The Anthrax Mailer
kathleen
scales.
"The *most important factor* was also the simplest. By the fall of
2001, Bush and other senior policymakers in Washington were scared out
of their wits. On Oct. 4 came the first anthrax attacks on New York
City and Washington.
Again, no evidence was found linking Saddam to the
attacks. But Saddam had once admitted developing anthrax weapons to
U.N. inspectors, and now anthrax was being used to kill Americans.
Even if a link to Baghdad could not be proved, this was enough to
stiffen the spines of those who thought Saddam's WMDs had been left
alone too long. "
---------------------------------
First Stop, Iraq
By Michael Elliott and James Carney
How did the U.S. end up taking on Saddam? The inside story of how Iraq
jumped to the top of Bush's agenda --and why the outcome there may
foreshadow a different world order
"F___ Saddam. we're taking him out." Those were the words of President
George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators,
discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or
perhaps in a coalition with America's Middle East allies. Bush wasn't
interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and
neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase.
The Senators laughed uncomfortably; Rice flashed a knowing smile. The
President left the room. A year later, Bush's outburst has been
translated into action, as cruise missiles and smart bombs slam into
Baghdad.
But the apparent simplicity of his message belies the gravity at hand.
Sure, the outcome is certain: America will win the war, and Saddam
will be taken out. But what is unfolding in Iraq is far bigger than
regime change or even the elimination of dangerous weapons.
The U.S. has launched a war unlike any it has fought in the past. This
one is being waged not to defend against an enemy that has attacked
the U.S. or its interests but to pre-empt the possibility that one day
it might do so. The war has turned much of the world against America.
Even in countries that have joined the "coalition of the willing," big
majorities view it as the impetuous action of a superpower led by a
bully. This divide threatens to emasculate a United Nations that
failed to channel a diplomatic settlement or brand the war as
legitimate.
The endgame will see the U.S. front and center, attempting to remake
not merely Iraq but the entire region. The hope is that the Middle
East, a cockpit of instability for decades, will eventually settle
into habits of democracy, prosperity and peace. The risks are that
Washington's rupture with some of its closest allies will deepen and
that the war will become a cause for which a new generation of
terrorists can be recruited.
How did we get here? In one sense, this war is easy to explain. Saddam
Hussein is a brutal dictator who hates America and has shown a wicked
fondness for acquiring and using weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has been acutely aware of what can
happen when powerful weapons fall into the hands of those with no
compunction about their use and no sympathy for those they kill.
Put those facts together, and you can argue that Saddam's days were
numbered from the moment the attacks on New York City and Washington
happened. But that suggests a fatalistic inevitability to the story
and ignores the dramatic shifts in opinion and influence among
Washington's key players. In truth, this war is just as much about an
idea--that Iraq is but the first step in an American-led effort to
make the world a safer place.
For some in the Administration, the principles that have shaped policy
on Iraq are generally applicable; they could be used with other
nations, like Iran or North Korea, that have or threaten to acquire
terrible weapons. The least understood story of the Iraq crisis is how
the idea behind it took root and eventually brought America to the
edge of Baghdad. In this battle march of an idea, there are four
central players: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary
of State Colin Powell and--least known to the general public--Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
One by one, these men signed on to the imperative of taking on Iraq
and its weapons, and sending a message to the world. This story does
not start where one might suppose, on the day last year when Bush
identified Iraq--with Iran and North Korea--as part of the "axis of
evil." Nor does it start with the horrors of Sept. 11. The
confrontation with Iraq can be traced to 1991 and the end of what some
Administration officials have since last fall called "the first Gulf
War"--the one waged and won by the President's father.
SOUNDING THE ALARM
When senior advisers of the first president Bush--including Powell,
then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Cheney, then Secretary
of Defense--gathered in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, Feb.
27, 1991, they agreed that their military and political objectives in
the Persian Gulf had been met. Saddam's forces, which had invaded
Kuwait seven months before, had been routed.
General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in chief of Operation Desert
Storm, concurred in the judgment. Bush had a clear goal for the war:
it was not to topple Saddam, much less to march on Baghdad, but to
drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. The President had assembled a
grand coalition, including armies from many Arab states, behind that
aim, and he was not inclined to deviate from it.
"Bush was a firm believer in sticking with his word," says a former
senior aide. "It was his word and his promises that got that coalition
together. There was never any doubt in his mind that the war had to
end and we couldn't go to Baghdad."
None of the four men--Bush, Powell, Cheney and Schwarzkopf--most
closely identified with the decision to cease hostilities at midnight,
Feb. 27, has ever publicly disowned it. Indeed, of the broader top
echelon of decision makers at the end of Gulf War I, only one has cast
doubt on how it was concluded--and at the time, nobody asked his
opinion.
But his misgivings about the cease-fire 12 years ago have arguably had
more of an effect on global politics than the certainties of those who
are sure they were right. That man was Paul Wolfowitz, then Under
Secretary for policy in the Pentagon, the third-ranking civilian under
Cheney.
