Those who charge President Bush and Vice President Cheney with lying to get America involved in the war in Iraq, as the New York Times columnist Frank Rich did yesterday, have a special obligation to get the truth correct themselves. It's one thing for Mr. Rich to disagree with the decision to go to war in Iraq and to blame Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for the decision. It's another for Mr. Rich to accuse our elected leaders of misleading the country while the columnist himself goes about misleading readers of The New York Times. . .There's much more; read it all.
September 11 and Iraq
Mr. Rich accuses Mr. Cheney of dissembling by conflating the terrorists of September 11, 2001, with those we are fighting in Iraq. As evidence that Mr. Cheney is lying he cites an American general who says the Iraqi insurgency is 90% homegrown. But it's undisputed that the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq is a Jordanian, Zarqawi, who shares with the rest of Al Qaeda, including the September 11 terrorists, the goal of re-establishing the caliphate. Certainly in their violent targeting of civilians and their jihadist rhetoric, those who attacked New York office buildings on September 11 and those who are blowing up restaurants and hospitals in Iraq have a lot in common. One may choose to emphasize or de-emphasize the similarities, but emphasizing the similarities as Mr. Cheney has done hardly amounts to dissembling.
The DIA Report and Senator Levin
Mr. Rich references a report of the Defense Intelligence Agency released by Senator Levin, a Democrat of Michigan, which Mr. Rich said demolished the credibility of a source the administration used "for its false claims about Iraq-Al Qaeda collaboration." Here's how Mr. Levin hyped the report in a press release. "In February 2002, the DIA stated the following, which has remained classified until now: 'Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.' That DIA finding is stunningly different from repeated Administration claims of a close relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Just imagine the impact if that DIA conclusion had been disclosed at the time. It surely could have made a difference in the congressional vote authorizing the war."
The only stunning thing here is the disingenuousness of Messrs. Levin and Rich. First of all, the DIA report is not much different from what Bush administration officials were saying publicly at the time. On February 6, 2002, the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, made a similar argument in public testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying, "Baghdad has a long history of supporting terrorism, altering its targets to reflect changing priorities and goals. It has also had contacts with al-Qa'ida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides' mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible - even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences."
Moreover, the notion that the secular Baathists and the Islamic jihadists are so ideologically divergent that they will not work together has been disproven by what is going on now in Iraq, where they are cooperating against Iraqi moderates and American troops. . .
The Truth. . .
That the president spoke the truth has been sadly confirmed in free Iraq. The Associated Press's Nadia Abou El-Magd interviewed Firas Adnan, whose tongue had been cut off with a box cutter by a Saddam loyalist. Mr. Adnan, "his slurred words barely comprehensible," said of Saddam, "He is a despot, the biggest despot, Iraq will be much better without him." Susan Sachs of Mr. Rich's own New York Times reported from the mass graves of Hilla: "On April 11, 1991, a few weeks into the Shiite rebellion, Iraqi helicopters dropped leaflets over Karbala ordering everyone to leave or be attacked with chemical weapons. Mr. Mohani piled his relatives into a pickup truck and a car and fled. About four miles south of the city, the escape route was blocked. There, he said, he saw Mr. Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, executing people randomly at a checkpoint. 'He was telling people to get out of their cars and then he would shoot them, shoot them until his arm was too tired to do it anymore.'"
More:
The 9/11 Commission concluded Bush did not blame the 9/11 attacks on Saddam (Chapter 10.3, footnotes omitted):
President Bush had wondered immediately after the attack whether Saddam Hussein's regime might have had a hand in it. Iraq had been an enemy of the United States for 11 years, and was the only place in the world where the United States was engaged in ongoing combat operations. As a former pilot, the President was struck by the apparent sophistication of the operation and some of the piloting, especially Hanjour's high-speed dive into the Pentagon. He told us he recalled Iraqi support for Palestinian suicide terrorists as well. Speculating about other possible states that could be involved, the President told us he also thought about Iran.
Clarke has written that on the evening of September 12, President Bush told him and some of his staff to explore possible Iraqi links to 9/11. "See if Sad-dam did this," Clarke recalls the President telling them. "See if he's linked in any way." While he believed the details of Clarke's account to be incorrect, President Bush acknowledged that he might well have spoken to Clarke at some point, asking him about Iraq.
