Vice President Cheney’s Role In The Iraq War

 

Almost the entire senior leadership of President Bush’s national security team was for regime change in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney was out in front making accusations against Saddam Hussein to justify the invasion. Since he recently passed here is a review of his role in the lead up to the Iraq War.

Review Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein

Nixon, John, Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016

 

John Nixon was part of a CIA team that was the first to debrief Saddam Hussein after his capture in December 2003. In Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein Nixon writes about what kind of person Saddam was, the issues he had with interviewing him, the range of topics they covered and then his criticism of how the Agency and the Bush administration dealt with the Iraq War. Nixon has a very easy writing style allowing the reader to quickly go through and digest the book. His main thesis was that the United States completely misunderstood Saddam which was part of a larger problem of never comprehending Iraq.

Chilcot Report Section 3.1 Development of UK Strategy and Options On Iraq, 9/11 to Early January 2002

Section 3.1 of the Chilcot Report documented the United Kingdom’s continued problems with its Iraq strategy at the start of the 2000s. London realized that international opinion had turned against its containment policy of sanctions and demanding weapons inspectors return to Iraq, yet it had no alternatives. Then 9/11 happened, opening the door to advocates of regime change within the new Bush administration. The Blair government initially believed that his Iraq policy didn’t have to change, but finally decided that getting rid of Saddam had to be on the table. That was the start of London following Washington for the rest of the decade.

Review Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi and the Selling of the Iraq War

Bonin, Richard, Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi and the Selling of the Iraq War, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland: Doubleday, 2011

 

Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi and the Selling of the Iraq War by 60 Minutes producer Richard Bonin was the second book on the controversial figure. Much of it is based upon conversations the author had with Chalabi. The book highlights his greatest achievement of helping to convince the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein to his many faults from his financial corruption to his turn towards sectarian politics. The book starts off giving Chalabi’s view of Iraq and then becomes more critical as it progresses.

Review The Man Who Pushed America To War, The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi

Roston, Aram, The Man Who Pushed America To War, The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi, New York: Nation Books, 2008

 

To people who know about the 2003 invasion of Iraq Ahmad Chalabi is a polarizing figure. Is he a hero or a villain? Is he a con man or a visionary? The Man Who Pushed America To War, The Extraordinary Life, Adventure, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi by Aram Roston attempts to answer those questions. The book goes through the major points in Chalabi’s life from his time growing up under the Iraqi monarchy to his exile after the 1958 coup to his family’s financial problems to joining the opposition to Saddam Hussein. The author believes that Chalabi helped convince the U.S. to go to war with Iraq but that was only because Americans wanted to hear what he said.

Review Against All Enemies, Inside America’s War on Terror

Clarke, Richard, Against All Enemies, Inside America’s War on Terror, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Free Press, 2004

 

Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, Inside America’s War on Terror was an early criticism of the Bush White House and its invasion of Iraq. Clarke worked for four administrations dealing with terrorism under Clinton and the second Bush. Clarke’s argument was that after 9/11 rather than focusing upon Al Qaeda President Bush decided to go after Saddam Hussein making the situation worse. The problem is that half the book is about Clarke’s entire time in government covering many topics that have nothing to do with his point.

Review Bush At War

Review Woodward, Bob, Bush At War, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Bush At War was the first of four books by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward on the Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This one covers the aftermath of 9/11 that led to the invasion of Afghanistan and then has a little on the public campaign for the Iraq War launched in 2002 in the Epilogue. Woodward provided important insight into how the Bush White House operated and how that led to failures in both conflicts.

Review Leap of Faith, Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy

Review Mazarr, Michael, Leap of Faith, Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy, New York: Public Affairs, 2019

RAND’s Michael Mazarr wanted to bring together all the research, reports and memoirs on the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 into one book and analyze what led to this momentous decision. As he wrote, it was a completely unjustified war. Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, and had no connections to Al Qaeda. This is not hindsight, because if the government had gone closely through the intelligence it could have ascertained this. Not only that, but the United States failed to achieve its goal of spreading democracy across the Middle East and deterring future terrorism and jihadism. The overall lesson of Iraq was that the United States put itself into a quagmire and exhausted itself in the process. In the end, Mazarr believes this was an example of criminal negligence because the Bush administration never had a debate about the rational for war, never went through the information on Iraq or consider the risks and consequences. This was the strong point of Leap of Faith. Where Mazarr fell short was his overall thesis for why America chose war. If someone asked Mazarr why Iraq? He would ultimately say because the U.S. thought it could do good. He argued politicians believed the United States had a special mission in the world to fix its problems and the Bush White House made a value judgement about attacking Iraq rather than an analytical one. This explanation would make no one happy.

Chilcot Report Section 3.1 Development of UK Strategy and Options On Iraq, 9/11 to Early January 2002

Section 3.1 of the Chilcot Report documented the United Kingdom’s continued problems with its Iraq strategy at the start of the 2000s. London realized that international opinion had turned against its containment policy of sanctions and demanding weapons inspectors return to Iraq, yet it had no alternatives. Then 9/11 happened, opening the door to advocates of regime change within the new Bush administration. The Blair government initially believed that it still didn’t have to change, but finally decided that getting rid of Saddam had to be on the table. That was the start of London following Washington for the rest of the decade.

Iraq, 9/11 And The Bush Administration

September 11 transformed U.S policy on Iraq. Beforehand, the Bush administration had discussed the country, but the president had set no policy and allowed each agency to follow its own path. After the terrorist attack however, the top officials in the White House from the president on down focused on Iraq almost as much as Al Qaeda. Bush eventually decided that Afghanistan would be the first target on the war on terror, but Iraq would be next.

For many in the administration the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon immediately brought Iraq to mind. Five hours after the hit on the Pentagon Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered plans to strike Iraq. He wrote a memo saying, “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough to hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden],” followed by, “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” Rumsfeld then asked the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers to look into Iraq as well as Al Qaeda, and told Pentagon lawyer Jim Haynes to get Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to come up with some information linking Iraq and Al Qaeda. Later in the day there was a National Security Council meeting at the White House where Rumsfeld brought up bombing Iraq because it had better targets than Afghanistan. Wolfowitz believed that Al Qaeda had a state sponsor, and that was likely Iraq. The president himself said that the U.S. should get rid of Saddam. Finally, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice mentioned to the British Ambassador to the U.S. Christopher Meyer that the White House was investigating whether Iraq was involved in 9/11. Right after the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington D.C. the administration was being told that Al Qaeda was the likely culprits. Still, that didn’t stop the president, the Defense Secretary, and his deputy from all bringing up Iraq as an alternative. The Pentagon especially seemed more interested in Saddam than Osama bin Laden.