He was 47 at the time and already a fixture in the Washington policy
village, one of those men who spend their life flitting among
government positions, foreign embassies and academia. Wolfowitz has
served every President since Gerald Ford except Bill Clinton. A man of
great personal charm, he has friends of all political persuasions. Of
his many distinctions, the most unusual, perhaps, is this: he is the
only Washington bureaucrat who has been fictionalized in a Saul Bellow
novel. That odd fact sheds light on Wolfowitz's membership in a much
smaller subset of Washington officials.
In Bellow's novel Ravelstein, the Wolfowitz character is a brilliant
former student of the book's eponymous hero, who is based on Bellow's
old friend and fellow professor at the University of Chicago, the
culture critic Allan Bloom. It was at Chicago, the home of Bloom and
the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss, that Wolfowitz was
first exposed to the set of ideas that is now often called
"neoconservative." In their belief system, neoconservatives--or
neo-Reaganites, as some prefer to be called--are at once pessimists
and optimists.
The world, they believe, is a dangerous, threatening place.
Civilization and democracy hang by a thread; great beasts prowl the
forest, ready to prey on those not tough enough to meet them in equal
combat. At the same time--this is the optimistic bit--the U.S. is
endowed by Providence with the power to make the world better if it
will only take the risks of leadership to do so; if, in the current
jargon, it is sufficiently "forward leaning."
At crucial times, they argue, the U.S. has been just that--notably
when Ronald Reagan used American technological prowess and cash to
challenge the Soviet Union to a contest it could not win. The U.S.,
neoconservatives believe, is unique in its power and its principles.
It cannot allow its mission to be tied down by international
agreements that diminish its freedom of action. At the same time,
neoconservatives insist that theirs is a generous and internationalist
vision; other nations, other peoples, will willingly support U.S.
policies--which, by definition, are good for them as well as
Americans--if only those policies are clearly articulated and
implemented with determination.
These beliefs are not the work of thoughtless gunslingers. Wolfowitz,
like many of his colleagues, couldn't be less of a cowboy. (Not many
cattle in Chevy Chase, Md.) These are men whose shoes are more likely
to be penny loafers than hand-tooled boots, who speak foreign
languages (even French!) and are at home in rarefied academic
environments. They know what they think. In a recent interview
Wolfowitz told TIME, "I believe this country is what it stands for,
more than anything else. If we're not true to our principles, we're
not serving our national interest."
He bridles at the way some lampoon him, as if he believes that, with
U.S. intervention, Jeffersonian democracy will pop up in the Middle
East like mushrooms after a storm. But he explicitly links the growth
of democracy to America's interests. "The tendency toward successful
representative self-government," he told TIME, "works for the benefit
of the United States and the world." When Wolfowitz heard that Gulf
War I was over, he didn't share the inner circle's view of a job well
done.
Although he didn't suggest that Schwarzkopf should march on
Baghdad--and has not done so since--he was disappointed that the war
did not continue long enough to ensure Saddam's downfall. He was
horrified when the U.S. stood by as Saddam's helicopter gunships mowed
down the Shi'ites in southern Iraq whom the U.S. had encouraged to
rise in rebellion.
To Wolfowitz, Saddam's survival represented an opportunity missed. In
a 1998 congressional hearing, he said, "Some might say--and I think I
would sympathize with this view--that perhaps if we had delayed the
cease-fire by a few more days, we might have got rid of him." Regimes
like Iraq's, dictatorial and willing to acquire and use terrifying
weapons, have long been a preoccupation of the neoconservatives. Since
the collapse of the Soviet Union, they argue, it is these states that
most threaten the U.S. and other democracies.
They are today's beasts in the forest, and they need to be tamed.
Shortly after Gulf War I ended in 1991, Wolfowitz got a chance to show
how. Cheney asked him to overhaul the Pentagon's basic
strategic-planning document, known as the Defense Planning Guidance.
In March 1992, a draft was first leaked to the New York Times. Forward
leaning wasn't the half of it; the document suggested that the U.S.
should discourage other nations "from challenging our leadership."
The U.S., the draft went on to say, "may be faced with the question of
whether to take military steps to prevent the development or use of
weapons of mass destruction." Those steps, Wolfowitz argued, might
include pre-emptive action--and the Guidance made clear that both Iraq
and North Korea were among those at whom the new policy would be
aimed.
At a time when the Bush Administration was trying to coax a defeated
Russia and a newly unified Germany into becoming full and respected
partners in the international system, the draft's bellicose terms were
tactless. Cheney and Wolfowitz were told to tone them down. But from
his perch at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies, where he waited out the Clinton years, Wolfowitz continued to
talk and write about Iraq. Like a traveler struggling to keep his
campfire burning amid chilly winds, he took every chance to stoke the
fire, reminding all who would listen that there was unfinished
business on the Tigris, that Saddam remained in power and still had
his weapons. In 1997, as Clinton's policy on Iraq lurched from crisis
to crisis--with U.N. weapons inspectors consistently thwarted by Iraq
and support for a more aggressive approach to Saddam ebbing away under
French and Russian pressure at the Security Council--Wolfowitz
co-authored a Weekly Standard article in which he pondered whether
Clinton's most important foreign-policy legacy would be "letting this
tyrant get stronger."
