United Nations weapons inspectors had not tramped around Iraq for four years. The Baghdad regime wanted to avoid inadvertent discoveries of old incriminating documents or stray equipment. Yet this housekeeping effort was hobbled by confusion across the highest levels of the government about whether Iraq really possessed what the inspectors were searching for—hidden WMD stocks, in particular. In the years after 1998, Saddam himself had sometimes appeared uncertain. Once, after a cabinet meeting, apparently referring to biological and chemical weapons, he had asked Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, then his deputy prime minister, “Do you have any programs going on that I don’t know about?”
“Absolutely not,” Huwaysh had answered. Worried that this might be some sort of loyalty test, Huwaysh recited Saddam’s policy: such illicit weapons work was permissible only under the president’s direct, explicit orders, and he had none.
The matter lingered in Huwaysh’s mind. Why had Saddam asked him that question? Was the president overseeing secret work and making sure that even senior civilian leaders like him didn’t know about it? Or was he afraid that unauthorized work was continuing? Huwaysh was all the more confused because he had once heard Saddam tell his generals, amidst a round of American bellicosity, that he had “something in his hand,” implying that Iraq had a secret weapon available.[1]
“Do we have WMD?” Ali Hassan al-Majid, “Chemical Ali,” recalled asking Saddam at another meeting.
“Don’t you know?” Saddam replied.
“No.”
“No.”[2]
Late in 2002, Saddam decided to clear things up once and for all. He now wanted to rally his government to pass U.N. inspections with flying colors, since France and Russia had informed him that this would help them make their case at the Security Council. Saddam may have also wanted to instill some realism in his ranks about Iraq’s position in the face of America’s threats. In any event, at separate meetings with generals, the Revolutionary Command Council, and his cabinet, Saddam notified them all that Iraq “had no WMD,” according to Tariq Aziz and Abid Hamid Mahmud, the presidential secretary.[3]
Some of his commanders and comrades received this news with incredulity. They had assumed that Iraq had special weapons hidden in reserve, not only because of Saddam’s elliptical hints but also because this would be in line with a certain kind of military logic. “If you did have a special weapon, you should keep it secret to achieve tactical surprise,” said Major General Walid Mohammed Taiee, then chief of army logistics.[4]
To make clear his intent, Saddam issued a fresh round of orders to military officers, bureaucrats, and private-sector importers, demanding that they destroy or turn over any remaining documents or equipment and cease any activity that might run afoul of U.N. review. The orders threatened severe penalties for violators. Republican Guard commanders were ordered to sign declarations that their units possessed no prohibited materials.
Yet as the U.N. scrutinized Iraq anew in December, the problems of the 1990s resurfaced. Once again, Iraq’s written declaration was judged to be inadequate. And again, the protocols of Iraqi secret police and presidential bodyguards misled U.N. inspectors. The Special Security Organization still regarded visiting inspectors as foreign spies and even potential assassins who threatened the mission of presidential protection. That mission encompassed not only the safety of Saddam’s person but also “anything to do with the President or his family,” as well as the concealment of “documents pertaining to human rights violations . . . and photos of senior Regime personnel,” according to a former senior S.S.O. officer. As during the 1990s, this all but guaranteed that whenever U.N. inspectors headed for sites regarded as sensitive, Saddam’s bodyguards would scramble into defensive action, zipping around in vehicles and chattering over radios as they tried to identify and hide protected places, people, or documents. Their actions made it look like they were hiding something—and they often were, but it was not stocks of WMD.[5]
By the end of 2002, the U.S. had deployed about four hundred military aircraft and at least fifteen thousand troops around Iraq, primarily in Kuwait. That invasion force would grow, but by design, it would remain smaller than the massive force that had assembled to liberate Kuwait nearly twelve years earlier. The Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force that had influenced the 1991 war plan had yielded now to a “hybrid” strategy that would rely on speed, combined arms, and advanced technology. Iraq’s military had shrunk in size and atrophied in capability across the 1990s. This time, the American plan—openly described in the Western press—would be to drive hard and fast on Baghdad to depose Saddam.[6]
Even in late 2002, Saddam still seemed to believe that Bush did not intend to mount a conventional land invasion. Around December, he addressed an audience of about 150 military officers. He asked “why the Americans would want to come here,” recalled General Zuhayr Talib Abd al-Sattar al-Naqib, the deputy head of military intelligence, who was present. The Americans had already achieved their goals, Saddam explained: “They wanted to occupy the Gulf States, and look, it has happened,” he said.
