Some of history’s greatest conquerors have paused near Baghdad before assaulting it. None ever assembled as overwhelming a force as the United States Army massed around the ancient city in the spring of 2003. Its commanders had a simple plan. They would encircle Baghdad with tanks to prevent defenders from fleeing, and then send troops in to capture palaces, military bases, and other keystones of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.
Sitting at his post eleven miles south of the city, Colonel David Perkins, the commander of a mechanized infantry brigade, was eager to avoid what might become a dangerous urban warfare campaign. On April 6 he offered his fellow commanders an alternative. He proposed to smash his way to the center of Baghdad in an audacious “thunder run,” using only his own men, a total of fewer than one thousand. They would take this city of five million, he promised, in a single day.
A “thunder run” is normally a quick, daring, and disruptive thrust into and out of enemy territory. Colonel Perkins’s men had staged one just the day before, pushing their column of tanks and armored personnel carriers to the Baghdad airport through a gauntlet of fire, killing several hundred defenders, and then withdrawing to safety before nightfall. Hours after that raid, the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, gave a bombastic press conference denying that any Americans had made it to the airport. Perkins took that as an affront and a challenge. He persuaded his superiors to send him on a “thunder run” far bolder than his last one. This time he would storm into the city center and try to stay there.
“If the condition’s right, I can stay the night,” he argued. “If I can stay the night, I can stay forever. If I’m in the city and I stay there, the war’s over.”
Perkins and his officers decided that their objective should be no less a prize than the walled palace complex from which Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. The complex was a tree-shaded enclave, strictly off-limits to the public, built on two square miles of land at a bend in the Tigris River. Four busts of Saddam Hussein, each of them thirteen feet high, decorated its most imposing edifice, the Republican Palace. Other buildings housed members of Saddam’s military and political elite. Just outside the walls lay other tantalizing targets, among them the army’s ceremonial parade ground, the information ministry, and the headquarters of the ruling Baath Party.
The only route from Perkins’s headquarters to the center of Baghdad was Highway 8, the same road his men had charged through on their first “thunder run.” He knew that it was lined with tenacious defenders who would meet his column with hails of rifle and grenade fire. The defenders, however, had shown themselves to be disorganized, unfamiliar with even basic combat tactics, and armed with weapons hardly potent enough to threaten the tanks, armored personnel carriers, and Bradley fighting vehicles that Perkins planned to send against them.
To hold a position in the city center, Perkins would have to take control of this highway. The largest clusters of defenders had dug in around three major interchanges. Perkins understood that capturing these three interchanges was the key to his “thunder run.” He and his staff officers circled them on maps and gave each a name. They might have called them One, Two, and Three, or Red, Yellow, and Blue. Instead they chose a trio of names that any American could love: Curly, Larry, and Moe.
The officers who gathered at Perkins’s makeshift headquarters on the eve of this daring thrust had been told repeatedly that thousands of infantrymen from the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne divisions would take Baghdad, and that their own role would be simply to support this assault. Perkins told them something very different. Rather than supporting the strike force, they would be the strike force.
“We have set the conditions to create the collapse of the Iraqi regime,” Perkins told his officers. “They said it would take five divisions to win this war, but there’s no question now that we can really do it ourselves tomorrow.”
Perkins, a forty-four-year-old West Point graduate from Keene, New Hampshire, devised a plan under which two columns of tanks would race into Baghdad, firing as they charged but not stopping to engage the enemy. A mechanized infantry brigade would follow, dropping combat teams at each of the three intersections. As soon as Curly, Larry, and Moe were in American hands, trucks carrying fuel and ammunition would speed into the city with supplies for the men encamped at Saddam’s palace complex.
“Holy shit, we’re going straight into fucking Baghdad!” Captain Philip Wolford, the officer assigned to seize the complex, thought as Perkins gave him his orders. “Are you crazy? What are you thinking?”
Late that night, Wolford called his unit commanders to an outdoor meeting. He unfolded a map of Baghdad on the hood of his Humvee and, by the light of several flashlights, explained their mission. If he felt any doubts, he did not betray them. Instead he gave a classic eve-of-battle speech.
“We are going to the heart of Saddam’s regime and we are going to take it and keep it,” he began. “If they fire one round at us, we fire a thousand back. If they shoot one of us, we kill them all . . . and we make them regret the day they joined the Iraqi army. Talk to your soldiers. Let them know what we expect of them. Tomorrow we fight.”