In January 1998, Wolfowitz joined other neoconservatives in signing a
letter to Clinton arguing that "containment" of Saddam had failed and
asserting that "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power ...
needs to become the aim of American foreign policy." In a prescient
note, the letter said, "American policy cannot continue to be crippled
by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the U.N. Security Council."
Of the 18 signatories, eight now hold senior positions in the Bush
Administration. But high office in itself was not enough. If they were
to rid the world of Saddam and his weapons, they would have to bring
on board one influential conservative whose name wasn't on the
letter--who at the time was in thought and deed far removed from the
Washington policy village. That person was Dick Cheney, who had good
reasons to contest the view that the end of Gulf War I had been
mishandled--because he was one of those who ended it.
THE RELUCTANT IMPERIALIST
Of all those responsible for the cease-fire in February 1991, none
seemed more comfortable with the decision than Cheney. In many
interviews Cheney explained why he opposed marching to Baghdad. If
U.S. forces got there, he argued, it would not be clear what they were
meant to do.
Nor was it evident how a new government would handle divisions among
Iraq's Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds, how long the U.S. would have to
stay in Iraq, or what would happen when it left. Two considerations
informed Cheney's view. The first, according to Dave Gribbin, Cheney's
closest aide at the Pentagon, was practical. Just a few days after the
invasion of Kuwait, Bush had assigned Cheney to win support from
Saddam's Arab neighbors. "He was out there early telling the Arab
world that the U.S. would come in and do just a couple of things,"
says Gribbin. "Get Saddam out of Kuwait and dismantle his ability to
harm his neighbors. Since he promised that, he stuck with that. To
occupy Iraq wasn't in the deal."
The second reason--the more interesting one--turned on Cheney's
political philosophy. Cheney is from Wyoming, and in 1991 he was
pretty much a straight-up-and-down Western conservative, the kind of
man who is skeptical of big, expansive government projects--except
irrigation for cattle ranges. He was prepared to go to war in the gulf
because it was in America's national interest to do so, not for any
starry-eyed vision (few men have ever had fewer stars in their eyes)
that the U.S., as a kindly imperial power, would bring an era of
peace, order and good government to the Middle East. "He's not much
for waxing rhapsodic," says Gribbin of his old boss.
In fact, when Cheney left government, he gave the impression that he
wasn't thinking much about Iraq or Saddam. In 1995 he moved to Texas
to serve as CEO of Halliburton, the giant oil-services company. A
colleague of Cheney's in both Bush administrations recalled how he
would drop by Cheney's office when he visited Texas. "His interest in
policy almost disappeared," says the colleague. "He was enjoying being
out of it and in the business world."
By the fall of 2000, however, Cheney was back in it--big time. As the
vice-presidential running mate of the son of his old boss, he was
beginning to focus on problems the Clinton Administration had been
unable to solve. High among them was Iraq's continued defiance of U.N.
resolutions requiring it to disarm. And when he broached the topic on
the campaign trail, Cheney sounded ever more hawkish. He had been
outraged by Saddam's attempt in 1993 to assassinate former President
Bush in Kuwait, and he thought the short bombing campaign after Iraq
kicked out the U.N. inspectors in 1998 was a joke.
"We have swept that problem under the rug for too long," he told a
campaign aide in 2000, speaking of Iraq. "We have a festering problem
there." When Cheney was tapped to create the second Bush
Administration, he seeded it with men who had once worked for him.
Wolfowitz became Deputy Secretary of Defense under Cheney's old friend
and mentor Donald Rumsfeld (another signatory of the 1998 letter).
But as is often the case, the new responsibilities of office meant
that officials had to postpone trying to implement their most
cherished to-do list. In the State Department, Powell was working on a
plan for "smart sanctions" on Iraq--tightening the porous U.N. embargo
while allowing more humanitarian support for innocent Iraqis. The
neoconservatives weren't impressed, but in those initial months they
were able to do little to develop their own strategies for ousting
Saddam.
Then Cheney, probably the most influential Vice President in U.S.
history, began to pay attention. His interest grew out of the Bush
Administration's obsession with building a system to defend the U.S.
against missile attacks. For the neoconservatives, missile defense and
Iraq's possession of WMDs were both examples of a common concern,
"asymmetric threats," or the idea that nations with far less
conventional military strength than the U.S. would use nuclear,
chemical or biological weapons to redress the balance.
Cheney had been charged with developing a policy on homeland security
in response to asymmetric threats, which meant that Iraq's continued
possession of WMDs was a problem that landed on his desk. In morning
intelligence briefings, says a former Administration official, the
Vice President began to raise questions about Saddam's regime.
Cheney and others, says the official, would say things like, "Tell me
about Iraq, tell me about Iraq, tell me about Iraq. What's the status
of their WMDs? What's their support of terrorism?" When senior members
of the intelligence community answered that they had little new
information on Iraq--no smoking guns on WMDs or terrorism--the message
would come back: "Try harder. Need to know more." In an interview with
the New Yorker in May 2001, Cheney in two sentences linked North
Korea, Iran and Iraq--the three countries that were later immortalized
as the "axis of evil"--as threats to American security. Cheney still
didn't buy into the whole neoconservative analysis.