A decade of American containment policy had conditioned Saddam to doubt the prospect of a land invasion. U.S. presidents repeatedly said that they wished to overthrow him, and they even enshrined this goal as official national policy, yet since 1991, the U.S. had attacked only from the air and only for a few days at a time. This time, too, “Saddam and his inner circle thought that the war would last a few days and then it would be over,” recalled Naqib. “They thought there would be a few air strikes and maybe some operations in the south.”
Iraqi generals prepared for a full invasion anyway. “We knew the goal was to make the Regime fall,” recalled Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, the minister of defense. “We thought the [American-led] forces would arrive in Baghdad or outside Baghdad in twenty days or a month.”[7]
Their baseline defense plan was conventional. Border guards served as sentries and trip wires on Iraq’s frontiers. Regular army formations were positioned behind them. Republican Guard corps assembled around Baghdad to defend the capital and mobilize for counterattack. Iraq’s generals had also developed contingency plans to better survive heavy air attacks. One such plan, created in 2001, called for the dispersal of troops and weapons away from major cities and likely targets, to ride out a short but intense air campaign.[8]
By the last days of 2002, Saddam finally came to accept that an American and British invasion was at least a realistic enough possibility to warrant planning. On December 18, General Sayf al-Din Fulayyih Hasan Taha al-Rawi, the chief of staff of the Republican Guard, summoned high-ranking commanders to Baghdad to hear about a new plan for the capital’s defense. Qusay appeared to make clear that the presentation came straight from the top.
General Rawi stood before a map that depicted Baghdad protected by four defensive rings, each four to six miles apart. Each ring was drawn in a different color. When invading forces reached the outermost perimeter, the general explained, the Iraqi troops deployed there would withdraw inward, to the next ring. This would continue, like a nesting doll repacking itself, until all of Iraq’s elite forces were positioned in the capital’s innermost districts along the Tigris. Here they would “fight to the death.”[9]
The design only made vague sense if the goal of the national military was to keep Saddam Hussein alive and in power for as long as possible. The plan seemed to rest on a hope of trapping American and British forces in urban warfare in Baghdad. American war planners did fear prolonged urban combat. But if Iraq drew all of its most capable soldiers, tanks, and armored vehicles into a small area around the Republican Palace, they would have conceded most of the country and would be relatively easy to destroy. In any event, the plan briefed on December 18 was no more than a light sketch, suggestive of something Saddam had drawn on a napkin. Although the ringed defense of Baghdad was discussed at several subsequent meetings, it never acquired a more specific layout.
In fairness, Saddam did develop that winter a strategic concept for the defense of Iraq, judging by the December 18 plan and other statements he made. He envisioned using Iraq’s conventional military to delay and exhaust American and British forces so that a nationwide guerrilla resistance could form to bleed the occupiers. He expected prideful Iraqis to mount a people’s war comparable to the ongoing Palestinian intifada that Saddam so often celebrated—but in Iraq’s case, the insurgency would mobilize trained soldiers, intelligence officers, security men, and paramilitaries. Such a resistance might not require a clear-cut victory to be successful. If the war bled international forces and disrupted the global economy, Moscow and perhaps Paris might seek to broker a cease-fire that would leave him in power, as Mikhail Gorbachev had attempted to do during the 1991 war.
Saddam’s office issued a Top Secret letter that winter providing instructions in the event that his regime did fall to the United States: security and intelligence officers were to “demolish and burn all of the offices in the country,” sabotage power and water stations, “cease all internal and external communications,” purchase “stolen weapons,” and carry out assassinations.
