NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 2001
At 5:30 in the morning, the phone rang. I was so confused at first that I almost picked it up. Then I remembered I was at my girlfriend’s apartment. Ha! I ducked under the covers and found a comfortable spot to lay my head while she fumbled with the receiver.
Since leaving the United Nations, my life had improved considerably. It was not always easy living without job security, but freedom from the cynicism that permeated the halls of the United Nations had done me a world of good. I had fallen in love, lost some weight, and was working on acquiring an entirely new set of creative skills at NYU film school. Unfortunately, the bubble of optimism and prosperity that had enveloped New York at the turn of the millennium had recently been pierced by the attacks of 9/11, and living in Manhattan was fast becoming a dark, almost fictional experience.
My girlfriend was still groggy when she answered the phone. Then I felt her tense up. First, she said, “What?” several times. Then she said, “OK, OK,” and eased herself out of bed to write something down. Then she said, “All right, I promise, I promise,” and hung up.
“Wassgoingon?” I mumbled, eager for her to come back to bed.
“My stepdad says I have to get on Cipro,” she said.
“What?” My head jumped up.
Cipro was the industrial-strength antibiotic people took when they got infected with anthrax. My girlfriend had recently visited her mother in a New York clinic where traces of anthrax had been found. Apparently, someone from that clinic had gotten sick from it, and every visitor in the past forty-eight hours was asked to get on the medication.
“Is it with a Y or an I?” She was wondering how to spell Cipro.
“I think it’s with a Y,” I said. “You want me to take you to the doctor?”
“It’s 5:30 a.m,” she said.
“Right. Do you feel any… like, any symptoms or anything?” I was worried. It’s not every day the person you love gets exposed to anthrax.
It turned out that she was fine. But that morning, since we couldn’t go back to sleep, we each got a bit paranoid about any kind of marks on our skin. Hers was totally clear, but she kept going to the bathroom to inspect herself. And frankly, I spent a few minutes in front of the mirror too. I hadn’t dared ask her if anthrax was transmissible, because I didn’t want to appear selfish at a time when she was the one in danger. But it is impossible not to think about such things.
We watched CNN for about an hour. Paula Zahn was telling us the first symptoms of the disease were similar to those of a “common cold.” That was really helpful because we both had a bit of a common cold. The whole thing seemed surreal. Anthrax used to be the name of a rock band, for God’s sake!
“You sure it’s with a Y?” she asked.
“I don’t know, baby. But I’m sure they’ll know what you mean.” I pressed her in my arms again.
Who the hell was attacking us? The media were as clueless as the rest of us, and they were doubly panicked because they had been the primary victims of this attack. They weren’t exactly accusing Saddam Hussein, but his name was bandied around as someone who definitely possessed the bio-agent anthrax. It was a matter of public record that the United States had sold anthrax spores to Iraq in the 1980s, ostensibly for use in preparing animal vaccines.
Warnings of further “spectacular attacks” and government-issued alerts did little to assuage our fears. Most people who live in Manhattan are perfectly capable of experiencing panic attacks without help from the federal government. So with John Ashcroft warning us of “generalized unspecified threats” every time he heard “chatter,” we lived in a constant state of alert without ever knowing what that was supposed to entail.
On the morning of September 10, 2001, Saddam Hussein could have been standing in front of his bathroom mirror, humming along to Sinatra’s “My Way.” He had done it all: confronted the Great Satan, survived Desert Storm, quelled all the uprisings and coup attempts, weathered the sanctions, kicked out the weapons inspectors, showed Clinton who the Desert Fox was, profited enormously from the Oil-for-Food program, rebuilt his palaces, bribed half the world to lobby on his behalf, and made a dramatic comeback on the Arab political scene by sponsoring suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. While his population was supposed to be suffering, Saddam felt rich enough to announce that he would offer $30,000 to $50,000 to families of bombers who exploded themselves in Israeli cities.
Thanks to the Oil-for-Food program, his policy of eroding the sanctions had shown significant progress. The UN weapons inspectors had been thrown out of the country three years earlier and had still not been allowed back. As of 2001, there was no longer any legal limit on how much oil Iraq could sell, and Iraqi applications for imports varied greatly, from flatbed trucks to Viagra.
Even as anti-sanctions activists continued to claim (falsely) that 5,000 children were dying every month because of the sanctions, Baghdad was holding trade fairs attended by thousands of international companies looking to do business in Iraq. It seemed as if even the government had gotten tired of its own propaganda campaign, and the parades of small coffins through the streets of Baghdad became less frequent. Most serious journalists traveling to Iraq no longer bought the government’s lies anyway.