His concern was the national security of the U.S., not some grand
design for remaking the Middle East. But after Sept. 11, 2001, it was
harder to keep those two thoughts in separate boxes. The attacks on
New York City and Washington gave the neoconservatives an opportunity.
The logic seemed airtight: Saddam had WMDs; terrorists had attacked
America; if al-Qaeda ever got hold of Saddam's weapons, the future
didn't bear thinking about. The afternoon after the attacks,
Wolfowitz, in conference calls with other officials, started voicing
suspicions that Iraq might somehow have been involved.
Within hours, he was lobbying Cheney on the topic, arguing--a central
plank of the neoconservative analysis--that Iraq was also somehow
behind the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Within
days, James Woolsey, once Clinton's head of the CIA but who had joined
the neoconservatives on Iraq, was dispatched by the Pentagon to find
proof that Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda. Cheney was skeptical of the
claim. (U.S. intelligence has never been able to substantiate a link
between Iraq and the 1993 World Trade Center attack--or the assault of
2001.)
But Wolfowitz stayed on the case. On the weekend after Sept. 11, Bush
convened his national-security team at Camp David. Wolfowitz argued
that if military action was to be taken against the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, which was harboring the leadership of al-Qaeda, it should
also be taken against Iraq. Saddam's regime had WMDs, had shown that
it was willing to use them, and harbored a continuing hostility to the
U.S. Powell was opposed to anything so ambitious, however, and Cheney
didn't back up his old Pentagon colleague.
Rice says the Vice President was a "proponent of doing one thing at a
time--Afghanistan first." But Cheney wasn't entirely in Powell's camp.
In fact, in his taciturn, deliberate way, Cheney was starting to go
through a shift in his intellectual bearings. "Dick Cheney," says
Wolfowitz, "is someone whose view of the need to get rid of Saddam
Hussein was transformed by Sept. 11--by the recognition of the danger
posed by the connection between terrorists and WMDs and by the growing
evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda."
After Sept. 11, Cheney began running a self-education seminar on Islam
and the Middle East, meeting with experts, a Cheney aide says, "to
discuss how might a postwar Iraq take shape and what are the prospects
for democracy in the region." Cheney, friends say, has gradually
abandoned his former skepticism about the potential for democracy in
the Middle East. Among those who have influenced him: Bernard Lewis, a
Princeton historian, and Fouad Ajami, a former colleague of
Wolfowitz's at Johns Hopkins.
Both men passionately believe that the lack of democracy and pluralism
are central to the chronic instability of the Middle East and that any
serious policy there must aspire to do more than leave existing
autocracies in power. Republican Congressman Porter Goss recalls a
telling moment a few months after Sept. 11, when he was among the
guests at a "sort of off-night dinner" at the Vice President's
residence. Lewis was there too, and Cheney, when he arrived, promptly
asked the professor to conduct a seminar on Islam, the Koran and
Muslim attitudes toward Americans.
Cheney expressed his views most forcefully in a major speech to the
Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville in August 2002.
"Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the
region," he said, including "the chance to promote the values that can
bring lasting peace." He quoted Ajami's conviction that after
liberation, the streets of Baghdad and Basra would "erupt in joy in
the same way as the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans."
By last summer, to the surprise of many old critics, Cheney's
intellectual journey was complete. William Kristol, editor of the
Weekly Standard, the Koran of neoconservative thought, was critical
when Bush chose Cheney as a running mate precisely because of his
defense of the way the Gulf War ended. Now, says Kristol,
neoconservatives happily "consider him a fellow-traveler." But a
couple of others still had to be persuaded to come along on the
journey.
THE EUREKA MOMENT
At the time of Gulf War I, George W. Bush was spending a lot more time
worrying about the Texas Rangers of the American League than about the
Rangers in Army fatigues. During his father's presidency, Bush was an
occasional and important political fixer, but he was never
involved--never wanted to be involved, and was never invited to be
involved--in foreign policy. When he ran for the presidency in 2000,
his team of advisers spent little time on Iraq.
To be sure, whenever he was asked about Saddam, Bush had the tough
talk down. In an interview with TIME during the campaign, he was asked
what he would do if Saddam tested him. "That would be good," said
Bush. "I've learned one thing; I'd jump on him." But despite the
aggressive language, there was no sign that he had accepted the logic
of a pre-emptive strike against Saddam. After Sept. 11, he initially
resisted making Iraq an early target of American might. Wolfowitz,
says a Republican lawmaker, "was like a parrot bringing [Iraq] up all
the time. It was getting on the President's nerves."
At one point in the Camp David meeting after Sept. 11, Wolfowitz tried
to persuade Bush to back a scheme to lop off the southern part of
Iraq, including Basra, its third largest city, and some important oil
fields. That went nowhere. And no matter how hard the intelligence
agencies looked, they couldn't come up with a link between Saddam and
Sept. 11 that might persuade Bush of the virtues of an early strike.
Yet in January 2002, Bush identified Iraq as a member of an "axis of
evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."