At an Iraqi Naval Forces Command conference during the same period, commanders were told: “Our enemy will fight us using the traditional way.” Iraq’s response would be to disperse and “work in a non-central form to fight,” communicating by “signals, animals, bicycles.” At another seminar that winter, a high-ranking Iraqi Army general pointed out that in 1991, the American-led coalition “had specific aims that were clear and limited . . . to get us out of Kuwait.” This war would be different. “We are on our land. We fight and sacrifice for its sake.”[10]
As the year closed, George W. Bush and his advisers decided that the case for war required another round of public persuasion. The White House asked the C.I.A. to prepare a portfolio of damning evidence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons work, terrorism ties, and murderous campaigns against dissent. The administration hoped to fashion an “Adlai Stevenson moment.” During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to the U.N. had made a dramatic presentation to the Security Council. Stevenson mounted declassified aerial photos on an easel to show that Moscow had deployed nuclear missiles on the Caribbean island. The photos offered an aesthetic of authenticity, of state secrets revealed. Perhaps a similar closing argument for war could be fashioned against Saddam. On December 21, in the Oval Office, George Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, met Bush, Cheney, Rice, and other advisers to share an initial draft of their best evidence.
McLaughlin walked through the material. He was an amateur magician capable of dazzling audiences, but at this consequential session, his performance was sober and dry. In any event, the case against Saddam on WMD was entirely circumstantial—there was nothing as direct as Stevenson’s photos. Bush was unimpressed. “Nice try,” the president said when McLaughlin was done. “It’s not something that Joe Public would understand.”
The president turned to Tenet. “This is the best we’ve got?”
The C.I.A. director was embarrassed. He felt that “we had wasted the president’s time by giving him an inferior briefing,” he recalled. So he reached for an easy phrase from his years of basketball fandom: making a powerful case about Saddam’s guilt, he said, was “a slam dunk.” He repeated the phrase.
“I believed him,” Bush remembered. That Saddam possessed nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons “was nearly a universal consensus.” The president admitted later that he should have challenged the intelligence and his own assumptions, but at the time, he asked himself: If Saddam doesn’t actually have WMD, why on earth would he subject himself to a war he will almost certainly lose?[11]
Over the winter holidays, Condoleezza Rice thought about whether the Bush administration should give up on the U.N. Tony Blair still wanted a second Security Council resolution that would effectively authorize a war against Iraq, on the basis that Saddam had failed to meet the U.N.’s latest demands. Blair had made clear that Britain could not join an invasion if the U.S. did not at least try for a second resolution. Early in January, as a result of her holiday reflections, Rice concluded that “a second resolution was necessary for American interests,” too, because the U.S. public was “not necessarily fully on board for an attack on Iraq.”
Blair agreed that the public case for war remained inadequate. “People suspect U.S. motives,” he wrote to Downing Street colleagues on January 4. They “don’t accept Saddam is a threat” and “worry it will make us a target. Yet the truth is, removing Saddam is right; he is a threat, and WMD has to be countered. So there is a big job of persuasion.”[12]
Five days later, Blair met Richard Dearlove. He again asked his spymaster about the chances of finding a “silver bullet” in Iraq, meaning irrefutable evidence of Saddam’s guilt that would turn international opinion. Dearlove raised his earlier forecast: he now felt the odds of a last-minute breakthrough were about 50 percent.
“Richard, my fate is in your hands,” Blair told him.[13]
The Bush administration hoped to crack Saddam’s wall of secrecy by interviewing Iraqi scientists outside the country. Bush spoke publicly about this effort, and his negotiators had inserted a line in the autumn U.N. resolution that permitted (but did not require) Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei to arrange for such meetings. The chief weapons inspectors could facilitate “the travel of those interviewed and family members.” Weapons scientists might confess and defect if they believed their families would be safe.
