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Iraq:
Schemers have their way
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - With demands for a full-scale
investigation of the manipulation of intelligence by the
administration of President George W Bush mounting
steadily, it appears increasingly clear that key
officials and their allies outside the administration
decided to use the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, as a pretext for going to war against Iraq within
hours of the attacks themselves.
Within the
administration, the principals appear to have included
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney and his
national-security advisor, I Lewis Libby, among others
in key posts in the National Security Council and the
State Department.
Outside the administration,
key figures included close friends of both Wolfowitz and
Rumsfeld, including Richard Perle and former Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey - both
members of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB); Frank
Gaffney, head of the arms industry-funded Center for
Security Policy; and William Kristol, editor of the
Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and chairman of the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC), among
others.
PNAC, which is based on the fifth floor
of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) building in
downtown Washington, was founded in 1997 with the
signing of a statement of principles calling for "a
Reaganite policy of military strength and moral
clarity", signed by 25 prominent neo-conservatives and
right-wingers, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and
Libby as well as several others who are now senior Bush
administration officials.
A close examination of
the public record indicates that all of these
individuals - both in and outside the administration -
were actively preparing the ground within days, even
hours, after the September 11 attacks, for an eventual
attack on Iraq, whether or not it had any role in the
attacks or any connection to al-Qaeda.
The
challenge, in their view, was to convince the public
that such links either did indeed exist or were
sufficiently likely to exist that a preventive strike
against Iraq was warranted. Their success in that
respect was stunning, although, in order to pull it off,
they also had to distort and exaggerate the evidence
being collected by US intelligence agencies.
A
hint of a deliberate campaign to connect Iraq with the
September 11 attacks and al-Qaeda surfaced last month in
a televised interview of General Wesley Clark on the
popular public-affairs program Meet the Press. In
answer to a question, Clark asserted, "There was a
concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting
immediately after September 11, to pin September 11 and
the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.
"It
came from the White House, it came from other people
around the White House. It came from all over. I got a
call on September 11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at
my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This
is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected
to Saddam Hussein.'"
While Clark has not yet
identified who called him, Perle, Woolsey, Gaffney and
Kristol were using the same language in their media
appearances on September 11 and over the following
weeks. "This could not have been done without help of
one or more governments," Perle told the Washington Post
on September 11. "Someone taught these suicide bombers
how to fly large airplanes. I don't think that can be
done without the assistance of large governments."
Woolsey was more direct. "It's not impossible
that terrorist groups could work together with the
government ... the Iraqi government has been quite
closely involved with a number of Sunni terrorist groups
and - on some matters - has had direct contact with
[Osama] bin Laden," he told one news anchor in a series
of at least half a dozen national television appearances
on September 11 and 12, 2001.
That same evening,
Kristol echoed Woolsey on National Public Radio. "I
think Iraq is, actually, the big, unspoken sort of
elephant in the room today. There's a fair amount of
evidence that Iraq has had very close associations with
Osama bin Laden in the past, a lot of evidence that it
had associations with the previous effort to destroy the
World Trade Center [in 1993]."
While Kristol and
company were trying to implicate Saddam Hussein in the
public debate, their friends in the administration were
pushing hard in the same direction. Cheney, according to
published accounts, had already confided to friends even
before September 11 that he hoped the Bush
administration would remove Saddam from power.
But the evidence about Rumsfeld is even more
dramatic. According to an account by veteran CBS newsman
David Martin last September, Rumsfeld was "telling his
aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though
there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the
attacks" five hours after an American Airlines jet
slammed into the Pentagon.
Martin attributed his
account in part to notes that had been taken at the time
by a Rumsfeld aide. They quote the defense chief asking
for the "best info fast" to "judge whether [it was ]
good enough to hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at the same time,
not only UBL" (Osama bin Laden). The administration
should "go massive ... sweep it all up, things related
and not", the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying.
Wolfowitz shared those views, according to an
account of the meeting of September 15-16, 2001, of the
administration's war council at Camp David provided by
the Washington Post's Bill Woodward and Dan Balz. In the
"I was there" style for which Woodward, whose access to
powerful officials since his investigative role in the
Watergate scandal almost 30 years ago is unmatched, is
famous, he reported: "Wolfowitz argued [at the meeting]
that the real source of all the trouble and terrorism
was probably Hussein. The terrorist attacks of September
11 created an opportunity to strike. Now, Rumsfeld asked
again: 'Is this the time to attack Iraq?'
"Powell objected," the Woodward and Balz account
continued, citing Secretary of State Colin Powell's
argument that US allies would not support a strike on
Iraq. "If you get something pinning September 11 on
Iraq, great," Powell is quoted as saying. "But let's get
Afghanistan now. If we do that, we will have increased
our ability to go after Iraq - if we can prove Iraq had
a role."
On their return to Washington, Rumsfeld
and Wolfowitz convened a secret, two-day meeting of the
DPB chaired by Perle. Instead of focusing on the first
steps in carrying out a "war on terrorism", however, the
discussions centered on how Washington could use
September 11 to strike at Iraq, according to an account
in the Wall Street Journal. Unlike Ahmed Chalabi, the
head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC),
neither the State Department nor the CIA was invited to
participate in the meeting.
After those
deliberations concluded, however, Woolsey was sent - it
remains unclear under whose authority - to London to
collect evidence of any possible ties between Baghdad
and al-Qaeda. Although he returned empty-handed, that
did not prevent him and his close associates on the DPB
from writing and speaking out in the press about
Saddam's alleged - and completely unconfirmed - role in
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and any other rumor,
dubiously sourced story, or allegations by INC-supplied
defectors that appeared to implicate Saddam in terrorist
activities in general and with al-Qaeda in particular.
But even as the DPB was locked in the Pentagon,
Kristol was gathering signatures on a letter to Bush,
eventually published in the PNAC's name in the
Washington Times on September 20, 2001, advising him on
targets in his war on terrorism, an agenda that so far
has anticipated to a remarkable degree the evolution of
Bush's actual policy. In addition to calling for the
ouster of the Taliban and war on al-Qaeda - as well as
cutting off the Palestinian Authority under Yasser
Arafat and other moves - the letter stated explicitly
that Saddam Hussein must go regardless of his
relationship to the attacks or al-Qaeda.
"It may
be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some
form to the recent attack on the United States," it
said. "But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly
to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of
terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined
effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Failure to
undertake such an effort will constitute an early and
perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international
terrorism."
The letter was signed by 38
prominent neo-conservatives, many of whom - especially
Perle, Kristol, Gaffney, William Bennett, DPB member
Eliot Cohen, AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht and Kirkpatrick,
Robert Kagan, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer,
Clifford May and Randy Scheunemann (who would go on to
head the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq) - would
emerge, along with Woolsey, as the most ubiquitous
champions of war with Iraq outside the administration.
It was the same people who, on behalf of their
friends in the Pentagon, also mounted an almost constant
campaign against the CIA, the State Department and
anyone else who tried to slow the drive to war or
question the administration's assertions about Saddam's
links with al-Qaeda or the threat he posed to US
security.
Their success is beyond question. By
last October, just before the House of Representatives
was to vote on giving Bush authority to go to war, a
survey by the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds
of adult respondents believed that "Saddam Hussein
helped the terrorists in the September 11 attacks".
While that percentage has declined over time, a
strong majority was found late last month to believe
that Saddam supported al-Qaeda, and a remarkable 52
percent believe that the US has actually found "clear
evidence in Iraq" of close ties between the two. A mere
7 percent in the latter poll said they believed "there
was no connection at all", the finding that most
accurately reflects the views of the US intelligence
community.
(Inter Press Service)
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