The next day at the White House it was more of the same. At a meeting the CIA said it was sure that Al Qaeda was behind 9/11. Wolfowitz again brought up his theory that Iraq was actually the force behind bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell questioned his argument saying that he was against any plan that would attack Iraq instead of Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld complained that there were no good targets in Afghanistan to bomb so the U.S. should consider attacking Iraq instead. He added that Saddam should be removed as well. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Hugh Skelton rebutted the secretary saying that only a full scale invasion would be able to get rid of Iraq’s dictator. After the meeting Bush took a few people aside and told them to look into connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke told the president that Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 and that people had looked into Iraq several times and found nothing. Finally, the White House asked CIA Director George Tenet to come up with a covert plan against Iraq. Clarke would alter write, “Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.” He also thanked Powell for rebuffing Wolfowitz, but the secretary warned that the Defense Department wasn’t finished. The Secretary of State was right, as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz would continue

On September 13 at a meeting of the National Security Council all the main actors went at it again over Iraq. Bush asked Tenet if the CIA was looking into any Iraq-Al Qaeda connections. Rumsfeld said attacking Iraq could deter other countries from supporting terrorism. Bush then told Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs head General Shelton to come up with plans and costs of military action against Iraq. That led Rumsfeld to send a memo to the Third Army headquarters to draw up scenarios for seizing Iraq’s southern oil fields.

The big debate on how the United States was to respond to 9/11 occurred on September 15-16 at Camp David. Bush was going to hear from all of his security, foreign policy, and political advisers on the best course of action. The Defense Department prepared a paper for the meeting that laid out three priority targets for the war on terror: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iraq. It claimed that only Al Qaeda and Iraq were strategic threats to America, and that Saddam was a long time supporter of terrorism, and possessed weapons of mass destruction.

On the first day of the conference the Defense and State Departments went at it again. Rumsfeld asked what the U.S. should do about Iraq, while his deputy Wolfowitz made the case for striking Iraq as part of countering terrorism. Wolfowitz argued that there was a 10-50% chance that Iraq was behind 9/11, and that the U.S. would eventually have to go after Saddam if it was serious about a war on terror. Powell countered that attacking Iraq without firm evidence would undermine the United States’ position in the world. He also demanded that Wolfowitz back his assertion that Saddam had anything to do with the September attacks. Like Clarke earlier, Powell believed that the deputy Secretary of Defense was using the terrorist attacks to push his own agenda about Iraq.

During the second day at Camp David the arguments over Iraq and Afghanistan were tackled again, and Bush made his final decision to tackle the latter, and plan for the former. Rumsfeld brought up his earlier belief that Iraq was better than Afghanistan because it didn’t have any good targets. Wolfowitz went further pushing a plan for the U.S. to seize Basra and its oil fields, and using it as a base for Iraqi opposition groups. Vice President Cheney noted that Iraq would have to be dealt with, but right now it was a distraction, and would cost U.S. support if it were the focus. General Shelton agreed adding that attacking Iraq would hinder attempts to build a coalition for Afghanistan and there were no Iraq-Al Qaeda links. The president ended the session calling for a show of hands and the majority agreed that the focus should be on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. Bush said “I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.” He would later call Rice telling her, “We’re putting Iraq off. But eventually we’ll have to return to that question.” He finished by asking her to come up with courses of action against Iraq. That was made official on September 17 when Bush signed a top secret paper directing the military to plan for military action versus Iraq. The White House staff agreed that Al Qaeda was the perpetrator of 9/11 and that it should be dealt with, but the minority view would not give up on Iraq. It had a powerful ally in the president who continued to harbor fears that Saddam was involved.

Back at the Pentagon Wolfowitz continued to make his case against Iraq. He sent a memo to the Defense Secretary called “Preventing More Events” arguing that even if there was a 10% chance that Iraq was behind 9/11, and there was, the U.S. should act. He added that Saddam praised the attacks, was a long time supporter of terror, and that he believed Ramzi Yousef who was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was an Iraqi agent working for Baghdad. That final remark about the 1993 bombing was based upon a conspiracy theory formulated by Laurie Mylroie that had gained weight amongst neoconservatives like Wolfowitz who had been arguing for a stauncher policy against Saddam.

After the president’s request, Richard Clarke sent his initial findings on Iraq and 9/11 to Rice on September 18. The paper, “Survey of Intelligence Information on Any Iraq Involvement in the September 11 Attacks,” found no connection between the two. Rice’s Afghan staffer Zalmay Khalilzad agreed with the conclusion believing there was only anecdotal evidence of any Iraq involvement in 9/11, and that the two were unlikely to work together since bin Laden did not like Saddam.

There were other elements within the Pentagon pushing Iraq such as members of the Defense Policy Board, which acted as a kind of consultancy group for the Defense Department. On September 19 the head of the Iraqi National Congress Ahmed Chalabi and Bernard Lewis professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton spoke to the board. Lewis said that 9/11 could have been worse if Al Qaeda had WMD and that the U.S. should support democratic reformers like Chalabi in the Middle East. The INC chief pushed for taking on Iraq instead of Afghanistan, and creating a modern, stable, pro-western government in Baghdad. Chalabi and his staff had been working on building up its connections with Washington elites since the 1990s, and now it appeared he would get a wider audience then ever before. Lewis on the other hand believed that the Middle East was caught in a clash of civilizations between Islam and modernization, and supported the use of force to break that deadlock. He provided the intellectual justification for many Republicans who wanted to take on Iraq.

Bush finally received the intelligence community’s findings on Iraq and 9/11 during his daily brief on September 21. It found that Iraq did not cooperate with Al Qaeda, but it did have sporadic contracts since the 1990s. It was believed that the two did not trust each other and had different goals. The paper was sent to Cheney, Rice, deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz.

There was pushback at the Pentagon about the briefing. A DIA analyst was sent to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith who said that the report was good on details, but that its analysis was bad. The analyst argued that the belief that Al Qaeda and Iraq had not cooperated should be ignored. Feith wrote a report on his briefing and forwarded it to Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. Feith was another anti-Saddam member of the Defense Department who had been arguing against the dictator for years. Earlier he wrote a memo to Rumsfeld saying, “The president has stressed that we are not defining our fight narrowly and are not focused only on those directly responsible for the September 11 attacks. … That is one of the reasons why I still favor an early focus on Iraq as well.”

By the end of the month the strategy was settled. Rice told CNN on September 23 that Iraq would be stage two in the war on terror. Six days later Rumsfeld asked General Myers to prepare war options for Iraq. Afghanistan and Al Qaeda would be the immediate response to 9/11, but after that was over Washington would move onto Iraq.