A hazy dawn was breaking as the American column snaked out of its improvised base. It comprised 970 soldiers riding in sixty tanks, twenty-eight Bradleys, and a handful of armored personnel carriers. As it moved, artillery units fired on the obstacles ahead, timing their barrages to hit ten minutes before the convoy arrived. When tank commanders heard explosions at Objective Curly, the first interchange they would have to take, they knew that many defenders had just been killed.
The defending force, a mix of foreign militants and Iraqis with personal loyalty to Saddam Hussein, fought with a courage bordering on fanaticism. They had no helmets, no flak jackets, and almost no weapons more powerful than rifles and grenade launchers. Their combat engineering skills were so rudimentary that they did not seem even to know how to measure trajectories for their few mortars and artillery pieces. They were facing an enemy that counted on awe-inspiring technology and firepower. Nothing within their power could have stopped its advance.
By mid-morning, just as he had hoped, Colonel Perkins was in downtown Baghdad. His men had destroyed dozens of vehicles, some of them packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers, and killed hundreds of defenders. Inside the palace complex, he gave a live interview to an American television crew that he hoped would prove he was indeed in the city center. Two of his officers, both graduates of the University of Georgia, triumphantly raised a Georgia Bulldogs flag and shouted, “How ’bout them Dawgs?” at each other.
Their jubilation was quickly dampened. First came a report that their headquarters, eleven miles to the south, had come under fire and that an incoming missile had set off a fireball in which several soldiers and two European journalists were killed. Then Perkins heard in turn from his commanders at Curly, Larry, and Moe. Each was pinned down by waves of attackers and all pleaded for reinforcements and artillery support. As Perkins was weighing this news, trying to decide whether it meant he should retreat from the city instead of trying to stay, he heard his least favorite Iraqi, Information Minister al-Sahaf, on the radio.
“The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad,” al-Sahaf proclaimed. That was all Perkins needed to hear.
“We’re staying,” he told his officers.
By mid-afternoon, although combat at the three interchanges was still intense, the highway was judged safe enough for transit and the supply convoy set out. It was under fire for much of the way, and lost five trucks to a deadly ambush at Objective Curly. By nightfall, though, Perkins’s men were unloading their precious fuel and ammunition. They did not yet control Baghdad, but they held a strong position there and a secure route in and out.
This “thunder run” cost the lives of five American soldiers. It was a brilliantly conceived operation, planned by highly trained tacticians and executed by brave, well-disciplined soldiers using equipment more sophisticated than their enemy could even imagine. Like the entire war plan, however, it was purely military. Neither Perkins nor any other American officer in Iraq—or in Washington—had thought much about what the United States would do with this country after conquering it. The soldiers believed, in the words of David Zucchino, a Los Angeles Times reporter traveling with them, that taking Baghdad “would be their ticket home.”
Once Baghdad fell, the war would be over. Their job would be done. There had been virtually no talk of post-war reconstruction and nation building. The division had been given no guidance for the post-combat phase, no orders for what to do with Baghdad once it was in American hands.
The men who staged this “thunder run” were hardly the only ones who thought that taking Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam meant the end of the Iraq war. Barely a week after its success, the top commander of Operation Iraqi Freedom, General Tommy Franks, stepped jubilantly from a C-130 at Baghdad airport and pumped his fist over his head in triumph. In his first meeting with senior officers, he ordered them to start preparing to leave Iraq. He told them that the first units would be pulled out within sixty days and that by September the 140,000 American troops in the country would be reduced to just 30,000.
As the meeting was about to end, General Franks told his officers that he had a surprise for them. An aide flicked on a television monitor, and after a few moments President Bush appeared on the screen. He congratulated the men on their victory, and when he was finished, they lit cigars and posed for a round of victory photos. None realized that this war was just beginning.
THE STORY OF THE IRAQ WAR IS, AND PROBABLY WILL FOREVER BE, ENVELOPED in a single one-word question: Why? President Bush and the handful of advisers with whom he conceived and launched this war explained their motives in a contradictory series of statements that changed as the war proceeded. Each had a particular set of motives, some declared and others left unsaid. The fact that there is so much debate and uncertainty about these motives makes the Iraq war unique in American history. It is the only conflict Americans ever fought without truly knowing why.
