[Peace-discuss] Crack in the facade

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Here's the article from today's Washington Post that I mentioned at the
meeting tonight.  Despite the disagreements in official Washington that
surface in pieces like this, it still seems that this administration is
devoted to getting down to the serious task of killing Arabs fairly soon.
--CGE]

	U.S. Decision On Iraq Has Puzzling Past
	Opponents of War Wonder When, How Policy Was Set 

	By Glenn Kessler
	Washington Post Staff Writer
	Sunday, January 12, 2003; Page A01 

On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 21/2-page document marked "TOP
SECRET" that outlined the plan for going to war in Afghanistan as part of
a global campaign against terrorism.

Almost as a footnote, the document also directed the Pentagon to begin
planning military options for an invasion of Iraq, senior administration
officials said.

The previously undisclosed Iraq directive is characteristic of an internal
decision-making process that has been obscured from public view. Over the
next nine months, the administration would make Iraq the central focus of
its war on terrorism without producing a rich paper trail or record of key
meetings and events leading to a formal decision to act against President
Saddam Hussein, according to a review of administration decision-making
based on interviews with more than 20 participants.

Instead, participants said, the decision to confront Hussein at this time
emerged in an ad hoc fashion. Often, the process circumvented traditional
policymaking channels as longtime advocates of ousting Hussein pushed Iraq
to the top of the agenda by connecting their cause to the war on
terrorism.

With the nation possibly on the brink of war, the result of this murky
process continues to reverberate today: tepid support for military action
at the State Department, muted concern in the military ranks of the
Pentagon and general confusion among relatively senior officials -- and
the public -- about how or even when the policy was decided.

The decision to confront Iraq was in many ways a victory for a small group
of conservatives who, at the start of the administration, found themselves
outnumbered by more moderate voices in the military and the foreign policy
bureaucracy. Their tough line on Iraq before Sept. 11, 2001, was embraced
quickly by President Bush and Vice President Cheney after the attacks. But
that shift was not communicated to opponents of military action until
months later, when the internal battle was already decided.

By the time the policy was set, opponents were left arguing over the
tactics -- such as whether to go to the United Nations -- without clearly
understanding how the decision was reached in the first place. "It simply
snuck up on us," a senior State Department official said.

The administration has embarked on something "quite extraordinary in
American history, a preventive war, and the threshold for justification
should be extraordinarily high," said G. John Ikenberry, an international
relations professor at Georgetown University. But "the external
presentation and the justification for it really seems to be lacking," he
said. "The external presentation appears to mirror the internal
decision-making quite a bit."

Advocates for military action against Iraq say the process may appear
mysterious only because the answer was so self-evident. They believe that
Bush understood instantly after Sept. 11 that Iraq would be the next major
step in the global war against terrorism, and that he made up his mind
within days, if not hours, of that fateful day. "The most important thing
is that the president's position changed after 9/11," said a senior
official who pushed hard for action.

"Saddam Must Go"

A small group of senior officials, especially in the Pentagon and the vice
president's office, have long been concerned about Hussein, and urged his
ouster in articles and open letters years before Bush became president.

Five years ago, the Dec. 1 issue of the Weekly Standard, a conservative
magazine, headlined its cover with a bold directive: "Saddam Must Go: A
How-to Guide." Two of the articles were written by current administration
officials, including the lead one, by Zalmay M. Khalilzad, now special
White House envoy to the Iraqi opposition, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, now
deputy defense secretary.

"We will have to confront him sooner or later -- and sooner would be
better," Khalilzad and Wolfowitz wrote. They called for "sustained attacks
on the elite military units and security forces that are the main pillar
of Saddam's terror-based regime."

In an open letter to President Bill Clinton in early 1998, Wolfowitz,
Khalilzad and eight other people who now hold positions in the Bush
administration -- including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- urged
Clinton to begin "implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime
from power."

Many advocates of action were skeptical that Hussein could be contained
indefinitely, even by repeated weapons inspections, and they viewed his
control of Iraq -- and his possible acquisition of weapons of mass
destruction -- as inherently destabilizing in the region. Many were also
strong supporters of Israel, and they saw ousting Hussein as key to
changing the political dynamic of the entire Middle East.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush and Cheney's position was not
as clear-cut.