This series of events begs the question about why there were so many in the Bush administration, including the president thinking about Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, especially if there was no strong evidence that Saddam was involved. Some have argued that this was the result of the neoconservatives in the White House who had been pushing for action against Saddam since the 1990s. The problem with that theory was that Bush, Rumsfeld, and others were not from this camp. What then can be the explanation? Almost all of the main players in the Bush presidency felt like Iraq was unfinished business. Many had taken part in the 1991 Gulf War when the U.S. called on Iraqis to rise up and overthrow the government, but then did nothing when revolts started. They all shared the belief that Saddam should have been overthrown. They also believed in a more forceful foreign policy after eight years of the Clinton administration, which they felt had diminished American power in the world. Together these two strains of thought opened the door for Iraq to be put on the agenda, and become the second stage on the war on terror even though it was not part of 9/11, and was not a supporter of Al Qaeda. Many felt Afghanistan was not enough and Iraq had been on their minds for several years, so why not use the opportunity to get rid of Saddam.

SOURCES

9/11 Commission, “9/11 Commission Report,” 7/22/04

Allawi, Ali, The Occupation of Iraq, Winning The War, Losing the Peace, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007

Battle, Joyce, “The Iraq War – PART I: The U.S. Prepares for Conflict, 2001, Timeline,” National Security Archive, 9/22/10

Benjamin, Daniel and Simon, Steven, The Next Attack, New York: Times Books, 2005

Burrough, Bryan, Peretz, Evgenia, Rose, David and Wise, David, “The Path To War,” Vanity Fair, 12/19/08

Clarke, Richard, “’Against All Enemies,’” New York Times, 3/28/04

-  Against All Enemies, Inside America’s War on Terror, Free Press: New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, 2004

Coile, Zachary, “Ex-aide’s charges spark blame game on 9/11, Iraq,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3/23/04

Diamond, John, Keen, Judy, Moniz, Dave, Page, Susan and Slavin, Barbara, “Iraq course set from tight White House circle,” USA Today, 9/11/02

Karon, Tony, “Iraq: The GOP War With Itself,” Time, 8/21/02

Roberts, Joel, “Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11,” CBS News, 9/4/02

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Report On the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04

Suskind, Ron, The Price of Loyalty, Free Press: New York, London, Sydney, 2004

Waas, Murray, “Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel,” National Journal, 11/22/05

Fouad Ajami’s Flawed Argument For The Iraq War

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, and a long time commentator on Iraq. For the last several years he has argued that the Middle East’s autocrats gave rise to Islamist terrorists, and that was what led to 9/11. Because Saddam Hussein was a perfect example of that type of dictatorial rule he advocated that he be deposed to stop future terrorism. This was an idea based upon changing the entire Middle East and North Africa, not necessarily taking on those that were directly responsible for attacking America. Ajami shared many ideas with the neoconservatives, and helped provide an ideological justification for the war in Iraq. Recently, he wrote an article claiming that Iraq was a good fight, but the American public and President Obama gave up on it. His own writings provide one example of why that happened. His argument for transforming the Arab world through the use of force was not how the invasion was sold to the public, and has not found many adherents either in the U.S. of the Middle East.

Fouad Ajami of the Hoover Institute argued that Arab dictators were what caused 9/11 and therefore Saddam Hussein was a legitimate target for the United States (Hoover Institute)

In March 2013, Fouad Ajami had an oped in the Wall Street Journal on the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion to re-iterate his main points about the war. He wrote that Iraq was the right response to 9/11, because the terrorists that struck that day were not Afghans, but Arabs. They were a result of the despots that ruled the Middle East, supported by imams and financiers in the Arab world. He went on to claim that terrorism is terrorism, and therefore there was no difference between secular and religious groups that practiced it. That was why he didn’t see any difference between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He then lamented that there were few war supporters like him left when the invasion was popular when it first began. The Congress voted to allow Bush to use force against Saddam, and over 70% of those polled in the United States on 3/19/03 supported the overthrow of Saddam as well. He then admitted to the fact that the failure to find WMD led to a drop in support. President Bush then turned to building a democracy in Iraq as the rationale for the war. Ajami claimed that Iraqis could not free themselves from Saddam, so the war was just, and Americans were hypocrites for failing to maintain their support for it. Those people that turned against the war helped get President Obama elected to office, and the result was that the new administration did not care about Iraq. He finished by saying that the White House’s neglect has led Baghdad to become a close ally of Iran, and the U.S. has thrown away all of its hard work and lost lives in Iraq. These are the same ideas that Ajami has been making for quite some time, and that he presented to the Bush administration before the 2003 invasion. He has written extensively on how he believed that Saddam Hussein was a perfect example of the type of Arab dictator that caused terrorism, and kept the Middle East behind the times. Ajami believed that the U.S. offered an alternative future for the region, which was modernity. This was very similar to ideas held by neoconservatives such as Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. There are several problems with Ajami’s view. First, Iraq had not supported any anti-American terrorism since the 1990s. His argument therefore was not about directly responding to 9/11 or any threats to the U.S., but rather what he saw as the root cause of instability and stagnation in the region, Arab dictators. This would not have won over many supporters as the proper response to the 2001 terrorist attacks, and was not how the Bush administration posed the invasion of Iraq either. Yet, he is now disappointed that so few Americans today support his view. Second, Iraq has not been held up in the region as a model for change, but rather as an example of what not to do such as rushing a constitution, sectarianism, etc. It has therefore failed to be a transformative event in the way Ajami envisioned it. Third, claiming that Iraq had fallen under the sway of Iran, and blaming it on Obama reads like partisanship and sour grapes by a person that lost the war of ideas over the war, and actually contradicts his earlier writing. In 2010 for example, Ajami had an articlewhere he argued that Iran would never control Iraq, because it was wearier of Tehran’s influence than any other country since it was right next door, and that Shiites were Arabs first. Now Ajami has suddenly changed his opinion because there is a different president in office, as if that would make Iraqis view their neighbor differently.

There is no problem with wanting change and democracy in the Middle East as Fouad Ajami has advocated for. The argument that kind of transformation can only be done through force, because Arabs are incapable of doing it themselves however, seems to be contradicted by the Arab Spring, and the current fighting in Syria. It also begs the question of why Arabs would accept having their country invaded by the U.S., and then occupied for several years as it did in Iraq as an acceptable model for change. Finally, Ajami’s claim that the U.S. needed to go to war with Arab autocrats, and not the actual terrorists that attacked America would not have won over much political or public support in 2001. Saddam Hussein, and his wars with Iran and Kuwait seemed to be a driving force for people like Ajami, rather than Iraq being a direct threat to the U.S. Like President Bush and others within the administration, Ajami was caught up in the past when arguing for a new future in the Arab world.