Iraq was at the top of the White House agenda from the moment Bush took office in January 2001. At a National Security Council meeting ten days after he was inaugurated, he, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other senior officials were fascinated when CIA director George Tenet showed them a large aerial surveillance photo of a building in Iraq that he said could be “a plant that produces either chemical or biological materials for weapons manufacture.” Two days later, at another meeting, Secretary of State Colin Powell was presenting a plan for “targeted sanctions” against Iraq when his principal bureaucratic rival, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, interrupted him.
“Sanctions are fine,” Rumsfeld said, “but what we really want to think about is going after Saddam. Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests.”
These were the first skirmishes of the Iraq war. They made clear that key members of the new administration arrived in Washington already determined to wage it. From their first days in office, they cast eagerly about for a justification.
“There was never any rigorous talk about this sweeping idea,” Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill recalled afterward. “From the start, we were building the case against [Saddam] and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President was saying, Tine. Go find me a way to do this.’”
The administration’s focus on Iraq was so intense that it crowded out even the most pressing foreign policy challenges facing the new administration. Just days after President Bush was inaugurated, his chief counter-terrorism specialist, Richard Clarke, wrote an urgent memo to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, asking for a chance to brief cabinet secretaries and other senior officials on threats posed by the Al Qaeda terror network. It took three months for Rice to schedule the briefing, and she invited second-tier officials rather than members of the cabinet. Clarke told them it was imperative that they make Al Qaeda a top priority, “because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States.”
“Well, there are others that do as well, at least as much,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz replied. “Iraqi terrorism, for example.”
That surprised Clarke. He told Wolfowitz that Iraq was not known to have sponsored even a single act of terrorism directed at Americans, and when he asked the deputy CIA director, John McLaughlin, to back him up, McLaughlin did.
“We have no evidence of any active Iraqi terrorist threat against the U.S.,” McLaughlin said.
“You give bin Laden too much credit,” Wolfowitz insisted. “He could not do all those things like the 1993 [truck bomb] attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because the FBI and the CIA have failed to find the linkages doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
The roots of this obsession are to be found in the 1980s, when Iraq was engaged in a horrific eight-year war with Iran. Bitterly anti-American militants had recently seized power in Iran, and President Reagan was eager to ensure that they did not win this war. That meant helping Saddam, which Reagan did in several ways. He sent Donald Rumsfeld, his special Middle East envoy, to meet Saddam and ask him what the United States could do to help his cause. Soon afterward, American intelligence agencies began sending Saddam reports about Iranian troop movements that allowed him to fend off what might have been abject defeat. Over the next seven years, the United States sold Saddam $200 million worth of weaponry, as well as a fleet of helicopters that were supposedly for civilian use but were immediately turned over to the Iraqi army. Washington also gave him $5 billion in agricultural credits and a $684 million loan to build an oil pipeline to Jordan, a project he awarded to the California-based Bechtel Corporation.
Trust between the United States and Iraq faded when Saddam began receiving weaponry from the Soviet Union, but as late as July 25, 1990, after George H. W. Bush had succeeded Reagan in the presidency, relations between the two countries were good. On that date, Saddam summoned the American ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, for what he called “comprehensive political discussions.”
“I have a direct instruction from the President to seek better relations with Iraq,” Glaspie told him.
Saddam launched into a monologue that gradually turned to his border dispute with neighboring Kuwait, which Iraq had for decades claimed as part of its own territory. He listed a series of supposed outrages that Kuwait had committed against Iraq, ranging from territorial encroachments to the odd charge that Kuwait “is harming even the milk our children drink.”
“Our patience is running out,” he told Ambassador Glaspie. “If we are unable to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.”
This was a broad hint, not difficult to decipher, that Saddam was planning to attack Kuwait. The Americans had not objected when he attacked Iran nearly a decade before, and he wanted to be sure they would not object this time either. Glaspie told him what he wanted to hear.
“We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait,” she told Saddam.