The President told Congress that he "would not wait on events while
dangers gather"--a clear sign that he was contemplating pre-emptive
strikes against those with WMDs. By April 2002, on Bush's instruction,
Cheney toured the Middle East trying to make the case for action
against Saddam. What had changed? What had brought Bush into the
get-Iraq-now camp?
The most important factor was also the simplest. By the fall of 2001,
Bush and other senior policymakers in Washington were scared out of
their wits. On Oct. 4 came the first anthrax attacks on New York City
and Washington. Again, no evidence was found linking Saddam to the
attacks. But Saddam had once admitted developing anthrax weapons to
U.N. inspectors, and now anthrax was being used to kill Americans.
Even if a link to Baghdad could not be proved, this was enough to
stiffen the spines of those who thought Saddam's WMDs had been left
alone too long.
Then, in November 2001, as alliance soldiers combed through al-Qaeda
safe houses in Afghanistan, documents and computer records revealed
that Osama bin Laden's network had been trying to acquire WMDs.
Administration officials didn't have to work hard to identify a
possible supplier. "Iraq," says a White House official, "was the
easiest place they could get them from." Says a former senior
Administration official: "The eureka moment was that realization by
the President that were a WMD to fall into [terrorists'] hands, their
willingness to use it would be unquestioned. So we must act
pre-emptively to ensure that those who have that capability aren't
allowed to proliferate it."
Those seeking to convince Bush that Saddam should be a target now had
important allies. Throughout the 1990s, the uniformed military had
been unenthusiastic about intervention in Iraq. After Sept. 11, that
changed. "It became clear that these terrorists would kill as many
Americans as they could," says an Army general. "If they could get
their hands on chemical, biological or nuclear weapons--from Saddam or
from someone else--they would use them against us."
There was more. By 2002, say advisers to the President, Bush had
become increasingly horrified by stories of Saddam's brutal regime--by
the ways in which Iraq's security services raped and tortured his
opponents, gassed Kurds rebelling against rule from Baghdad in 1988
and summarily executed those Saddam mistrusted. This fascination with
Saddam's cruelty, says a source close to the White House, was neither
ghoulish nor an expression of Bush's propensity to identify evil in
the world. The point, says this adviser, is that Bush thinks Saddam is
insane. "If there is one thing standing between those who want WMDs
and those who have them," says this source, "it is this madman.
Depending on the sanity of Saddam is not an option." By this point,
Bush was on board for action against Iraq. But in what form? It was
easy to say Iraq should be disarmed and Saddam unseated from power if
he would not abandon his WMDs. But by the spring of 2002, the
Administration had no idea how to achieve such a goal. Would the U.S.
do it alone? What would Washington tell its allies in the Middle East
and Europe?
In March, as he did 12 years earlier, Cheney set out on a trip to the
Middle East to rally support for an aggressive American policy against
Iraq. The trip didn't go well. Cheney's hosts wanted to talk about the
rising tide of violence in Israel and the occupied territories, not
about Iraq. If there was going to be an international effort to disarm
Saddam or remove him from power, it would have to be led by the man
who, up to now, had steadfastly resisted the neoconservative
case--Colin Powell.
NO LONGER A DOVE
When Powell took over at state in 2001, he had no illusions that
Clinton's policy on Iraq was a success, because he had to cope with
its failures. Every day news would arrive of another violation of the
U.N. sanctions--civilian planes from Arab nations making direct
flights to Baghdad, brazen exports of oil and imports of prohibited
goods. Powell didn't want to ditch the sanctions, as he thought they
had some value, but he wanted to make them more effective.
"Though [the Iraqis] may be pursuing weapons of mass destruction of
all kinds," he said in February 2001, "it is not clear how successful
they have been. We ought to declare this a success. We have kept him
contained, kept him in his box."
That analysis, of course, was precisely the one the neoconservatives
had long rejected, and it was inevitably subject to revision after
Sept. 11. At the Camp David meeting, Powell argued against targeting
Iraq, but he too knew the game had changed. There would be no more
talk, says a State official, of Saddam being kept "in his box."
By the spring of 2002, the Administration had a new problem. Beyond
that nifty phrase "the axis of evil," it didn't have a forward-leaning
policy on Iraq. It didn't have anything. Cheney's trip to the Middle
East, designed to start building a coalition for action to disarm
Iraq, had fallen well short of his hopes. One of his aides admitted
that the team had underestimated Arab anger at Israel's crackdown on
the occupied territories.
"We thought [the Arab governments] were exaggerating 'the street' for
their own purposes," says the official. "They weren't." After Cheney's
return, the Administration's incoherence on Iraq began to spill out.
Officials started free-lancing. Exiled Iraqi opposition leaders,
convinced that war was imminent, began lobbying for favors.
Campaigning for congressional Republicans, Cheney started to test the
waters for a pre-emptive strike to "remove serious threats to our
country before they materialize." (He never mentioned Iraq by name,
but everyone knew what he meant.) Republican congressional leaders,
facing an election, fretted that the disarray would hurt them
politically. At one point that spring, a senior White House official
said in exasperation, "The dirty little secret of Iraq is that there
is no plan." Rice, responding to a request by Democratic Senator Joe
Biden for Administration officials to appear before his Foreign
Relations Committee, was refreshingly blunt. "We're not ready yet,"
she told Biden, who held the hearings anyway.
