continued, “but it’s not going to bear fruit unless they see a tangible commitment.” By that, he meant American arms supplies, training, or a U.S. military deployment in support of rebellious Iraqi military leaders, Kurdish militia, and Shiite activists in southern Iraq.
“Saddam’s a threat,” Bush concluded after the discussion. An invasion “is an option.”[29]
On January 29, 2002, Bush delivered his first State of the Union address. He celebrated the Taliban’s defeat in Afghanistan. He laid out plans to attack al-Qaeda, but also Hamas, Hezbollah, and other designated terrorist groups. Then he turned to the doctrine he had been nurturing for months—preemptive military action against countries that possessed nuclear, chemical, or biological arms and might provide them to terrorists:
Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the eleventh. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. . . . This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.
Bush then offered a turn of rhetoric that would become immortal: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”[30]
Applause washed through the chamber. A week later, a published poll revealed that three-quarters of Americans thought Saddam had aided al-Qaeda. Roughly the same number supported attacking Baghdad.[31]
Bush finally got Saddam’s attention. The Iraqi leader discussed the speech at a Revolutionary Command Council meeting. Tariq Aziz returned to the idea floated by Colin Powell during the stillborn exchanges of the previous autumn: Iraq should readmit the U.N. weapons inspectors to flummox the Bush administration and to give Russia and France something to work with as they tried to help Iraq in the U.N. Security Council. Saddam was rattled enough to allow Aziz to explore this possibility—but only if Iraq could get sanctions relief in return. That was implausible and meant that Aziz would again get nowhere.[32]
On February 11, at a cabinet meeting, Saddam opined about Bush’s “axis of evil” formulation. It expressed “the American administration’s viewpoint, which sees all Muslims who don’t submit to it as axes of evil,” he said. Bush had only included North Korea in his trio of rogue regimes to distract from his anti-Muslim bias.
The Iraqi president also analyzed Bush’s decision to threaten Iran. The catastrophic war of the 1980s had yielded an uneasy armistice that had by now lasted more than a decade. “We are opposed to aggression against Iran,” Saddam explained. Iran was a neighbor, and whatever “aggression or harm comes upon it—it will eventually come upon us.”[33]
Saddam had come full circle since the Reagan years: he believed he would be better off making common cause with Iran against America than with America against Iran.
If a certain complacency and literary self-indulgence had crept into Saddam’s outlook by early 2002, it did not extend to his engagement with the problem of his regime’s weak position in Kurdistan. He understood that he remained vulnerable: “The north is the pivoting center for all foreign and regional forces” that seek to “influence Iraq and harm this country,” he told colleagues after the September 11 attacks. “That’s for sure.”[34]
On March 14, 2002, Saddam sat down with Nechirvan Barzani, a rising figure in Kurdish politics and a nephew of Masoud Barzani, the powerful Kurdistan Democratic Party leader.
Nechirvan reported on a recent visit by an American “delegation” to Kurdistan whose members “did not identify themselves.” (This was a C.I.A. team dispatched by Luis Rueda at the Iraq Operations Group.) The Americans had stayed eight days, accompanied by a Turkish escort. They had discussed future cooperation with Kurdish leaders.
“Our conclusions: there is a conspiracy planned against Iraq,” Barzani continued. He pledged loyalty in the event of an American attack. The Kuwaitis and Jordanians would likely join any American aggression, as might Turkey, he added.
“We agree with your analysis,” Saddam replied. “If we have to face [America] militarily, then we are prepared to do so. The Americans, anyway, as a military force, are trying to avoid coming to Iraq. . . . They were not able to prove that Iraq played a role in what happened [on September 11]—of course, we had no role in what happened.
“In our assessment, the Americans will not strike—or maybe they will only strike military targets,” Saddam continued, referring to the sorts of cruise-missile and air attacks that Iraq had endured periodically since 1991. “They will not take action to change the regime at this time, and at least for a while.”
A plan to invade Iraq “requires much more time, and there are indications that his [Bush’s] popularity is starting to partially diminish,” he went on. Without a hint of self-awareness, speaking again of Bush, he concluded: “Narcissism is dangerous and can cost a man the opportunity to be wise.”[35]