Eight days later, Saddam sent his army into Kuwait, easily subdued it, and announced that it had become Iraq’s nineteenth province. To his great surprise, President Bush reacted with outrage. Kuwait was a key supplier of oil to the United States, and Bush vowed that the Iraqi occupation would “not stand.” He spent the next five months painstakingly assembling a coalition of thirty-four nations that shared his determination. On January 16, 1991, the Americanled coalition launched a bombing campaign against Iraq and Iraqi positions in Kuwait. It followed with a land invasion, not only chasing the Iraqi army out of Kuwait but pursuing it most of the way back to Baghdad. Some urged Bush to press on to the capital itself and depose Saddam, but he prudently declined.
By invading Kuwait, evidently under the mistaken impression that the United States would approve, Saddam turned himself into a pariah in the eyes of Washington. Over the next decade, he and the Americans engaged in a running feud. Although crippled by economic sanctions and left with a devastated army, Saddam ordered his soldiers to take potshots at American spy planes whenever they could. None was ever hit, but the Americans replied by bombing every Iraqi missile site they could find. In 1993, after the publication of reports that Saddam had tried to arrange the assassination of former President Bush, American bombers attacked Baghdad itself. They did so again five years later, after Saddam evicted United Nations weapons inspectors.
Saddam survived all of these assaults. Some powerful Americans, especially several who had held important posts in past Republican administrations, found his resilience unbearable. They harbored a deep sense that Saddam had gotten the better of them, and developed a passionate determination to crush him. When Bush’s son assumed the presidency at the beginning of 2001, several of these men found themselves back in power. Among them were Cheney, who had been the father’s secretary of defense and was the son’s vice president; Wolfowitz, who had been a senior defense department official under the father and became the department’s second-ranking figure in the son’s administration; and Rumsfeld, who had been President Gerald Ford’s defense secretary in the 1970s and took that post for a second time in 2001. They returned to office determined to complete what they saw as unfinished business in Iraq.
The new president himself carried this sense of grievance, and this determination, into the White House. He called Saddam “the guy that wanted to kill my dad,” and when the idea of invading Iraq was first urged on him after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, he could not fail to recognize it as a way to have his revenge, complete the job his father had begun, and redeem his family’s honor. Richard Clarke, however, found the idea almost criminally irresponsible.
“Having been attacked by Al Qaeda,” he told Secretary of State Powell, “for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked at Pearl Harbor.”
A few days after the September 11 attacks, Bush was standing by himself in the White House Situation Room when Clarke and a couple of his aides walked by. Clarke later recalled that the president summoned them, closed the door, and gave them an extraordinary order.
“I know you have a lot to do and all,” Bush said, “but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.”
“But, Mr. President,” Clarke replied, astonished, “Al Qaeda did this.”
“I know, I know, but see if Saddam was involved,” Bush insisted. “Just look. I want to know any shred.”
“Absolutely, we will look again. But you know, we have looked several times at state sponsorship of Al Qaeda and have not found any linkages to Iraq.”
“Look into Iraq,” Bush ordered him once more. “Saddam.”
Over the months that followed, Bush and his aides pursued a policy that reflected their obsession. Instead of using their great power to crush a terror group responsible for devastating attacks on the United States, they turned it against a dictator who, though odious and brutal, had never attacked Americans or threatened to do so.
“We won’t do Iraq now,” Bush told Condoleezza Rice four days after the September 11 attacks, “but eventually we’ll have to return to that question.”
Bush would later justify his focus on Iraq by asserting that Saddam was building chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons that would soon pose a mortal threat to the world. Sometimes his claims came out as a jumble of the scariest words he could find, as when he asserted that Saddam might soon launch an attack using “horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons.” He was more articulate when composed, as during an interview he gave to a British television network in mid-2002.
“The worst thing that could happen,” Bush said, “would be to allow a nation like Iraq, run by Saddam Hussein, to develop weapons of mass destruction, and then team up with terrorist organizations so they can blackmail the world.”
No one could disagree with that. For the world to stand idly by while a brutal dictator built weapons of mass destruction and passed them on to terrorists would be not just irresponsible but suicidal. Any nation that launched a preemptive war against such a dictator would be acting in urgent self-defense. Saddam, however, was no such dictator. His military was a pitiful shell, devastated by eight years of war with Iran and more than a decade of economic sanctions, and armed mainly with weapons old enough to be museum pieces. He was also a secular nationalist who had spent his life repressing, and in many cases slaughtering, fundamentalists who sympathized with groups like Al Qaeda. Aging and contained, he posed no imminent threat to anyone other than his own people.