They were covered widely as a preparation for war, to the
consternation of Republican congressional leaders. Trent Lott, then
Senate leader of the G.O.P., called Cheney to tell him the media were
making the Administration's Iraq policy for it. "We've got to get this
thing on track," Lott said.
Powell was trying to do just that. On Aug. 5, he and Rice had dinner
with Bush in the White House. Powell argued that if Saddam was to be
disarmed, it was best to do so with the backing of the international
community. The Security Council, Powell said, was ready to force
Saddam to accept weapons inspectors for the first time since 1998.
Bush was hearing the same argument from old colleagues of his
father's, like Brent Scowcroft, Rice's predecessor and mentor, and
from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was due to visit Camp
David at the end of the month.
On Aug. 26, in Crawford, Texas, Bush held a meeting of the National
Security Council over a secure videoconference system. Powell argued
that taking the Iraq issue to the U.N. would maintain international
support and close off no options. Reluctantly, Cheney and Rumsfeld
agreed. Bush would make the case at the U.N. in September, challenging
the Security Council to enforce its resolutions on Iraqi disarmament.
But Cheney pushed back. Without informing Powell, he decided that his
speech to the V.F.W. convention in Nashville would set out the
hard-line case against Saddam--including Cheney's judgment that the
return of inspectors would be a "false comfort" and provide "no
assurance whatsoever" of Iraq's compliance with U.N. resolutions. He
spoke openly of what the U.S. would do after a regime change in
Iraq--implying that it was prepared to go to war to get Saddam out.
Cheney wasn't free-lancing. He and Bush had settled on the fine print
of the speech together.
For the two men, the position that the Administration now held had a
certain logic. Multilateral support for action against Saddam in the
U.N., they thought, would come only if the Security Council was
convinced that the U.S. would go it alone if it had to; inspections
would work only if they were backed up by a credible threat of force
if Saddam did not come clean on his weapons.
After Bush's speech, Powell and his team set about drafting a
text--Security Council Resolution 1441--that would promise Saddam
"serious consequences," meaning war, if he passed up a last chance to
disarm. The negotiations were tough. The French were determined that
if Iraq was found to be in breach, the Security Council should meet
again before going to war.
On Nov. 2, as he was waiting to escort his daughter down the aisle at
her wedding, Powell received a call from Dominique de Villepin, the
French Foreign Minister, and the two men settled on the outlines of a
compromise. Six days later, the Security Council voted unanimously in
favor of Resolution 1441. The mood at State was ebullient; the
Security Council, said a senior official, had "found Iraq guilty and
offered it a probation."
Powell, say State Department sources, was convinced that if it came to
the crunch and Saddam violated 1441, France and every other
significant nation would back the U.S. in a vote for war. It didn't
turn out that way, and perhaps it never could. Resolution 1441, like
so many other diplomatic texts, turned out to have enough ambiguities
in it to mean all things to all men. The French insist that they
understood the resolution allowed some time for inspections to work.
"Maybe six months, maybe 12, maybe 18," says a top aide to French
President Jacques Chirac. By December, Paris was starting to panic.
The Americans, says the aide to Chirac, were saying, "We're putting
Saddam to a test that he's certain to fail. In a few weeks, we'll have
a green light for a military attack." Every time Saddam did
something--accept the weapons inspectors back, provide a report on his
WMD--the French saw it as proof that inspections were working.
The Americans, by contrast, saw it as continued Iraqi obstruction.
"Each time there was progress," says a French official, "instead of
demanding more, Bush portrayed it as deception and trickery." The real
problem, says this official, is that Saddam was canny enough not to
make "one big mistake"--a stiffing of the inspectors so egregious that
even those most opposed to war would be forced to concede that the
time for diplomacy was over. As late as January, the Administration
was convinced that France would come around.
"This is what the French do," said a senior U.S. official. "They
resist, and then when the time comes, they move to the head of the
parade." The Administration missed what was happening in Europe. In
the summer, to save his skin in federal elections, German Chancellor
Gerhard Schroder came out against military action in Iraq under any
circumstances. He and Chirac had long had chilly relations, but last
fall the French and German governments began to work toward a set of
common positions on a variety of issues.
For the French, this was vital. With Germany set to take a seat on the
Security Council in January, Paris would no longer be facing the
Americans alone. On Jan. 14, at a meeting to prepare for the 40th
anniversary of a treaty of friendship between the two nations, Chirac
said France's position on the need to continue with inspections was
"identical" to Germany's. Six days later, on Martin Luther King Day,
Powell--at de Villepin's request--attended a Security Council session
that was to debate terrorism.
The meeting was relatively uneventful, though Joschka Fischer,
Germany's Foreign Minister, said a military strike against Iraq would
make fighting terrorism more difficult. But at the press conference
afterward, de Villepin dropped his bomb. France, he said, thought that
"nothing justifies envisaging military action." It was the plainest
signal possible that so long as the inspectors were getting
cooperation from Saddam, Paris would not support a war.
