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 Days Of Fire, Bush and Cheney in the White House

Baker, Peter, Days Of Fire, Bush and Cheney in the White House, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland: Doubleday, 2013

 

Peter Baker wrote Days Of Fire, Bush and Cheney in the White House to refute the idea that Vice President Dick Cheney was the driving force behind President George Bush. Baker argues that the two largely agreed about issues during the first administration but then drifted apart in the second. The Iraq War was an example of their relationship since both individuals wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The author also pointed out how badly the war was handled by the White House.

Chilcot Report Section 3.5 Development of UK Strategy and Options September to November 2002 – Negotiation of Resolution 1441

From September to November 2002 the main issue before the Blair government was how to approach the United Nations and deal with the United States’ opposition to that move. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s only victory so far with the Bush administration was to convince the president to go to the U.N. to get a new resolution on Iraq. Now there were disputes over whether one or two resolutions were needed to go to war. The Blair government was told that two would be necessary, and the problems that would cause with the Americans, but Blair went ahead anyway taking the risk that things would work out.

“We Will Be Greeted As Liberators,” Why The Bush Administration Saw Iraq As A War Of Liberation

Before 2003, many members of the Bush White House held a rosy image of what the Iraq war would be like. Kenneth Adelman of the Defense Policy Board for example wrote an op ed for the Washington Post entitled “Cakewalk in Iraq.” Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC’s Meet The Press that Iraqis would see the Americans as liberators. These scenarios were based upon several factors including advice officials received from Middle East scholars and Iraqi exiles. Most importantly, President Bush and others were driven by their conviction that what they were doing was right, and therefore would have a positive affect in the end. The reality of what the invasion wrought in Iraq would quickly change Washington’s view of things.

Professors Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami were key in convincing Vice President Cheney that Iraq and the Middle East were ripe for democratization and a war of liberation (Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa)

The Bush administration was largely bereft of any high officials that knew about Iraq. There were several who were involved in the 1991 Gulf War such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, but actual knowledge of Iraq’s internal politics was lacking. Following the attacks on 9/11 Vice President Cheney attempted to fill in some of these gaps by asking experts to brief him about the Middle East and Islam such as Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami then of Johns Hopkins. Lewis and Ajami held the view that the Middle East was a backward region, because of its dictatorships, corruption, extremists, and lack of cultural and economic development. They held Saddam Hussein as a prime example of the problems facing the Arab world. The two advocated the use of American military force to overthrow Saddam, and begin the process of modernization and democratization of the entire area. This would be greeted by locals they argued, because Arabs knew they had difficulties, but could not solve them themselves. In August 2002, the Vice President went public with some of these ideas in a speech at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region. When the gravest threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace. As for the reaction of the Arab “street,” the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are ‘sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans,’” said Cheney. This dovetailed with beliefs held by neoconservatives that the domestic policies of countries determined their foreign agendas. Countries that were run by autocrats who did not care about their own populations would not care about other countries, and were therefore more likely to cause problems in the international system such as wars. They also believed in the forceful promotion of democracy and human rights around the world using the American military. The ideas of thinkers like Lewis, Ajami, and the neoconservatives gave some ideological support to the President’s agenda of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. They gave moral weight to the administration’s argument that the invasion of Iraq would help not only the Iraqi people, but the region and the world in general.

Iraqi exiles also assured the president that Iraq would welcome the overthrow of Saddam. On January 10, 2003, author and member of the Iraqi National Congress Kanan Makiya, head of the Iraq Foundation Rend Rahim, and head of the Iraqi National Movement Hatem Muklis met with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and White House representative to the Iraqi opposition Zalmay Khalilzad in Washington. Makiya said that the invasion of Iraq would change America’s image in the Arab world from being a supporter of dictators to one of liberators, and that Iraqis were modern professionals who were waiting for the yoke of oppression to be thrown off them. He told the gathering that, “People will greet the [U.S.] troops with sweets and flowers.” Muklis on the other hand believed that if the Americans did not win over the public immediately after the overthrow of the regime they would turn on them, a warning that went unheeded. Cheney would later mention this meeting an interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet The Press in March, just before the invasion. Russert asked the Vice President what would happen if the public did not welcome the Americans, and Iraq turned into a long and bloody occupation. Cheney responded, “I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. … The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want is to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.” The meeting with Makiya, Rahim, and Muklis reassured the president and other administration officials that their course of action was a righteous one. For Cheney, their views only supported what he had already been hearing from Lewis and Ajami. Iraq was prime for regime change, something that the Iraqis themselves had been waiting for a long time.