SOUCES

Ajami, Fouad, “Another Step Forward for Iraq,” Wall Street Journal, 3/2/10

- “Back to the Future,” U.S. News & World Repot, 12/4/06

- “A Decent Outcome for Iraq,” U.S. News & World Report, 10/5/07

- “Fouad Ajami: Ten Years Ago, an Honorable War Began With Wide Support,” Wall Street Journal, 3/18/13

- “Iraq and the Arabs’ Future,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2003

- “What Obama Left Behind in Iraq,” Wall Street Journal, 12/17/11

Battle, Joyce, “The Iraq War – PART I: The U.S. Prepares for Conflict, 2001, Timeline,” National Security Archive, 9/22/10

Benjamin, Daniel and Simon, Steven, The Next Attack, New York: Times Books, 2005

Clarke, Richard, “’Against All Enemies,’” New York Times, 3/28/04

Elliott, Michael and Carney, James, “First Stop, Iraq,” Time, 3/31/03

Packer, George, The Assassins’ Gate, America In Iraq, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

MSNBC VIDEO: Hubris: Selling The Iraq War

TELEGRAPH VIDEO: Sir Christopher Meyer At The Chilcot Inquiry

ABC VIDEO: Former CIA Director James Woolsey On 9/11 And Iraq On 9/11/01

In this interview former CIA Director Woolsey is putting forward a theory about Iraq and Al Qaeda formulated by Laurie Mylroie. More can be read about her ideas here.

Laurie Mylroie’s Convoluted Iraq-Terrorism Conspiracy Theory

In April 2001, the new Bush administration held its first National Security Council meeting on terrorism. The White House’s counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke said that the United States had to focus upon Al Qaeda. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz disagreed. He said that Iraq was the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world. He claimed that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as an example. Wolfowitz went on to say that just because the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) couldn’t find any evidence to support his claim didn’t meant it wasn’t true. Clarke and Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin both countered by saying that Iraq had not been behind any anti-Western terrorism since its 1993 attempt upon former President Bush while he was on a trip to Kuwait. Wolfowitz’s argument was based upon a book written by Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie began as an adamant supporter of Iraq in the 1980s, but when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 she turned around 180 degrees. She became obsessed with the 1993 New York bombing, creating an elaborate conspiracy theory to blame Iraq for it. That led her to blame every major terrorist attack upon the U.S. on Saddam. Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney and others later embraced her idea, and used it to advocate for military action against Iraq. This was despite the fact that every investigation of her theory found nothing to support her claims.

Laurie Mylroie began as a staunch supporter of Saddam Hussein. She started writing about the Middle East in the 1980s as a graduate student. She later became an assistant professor of political science at Harvard, and then worked at the U.S. Naval War College. She became attached to Saddam because he was not anti-American or an Islamist. She then argued that the U.S. should ally with Iraq in a 1987 article co-written by Daniel Pipes for the New Republic. In it, she wrote that Washington should back Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq War believing that would help with not only American security, but Israel’s as well because it would block the expansion of Tehran’s revolutionary ideas. Mylroie then took it a step further believing that she could personally broker a peace between Iraq and Israel. She went to the Middle East and worked with a professor from the Israeli University to try to mediate between the two countries. In 1987, she travelled to Baghdad and met with Iraq’s Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz and its Ambassador to the U.S. Nizar Hamdoon. She worked out a meeting with Hamdoon and two Israeli Army generals in the United States. The effort failed, but it showed how committed she was to her beliefs. In May 1989, she wrote a piece for the Jerusalem Post saying that Israel and America should not condemn Iraq’s gassing of the Kurds from 1987-1988. Everything would change the next year however.

The 1990 invasion of Kuwait would forever change Mylroie’s opinion of Iraq. She ended up co-authoring a book with New York Times reporter Judith Miller entitled Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf. It detailed Iraq’s abuses. It became a best seller, and helped her get a position at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In a flash, Mylroie went from one of the biggest boosters of Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein, going as far as trying to improve its relations with Israel, to suddenly condemning Saddam as a brutal dictator. This was a beginning of an obsession for Mylroie who went beyond Iraq’s actual crimes, to trying to blame almost any terrorist act against the United States on Baghdad.

That began with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Al Qaeda was behind the attack, Mylroie began arguing that it was actually the work of Iraq. The gist of her argument came down to three major claims. First, was that one of the conspiracy members Abdul Rahman Yasin fled to Iraq after the incident. Yasin was an Iraqi born in Indiana, who grew up in Baghdad. Mylroie argued that Yasin was working for the Iraqi government, and was given safe haven by them after he returned to the country. Second, Mylroie found out that one of the bombers, Mohammed Salmeh, was the nephew of a PLO-Fatah member, Abu Bakir who lived in Baghdad, and would call him often. She thought that proved Iraq was involved in the 1993 attack because Bakir could have been working for Iraqi intelligence. Finally, Mylroie believed that the lead bomber, Ramzi Yousef, was an Iraqi agent. In 1995, the FBI arrested Yousef in Pakistan. He ended up admitting that his real name was Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani national who grew up in Kuwait, and went to school in Wales. Mylroie theorized that there were actually two Abdul Basit Karims. One was the real Karim, who was killed along with his whole family in the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Iraqi intelligence then took his identity and gave it to one of their agents who then became Ramzi Yousef. Mylroie's evidence was that Karim’s passport was missing some pages and had some discrepancies, which she claimed were because his passport was a fake made by Baghdad. She also claimed that former classmates of Karim’s in Wales claimed he looked physically different, like being shorter. In May 1993, three months after the World Trade Center bombing, Mylroie presented her ideas to the FBI. They did not call her back. Later, the 1993 prosecutor of the bombing, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Council all looked into Mylroie’s writings and found nothing. Officially, Mylroie’s theory was not accepted by a single agency within the U.S. government.

There were several problems with her theory. First, Iraq tried to use Abdul Rahman Yasin as a bargaining chip with the United States, something that didn’t seem to jibe with him being an Iraqi agent. For example, in 1998, Baghdad offered to return Yasin to America, but the Clinton administration refused because it did not want to give any concessions to Saddam. Second, several other members of the 1993 bomb plot planned on going back to their homes countries like Egypt and Pakistan. The difference was that Yasin actually made it to Iraq, while the others didn’t. Those other countries were not implicated in the 1993 bombing by Mylroie, only Iraq was. As for Ramzi Yousef, there were witnesses in England who testified that he was the same man they’d known in Wales. Other witnesses said Yousef was an Islamic radical who trained in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, something he admitted himself. The FBI also said that Yousef’s fingerprints matched those of Basit in Kuwait. Finally, even if Yousef did not prove to be exactly whom he was that did not prove that he worked for Iraqi intelligence. Overall, her whole argument was largely based upon speculation, which was likely the reason why it received no official support.

In the 1990s, Mylroie would pick up an important supporter in Paul Wolfowitz. At the time, he was a dean at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He found a kindred spirit in Mylroie, who was just as obsessed with Iraq as he was. Wolfowitz became a fan of her book, and went to the National Security Council asking why Washington wasn’t doing more about her theory. He was told that the CIA and FBI had debunked her writing, but Wolfowitz didn’t believe them. Rather he claimed that the Clinton administration did not want to take on Saddam. Wolfowitz would end up pushing Mylroie’s argument when he returned to government with the second Bush administration in 2001.