Though it was not clear at the time, the attempt to build a unified
international position on Iraq died that day. Everything that
followed--the gnomic reports by Hans Blix, the U.N.'s chief
biochemical-weapons inspector; Powell's presentation of new
intelligence on Saddam's WMD capabilities; increasingly frantic
British efforts to forge a new resolution that might win a majority of
the Council--was no more than flowers on the coffin of Resolution
1441.
Powell was furious at the Martin Luther King Day ambush. "He had won
an internal debate within the Administration to go to the U.N.," says
a Republican Senator. "But the French ratted out on him. That lowered
his stock." The next weekend Powell flew to the World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland, and friends found him despondent.
"He was frustrated by the disinterest of the allies," says a
Congressman who spoke to him at Davos. "He had laid out the facts
about Iraq's transgressions. He truly believed we'd done all we could
on the diplomatic front. We'd exhausted it."
Resolution 1441, Powell said grimly on the eve of war, set the
Security Council a test that it "did not meet." Once Powell had
shifted his allegiance to the group determined to take out Saddam, the
Iraqi dictator's fate was sealed.
The extraordinary power of the American armed forces would see to
that. Historians will long debate whether the road to war in Iraq
could have been handled a different way--and ask if the U.N. could
have formed a united front against Saddam, as it did in Gulf War I,
and avoided the bitter breaches between old friends that have
characterized the past few months.
To be sure, mistakes--as politicians say--were made; American
diplomacy was curiously lacking in the weeks after adoption of
Resolution 1441, when it might have been possible to maintain the
unity that was demonstrated when the resolution passed the Security
Council. But perhaps unity was an impossible dream.
For the intellectual roots of the war with Iraq and the personal
sensibilities of the four Americans who paved the road to battle took
shape in a specific time and place. Everyone sensible--French,
American, Russian, German--has known for years that Saddam is a
dangerous tyrant who brutalizes his people, is prepared to threaten
others and bears abiding grudges.
But only one nation--the U.S.--has suffered the thousands of deaths
that a few people with a deep hatred could inflict. "I do think 9/11
is a historic watershed," Cheney told NBC News last week. The U.S., he
said, was worried that the next attack on its territory "could involve
far deadlier weapons than the world has ever seen. The rest of the
world hasn't had to come to grips with that yet." That is true. It is
also true that Iraq is not the only nation that either has such deadly
weapons or would like to get them.
North Korea, Iran, possibly Libya and Syria would all love to have the
power that Saddam coveted. The unanswered question of the Iraq story
is whether the ideas behind it will one day be used in other places
too.
--With reporting by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, John F.
Dickerson, Mark Thompson, Eric Roston and Douglas Waller/Washington,
Mitch Frank/New York and James Graff/Paris
Copyright © 2003 Time Inc.
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zipzip
read 'the fight'?, classic journalistic novel....
kathleen
I find real life more exciting.
Think about it. This bullshit never
happened before in the history of either
science or medicine. No hoax or fraud ever
lasted this long, nor was this big.
They intended to sweep this uncontrollable,
devastating epidemic under the carpet, and make
it go away with a "bogus" magic bullet. They even
went so far as to assert that vaccine damage, or
chronic illness, was caused by the victims,
themselves, ***even before the vaccine was approved
by the FDA.*** They *still* intend to continue to
assert the same basic fraud.
I guess they thought they would never get caught.
And they used my kids as a weapon, and tried to
otherwise shut me up. They (Yale) tried everything.
Even totally false criminal charges.
Think about it.
PLUS, whoever did this Anthrax Scare, clearly had
it backfire on him, if he was a disgruntled NIH
employee or something along those lines, looking
for more bioterror funding.
"When federal agents, backed by federal laws, come to view classrooms
as terrorist training camps, backyard hobbyists as dangerous lunatics,
and professors as domestic terrorists, then we are all in danger."
-----------------
>From Washington Dispatch.com
Commentary
BioCrimes and Misdemeanors
Commentary by Edward McSweegan
August 17, 2004
As a graduate student twenty years ago, I had a departmental recruiting
poster tacked up on the wall next to my desk. It read, in part, "If
you are curious, patient, and awfully damned intelligent, consider a
Ph.D. in microbiology." In 1984 a degree in microbiology seemed like a
good idea.
AIDS was just exploding on the scene. Lyme disease was racing through
the Northeast. Evidence was emerging that a bizarre neurologic
disease might be caused by an equally bizarre infectious agent called a
prion. And recombinant DNA techniques, discovered a decade earlier,
were rapidly helping to create a multi-billion dollar industry in the
U.S.
But now in 2004, a degree in microbiology, or even a vague interest in
infectious diseases, might not be such a good idea. In fact, it might
get you arrested by the FBI.
After 9/11 and the October anthrax mailings, a series of laws and
regulations were hastily enacted to discourage future acts of
bioterrorism and misguided hoaxes. The anthrax mailer has not been
caught and no other bioterrorists appear to be lurking on the horizon.