Paul Wolfowitz told Blix that summoning key nuclear- or biological-weapons scientists would be “like issuing a subpoena.” Wolfowitz understood Saddam’s dictatorship well enough to know that interviews with scientists abroad would rattle Saddam by provoking his chronic fears of spying and uncontrollable dissent. Even if the gambit didn’t produce revelatory confessions, it was a test of inspection procedure that Saddam was likely to fail, and that in turn would strengthen Washington’s case for war.[14]
As an investigative technique, Blix thought such interviews were unsound. He told Rice that “even if a scientist came out with a family of twelve, he could still have an uncle somewhere in Iraq whose life could be threatened.” Blix was right that Iraqi families could not be defined by a single household in a situation like this and that any scientist weighing defection would have to consider the dishonor that would befall them if extended family members suffered on their account. Blix also worried that televised images of international inspectors coercing scientists to leave Iraq for interviews would damage the U.N.’s reputation. But Rice “stressed that this might be the only way to get honest statements,” Blix recalled. The matter became his starkest disagreement with the White House.[15]
It also created strains at the highest levels of Saddam’s regime, as Wolfowitz and others in Washington had hoped. In January, Saddam appointed a new committee, chaired by Taha Yassin Ramadan, to manage Iraq’s relations with the U.N. He named Jafar Dhia Jafar, Tariq Aziz, and Qusay as members. At a session devoted to the matter of scientist interviews, Qusay said that “we could not trust the scientists, especially if they are interviewed outside Iraq with the company of their families.” Qusay feared that “some of them could deliver false information” invented to win favor from Iraq’s enemies. They decided to refer the question to Saddam personally.[16]
Iraqi scientists well understood that their lives would now depend on how they handled U.N. demands for interviews. Mahdi Obeidi, the nuclear physicist, attended a briefing by Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, the deputy prime minister. Huwaysh stared meaningfully at Obeidi as he spoke.
“Let the scientists leave Iraq to meet the inspectors,” Huwaysh said.
He drew a finger silently across his throat. “Their families will stay here.”[17]
Ramadan soon received an answer from Saddam about interviews abroad. To convey the decision, he called a meeting of about five hundred scientists and engineers. They assembled at the Great Conference Hall in Baghdad. Ramadan “ordered that the meeting be closed,” Jafar recalled. He sent administrative and security staff, including his own bodyguards, outside. Ramadan spoke for ninety minutes. His main message—one he repeated several times—was that Saddam was “willing to go to war not to allow any scientist” to be interviewed outside the country.
All scientists were ordered to henceforth refuse such requests. If summoned, they should demand that a colleague join as a witness. If this proved impossible to arrange, the scientist “must record the entire meeting on an electronic recording device and hand it over” to the National Monitoring Directorate, the body charged with managing U.N. inspectors.[18]
In the end, Saddam’s qualified acceptance of interviews inside Iraq and Blix’s skepticism about Washington’s plan to force Iraqis to go abroad eased the pressure on scientists. When Obeidi was summoned, he appeared alone and ran a tape recorder. The inspectors queried him at length about the imported aluminum tubes that had become such a visible part of the evidence Washington cited to argue that Iraq had reactivated its atomic-bomb program. Obeidi “explained the major flaws” in the assumptions of Western intelligence analysts, but his interrogators “were like racehorses wearing blinders.”[19]
The president has made the decision to go after Saddam Hussein,” Vice President Dick Cheney told Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, at a meeting in the West Wing on January 11, 2003. There was no formal announcement, but Bush had firmly decided to invade. Two days later, after a group discussion in the Oval Office, the president asked Colin Powell to stay behind. “I really think I’m going to have to do this,” Bush said when they were alone.
“Are you with me on this?” the president asked. “I want you with me.”