Mylroie was not done with her Iraq conspiracy ideas. In 1995, she offered to be a witness in the trial of Eyad Ismoil, one of the 1993 bombers, claiming that he was just a fall guy because Iraq was really the main culprit. That same year, she talked with Timothy McVeigh’s lawyer claiming that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the work of Iraq as well. She ended up being hired by McVeigh’s defense team. One theory she came up involved McVeigh’s co-conspirator Terry Nicholas. He spent time in the Philippines, and Mylroie argued that he met Ramzi Yousef there, proving an Iraq connection. McVeigh’s lawyer hired an investigator to look into this, but found nothing. This would start a trend of blaming almost every single major terrorist attack upon America on Iraq. This included the 1996 Khobar tower bombings in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 U.S.S. Cole assault. Like her previous work on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, her arguments for Iraqi connections to all of these attacks were tenuous at best.

In the 2000s, Mylroie’s fortunes appeared to pick up when some of her supporters joined the new Bush administration. First, she got a job with the American Enterprise Institute, which published her book in 2000, Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America where she outlined her argument about Iraq’s involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Paul Wolfowitz, former Defense Department official Richard Perle, and ex-CIA Director James Woolsey all endorsed her work. In 2001, she was hired as a Pentagon adviser on terrorism. Wolfowitz and others would all end up pushing her work hard within the White House and with the public. In early 2001 for example, Wolfowitz asked the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) director Admiral Thomas Wilson to go over Mylroie’s book. He found nothing. In June 2001 Wolfowitz asked the same of the CIA, and they had the same results. Just like in the 1990s, government agencies could not find anything to support Mylroie’s conspiracy theory about the World Trade Center bombings, but that didn’t stop her or her supporters.

When the September 11 attacks occurred in 2001, Mylroie, Wolfowitz, and others used her book to argue for attacking Iraq instead of Al Qaeda. On September 12, Wolfowitz began arguing that Iraq was behind the attacks, saying that they were responsible for the 1993 bombing. The next day, James Woolsey wrote a piece for the New Republic summing up Mylroie’s argument. He would repeat that story for the Wall Street Journal in October. (1) On September 14, the American Enterprise Institute held a panel discussion about the attacks, which Mylroie participated in. She said that Al Qaeda could not carry off the assault without a state sponsor, and that was Iraq. Three days later, Wolfowitz sent a memo to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld entitled, “Preventing More Events” saying that Iraq was behind 9/11, and cited Iraq’s involvement in the 1993 bombing as evidence. The fact that no government agency had ever been able to find any evidence to support Mylroie’s theory did not seem to matter. Rather it was the biases of Wolfowitz and others who became obsessed with Iraq that was important. They had reached the point where they would believe just about anything that fingered Saddam for wrong doing in the world, and that led them to Mylroie’s ideas.

In mid-September, Wolfowitz wanted to try to prove Mylroie’s theory on his own, since the U.S. intelligence agencies had rejected it. He sent Woolsey on a trip to England to find evidence. In London, Woolsey asked British officials to release more information about Ramzi Yousef from when he was a student in Wales. The British said they had cooperated with the FBI in their investigation of the 1993 bombing, and found nothing to support Mylroie’s ideas. Woolsey came away empty handed, but that didn’t matter either. He went on to write a new forward for Mylroie’s book. She in turned claimed that proved that he must have found evidence to support her book in England, otherwise he would not have endorsed it. In an interview with PBS’s Frontline that aired in October, she said the same thing, claiming that the British had proof that Iraq had tampered with Yousef’s files in Kuwait. That seemed to be contradicted by Woolsey himself in another Frontline piece where he said he knew Yousef was an Iraqi agent, but he couldn’t prove it. Wolfowitz and Woolsey’s own failure didn’t stop them from their continued support for Mylroie.

In the following months, heading into 2002, Mylroie only gained more support within the Bush administration, while she continued to expand her conspiracy theories. In October, she claimed that the anthrax letters sent to Washington D.C. were from Iraq. Then Vice President Dick Cheney took up her cause. He went on Meet The Press in December claiming that Abdul Rahim Yasin was in Iraq implying that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. (2) Cheney, like Wolfowitz, was keen on any reports that implied Saddam’s wrong doing. With Wolfowitz and others pushing Mylroie within the administration it was only a matter of time before they reached the Vice President.

After the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Mylroie supporters believed they would finally be able to find the evidence they’d always lacked to prove her theory. Wolfowitz sent a Pentagon official to investigate captured Iraqi records for information on Abdul Rahman Yasin for example. Nothing substantial was found, but it was discovered that Yasin received a monthly stipend from the government while he was kept under surveillance. This was later used as evidence for Mylroie's case. In late-2003, Cheney for instance, was interviewed on National Public Radio (NPR) where he said that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing because Yasin was on the Iraqi payroll after he fled to Baghdad. In November, Wolfowitz was on Good Morning America talking about how Yasin fled to Iraq, and that the government was finding more connections between him and Baghdad. In January 2004, Cheney told NPR much of the same thing. These claims showed how Wolfowitz and Cheney’s support of Mylroie was based more upon faith and their anti-Iraq biases then any evidence. Previously Wolfowitz had gone to the U.S. intelligence agencies and they had all said that there was nothing to Mylroie’s story. After he sent one of his own underlings to Iraq and he could not turn anything up except that Yasin received a monthly stipend, it did not shake Wolfowitz’s belief or Cheney’s.

From 2004 on, more and more evidence actually built up against Mylroie's theory. In March, Richard Clarke testified to the 9/11 Commission. He stated that one of the 12 culprits involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing being an Iraqi did not prove that Iraq was involved. He said that Al Qaeda, not Iraq was responsible, and that from 1995-1996 the CIA and FBI reviewed all the information available and found no Iraqi ties. In July, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on pre-war intelligence. Supporters of Mylroie’s theory claimed that Ramzi Yousef used a fake passport provided by Iraqi intelligence. The CIA could find no evidence of that. The claim that Abdul Rahman Yasin was an Iraqi agent because he received a stipend after he fled to Baghdad in 1993 was countered by the fact that he was held under custody after he arrived. Finally, the CIA did not think that bomber Mohammed Salameh’s uncle who was in the PLO was used as a middleman by the Iraqi government because he was allowed to move to the West Bank in 1995. The Agency did not think that the uncle would be allowed to leave if he played an important role in a major terrorist attack upon the United States. Finally, the United States ended up arresting and interrogating Abdul Rahman Yasin after the fall of Saddam, and found that Baghdad tried to use him as a trading chip with the United States. As stated before, Iraq offered to return Yasin for concessions, which the Clinton administration was unwilling to give. An investigation of Iraqi documents also discovered that Saddam’s government actually had its own conspiracy theory about the 1993 attack, believing that the CIA or the Mossad was behind it. As usual, none of this shook Wolfowitz’s faith. In a November 2004 profile in the New Yorker, he was still repeating Mylroie’s story, claiming that Yasin fleeing to Iraq proved that Saddam was behind Islamic terrorism in the world.