No one close to President Bush ever presented the case for avoiding war in Iraq. Rice had mastered the art of telling him what he wanted to hear. Powell told Pentagon officials that he considered the Iraq project to be “lunacy,” but he was much more circumspect when speaking with Bush, saying only that an invasion would not be “as easy as it is being presented.” It fell to a private citizen, retired General Brent Scowcroft, who had been national security adviser to Bush’s father, to issue an anguished warning. It appeared in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “Don’t Attack Saddam.”
There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks. Indeed Saddam’s goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them. He is unlikely to risk his investment in weapons of mass destruction, much less his country, by handing such weapons to terrorists who would use them for their own purposes and leave Baghdad as the return address. . . .
The central point is that any campaign against Iraq, whatever the strategy, cost and risks, is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism. Worse, there is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time. . . . Ignoring that clear sentiment would result in a serious degradation in international cooperation with us against terrorism. And make no mistake, we simply cannot win that war without enthusiastic international cooperation, especially on intelligence.
Subsequent events proved Scowcroft right. As he predicted, the war against Saddam turned out to be a priceless gift to Islamic radicals like bin Laden. Why did the Bush administration push ahead with this project despite being warned that it would undermine the security of the United States?
Bush and his senior advisers may truly have believed that Iraq possessed or was building weapons of mass destruction, but they were able to reach that conclusion only by shaping a highly politicized process in which, as the chief of the British secret service reported after visiting Washington in the summer of 2002, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Wolfowitz later conceded that the administration decided to push this argument “because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” There were a host of other reasons. Each member of the war party had one or two or three of his or her own. Together they pushed the United States to war.
• Despite Rumsfeld’s insistence that the Iraq war had “nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil,” great powers have often intervened in the Middle East when oil supplies are threatened. The United States consumes oil more voraciously than any other country on earth, and President Bush, who came of age among oil barons in Houston and for a time was in the oil business himself, believed fervently that American security depended on free access to Middle East oil. So did Vice President Cheney, who, like Bush, had once been in the oil business. With Iran in hostile hands and the governments of other Persian Gulf states becoming less stable, control of Iraq’s vast reserves, which comprise 10 percent of the world’s supply, would guarantee the United States a steady flow of oil.
• Giant American corporations stood to make huge profits from this war and its aftermath. Among the greatest beneficiaries was Halliburton, the oil and infrastructure company that Cheney formerly headed, which was awarded billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for projects ranging from rebuilding Iraq’s oil refineries to constructing jails for war prisoners. Two other behemoths tied closely to the Republican Party, Bechtel and the Carlyle Group, also profited handsomely. So did American companies that make missiles, combat jets, and other weapons of war, especially the three biggest, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and McDonnell-Douglas—which among them were awarded $41 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2002 alone. These companies were major contributors to Bush’s presidential campaigns, and he named their senior officers to key positions in the Pentagon and elsewhere. In these men’s minds, corporate interest and national interest meshed perfectly.
• Officials in the Pentagon saw Iraq as a proving ground for their theories about how the United States could win future wars. The most eager among them was Donald Rumsfeld. He detested the so-called “Powell Doctrine,” named for General Powell, which holds that the United States should never go to war without a force large enough to overwhelm any enemy and deal with any problems that might emerge after victory. His contrary theory was that Americans could win wars with fewer soldiers and more technology. That was why he insisted on sending a relatively small force to Iraq, and publicly reprimanded the army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, for warning that a much larger one would be needed to stabilize Iraq after Saddam was vanquished.
• During the entire modern era, the United States has been able to use the territory of a large Middle Eastern country to project power through the region. For a quarter of a century that was Iran, but Iran was lost to the West after the Islamic revolution of 1979. The United States then chose Saudi Arabia as its regional proxy, but by the end of the twentieth century, many in Washington were worried about Saudi Arabia’s long-term stability. They thought a pro-American Iraq would be an ideal replacement.
• Protecting the Saudi royal family was another benefit some saw in the Iraq invasion. Radicals in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, most notably Osama bin Laden, were outraged by the presence of American troops in the kingdom. These troops had used Saudi Arabia as a base during the 1991 Gulf War and never left, leaving many Muslims outraged that an infidel army was profaning the land where Islam was born. Wolfowitz realized that their presence was “a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government” but believed they could not be safely removed until the United States achieved a foothold somewhere else in the Middle East. He described this as “an almost unnoticed but huge” reason for the United States to depose Saddam and replace him with a pro-American regime.