Deprived of new suspects, terrorists, plagues or other insidious acts
of microbiology, the FBI has turned its attention to softer targets.
In the last two years they have used provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act
and the 2002 Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and
Response Act to arrest and prosecute university professors, graduate
students, and at least one New York artist. None of these U.S.
citizens are terrorists, but they have all been run to ground by the
FBI's need to be seen doing something...even if it's the wrong thing.
Two years ago, a University of Connecticut graduate student (Tomas
Foral) became the first person to be arrested under the Patriot Act.
His crime: moving a 35-year-old sample collected from an
anthrax-infected cow from one freezer to another freezer. This spring,
world-renowned plague expert and physician Thomas Butler was sentenced
to two years in prison. His crime: mislabeling a FedEx package
containing plague samples, and getting into billing disputes with Texas
Tech University accountants over his research funds.
In July, a federal grand jury indicted a University of Pittsburgh
genetics professor, and an artist at the State University of New York
at Buffalo. As with Butler and Foral before them, neither man is
charged with any actual acts of bioterrorism. Rather they are charged
with mail and wire fraud. The artist, Steve Kurtz, got two samples of
harmless bacteria from Pittsburg Professor Robert Ferrell who
apparently failed to fill out the appropriate paperwork. Both men are
facing the possibility of 20 years in prison.
The Patriot Act prohibits the possession of "any biological agent,
toxin, or delivery system of a type or in a quantity that, under the
circumstances, is not reasonably justified by a prophylactic,
protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose."
Phrase such as "biological agent," "reasonably justified," and
"peaceful purposes" are open to interpretation; if one is inclined to
be reasonable, especially about criminal intent. Unfortunately, the
FBI and the Justice Department have shown no interest in being
reasonable or responsible defenders of the public's safety.
Last fall, D.A. Henderson, the Johns Hopkins University professor who
eradicated smallpox in the 1970's and advises the federal government
on bioterrorism, declared the FBI has "lost all perspective" and "is
out of control." In June, Dr. Barbara Rosenberg, Chair of the Arms
Control Center's Scientists Working Group on Biological and Chemical
Weapons, said, "Clearly the Justice Department hasn't the foggiest idea
of what is significant."
Instead of focusing on real terrorists and lone lunatics, they are
using the Patriot Act as a crowbar to pry open the innocuous trivia of
ordinary people's lives, and leveraging Mickey Mouse complaints, sloppy
paperwork and professional disputes to the status of federal crimes
worthy of indictment, prosecution and imprisonment.
The result is widespread fear among scientists. Some researchers have
stopped working on certain dangerous pathogens and some universities
have destroyed valuable collections rather than risk a paperwork mishap
that might attract the FBI. Cornell professor and Nobel Laureate
Robert Richardson noted that before the Patriot Act thirty-eight of his
colleagues were working on "select agents." Now there are two.
Anthrax expert Paul Keim told the Los Angeles Times last October, "All
of us are worried we are going to fall into some trap that we don't
know about."
One of the biggest traps may be the new Material Transfer Agreement
(MTA) people now must sign in order to get specimens from the American
Type Culture Collection (ATCC), a national archive of biological
materials. The Agreement states, "The Purchaser shall not
distribute, sell, lend or otherwise transfer the Material...for any
reason."
That may sound reasonable, but how do teachers and professors hand out
classroom samples and do student experiments without violating the ATCC
decree not to distribute, lend or otherwise transfer? To follow the
letter of the law, every Biology 101 class could generate hundreds of
MTAs. How do researchers and graduate students collaborate if every
test tube and Petri dish must generate a paper trail from person to
person, sample to sample, and experiment to experiment? As University
of California at San Diego Professor Natalie Jeremijenko observed,
"They're going to have to indict the entire scientific
community." Medical research and science education are becoming the
new causalities in the war on terror.
As the arrest of Steve Kurtz suggests, the greatest threat may be to
amateur scientists. The Society for Amateur Scientists (SAS) defines
an amateur as "anyone who wants to do science simply for the pleasure
of finding things out." Unfortunately, that also may be the FBI's
definition of a terrorist.
Shawn Carlson, Executive Director of the SAS and a regular contributor
to Scientific American's monthly amateur scientist column, denounced
the "demonization of citizen scientists" in a 2002 press release. He
noted, "My fellow citizen scientists are very worried right now."
The federal assault on science and scientists is an important issue
that has not been well covered outside professional journals and
science magazines. It should be. When federal agents, backed by
federal laws, come to view classrooms as terrorist training camps,
backyard hobbyists as dangerous lunatics, and professors as domestic
terrorists, then we are all in danger.
Professional and amateur scientists, and the science teachers who first
inspired them, share a common threat and should form a common front
against the indiscriminate use of laws meant to protect us from foreign
terrors. Benjamin Franklin-patriot, rebel and amateur
scientist-once noted, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we
shall all hang separately." So far, the FBI has been hanging us
separately.
Edward McSweegan is a working microbiologist and writes the "Pathogens
& People" column for The Capital newspaper in Maryland.
© Copyright 2004 The Washington Dispatch