Laurie Mylroie went from one of the strongest supporters of Saddam Hussein, to one of its greatest opponents. She was so attached to Iraq being the savior of the Middle East, that when it invaded Iraq in 1990 she felt deeply betrayed. She became obsessed with Iraq, and tried to blame every anti-American terrorist attack upon it with very little evidence to support her argument. She was still able to attract many powerful allies like Wolfowitz, Woolsey, and Cheney. The fact that one U.S. agency after another found nothing to support her writing did not matter. It was that she blamed Iraq for much of the wrong doing in the world that made her appealing to people like Wolfowitz and the others. They were so convinced that Iraq was one of the greatest threats to the United States that they would accept just about any evidence against Saddam no matter how factitious it was. It was that anti-Iraq agenda that led to all these people pushing such a flimsy conspiracy theory.

FOOTNOTES

1. Woolsey, R. James, “The Iraq Connection,” Wall Street Journal, 10/18/01

2. NBC, “The Vice President Appears on NBC’s Meet The Press,” 12/9/01

SOURCES

9/11 Commission, “9/11 Commission Report,” 7/22/04

Ackerman, Spencer, “The Weakest Link,” Washington Monthly, November 2003

Battle, Joyce, “The Iraq War – PART I: The U.S. Prepares for Conflict, 2001, Timeline,” National Security Archive, 9/22/10

Benjamin, Daniel and Simon, Steven, The Next Attack; The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right, New York: Times Books, 2005

Bergen, Peter, “Armchair Provocateur,” Washington Monthly, December 2003

Clarke, Richard, Against All Enemies, Inside America’s War on Terror, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Free Press, 2004

Coughlin, Con, “Powell will struggle to link Saddam with al-Qa’eda terrorism,” Telegraph, 2/2/03

Diamond, John, “U.S.: Iraq sheltered suspect in ’93 WTC attack,” USA Today, 9/17/03

Donnelly, John and Bender, Bryan, “U.S. Looks for an Iraqi Role in Attacks,” Boston Globe, 9/20/01

Elliott, Michael and Carney, James, “First Stop, Iraq,” Time, 3/31/03

Isikioff, Michael and Corn, David, Hubris, The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, New York: Crown Publishers, 2006

Meyer, Ambassador Christopher, “CONFIDENTIAL AND PERSONAL,” British Embassy, Washington, 3/18/02

Miller, Greg, “Cheney claims al Qaeda link to Hussein,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1/23/04

Miller, Judith, “Ex-counterterrorism chief says Bush politicized response to 9/11,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3/22/04

NBC, “The Vice President Appears on NBC’s Meet The Press,” 12/9/01

Norton-Taylor, Richard, “UK spies reject al-Qaida link,” Guardian, 10/10/02

PBS Frontline, “Laurie Mylroie,” Gunning For Saddam, 11/8/01

- “R. James Woolsey,” Gunning For Saddam, 11/8/01

- “Richard Perle,” Gunning For Saddam, 11/8/01

Pincus, Walter and Priest, Dana, “Some Iraq Analysts Felt Pressure From Cheney Visits,” Washington Post, 6/5/03

Robbins, James, “No Question About It,” National Review, 9/19/03

Rose, David, “Saddam and al Qaeda the link we’ve all missed,” Evening Standard, 12/9/02

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Report On the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04

Strobel, Warren, “Former CIA Director looks for evidence that Iraq had a role in attacks,” Knight Ridder, 10/11/01

Strobel, Warren, Landa, Jonathan and Walcott, John, “Doubts cast on efforts to link Saddam, al-Qaida,” Knight Ridder, 3/2/04

Tanenhaus, Sam, “Bush’s Brain Trust,” Vanity Fair, July 2003

Washington Post, “Transcript: Wednesday’s 9/11 Commission Hearing,” 3/24/04

Woods, Kevin with Lacey, James, “Iraqi Perspectives Project Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents Volume 1 (Redacted),” Institute For Defense Analyses, November 2007

Woolsey, R. James, “The Iraq Connection,” New Republic, 9/13/01

- “The Iraq Connection,” Wall Street Journal, 10/18/01

Vest, Jason, “Saddam in the Crosshairs,” Village Voice, 11/20/01

Iraq And 9/11, How The Bush Administration Immediately Focused Upon Saddam After The September Attacks

When President Bush took office in January 2001, Iraq was one of the first foreign policy topics to come to the fore. The President and cabinet all wanted to do something about Iraq, but were deeply divided over what that should be. That led to deadlock in the first nine months of the new Bush term. When the September 11 attacks happened, Iraq again quickly became the focus of the White House. Many officials from Bush on down believed that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected with the terrorists, but had no evidence to supported their claims. While the administration quickly decided to take on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan as the first stage in the war on terror, it also decided that Iraq would be next.

September 11 immediately led to President Bush and the Pentagon to think about Iraq. Right after the attack upon the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the President asked some of his aides whether Iraq was involved since Saddam had supported terrorists. That same idea was prevalent in the Defense Department where Secretary Donald Rumsfeld jotted off a memo saying, “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at the same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]. … Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” Rumsfeld later asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to look into attacking both Al Qaeda and Iraq, and asked Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz for any information on links between the two. Separately Wolfowitz told his deputies that he thought Iraq was involved. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and William Luti of the Near East and South Asia division of the Pentagon were in Europe at the time, and both pushed for going after state sponsors of terrorism, with Iraq being the main target. That thought was echoed by Richard Perle, a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, who called one of Bush’s top speechwriters David Frum about it that night. These advisers and others were instrumental in Bush’s televised speech to the nation later that day when he said, “We will make no distinction between terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Iraq was one of the first foreign policy issues discussed by the Bush administration. In those early conversations, the Pentagon became the major proponent of overthrowing Saddam using America’s military. During other meetings on what the United States’ new anti-terrorism policy should be, the Defense Department staff continually derided the threat of Al Qaeda and stressed Iraq instead. When 9/11 happened, those ideas came to the fore again. Iraq was already on the minds of many in the administration, so it was quick to jump on Saddam Hussein as being a participant in the September attacks. It also allowed those that were already supporters of getting rid of Saddam to push their agenda even further because now both the President and American public were more open to using military force in the world. 