Other members of the administration shared these ideas. In early 2003 for example, the CIA believed that the Shiites of southern Iraq would greet the Coalition forces after years of harsh treatment by Saddam. Operatives at the Agency even suggested that American flags should be sneaked into Iraq so that they could be waved as U.S. troops entered the country. That would be filmed and used as part of a propaganda campaign in the Arab world. The plan never got off the ground. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress in February 2003 that post-war Iraq would be easier than the invasion, because Iraqis would embrace America. “I am reasonably certain that [Iraqis] will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep [post-war] requirements down,” he remarked. “We can say with reasonable confidence that the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops [being necessary for post-invasion Iraq] is way off the mark,” the Deputy Defense Secretary continued. His comments came in response to Chief of Staff of the Army General Eric Shinseki who warned Congress that America’s experience in the former Yugoslavia pointed to a large occupation force being necessary to maintain order after initial military operations were over. Wolfowitz was a neoconservative who was one of the strongest advocates of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East by invading Iraq. CIA Director George Tenet threw his support behind the President’s Iraq policy, and set up several groups within the Agency to deal with it. This showed that both true believers in the war, and some members of the long-term bureaucracy saw post-war Iraq as being the easy part of the war, because the Coalition would be embraced by the public opening the way for a quick conflict and an early exit.

Polling of Iraqis after the 2003 invasion showed that many did welcome the U.S, but quickly turned against it. In April 2003, nearly 50% of Iraqis saw the Americans as liberators. Half a year later in October, that had dramatically changed as only one in six held that view. In April 2004, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey found that 71% of Iraqis saw the U.S. as occupiers, 46% said that they had done more harm than good in Iraq, while only 19% said the U.S. were liberators. In June, only 2% of the public had a favorable opinion of the Coalition. As the polls showed, many people were happy that Saddam was overthrown. The post-war chaos that followed in the wake of the Coalition forces quickly spoiled that mood. It seemed as if Muklis was prophetic when he warned the White House that Iraqis would quickly turn on the Americans if they didn’t see immediate benefits from the invasion. 

President Bush believed in the liberation of Iraq and the spreading of democracy. Several members of his administration such as Vice President Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz shared those views. Middle Eastern experts and Iraqi exiles assured the White House that Iraq was ready for freedom, and could transform the region. Those predictions proved partially true when Coalition forces were initially welcomed in Iraq. The problem was the United States had no plans for what to do after the fall of Saddam, and things quickly turned sour. With no authority running the country anymore, Iraqis took matters into their own hands, and started looting and murdering as the Iraqi bureaucracy and police disappeared. Chaos was what the Americans ended up bringing to Iraq, which cost them any good will that might have initially been generated. This change in mood took a while to work its way up from the U.S. soldiers on the ground to Washington, but the White House did eventually give up its vision of Iraq as a quick war of liberation, and thereafter saw it as a long-term occupation that would hopefully end in a democracy in time.

SOURCES

Arquilla, John, “Evolution Of Attack,” San Francisco Chronicle, 8/21/05

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

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

Cheney, Vice President Dick, “Vice President Speaks at VFW 103^rd National Convention,” White House, 8/26/02

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

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

Fukuyama, Francis, America at the Crossroads, Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2006

Gordon, Michael, “’Catastrophic Success’ Poor Intelligence Misled Troops About Risk of Drawn-Out War,” New York Times, 10/20/04

Hertzberg, Hendrik, “Cakewalk,” New Yorker, 4/14/03

Meet The Press, “Interview with Vice-President Dick Cheney,” NBC, 3/16/03

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

San Francisco Chronicle, “Majority of Iraqis eager to see foreign troops go, poll finds,” 5/1/04

VIDEO: Leading To War

How The Bush White House Used Leaked Intelligence To Launch A Media Campaign Against Iraq In September 2002

In early September 2002, the Bush White House unraveled a concerted propaganda campaign to convince the American public of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. The administration proved masterful at media manipulation, leaking a story about Iraq’s nuclear program to the press, and then quoting the story as proof of their claims. They then included the piece in an official release, which was reported on again. The news created about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, seemed to provide a convincing case against Saddam, when all along it was simply one administration claim repeated again and again by different outlets.

The administration unleashed its plan on September 8, 2002. It began with an article in the New York Times by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon entitled “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest For A-Bomb Parts.” The piece started with the claim that Iraq had tried to buy thousands of aluminum tubes to build centrifuges for enriching uranium for an atomic bomb. It said that U.S. intelligence had found out that Saddam had met with his nuclear scientists and praised their work, defectors claimed that acquiring a nuclear bomb was a major goal of Baghdad, and that new construction was going on at suspected sites. Administration officials told the Times that Iraq’s nuclear program was making Saddam an even greater threat, claiming that he would be more likely to use his weapons of mass destruction if he had the protection of a nuclear bomb. War supporters within the White House went on to say that they were afraid that Iraq was even further along with its program than U.S. intelligence knew about. They did not want, “The first sign of a ‘smoking gun’” to “be a mushroom cloud.” The rest of the article went on to recount Iraq’s previous attempts to build a bomb, and claims about its chemical and biological arsenal. This was the opening shot in the White House’s propaganda campaign. Although the Times report included Iraqi defectors, and other sources, the major claims about Saddam’s nuclear operations came from the administration itself. The line about a “mushroom cloud” for example, came from one of Bush’s top speechwriters Michael Gerson, and was okayed for use by the White House Iraq Group on September 5. The next phase was to hit the Sunday news talk shows, and repeat these claims again and again.