“I’m with you, Mr. President,” Powell assured him.[20]
His decision was no surprise; Powell was a career soldier steeped in the disciplines of command. But it was a consequential choice. No one in Bush’s cabinet had more pointedly worried aloud about the potential costs of war with Iraq. No one in the cabinet had greater public credibility. The invasion and occupation plan that Bush had developed violated Powell’s storied principles for successful military action: there was no clear exit. If Powell had resigned that winter, as the journalist Robert Draper has written, he might have touched off a chain of political events that could have disrupted the momentum for war and perhaps even stopped it. But “loyalty is a trait that I value,” Powell explained later. Moreover, he accepted Bush’s judgment that, after 9/11, even though nothing connected Saddam to Bin Laden, Saddam’s reign could not be tolerated.[21]
As war appeared inevitable, French president Jacques Chirac kept his options open. He did not rule out committing his troops to a U.S.-led invasion “if military intervention . . . turned out to be legitimate,” as he put it later. He was presumably thinking about scenarios such as Tony Blair’s “silver bullet,” a late-breaking discovery that Saddam was actively building an atomic bomb or germ weapons. That winter, Chirac dispatched aides on a discreet trip to Washington to check in on military planning for Iraq. They received a “courteous and attentive” reception, but the Pentagon made clear that time was running out, and it would soon be impossible to “reserve spaces for French forces.” In mid-January, he sent the career diplomat Maurice Gourdault-Montagne to consult with Condoleezza Rice.
A “final phase” of diplomacy was now at hand, Rice said, as they returned to the U.N. for a second resolution. Gourdault-Montagne reported her entreaty to Paris: “The credibility of the United States is at stake. Everyone knows that Saddam Hussein cheats and hides. If we do not act, the countries of the region and of the whole world will note our weakness. . . . We refuse to postpone the inevitable.”
At this point, Rice added, the only way to avoid war “would be the immediate departure of Saddam and all his team” from Iraq, followed by the creation of a democratic government. “There has to be a change of government,” she said. “After a while, we can lift the sanctions.”
At the Pentagon, Gourdault-Montagne met Paul Wolfowitz. The French envoy argued that the U.N. weapons inspectors now back on the job in Iraq could continue to deter Saddam from threatening other nations. They should be afforded more time. Referring to Hans Blix, Wolfowitz asked sarcastically, “Why put your foreign policy in the hands of a Swedish diplomat with fewer men than the police of a provincial French town?”
A few days later, Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei flew to Paris. A phalanx of police vehicles escorted them to the Élysée. Gourdault-Montagne’s report from Washington only reinforced Chirac’s conviction that the Bush administration had adopted “a dominating and Manichean logic that favored force over law.”[22]
Blix briefed Chirac about inspections to date. Though cooperative, the Iraqis had still failed to resolve the major historical questions. Blix noted that “a number of intelligence services,” including France’s, “were convinced that weapons of mass destruction remained in Iraq.” But neither Blix nor ElBaradei had found any evidence.
Chirac distanced himself from his own spies. France did not have any “serious evidence” that Saddam had retained nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, he said. Spy agencies sometimes “intoxicate each other,” he remarked. Personally, Chirac did not believe that Iraq had retained any WMD. Saddam, however, was “locked up in an intellectual bunker,” he continued. If war came, it would inevitably lead to Saddam’s elimination, he predicted.[23]
The political and diplomatic struggle with France offered a rallying cause for U.N. skeptics in Washington. (The cafeterias in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives would rechristen the french fries on its menu “freedom fries.”) On January 23, British foreign secretary Jack Straw met Dick Cheney in Washington. Cheney made little effort to hide his frustration that Washington found itself entangled with Chirac. To have any hope of passing an acceptable second resolution, American diplomats now had to lobby for votes among the rotating members of the Security Council—Chile, Mexico, Guinea, Cameroon, and others. Bush “could not let a charade continue,” Cheney declared. He “could not let France and Germany dictate policy.”
If France vetoed a second resolution, it “wouldn’t hurt one bit in the States,” Cheney said. It was a gratuitous observation, since it was clear that the political price of failure at the U.N. would be paid by Blair’s government. War would resolve the big questions, the vice president continued. Once an invasion started, “the Iraqi regime was likely to fall apart quickly,” he predicted, and “Iraqis would reveal all the WMD now hidden away.”[24]
By January, Saddam had grown alarmed enough about the prospect of a ground invasion that he called in cabinet-level economic advisers to review how to protect the $1 billion in cash and four tons of gold stored in the vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq, on Rasheed Street in downtown Baghdad.