Rumsfeld's 9/11 memo (Washington Monthly)

 The next day there was a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) to discuss the implications and responses to 9/11. The White House counterterrorism head Richard Clarke and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. Wolfowitz disagreed saying that the operation was too sophisticated for a terrorist group to do by itself. He said a country must be behind it, and then began arguing that it had to be Iraq. Rumsfeld talked about how the Pentagon had been discussing plans for Iraq, and that it should therefore be included in the war on terror. He pushed for bombing Iraq as well, arguing there were no good targets in Afghanistan where Al Qaeda was based. Clarke and Secretary of State Colin Powell both pushed back saying that Al Qaeda and Afghanistan should be the target. Bush agreed that Saddam needed to be removed, while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton said that could only be achieved through an invasion. After the meeting adjourned Clarke thanked Powell for his support, but Powell warned him that the Pentagon was not done pushing Iraq. They were not the only ones however, as the President would later pull Clarke over and ask him to investigate whether Saddam was behind 9/11. Clarke told him that it was Al Qaeda, but Bush insisted that Iraq be looked at. Also that day, Wolfowitz sent former CIA Director James Woolsey to England to investigate Iraq-Al Qaeda connections. He found none. The Deputy Defense Secretary had never seen Osama bin Laden as being a major threat to the United States in meetings before September even though he knew little about terrorism. That was because he was so set on Iraq he blamed Saddam for almost any act of terror. The President as well seemed to be convinced by earlier arguments within the cabinet that Iraq was the real problem, not some non-state actor, and that led him to push Clarke to look into the country’s possible involvement in 9/11. Faced with the greatest attack upon America since Pearl Harbor in 1941, the President and others were falling back upon what they knew, Iraq, rather than what they didn’t, Al Qaeda.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz was obsessed with Iraq and would bring it up every chance he could (Wikipedia)

 The focus upon states and Iraq continued on September 13. Wolfowitz gave a press conference repeating the President’s earlier theme that the U.S. would not only go after terrorists, but end their state sponsors. Powell, worried that the Wolfowitz was implying Iraq, said that the Deputy Secretary was speaking for himself, not the administration. That day there was another NSC meeting, where Powell asked for support from the Joint Chiefs chairman General Shelton against Wolfowitz and others who were pushing Iraq. Shelton agreed with Powell that the war on terror should not be expanded to Baghdad. During the meeting, the President asked CIA Director George Tenet whether he was looking into Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. Rumsfeld said that attacking Iraq would deter countries that supported terrorism. Bush then asked the Defense Secretary and General Shelton to come up with new plans and costs for invading Iraq. The next day, the President called England’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, and told him that Iraq was probably involved in the attacks, but Blair was skeptical. Two days after September 11, and there was the first mention of an Iraq invasion by the President. During earlier debates before the attack, the administration had been deadlocked over Iraq with the State and Defense having opposing viewpoints. Powell wanted to continue on with the previous policy of containment, while the Pentagon was pushing for overthrowing Saddam, although it didn’t agree upon how. Now, 9/11 had changed that. The United States had been attacked, and Bush and others were looking for revenge. Since the government was so use to dealing with nation-states Iraq seemed to be a much better target than a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda.

Cheney, Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz at Campd David summit to discuss what to do about 9/11 (Flickr)

 From September 15 to 16, the White House staff met at Camp David to finally decide on what the response to September 11 should be. Iraq was included in position papers submitted before the summit. One from the Defense Department for example, listed three targets in the war on terror: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iraq. Of those three, Al Qaeda and Iraq were listed as strategic threats. On the first day of the meeting, Rumsfeld asked what the U.S. should do about Saddam. Wolfowitz said that America should strike Iraq because it was the main source of terrorism in the world, and that there was a 10-50% chance that Iraq was behind 9/11. He would later argue that taking on Afghanistan would be too difficult, and that Iraq would be much easier. He then endorsed a plan made by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) that a revolt could be fomented with the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shiites in the south. Rumsfeld supported Wolfowitz, while he was making these arguments. Vice President Dick Cheney on the other hand, slightly disagreed, saying that Iraq had to be dealt with, but that it would be a distraction now. He said that the United States would lose its standing if it went after Iraq, an idea supported by Powell and General Shelton. Three times, once by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, once by Vice President Cheney, and by the President himself, Wolfowitz was told to drop Iraq. He didn’t, as he continued to push the issue later in the day, and into the next. On September 16, Bush asked for a show of hands about what to do, and the group agreed that Al Qaeda should be targeted. Bush was quoted as saying, “I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.” With that being done, the President did ask the Pentagon to come up with new military plans for Iraq. Later on September 16, Vice President Cheney made public the administration’s decision. He appeared on Meet The Press where he said that the United States was going to take on Al Qaeda. When asked about Iraq, he said that Saddam was “bottled up.” Rice later claimed that the administration was simply worried that Iraq would take advantage of the September attacks. Powell on the other hand, believed that Wolfowitz was taking advantage of the situation to push his own Iraq agenda. Others like General Shelton and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil tended to agree. The Camp David meeting also marked the first time that the President had made a decision about Iraq. It took 9/11 to make him finally make one as before he let his cabinet dilly dally over the issue. He agreed that Afghanistan would be the first stop on the war on terror, but hinted that Iraq would be next when he ordered new war plans be made.

Wolfowitz was still pushing his point the next day. He wrote a memo to Rumsfeld entitled “Prevent More Events,” which stated that even if there was a 10% chance that Iraq was behind 9/11, something that he believed to be true, the United States should attack it. He went on to write that Saddam had praised September 11, was a long time supporter of terrorism, and was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The last was a conspiracy theory that he subscribed too put forth by Laurie Myrolie of the American Enterprise Institute. Wolfowitz was writing to the true believers as Rumsfeld had been pushing an attack upon Iraq since the beginning of the year. Bush had joined their camp as well as at an NSC meeting that day, he officially ordered the military to plan for an invasion of Iraq.

On September 18, counterterrorism adviser Clarke finished his report on Iraq and 9/11 that the President had requested, and sent it to Rice for review. The memo, “Survey of Intelligence Information on Any Iraq Involvement in the September 11 Attacks” claimed that Iraq was not connected because bin Laden did not like Saddam Hussein’s government. It also stated that there were no confirmed reports that Iraq was working with Al Qaeda on weapons of mass destruction (WMD). President Bush never saw it, and Rice sent it back to Clarke saying, “Wrong answer … Do it again.” Rice too, seemed to believe that Iraq was behind 9/11, and did not want to hear otherwise. She was therefore not going to distribute Clarke’s paper, and ended up rejecting it.

The President too was looking for evidence against Iraq when he met with CIA Director Tenet on September 19. Bush asked the CIA to look into Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, and said that Vice President Cheney had some information about the matter. Cheney later consulted with Tenet, and told him about a report that claimed the chief 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met in Prague with Iraqi intelligence. Tenet went back to CIA headquarters and ordered an immediate report on the matter. That same day, Cheney was on Meet The Press and said that Iraq was not involved with 9/11. Publicly, the administration did not want people to know that it was focusing upon Iraq instead of Al Qaeda yet. The President however was pushing the matter hard.