• Many key figures in the Bush administration were vigorous supporters of Israel, and especially of Ariel Sharon and other Israeli hardliners. Stability in the Middle East, they argued, could be achieved only by crushing Israel’s enemies. They saw Saddam as among the most dangerous of these enemies and were eager to promote any plan that would result in his overthrow.
• Bush and his aides also saw the Iraq war as a way for the United States to show the world how strong it had become. A swift, overwhelming victory in Iraq, they believed, would serve as a powerful warning to any real or potential foe.
• The final important argument for the war, which became the major one when American inspectors discovered afterward that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, was what Bush called his “deep desire to spread liberty around the world.” Although he knew little about world history and even less about Islamic and Middle Eastern cultures—or perhaps because of that—he convinced himself of an extraordinary series of propositions. He declared repeatedly that the Western form of democracy, based on individual choice as expressed through political parties and elections, was ideal for every one of the world’s societies; that the United States had a duty to spread this system; and that it could be imposed in Iraq after an American invasion. From there, he dared to hope, it would spread throughout the Middle East and transform it into a region of peace and prosperity.
All of these motives combined to lead the Bush administration to war in Iraq. Beneath them lay an intense desire for vindication, for final victory over an adversary who had taunted the United States—and the Bush family—for more than a decade. So the question of why the United States embarked on this war has many answers, but also no answer at all. When it was posed to Richard Haass, who headed the State Department’s policy planning staff during the run-up to the war and was in as good a position as anyone to know the truth, he replied with refreshing candor.
“I will go to my grave not knowing that,” Haass said. “I can’t answer it. I can’t explain the strategic obsession with Iraq, why it rose to the top of people’s priority list. I just can’t explain why so many people thought this was so important to do.”
THE PUBLIC DRUMBEAT FOR WAR INTENSIFIED STEADILY DURING 2002. ON January 29, in his State of the Union address, President Bush named Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, as part of an “axis of evil” that posed “a grave and growing danger” to the United States and the rest of the world. He called the Iraqi regime one of the most dangerous on earth, and asserted that it was developing, or actively seeking to develop, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. “I will not stand by as peril draws closer,” he vowed. Six months later he told graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point that their country was engaged in “a conflict between good and evil” and warned, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”
Bush’s determination to depose Saddam deeply alarmed many people in the United States and beyond. A group of world leaders, doubting his dramatic charges about Iraq’s arsenal, proposed an alternative approach. They suggested that the United Nations Security Council pass a resolution demanding that Saddam readmit the weapons inspectors who had been in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. If he accepted this demand, they reasoned, the inspectors would be able to determine what weapons Iraq did and did not have. This suggestion threatened to undermine the war plan, and Cheney rejected it.
“A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of [Saddam’s] compliance with U.N. resolutions,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August. “On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow ’back in the box.’ . . . Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
At a meeting of the National Security Council a week later, General Tommy Franks presented his war plan. After he finished, he turned to Bush and told him something neither he nor almost anyone else in the room wanted to hear. “Mr. President,” he said, “we’ve been looking for Scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for ten years and haven’t found any yet.” Bush passed over this warning as if he had not heard it. A few days later, he told members of Congress at a White House meeting that he considered Saddam a more threatening enemy than Al Qaeda.
“The war on terror is going okay,” he said. “We are hunting down Al Qaeda one by one. The biggest threat, however, is Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.”
Half a century earlier, John Foster Dulles admitted he had no hard evidence that the Guatemalan government was being manipulated by the Kremlin but said he was determined to overthrow it anyway because of “our deep conviction that such a tie must exist.” Bush was acting on the same principle. He liked to call himself a “gut player,” and prided himself on the acuity of his instinct. Instinct told him that, as he put it at the end of September, “the Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.” Never did he entertain any contrary evidence.
“I doubt that anyone ever had the chance to make the case to him that attacking Iraq would actually make America less secure and strengthen the broader radical Islamic terrorist movement,” Richard Clarke wrote after leaving the administration. “Certainly he did not hear that from the small circle of advisors who alone are the people whose views he respects and trusts.”