The bank was headquartered in a modern, cubed building constructed by Saddam during the 1980s. Over the years, because of Iraq’s oil bounty and the character of Saddam’s dictatorship, a myth had sprung up that Saddam and his family members had many billions of dollars secreted offshore, in Switzerland or other bank secrecy havens, in the manner of the families of other rich oil potentates and dictators around the world. But Saddam was too paranoid and controlling to allow anyone around him to accumulate a billion-dollar personal fortune overseas. The Central Bank and Iraq’s major state-owned firms that traded oil and other materials were the principal account holders of Baathist cash, under Saddam’s attentive eye.
During the years when Saddam regarded America and Britain as business partners, if not allies, Iraqi firms held several billion dollars in U.S. and British banks. Those governments froze that money after the invasion of Kuwait. During much of the 1990s, as sanctions and embargoes crushed Iraq’s export-dependent economy, the Central Bank and other state-owned entities possessed little cash or gold. Once Saddam signed up for the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food scheme, in 1996, the Central Bank reopened accounts overseas to facilitate trading, but it wasn’t until 2001, after Saddam imposed a system of illicit kickbacks on Oil-for-Food importers, that the regime began to accumulate serious amounts of cash.
The kickbacks were initially deposited into Lebanese banks. From time to time after 2001, the Mukhabarat secretly trucked pallets of gold and hard currency from Beirut to Baghdad to store them in the Central Bank’s vaults. To cover such expenditures as overseas travel and international medical treatment for favored individuals, Saddam’s office drew on this cash by issuing ad hoc withdrawal orders for amounts ranging from a few thousand dollars to $1 million.
At the January meeting, Saddam ordered that $1 billion in cash be taken out of the vaults, “to avoid the risk of all the money being destroyed in one location in the event of an allied attack,” according to later investigations by the Iraq Survey Group. It appears that the money—stacks of $100 and $500 notes—was boxed up for removal at this time, but Saddam delayed taking action.[25]
As with so much else about his preparations, Saddam’s effort to create a portable treasury for the guerrilla war that he imagined he might soon lead was late and improvised. The president ordered civil servants—including those working in his office—to undergo guerrilla training. Saman Abdul Majid, the French-educated linguist, received instructions to take part. He spent an initial week marching and a second week learning how to strip a Kalashnikov rifle. “You who are so close to the President, you will have to fight to the last,” his trainers insisted. They were given only a few boxes of ammunition, however, and by the third week, they had nothing to do.
Saman Majid held out hope that Saddam would find a way to avoid the looming catastrophe. The president was a pragmatic man, in his experience. That winter, Saddam seemed to be going without sleep. He was writing his new novel while dispatching war preparatives to his staff at all hours of the night. The atmosphere was one of peril and confusion. The C.I.A.’s Iraq Operations Group was now relentlessly dialing the phone numbers of Iraqi officials and military officers, running a spam-marketing version of the cold pitches and “bumps” that diplomats and scientists such as Jafar Dhia Jafar had endured the previous year. Civil servants received messages urging them to defect and join the coming order. The message was clear, Saman Majid recalled: “Iraq’s defeat is certain. Why stay on the side of the vanquished? Join us. You will make money, and you will have positions in the free Iraq that we will build together.”[26]
On February 5, Colin Powell sat at the circular table in the U.N. Security Council chamber and delivered a seventy-five-minute presentation. This was the C.I.A.-informed “Adlai Stevenson moment” the White House had been considering since at least December. C.I.A. director George Tenet and U.N. ambassador John Negroponte flanked Powell. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” Powell said. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
The infamous litany of invented, misinterpreted, and exaggerated intelligence on which Powell relied that day has been exhaustively documented. The worst falsehoods came during his presentation on biological weapons, the first and longest argument Powell made about Iraq’s alleged ongoing WMD programs. Based substantially on the testimony of “Curveball,” a D.I.A. source who had been previously flagged as a fabricator, Powell described Iraq’s active use of “mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.” Here he offered one of his Stevenson-inspired flourishes: “Let me take you inside that intelligence file. . . .” He displayed diagrams of the supposed mobile labs based on “what our sources reported.” Iraq was making anthrax by the liter, he charged.