In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," about one year before the Sept.
11 attacks, Cheney defended the decision of George H.W. Bush's
administration not to attack Baghdad because, he said, the United States
should not act as though "we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving
into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments." In the
current environment, he said, "we want to maintain our current posture
vis-à-vis Iraq."

Bush, during the campaign, focused more on the dangers of nuclear
proliferation than on the removal of Saddam Hussein. In a December 1999
debate among GOP presidential contenders, Bush backtracked when he said
he'd "take 'em out" if Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Asked by
the moderator whether he had said "take him out," Bush replied, "Take out
the weapons of mass destruction."

"Transformed by Sept. 11"

In the early months of the Bush administration, officials intent on
challenging Hussein sought to put Iraq near the top of the
administration's foreign policy agenda. Many felt frustrated by the
interagency debate. Defense officials seethed as the State Department
pressed ahead with a plan to impose "smart sanctions" on Iraq and, in
their view, threw bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of providing funds to
the Iraqi opposition.

"Even relatively easy decisions were always thrown up to the presidential
level," said a Defense official.

Meanwhile, at the White House, officials worked on refining the
administration's Iraq policy, focusing especially on how to implement the
official U.S. stance of "regime change" articulated by the Clinton
administration. Bush was informed of the deliberations, but nothing had
been settled when the terrorists attacked the Pentagon and World Trade
Center.

"Certainly, different people at different times were arguing for a more
vigorous approach to Saddam," one senior official said. "But nobody
suggested that we have the U.S. military go to Baghdad. That was
transformed by Sept. 11."

Iraq, and its possible possession of weapons of mass destruction, was on
the minds of several key officials as they struggled to grapple with the
aftermath of Sept. 11. Cheney, as he watched the World Trade Center towers
collapse while he was sitting in front of a television in the White
House's underground bunker, turned to an aide and remarked, "As
unfathomable as this was, it could have been so much worse if they had
weapons of mass destruction."

The same thought occurred to other senior officials in the days that
followed. Rumsfeld wondered to aides whether Hussein had a role in the
attacks. Wolfowitz, in public and private conversations, was an especially
forceful advocate for tackling Iraq at the same time as Osama bin Laden.
And within days, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice also privately
began to counsel the president that he needed to go after all rogue
nations harboring weapons of mass destruction.

But these concerns were submerged by the imperative of dealing first with
Afghanistan. "I remember the day that we put the map on the table, and the
color drained from everybody's face," one official said. "Afghanistan is
not the place you would choose to fight."

The Pentagon, while it was fighting the war in Afghanistan, began
reviewing its plans for Iraq because of the secret presidential directive
on Sept. 17. On Sept. 19 and 20, an advisory group known as the Defense
Policy Board met at the Pentagon -- with Rumsfeld in attendance -- and
animatedly discussed the importance of ousting Hussein.

The anthrax attacks, which came soon after Sept. 11, further strengthened
the resolve of some key administration officials to deal with Iraq.
Cheney, in particular, became consumed with the possibility that Iraq or
other countries could distribute biological or chemical weapons to
terrorists, officials said.

Though Cheney's aides said the vice president has been consistently
concerned about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, others perceived a
shift. "To his credit, he looked at the situation differently after Sept.
11 than he did before," one senior official said.

Because the culprit behind the anthrax attacks has not been found, some
administration officials still are convinced that Hussein had a role in
the anthrax attacks. "It's hard to get away from the feeling that the
timing was too much of a coincidence," one official said.

Officials close to the president portray the Iraq decision as a natural
outgrowth of concerns Bush raised during the presidential campaign, and
they say he very quickly decided he needed to challenge Iraq after the
terrorist attacks.

But he didn't publicly raise it earlier because, in the words of one
senior official, "he didn't think the country could handle the shock of
9/11 and a lot of talk about dealing with states that had weapons of mass
destruction."

"What a Fixation"

In free-wheeling meetings of the "principals" during October and November,
Rumsfeld and Cheney emphasized their suspicions of ties between rogue
states, such as Iraq, and terrorists. Some of the conversations were
prompted by intelligence, later discounted, that al Qaeda may have been on
the verge of obtaining a "dirty bomb" that would spread radioactive
material.

By early November, Wayne Downing, a retired Army general who headed
counterterrorism in the White House, on his own initiative began working
up plans for an attack of Iraq, keeping his superiors informed of his
progress. A Pentagon planning group also kept hard at work on possible
options.