In the autumn of 2002, the United States Senate and House of Representatives voted by large margins to authorize President Bush to use force in Iraq if he deemed it necessary. Soon afterward, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved a resolution requiring Saddam to readmit weapons inspectors and allow them free access to any site they wished to visit. To the dismay of some in Washington, he quickly agreed, insisting that Iraq was “a country devoid of weapons of mass destruction.” On November 25, inspection teams arrived in Baghdad to resume their work.
Over the months that followed, the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, released a series of relatively positive reports. They said that although Saddam was not cooperating fully, their teams were working more freely than ever before. Then, on December 7, Iraq submitted a massive report, more than eleven thousand pages long, purporting to prove that it had no outlawed weapons.
“The declaration is nothing, it’s empty, it’s a joke,” Bush told one of his few foreign allies in this war, Prime Minister José María Aznar of Spain, who visited the White House a few days later. “At some point, we will conclude that enough is enough and take him out.”
Most of Bush’s advisers, recognizing that he had made up his mind to depose Saddam, embraced the idea and urged him on. CIA director George Tenet was among the most enthusiastic. His analysts had found clues suggesting that Saddam might be concealing forbidden weapons, but no hard proof. When Bush asked him on December 19 how confident he was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, he abandoned the analytical coolness that distinguishes great spymasters and told the president what he clearly wanted to hear.
“It’s a slam-dunk case,” Tenet assured him. “Don’t worry. It’s a slam-dunk.”
After hearing this, Bush decided it was time for Secretary of State Powell to address the Security Council, present the evidence against Saddam, and demand a resolution endorsing military action against him. Powell made the speech on February 5, 2003, with Tenet sitting behind him. He told the delegates that he could not reveal “everything that we know” but laid out a chilling case that Saddam had horrific weapons and was likely to use them “at a time and a place and in a manner of his choosing.” To strengthen his case, he played tapes of intercepted telephone conversations that sounded vaguely incriminating, showed aerial photographs of suspected weapons factories, and even held up a vial of white powder to illustrate the prospect that Saddam might use anthrax spores in some future attack.
Powell and others in Washington considered this speech to have been a great success, but it did not move the world. President Jacques Chirac of France called Bush soon afterward to tell him that France would vote against his resolution because “war is not inevitable” and there were “alternative ways” to deal with Saddam. The presidents of two other countries with seats on the Security Council, Vicente Fox of Mexico and Ricardo Lagos of Chile, also told him they would vote against it.
For weeks Bush had been insisting that the Security Council vote on his war resolution. When it became clear that the measure could not pass, however, he changed his mind. He would have preferred to depose Saddam with the approval of the United Nations but had long since made up his mind to do it no matter what anyone else said or did. Chirac was mistaken when he told Bush that war was “not inevitable.” It had been inevitable since Bush made his private decision more than a year before.
“All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end,” the president declared in a televised address on Monday evening, March 17. “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.”
The United States had massed 130,000 soldiers in Kuwait and tens of thousands more nearby. Britain, the only other major power that supported Operation Iraqi Freedom, had 25,000 there, and there were small, symbolic contingents from Poland and Australia. This force was less than half the size of the one the United States had assembled to fight Saddam in the Gulf War a decade before.
According to General Franks’s plan, the war would begin with a brief but intense bombing campaign aimed at killing as many Iraqi soldiers as possible, to be followed by an overland invasion. Americans would charge northward along two routes toward Baghdad, nearly three hundred miles away, while the British would veer to the east and take the port city of Basra. Other American units were to have invaded from Turkey in the north, but the Turkish parliament, reflecting overwhelming public sentiment, refused to permit this.
At midday on March 19, the first American advance teams crossed into Iraq. The main force was to cross two days later, but that plan changed suddenly when a CIA agent who had been inside Iraq for weeks sent urgent and startling news to Langley. He said one of his most trusted Iraqi informants had pinpointed a farm near Baghdad where Saddam and his two widely despised sons would be sleeping that night.
As soon as Tenet and Rumsfeld received this report, they sped to the White House and told Bush he had a chance to decapitate the regime with a single stroke. He approved their plan to attack the farm as soon as the convoy carrying Saddam arrived. It pulled in shortly before dawn, just as the informant had predicted, and soon afterward, American bombs and cruise missiles decimated the farmhouse and everything around it. Several hours later came the disappointing news that neither Saddam nor his sons had been killed. They had either not been at the farm or had managed to escape. The only important figure who died in the attack was the Iraqi informant whose tip had triggered it.