Powell also shared audio excerpts of intercepted conversations among Iraqi security officers—evidence, he said, of ongoing deception by Saddam that was making a fool out of the U.N.:
“They are inspecting the ammunition you have—”
“Yes.”
“—for the possibility there are forbidden ammo.”
“Yes?”
“For the possibility there is, by chance, forbidden ammo.”
“Yes.”
“And we sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.”
“Yes.”
“After you have carried out what is contained in the message . . . destroy the message.”
“Yes.”
“Because I don’t want anyone to see this message.”
“Okay, okay.”
Powell recapitulated this exchange for his audience, embellishing it with sentences that the transcript he had just displayed did not contain: “Clean out all the areas. . . . Make sure there is nothing there.” He then asked his audience why the speakers wanted to destroy their own message. He said it was because they were trying “to leave no evidence behind of the presence of weapons of mass destruction.”[27]
In reality, Saddam had created an atmosphere of fear among all of the security officers and scientists who were under orders to remove embarrassing historical files. A mistake could result in severe punishments. Most likely, the anonymous speakers Powell cited before the world as conspirators in a cover-up of WMD had acted as they did because they were afraid of their bosses.
By early February, the teams working for Hans Blix in Iraq had conducted more than three hundred inspections inside Iraq at more than 230 sites. Nuclear specialists reporting to ElBaradei had conducted dozens more. As time passed, Blix found it “amazing” that all they had found were some old, empty chemical warheads, some nuclear documents stashed in one scientist’s home, and some illegally imported missile engines—hardly enough to seal the case for war. They had found nothing at the places suggested to them by the C.I.A. and other U.S. intelligence agencies. If his inspectors had even come close to hidden contraband, Blix figured that the Iraqis would have denied them access. That hadn’t happened. Personally, Blix “tended to think” that Iraq did possess hidden weapons, but the absence of evidence was beginning to seem to him like evidence of absence.[28]
The day after Powell’s presentation, Blix and ElBaradei met Tony Blair at Downing Street. “It would be paradoxical to go to war for something that might turn out to be very little,” Blix said.
Blair was unmoved. If Saddam had few banned weapons or none at all, “he should prove it,” the prime minister said.[29]
On February 7, Chirac spoke with Bush. He had found Powell’s presentation unpersuasive. The conversation was courteous and calm, but it amounted to dialogue between “two men who had used up all their arguments,” Chirac recalled.
“We have two analyses, which lead to war or to peace,” Chirac said. “It is a moral problem. . . . It involves two different visions of the world, and we have to accept that—but it should not stop us talking to each other.”
After hanging up, Bush recalled thinking: If a dictator who tortures and gasses his people is not immoral, then who is?[30]
On February 18, Saddam appeared in Baghdad before an audience of officers from the Mukhabarat. He sought to boost morale and prepare his spies for unconventional war. He spoke at first about “principles” of Iraq’s glorious history, particularly its emergence as an Arab nation free of Persian domination. He alluded to his plan of resistance. “Our strategy is reducing our losses,” he said. “The enemy will try to land here and there, and try to bombard everything.” Iraq would evade such tactics. Leaders could resist by working in small groups hidden among a grove of trees or disguised in the shadows of a wall or house.
He addressed the tradecraft of a spy’s life. He described the ideal intelligence officer as a person of brains and subtle fighting skills. With his “considerable linguistic and literary repertoire,” a spy should not only write well but also be capable of fighting with weapons and without them. He drew on his own life story to explain how his spy force should continually renew skills needed for unconventional warfare. “I trained in a tank,” he said, recounting one of his experiences during the 1968 revolution that brought the Baath Party to power. He “learned how to ride a motorcycle” soon afterward. “You need to have skills in everything,” he counseled. Apparently forecasting the requirements of the coming war, he urged his officers to “learn how to ride horses.” Faith in God and adherence to Iraq’s principles would see them through. “The U.S.A. is the strongest state,” Saddam said. “But it is not the most capable.”[31]