The inevitable war
When did war become inevitable? When did Tenet see the freight train coming?
Does he really hope to convince us that it took him longer than the British,
who signed on for war at a meeting with Bush at his Texas ranch in April 2002?
What we know about the extraordinarily close British-US relationship in the
run-up to war comes mainly from a series of high-level British government
papers known collectively as the Downing Street Memos. An unknown person gave
them to British newspaper correspondent Michael Smith - a first batch of six,
in September 2004, when Smith was working for The Daily Telegraph, and two more
the following May after Smith had moved over to The Times. These documents
reveal British plans in a
language of bald directness and candor. There is no fudge; there is no evasion
of awkward fact; there is frank admission of where they want to get and how
they plan to get there.
The British had no objection to overthrowing Saddam by military means but
feared that the US willingness to go it alone would undermine the case, anger
the world, and make it impossible for Britain to take part. The solution was to
cast Saddam as the villain, and the British saw promise in his serial rejection
of United Nations resolutions. If he could be coaxed to defy one final offer to
disarm, worded carefully to make UN demands sound fair, then the world might
come around to seeing war as reasonable.
This was the strategy the British hoped to sell to the Americans in the spring
of 2002. In a first step, Manning in mid-March flew again to Washington, where
he met twice with Rice. He reported in a memo to Blair on March 14:
These were good exchanges, and particularly frank when we were
one-on-one at dinner ... Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed. But
there were some signs, since we last spoke, of greater awareness of the
practical difficulties ... From what she said, Bush has yet to find the answers
to the big questions: How to persuade international opinion that military
action against Iraq is necessary and justified; ... what happens on the morning
after?
Blair was in a strong position, in Manning's view. "Bush
will want to pick your brains," he told the prime minister in his memo. "He
also wants your support." The price of that support, Manning told Rice, would
be recognition of British concerns:
In particular: the UN dimension.
The issue of the weapons inspectors must be handled in a way that would
persuade European and wider opinion that the US was conscious of the
international framework, and the insistence of many countries on the need for a
legal base. Renewed refusal by Saddam to accept unfettered inspections would be
a powerful argument.
A few days after Manning's dinner with
Rice, Meyer invited Wolfowitz to lunch at the ambassador's residence. He
reported the result to Manning on March 18: "I opened by sticking very closely
to the script that you used with Condi Rice last week."
Yes, Britain supported regime change, but the world had to be brought along.
Wolfowitz wanted to talk about Saddam's crimes and his connections to al-Qaeda
- "did we, he asked, know anything more about this meeting" of Mohamed Atta
with the Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague? Meyer stuck to the script: "I
then went through the need to wrong-foot Saddam on the inspectors" and the UN
Security Council resolutions.
The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, expanded on this argument in his
options paper for Blair at the end of the month. Making the case, in Straw's
view, meant going back to the UN:
That Iraq is in flagrant breach of
international legal obligations imposed on it by UNSC provides us with the core
of a strategy ... I believe that a demand for the unfettered re-admission of
weapons inspectors is essential, in terms of public explanation, and in terms
of legal sanction for any subsequent military action.
Straw
appended a memo from the Foreign Office political director, Peter Ricketts, who
described the immediate challenge as explaining why Iraq, and why now:
The truth is that ... even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show
much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW [chemical
weapons/biological weapons] fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but
have not, as far as we know, been stepped up ... We are still left with a
problem of bringing public opinion to accept the imminence of a threat from
Iraq. This is something the prime minister and president need to have a frank
discussion about.
Blair met with Bush in Crawford, Texas, on April 6 and promised to join a
military campaign for Saddam's removal, but only, Blair stressed, after "the
options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors
had been exhausted". Bush did not say yes to this at the time and, as spring of
2002 moved into summer, the vice president argued against any return to the UN.
Cheney feared that Baghdad would renew its cat-and-mouse game with inspectors,
the process would drag on, and the administration's determination to invade and
occupy Iraq would gradually erode, leaving a defiant Saddam still in power.
The British made a final effort to persuade Bush to obtain a UN resolution in
July, beginning with a trip to Washington by MI6's director, Dearlove, to check
the temperature of US thinking. On Saturday, July 20, Dearlove and other
British intelligence officials visited the CIA in Langley, where Tenet took
Dearlove aside for a private talk that lasted an hour and a half. On July 23,
back in London, Dearlove reported on his frank discussions in Washington.
But first let us consider Tenet's account of this episode in his memoir. It is
deceptive in the extreme. "In May of 2002", he writes, Dearlove came to
Washington and met with Rice, Hadley, Libby and congressman Porter Goss, then
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Three years later the documents
leaked to the British press quoted Dearlove describing his findings in
Washington at a cabinet meeting. Tenet writes, "Sir Richard later told me that
he had been misquoted."