That evening, after sharing a dinner of chicken pot pie with his wife, Bush appeared on television to tell the world that the American-led invasion of Iraq had begun, twenty-four hours earlier than originally planned. He said bombs were falling on “selected targets of military importance” and that these strikes were “the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign.” Saddam responded with a broadcast of his own, defying “the criminal junior Bush.”
“Go, use a sword!” he urged his people. “Let Iraq live!”
Few Iraqis heeded Saddam’s plea. Soldiers by the thousands ripped off their uniforms and melted into the countryside as American columns charged northward. There were skirmishes in a few towns, but for most of the American soldiers, the ride toward Baghdad was free of resistance. Some units moved at forty miles an hour, so fast that the treads on their amphibious troop carriers began to shred.
Because there was scattered fighting along the route, and because the invading force took casualties, the drive toward Baghdad cannot truly be described as a “cakewalk,” the word used in many news dispatches and other accounts. Still, the invading force faced no sustained resistance on the ground, no aerial bombardment, and no chemical or biological attacks. Many soldiers feared they might encounter all of that when they assaulted Baghdad, but because the “thunder run” on April 7 succeeded so spectacularly, no such assault was necessary. That same day Saddam Hussein fled and his regime collapsed. A thirty-nine-year-old Iraqi named Qifa, who had been working for the Ministry of Information, wept with joy and clutched the hand of an American reporter as he tried to grasp the fact that the bloody tyrant was gone.
“Touch me,” he pleaded. “Touch me. Tell me that this is real. Tell me that the nightmare is really over.”
It was indeed over. General Franks began planning to withdraw American troops, and President Bush reveled in the swiftness and completeness of his triumph. On May 1, forty-three days after the war began, he stepped out of a fighter jet onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, anchored a few miles off the coast of California. Dressed in a pilot’s flight suit, he strode across the deck like a proud conqueror. Then, in a speech to hundreds of soldiers and sailors and airmen on board, he declared that “major combat operations” in Iraq had ended. He said the war had been “a noble cause” and “a great moral advance,” and even compared it to the World War II battles at Normandy and Iwo Jima, where thousands died in a cause most of the world embraced. Behind him hung a giant banner that summarized his speech in two words: “Mission Accomplished.”
Bush often asserted that this war was about much more than Iraq. So it was, but not only in the way he meant. It grew from the history of three places far distant from one another that combined to shape the collective psyche of the Bush administration.
The first was Iran. When militant clerics seized power there after the Islamic revolution of 1979, they shook the world in ways even they could not foresee. Their revolution helped provoke the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which in turn drew the United States into Afghanistan and created the conditions under which Al Qaeda grew and thrived. It led American leaders to begin searching for a new ally and proxy in the Muslim Middle East, a search that drew them to Iraq. It also led Saddam to believe he could finally get away with his old dream of seizing territory from Iran and later from Kuwait. He did not succeed, but America’s decision to embrace him during his war against Iran was the first phase of a torturous relationship between Washington and Baghdad that culminated in the American invasion of 2003.
Vietnam was the second place where Americans had traumatic experiences that led indirectly to the invasion of Iraq. In Vietnam, as in Iran, the United States suffered a deep humiliation from which it never truly recovered. Bush and many of those around him believed that, a quarter century later, Americans were still suffering from the “Vietnam syndrome,” which they defined as a reluctance to use military force abroad and a nagging sense that the United States had lost its power to shape world events. They saw Iraq as a place where they could win a quick, overwhelming victory that would erase those doubts forever.
The third place whose history strangely influenced the course of events in Iraq was Bush’s home state of Texas. The first whites in Texas imposed order at the point of a gun and then, with encouragement from Washington, rebelled against Mexico to establish a regime of their own. All schoolchildren in Texas learn about the bravery of these men in the face of overwhelming odds. Even more than most other Americans, Texans absorb a sense that good men with guns can bring order out of chaos. With that conviction, and with the quintessentially American belief that anything can be achieved if one tries hard enough, Bush launched an invasion that seemed successful only for the briefest of moments. Very soon the “Mission Accomplished” banner that hung behind him as he swaggered across the deck of the Abraham Lincoln began to look like a cruel joke.