That same day, the Defense Policy Board, a consulting group at the Pentagon, held a two-day meeting on the war on terror. Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University and Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) attended. Lewis urged the United States to respond to 9/11 with force, otherwise it would be perceived as weak. Lewis said that the attack could have been worse if Al Qaeda had WMD, an argument that would later be taken up by the administration as a reason to strike Iraq. Lewis then introduced Chalabi as a democratic reformer the White House should stand behind. Chalabi said that Iraq had WMD, and that it should be invaded instead of Afghanistan. He pushed his plan to start an uprising within the country that he claimed would only require some air support and Special Forces from the U.S. to be successful. He stated the result would be a modern, pro-Western, capitalistic Iraq. The second day, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz attended. Board member Richard Perle argued that Saddam should be removed even if he didn’t have ties with Al Qaeda. He and other conservatives would express this view to the President in a letter they sent him. Rumsfeld added that attacking Afghanistan alone wasn’t enough. He wanted the U.S. to do more to deter its enemies. That obviously meant expanding the war on terror to Iraq.

Pres. Bush phoned and later met with British PM Blair immediately after 9/11, each time talking about Iraq. Blair tried to warn the president to stay focused upon Al Qaeda (EPA)

 On September 20, President Bush met with Prime Minister Blair, Powell, Rice, and the British Ambassador to the U.S. Christopher Meyer. Bush said that he wanted to get rid of Saddam. Blair told Bush that they should not lose focus upon Al Qaeda. Bush said that Afghanistan would be first, but that Iraq would come later. England would later be America’s strongest supporter for the invasion of Iraq, but at this early date Blair thought that it was a distraction.

Back at the Pentagon, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith sent a memo to Rumsfeld urging expansion of the war on terror. He wrote that there were no good targets in Afghanistan, and that the war should not be a narrow one limited just to that single country. Feith argued that the U.S. should bomb Iraq, South America, and South Asia, as a way to surprise terrorists. Rumsfeld liked Feith because of his original thinking, but his memo was bordering on the ridiculous. What it did show was that the leadership of the Pentagon was firmly set upon attacking Iraq.

In Virginia, the CIA issued its first report on Iraq and September 11, as per the request of the President. It was presented as part of the President’s daily intelligence briefing. It found that Iraq had not cooperated with Al Qaeda, but the two did have sporadic meeting since the mid-1990s. Iraq might have offered a non-aggression pact and training to keep tabs on the organization’s activities as well. Finally, it stated that there was nothing behind the story that Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence. Overall, the two did not trust each other, and had different goals, which precluded them working together. All the way to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq the Agency proved consistent with this first paper. It never claimed there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11 nor to Al Qaeda, although it did think that some meeting occurred and training might have been offered. The Bush administration made such ties a key piece of its argument for war, but that was only partially based upon the official intelligence it was receiving.

For the rest of September, continuing into the following months, the White House moved closer to war with Iraq. On September 23, Rice said that Iraq would be the second stage in the fight against terror. By October, the war in Afghanistan was going well, and Cheney returned to Iraq. The campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, also convinced Rumsfeld that an invasion of Iraq would be quick and easy. That month, the Third Army was told to revise its Iraq Vigilant Guardian plan that included seizing Iraq’s southern oil fields with just 75,000-100,000 troops. At the beginning of November, Rumsfeld asked Douglas Feith to evaluate ways to get rid of Iraq’s WMD. Feith wrote a memo in response, saying that supporting Ahmed Chalabi and the INC’s plans for an uprising, would be the best way to do that. Later in November, Bush asked Rumsfeld about the Iraq war plans. He responded that he didn’t think the existing ones were good enough. He wanted a lighter and smaller force akin to the war in Afghanistan. On November 21, the Pentagon had gone over those plans, which included a 500,000-man invasion force. Rumsfeld objected to using so many troops. Within a week, the Defense Secretary would fly to Tampa, Florida to meet with General Tommy Franks, the head of the Central Command (CENTCOM), which was in charge of the Middle East to discuss Iraq. Rumsfeld talked about the INC’s revolt idea, but his main point was that he believed a traditional attack upon Iraq was outdated. By December, the Bush administration was getting briefings on the progress of the new plans. That was the same month that the United States believed that most of the fighting in Afghanistan was over. The White House quickly moved to Iraq, making it the number one foreign policy issue going into 2002, until it finally invaded in March 2003.

Iraq was on the minds of all the top Bush administration officials from the day it took office in January 2001. For the first nine months, the Defense and State Departments, along with Richard Clarke, went back and forth on the issue of what to do about Saddam Hussein. The debate went nowhere because the President never made a decision about which policy he wanted to follow. When September 11 happened, it convinced Bush that America’s enemies could attack it, and that therefore the country had to be far more aggressive to protect itself. He, along with many on his staff, also believed that states were what mattered, and that they were ultimately behind terrorism, not organizations like Al Qaeda. Since the President and the Defense Department already believed that Iraq was the greatest security risk in the Middle East and was the prime supporter of terrorism in the world, 9/11 made them immediately think of Saddam. At Camp David, the cabinet decided to deal with Al Qaeda and Afghanistan first, but Iraq was going to be next. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice were all pushing the matter, and Bush needed little convincing. That’s why within a week of the New York City and Washington D.C. assaults, the President had already ordered the Defense Department to review its invasion plans for Iraq. It was only a matter of time before U.S. was going to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

SOURCES

9/11 Commission, “9/11 Commission Report,” 7/22/04

Battle, Joyce, “The Iraq War – PART I: The U.S. Prepares for Conflict, 2001, Timeline,” National Security Archive, 9/22/10

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Burrough, Bryan, Peretz, Evgenia, Rose, David and Wise, David, “Path To War,” Vanity Fair, May 2004

CBS, “Did Bush Press For Iraq-9/11 Link?” 3/21/04

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Donnelly, John and Bender, Bryan, “U.S. Looks for an Iraqi Role in Attacks,” Boston Globe, 9/20/01

Elliott, Michael and Carney, James, “First Stop, Iraq,” Time, 3/31/03

Gordin, Philip, “The End of the Bush Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006

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- “Iraq: The GOP War With Itself,” Time, 8/21/02

Packer, George, The Assassins’ Gate, America In Iraq, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

PBS Frontline,"Bush's War - Transcript," Bush's War, 3/24/08
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Roberts, Joel, “Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11,” CBS News, 9/4/02

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Suskind, Ron, The One Percent Doctrine, Deep Inside America’s Pursuit Of Its Enemies Since 9/11, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Simon & Schuster, 2006

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Uhler, Walter, “Foreign policy and its offenders,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4/25/04