The fact that the Iraqi government could rely on the Oil-for-Food program to cover its civilian needs meant that it could use its own funds, acquired through oil smuggling and illegal back-end bribes, to rebuild its security apparatus and military machine. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, Saddam Hussein might have accumulated as much as $13 billion from illegal oil sales and smuggling between 1997 and 2003.* Saddam’s cronies got fat once again, and the region’s leaders were beginning to treat him with the respect they had once shown him before the Gulf War. Proof of that came when the Iraqi vice president and a Saudi royal were caught on camera kissing at an Arab summit.
The chances of a successful coup were as slim as ever, and the only way the regime in Iraq was going to change was if Saddam slipped in the shower and fractured his skull against his golden faucet. If Saddam had died abruptly, it is likely that Iraq would have descended into civil war rather quickly, and the international community would have had to face the question of whether to intervene in order to reestablish order or risk losing access to the world’s second-largest oil reserves.
The issue of Iraq hardly surfaced in the 2000 campaign. Candidate George Bush had mumbled something about tightening the sanctions. What sanctions? The dramatic mushrooming of the UN Oil-for-Food program had all but nullified them. What Saddam could not buy legally through the UN he bought illegally from Russian, Jordanian, and Ukrainian companies.
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz had consistently argued for opposing Saddam Hussein more forcefully. Some inside the Clinton administration, like Kenneth Pollack, agreed, but during the 2000 campaign, their voices were hardly heard; the expression “regime change” had yet to appear on the public’s radar screen. In fact, according to Bob Woodward, Bush 43 even said to his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that he thought his father had done the right thing in 1991 by sticking to the UN mandate and stopping short of overthrowing Saddam.
By the time of the September 11 attacks, Saddam had every reason to feel safe. Still, his reaction to the greatest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor was unwise. When he first heard of the attacks, he rejoiced and declared publicly that they were the result of America’s “evil policy,” contending that the United States exported corruption and crime through its military forces and its movies.† He was the only national leader in the world to come out publicly in support of the terrorist attacks.
In all fairness, it was difficult to foresee that the aftershocks from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers would soon topple his own statues. The traditional policy of the United States was to react to terrorist attacks by going after the actual perpetrators. In this case, America reacted as it had only twice before in its history, during the world wars of the twentieth century. It reacted by seeking to radically change the world.
The campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein began on 9/12 with a suggestion by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that Iraq be attacked as part of the “first round” of the war on terror.‡ His proposal, made at an afternoon National Security Council meeting, did not receive much support initially. Secretary of State Colin Powell and the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hugh Sheldon, both opposed it. The president himself did not question the validity of attacking Iraq as part of the war on terror. But there was no provable link between Saddam Hussein and the terror attacks, so the priority remained Afghanistan.
In the months that followed, little evidence emerged to suggest that Saddam had played a role in the September 11 attacks. Yet the argument for attacking America’s longtime foe gained ground with every meeting of the president’s principals. Powell continued to resist the idea. “What the hell, what are these guys thinking about?” he asked Chairman Sheldon after one meeting. “Can’t you get these guys back in the box?” But the split within the administration eventually gave way to a coordinated diplomatic and military strategy to effect regime change in Iraq through war.
What tipped the scales? The anthrax scare was one of several highly stressful post-9/11 events that rattled America’s psyche and predisposed the American public toward preventive action to confront threats from weapons of mass destruction.
After that, the notion of acting preventively to disarm Saddam was a much easier sell with the American public. Especially as much of the media fueled suspicion that Saddam had something to do with the anthrax attacks.
Our experience in dealing with Saddam had been rather successful, we thought (mostly because we had completely ignored the harm we had done to the Iraqi people in the process). Operation Desert Storm created very few casualties and had offered images of towering success for the U.S. military. It is doubtful whether public opinion would have supported going back to Vietnam or Somalia for a war “of choice.” But Iraq had been a “positive” experience (if war can ever be called that) in the eyes of much of the public. America had gone in, gotten out clean with minimal casualties, and held a parade. The world had paid for much of the war, and in its aftermath, America entered one of the most prosperous decades in its history.
Even though Saddam had not commandeered the 9/11 attacks or the anthrax attacks, the scales had tipped against him. As late as September 2003, seven in ten Americans still believed the Iraqi dictator was likely personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. A majority of Americans had long ago put Saddam’s name on the “to do” list. To the hawks of both parties in Washington, getting rid of him was more a question of opportunity than necessity.