Responding to a presidential tasking, Clarke's office sent a memo to Rice on September 18, titled "Survey of Intelligence Information on Any Iraq Involvement in the September 11 Attacks." Rice's chief staffer on Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, concurred in its conclusion that only some anecdotal evidence linked Iraq to al Qaeda. The memo found no "compelling case" that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks. It passed along a few foreign intelligence reports, including the Czech report alleging an April 2001 Prague meeting between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer (discussed in chapter 7) and a Polish report that personnel at the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad were told before September 11 to go on the streets to gauge crowd reaction to an unspecified event. Arguing that the case for links between Iraq and al Qaeda was weak, the memo pointed out that Bin Ladin resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein's regime. Finally, the memo said, there was no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with Bin Ladin on unconventional weapons.
On the afternoon of 9/11, according to contemporaneous notes, Secretary Rumsfeld instructed General Myers to obtain quickly as much information as possible. The notes indicate that he also told Myers that he was not simply interested in striking empty training sites. He thought the U.S. response should consider a wide range of options and possibilities. The secretary said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time-not only Bin Ladin. Secretary Rumsfeld later explained that at the time, he had been considering either one of them, or perhaps someone else, as the responsible party.
According to Rice, the issue of what, if anything, to do about Iraq was really engaged at Camp David. Briefing papers on Iraq, along with many others, were in briefing materials for the participants. Rice told us the administration was concerned that Iraq would take advantage of the 9/11 attacks. She recalled that in the first Camp David session chaired by the President, Rumsfeld asked what the administration should do about Iraq. Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz made the case for striking Iraq during "this round" of the war on terrorism.
A Defense Department paper for the Camp David briefing book on the strategic concept for the war on terrorism specified three priority targets for initial action: al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iraq. It argued that of the three, al Qaeda and Iraq posed a strategic threat to the United States. Iraq's long-standing involvement in terrorism was cited, along with its interest in weapons of mass destruction.
Secretary Powell recalled that Wolfowitz-not Rumsfeld-argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked. Powell said that Wolfowitz was not able to justify his belief that Iraq was behind 9/11. "Paul was always of the view that Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with," Powell told us. "And he saw this as one way of using this event as a way to deal with the Iraq problem." Powell said that President Bush did not give Wolfowitz's argument "much weight." Though continuing to worry about Iraq in the following week, Powell said, President Bush saw Afghanistan as the priority.
President Bush told Bob Woodward that the decision not to invade Iraq was made at the morning session on September 15. Iraq was not even on the table during the September 15 afternoon session, which dealt solely with Afghanistan. Rice said that when President Bush called her on Sunday, September 16, he said the focus would be on Afghanistan, although he still wanted plans for Iraq should the country take some action or the administration eventually determine that it had been involved in the 9/11 attacks.
At the September 17 NSC meeting, there was some further discussion of "phase two" of the war on terrorism. President Bush ordered the Defense Department to be ready to deal with Iraq if Baghdad acted against U.S. interests, with plans to include possibly occupying Iraqi oil fields.
Within the Pentagon, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz continued to press the case for dealing with Iraq. Writing to Rumsfeld on September 17 in a memo headlined "Preventing More Events," he argued that if there was even a 10 percent chance that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack, maximum priority should be placed on eliminating that threat. Wolfowitz contended that the odds were "far more" than 1 in 10, citing Saddam's praise for the attack, his long record of involvement in terrorism, and theories that Ramzi Yousef was an Iraqi agent and Iraq was behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The next day, Wolfowitz renewed the argument, writing to Rumsfeld about the interest of Yousef's co-conspirator in the 1995 Manila air plot in crashing an explosives-laden plane into CIA headquarters, and about information from a foreign government regarding Iraqis' involvement in the attempted hijacking of a Gulf Air flight. Given this background, he wondered why so little thought had been devoted to the danger of suicide pilots, seeing a "failure of imagination" and a mind-set that dismissed possibilities.
On September 19, Rumsfeld offered several thoughts for his commanders as they worked on their contingency plans. Though he emphasized the worldwide nature of the conflict, the references to specific enemies or regions named only the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Afghanistan. Shelton told us the administration reviewed all the Pentagon's war plans and challenged certain assumptions underlying them, as any prudent organization or leader should do.
General Tommy Franks, the commanding general of Central Command, recalled receiving Rumsfeld's guidance that each regional commander should assess what these plans meant for his area of responsibility. He knew he would soon be striking the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But, he told us, he now wondered how that action was connected to what might need to be done in Somalia, Yemen, or Iraq.
On September 20, President Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the two leaders discussed the global conflict ahead. When Blair asked about Iraq, the President replied that Iraq was not the immediate problem. Some members of his administration, he commented, had expressed a different view, but he was the one responsible for making the decisions.
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