May of 2002? Tenet is off by two months. I suspect that Dearlove really did
come in May as well, and that Tenet cites the earlier visit to muddy the waters
about his meeting with Dearlove on July 20 - neither denying it took place nor
lying about what was said. After May 2005 - a full year after Tenet had left
the CIA - Dearlove "told me that he had been misquoted". Tenet knows what he
told Dearlove; does he think his views were misrepresented by Dearlove's report
to the cabinet, as recorded in the minutes? Tenet does not say.
He adds that Dearlove "believed that the crowd around the vice president was
playing fast and loose with the evidence". In short, Tenet is trying to put a
country mile of daylight between Dearlove's unvarnished report to the British
cabinet and Tenet's 90-minute, private conversation with Dearlove at the CIA
only three days earlier.
We may assume that the whole of Dearlove's remarks as reported in the cabinet
meeting minutes were colored by what Tenet told him:
C [the traditional
designation for the chief of MI6] reported on his recent talks in Washington.
There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as
inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by
the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no
enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was
little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Tenet has done his utmost - short of lying - to hide his role as Dearlove's
informant, but every point the MI6 director made was something Tenet was
uniquely positioned to tell him.
The danger from Blair's point of view was a bull-headed US drive to war that
the British would find it politically impossible to join. He told the cabinet
that "it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused
to allow in the UN inspectors". The cabinet agreed that a strategy to
"wrong-foot" Saddam through the UN was crucial. Straw "would send the prime
minister the background on the UN inspectors and discreetly work up the
ultimatum to Saddam".
Early in August, Straw made a secret visit to argue Blair's case for the UN
gambit with US secretary of state Colin Powell in the latter's house; Powell
then pressed the point about the UN hard with Bush at a private White House
dinner, and Bush at last agreed. Tenet attended a final meeting on the issue at
Camp David on Saturday morning, September 7:
Colin Powell was firmly on
the side of going the extra mile with the UN, while the vice president argued
just as forcefully that doing so would only get us mired in a bureaucratic
tangle with nothing to show for it other than the time lost off a ticking
clock. The president let Powell and Cheney pretty much duke it out.
But the decision had already been made. Blair was also present at Camp David
that day. He had been urging a UN resolution for months and had not crossed the
ocean to be told no.
According to Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, Bush told Blair that
the United States would bring the question of Saddam's WMD to the UN one more
time before going to war, but war would probably still follow in the end. Thus
the stage was set for a UN melodrama starring a defiant Saddam before armies
crossed borders, but nothing worked as the British had imagined.
Saddam accepted unconditionally the Security Council's demand on November 8 for
intrusive new inspections. While the report he submitted on Iraq's destruction
of its WMD was rejected as obfuscating, the UN was able to resume inspections
at the end of November. Blix's inspectors scoured the country inspecting
hundreds of sites but found nothing, and Blix infuriated the White House by
refusing to declare Iraq in material breach of Resolution 1441 demanding that
he disarm.
As a ploy for war, "wrong-footing" Saddam was a bust. With each passing week he
seemed less of a threat. Cheney's clock was ticking; US military plans, hoping
to avoid the brutal Iraqi summer, called for fighting to begin in March at the
latest. Bush was determined and Blair was willing to go forward with war, but
since the UN gambit had generated no just cause for war, the Americans were
compelled to make the case before the UN themselves.
The date was set for February 5, and Powell was chosen to present the evidence
- the fruits of many months of work by the collectors and analysts of Tenet's
CIA. Everything seemed to rest on the strength of Powell's argument - the onset
of war, the Bush policy to remake the Middle East, the US reputation in the
world. This was the moment when the intelligence and the war fell completely
into lockstep; no intelligence, no war. If Tenet is to be vindicated as an
honest man, this is where he must convince us the intelligence was genuinely
believed and honestly presented.
"My colleagues," Powell said in the speech, "every statement I make today is
backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're
giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." Visible
behind Powell as he placed his public reputation on the line was Tenet, arms
folded and filling his seat with bearlike bulk. Tenet had personally guaranteed
Powell that every claim he made was on firm ground.
"It was a great presentation," Tenet writes of Powell's speech, "but
unfortunately the substance didn't hold up."
The substance, in fact, was wrong in every particular, as is now well known.
Tenet does not linger on that. He argues instead that it didn't matter: Bush
didn't go to war because the CIA told him Saddam had WMD - the dead-certain
"slam dunk" he used to describe the evidence in a White House meeting in
December 2002. And maybe the WMD claims in the agency's National Intelligence
Estimate "were flawed", he writes, but didn't Congress have an obligation at
the very least to read the whole of the 90-page paper before voting to
authorize war? Should their negligence be blamed on him? "The intelligence
process was not disingenuous," he insists, "nor was it influenced by politics."
This is the whole of his defense: we were wrong, but it was an honest error.
This is not the place for an exhaustive re-examination of the agency's
long-exploded claims, but no plea of honest error can survive even a quick look
at the facts in three disputes - what Iraq intended to do with aluminum tubes,
how the agency knew about Iraq's mobile biological-warfare labs, and why a
report that Iraq was trying to buy uranium "yellowcake" in Niger made its way
into one official speech after another until it finally appeared - the infamous
"16 words" - in Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2003.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