The opportunity came in the aftermath of the Afghan war, which in many ways had been anticlimactic. Certainly, it had been nothing like the “big bang” that the head of Fox News Channel, Robert Ailes, had told President Bush the American people wanted. The war in Afghanistan succeeded in toppling the Taliban, but they and Osama bin Laden seemed almost unworthy enemies for the United States. The American military machine had not been designed to go chasing after a “one-eyed man on a motorbike,” as Sheikh Omar was described in Pentagon briefings. In President Bush’s own words, “The antiseptic notion of launching a cruise missile into some guy’s, you know, tent, really is a joke.”§ After the fiasco at Tora Bora, in which U.S. forces reshaped Afghanistan’s mountain range with “daisy cutter” bombs but failed to catch or kill Osama bin Laden, America needed a villain on whom it could land a good, clean punch. And during the summer of 2002, it became clear that Saddam Hussein had gotten the part.
After President Bush’s speech to the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2002, I realized an attack on Iraq was inevitable. Back in 1998, I had witnessed the diplomatic circus that preceded any U.S. action against Saddam. It was clear to me that the U.S. would not win Security Council authorization to invade Iraq. It was also clear to me that the United States would act anyway. What was less obvious was how the United States was planning to deal with Iraq after an invasion. Did they understand the country they would be charged with running? Did they realize how deeply its economy was revolving around one man? Did they realize how profoundly eroded its basic infrastructure was? And did they understand the consequences of breaking up Saddam’s racket?
While New York and Silicon Valley were experiencing something akin to a modern-day gold rush, Baghdad remained frozen in time. Under Saddam had arisen a generation of children who had grown up less educated than their parents. Unemployment levels had risen to an all-time high. Nearly half of Iraq’s young had no official job, and criminal gangs were so powerful that even Saddam had trouble controlling them. The Iraqi dictator was unable to stop the pillaging of Iraq’s Mesopotamian and Babylonian treasures that occurred during his reign. And he hardly exerted control over the unruly border tribes of western Iraq, which eventually gave allied troops their greatest headache during the occupation. Iraq’s frustrated youth, and its growing criminal networks, would present an ideal feeding ground for would-be terrorist leaders.
Invading Iraq would be one thing. Occupying it would be another. With the primary focus on Saddam’s WMDs, the United States failed to prepare for the greater challenge of running Iraq’s economy and building up a state from scratch in a climate of increasing insecurity.
The only institution that had experience dealing with Iraq’s economy in the past seven years was the UN Oil-for-Food program. While we had utterly failed to rein in Saddam’s fraud, we did understand how his government managed various sectors of the economy. Whether the U.S.-led invasion force would find WMDs in Iraq hardly solved the problem of how to manage the country after the war. So it seemed logical to me, at a time of such great potential turmoil, that people with our kind of experience should get involved in planning for the post-Saddam era.
Over dinner with my former director (Swede number two) in the fall of 2002, we talked about the idea of me going back to the UN to help with what was likely to be a difficult transition to Iraqi self-rule. A strange change had occurred in the months following my departure. Cindy had been forcibly removed from her position of chief of office within the Oil-for-Food program. Apparently, her power grab had spun completely out of control and led her into confrontation with Pasha himself. In a sense, it was a logical outcome. Cindy was the consummate turf warrior. Once she had won every bureaucratic battle, the only remaining enemy would be Pasha himself.
What issue had been at the heart of their dispute? Nobody knew. And the mystery would last for years. On weekends, Cindy could be seen rummaging through the files in Pasha’s office, preparing for what promised to be a major bureaucratic showdown with her own boss. What was she looking for?
Cindy’s expulsion had prompted people to speculate that I might come back. Pasha himself had invited me to return. At first, I declined. But the looming war in Iraq changed my mind. The UN would have to face new challenges, and an entirely new operation might see the dawn of day—an operation I hoped would be in support of freedom and democracy in Iraq. Call it an idealistic relapse.
While waiting for my appointment, I watched events unfold in the Security Council with increasing alarm. After thirteen years of jousting for the moral high ground, the Franco-Russian and Anglo-American duos were headed for a theatrical clash on the world stage.
* James J. Barnes, prepared witness testimony, hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, “United Nations Oil for Food Program,” May 14, 2003.
† “After the Attacks; Reaction From Around the World,” New York Times, September 13, 2001.
‡ Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2002), p. 49.
§ Woodward, Bush at War, p. 38.