"The issue got away from the president," said a senior official who
attended discussions in the White House. "He wasn't controlling the tone
or the direction" and was influenced by people who "painted him into a
corner because Iraq was an albatross around their necks."

After some of these meetings at the White House, Secretary of State Colin
L. Powell, skeptical of military action without the necessary diplomatic
groundwork, would return to his office on the seventh floor of the State
Department, roll his eyes and say, "Jeez, what a fixation about Iraq,"
State Department officials said.

"I do believe certain people have grown theological about this," said
another administration official who opposed focusing so intently on Iraq.
"It's almost a religion -- that it will be the end of our society if we
don't take action now."

"Axis of Evil"

Much of this activity -- and these concerns -- were hidden from the public
eye. Bush barely mentioned Iraq in his address to the nation nine days
after the Sept. 11 attacks. In fact, the administration did not publicly
tip its hand until Bush made his State of the Union address on Jan. 28,
2002. Even then, officials did their best to obscure the meaning of Bush's
words.

Listing Iraq, Iran and North Korea, Bush declared, "States like these, and
their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the
peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes
pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to
terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred."

"I will not wait on events, while dangers gather," Bush warned.

State Department officials puzzled over drafts of the speech and
ultimately concluded the words did not represent a policy shift, though
some were worried the rhetoric would have diplomatic consequences. Powell
"thought it rang an alarm bell since it would send waves out there to
colleagues around the world," a State Department official said.

Powell expressed concerns about the language to the White House, he said.
"But he didn't push it hard."

Briefing reporters at the White House, officials played down the
importance of the "axis of evil." One senior White House official advised
"not to read anything into any [country] name in terms of the next phase"
of the war against terrorism. "We've always said there are a number of
elements of national power" in the U.S. arsenal, the aide added, including
diplomacy and sanctions. "This is not a call to use a specific element" of
that power.

Yet, in this period, Bush also secretly signed an intelligence order,
expanding on a previous presidential finding, that directed the CIA to
undertake a comprehensive, covert program to topple Hussein, including
authority to use lethal force to capture the Iraqi president.

Speculation continued to run high in the media that an attack on Iraq was
imminent. But within the administration, some of the advocates were
becoming depressed about the lack of action, complaining that it was
difficult to focus attention on Iraq, especially as the conflict between
the Israelis and Palestinians spiraled out of control. In March, Cheney
toured the Middle East on a trip dominated by questions from Arab leaders
about the Israeli-Palestinian violence. But he also stressed the
administration's contention that Iraq was a problem that needed to be
addressed.

"I Made Up My Mind"

Then, in April, Bush approached Rice. It was time to figure out "what we
are doing about Iraq," he told her, setting in motion a series of meetings
by the principals and their deputies. "I made up my mind that Saddam needs
to go," Bush hinted to a British reporter at the time. "That's about all
I'm willing to share with you."

At the meetings, senior officials examined new but unconfirmed evidence of
Iraq's programs to build biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and
considered connections between Baghdad and Palestinian terrorism. They
argued over which elements of the Iraqi opposition to back, ultimately
deciding to push for unity among the exiles and within the U.S.
bureaucracy.

By many accounts, they did not deal with the hard question of whether
there should be a confrontation with Iraq. "Most of the internal debate in
the administration has really been about tactics," an official said.

Powell sent his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, who had signed the letter to
Clinton urging Hussein's ouster, to many of the meetings. As a way of
establishing Powell's bona fides with those eager for action, Armitage
would boast -- incorrectly, as it turned out -- that Powell first backed
"regime change" in his confirmation hearings.

Serious military planning also began in earnest in the spring. Every three
or four weeks, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of U.S. Central
Command, would travel to the White House to give Bush a private briefing
on the war planning for Iraq.

On June 1, Bush made another speech, this time at West Point, arguing for
a policy of preemption against potential threats. "If we wait for the
threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long," Bush said.
That month, two major foreign policy headaches -- a potential war between
India and Pakistan and the administration's uncertain policy toward the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- were also resolved, freeing the White
House to turn its full attention to confronting Iraq.

Only later did it become clear that the president already had made up his
mind. In July, the State Department's director of policy planning, Richard
N. Haass, held a regular meeting with Rice and asked whether they should
talk about the pros and cons of confronting Iraq.

Don't bother, Rice replied: The president has made a decision.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company