(MSNBC)

That day, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on NBC’s Meet The Press. He claimed that Iraq had restarted both its nuclear and weapons of mass destruction programs. He said that Baghdad was buying equipment to build a nuclear bomb such as the aluminum tubes. Cheney then quoted the New York Times article as proof of his argument. He went on to say that the U.S. did not know whether Iraq had a bomb or not, but that it was an immediate threat that America could act against in self-defense. He warned that if the Bush administration did not act, the United States would become a target of any atomic device Iraq could build in the future. The genius of the White House’s program was revealed in this interview. The Vice President was able to use the government’s own leak as proof of its claims against Iraq’s nuclear ambitions.

TV appearances by Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice followed. Powell was interviewed on Fox News Sunday saying that Iraq’s weapons programs and stocks were growing. (1) Later that day, Rice went on CNN’s Late Edition, and said that the aluminum tubes that Iraq attempted to buy were only good for centrifuges. She warned that the United States did not know how quickly Iraq could get a bomb, and used Gerson’s phrase that Washington did not want to find out through a “mushroom cloud.” Here again, administration officials were repeating the party line on Iraq, and using the phrase devised by the White House Iraq Group. The point was to flood he Sunday talk shows with the government's argument to create a media buzz about the threat posed by Saddam.

On September 12, the White House Group released a white paper on Iraq entitled, “A Decade of Deception and Defiance.” It was written by Jim Wilkerson, a deputy to White House communications chief Karen Hughes. It went over a number of Saddam’s crimes such as his human rights abuses and dictatorship, and then went through his weapons and nuclear programs. It mentioned a defector who claimed that Iraq had secret biological, chemical, and nuclear facilities. The next day, Miller and Gordon wrote about it in the Times. Along with going over a number of charges against Iraq’s WMD, it repeated many of the claims made by the Bush administration in the two reporters’ piece from September 8 such as the aluminum tubes Iraq tried to purchase, and that Saddam had recently met with his nuclear scientists. It did add that there was a debate within the U.S. intelligence community over the tubes with the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Oak Ridge nuclear facility all believing that they were for a nuclear program, while the State and Energy Departments were dissenting. With this white paper and article, the propaganda campaign had completed the circle. First, the government leaked the aluminum tubes story to the Times, then Cheney and others quoted the piece as proof of their charges against Saddam, the White House then wrote a paper partially based upon the Times article, and then the newspaper wrote about the nuclear story all over again. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was talking about the threat Saddam would pose if he eventually acquired an atomic bomb when in fact, it was all started by one single claim the administration told to the New York Times.

(PBS)

President Bush topped off the campaign by addressing the United Nations on September 12. The President said that the world could not wait for Iraq to get a nuclear weapon. He warned that the international community would only know if Baghdad had a bomb when it used it. He went on to claim that the aluminum tubes were proof that Iraq was trying to enrich uranium. The rest of the speech was full of charges about how Iraq was expanding its WMD programs. Here the U.S. government was spreading its case from advocating to the American public to the world body, trying to convince it that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat that needed to be dealt with.

The American media always tends to follow the lead of the government. Whenever Washington makes announcements it gets noted, and officials are major sources for reporters. Thus, when the Bush White House leaked the story of the aluminum tubes to the New York Times, it was immediately reported. The administration then used that coverage to claim that their argument against Iraq was supported by the news. This was then repeated again and again, in a concerted propaganda campaign to convince the American public that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the country because he was attempting to acquire a nuclear bomb. The White House proved adept at manipulating the media, but in the end, it had little affect upon the public at that time. In mid-August 2002, 53% of respondents in a Gallup Poll said they favored invading Iraq, while 41% were opposed. During the campaign, the numbers went up to 57-58% for a war, but by the beginning of October they were back to 53% in favor. The tubes story proved to be an important event for the administration to make its case against Iraq, but it was not the last. It would launch more campaigns, go to the Congress for an authorization for the use of force against Iraq, present to the United Nations again, and lobby allies to join its war plans. What it showed was how many in the media played along with the government, and helped promote the war. This is something that few have acknowledged since then. In May 2004 for example, the editors at the New York Times wrote a short piece on their pre-war Iraq coverage and mentioned the aluminum tubes reporting saying that they should have been more skeptical. They wrote that the story came from U.S. intelligence sources, when in fact, the White House orchestrated it. In the end, they promised more aggressive reporting on Iraq, yet to this day it, along with the rest of the America press continues to depend upon the government as a major source for its coverage. That gives little assurance that the next time an administration decides to launch a media offensive, the U.S. press will not fully comply, and repeat the official line rather than provide a critical source for the American public to decide the merits of the government’s decisions.

FOOTNOTES

1. Mukhopadhyay, Dipali, “The Bush Administration on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Capabilities,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004

SOURCES

Allen, Mike, “War Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack: Bush Advisers Cite U.S. Danger,” Washington Post, 9/9/02

Dickinson, Tim, “West Wing Pipe Dream,” Mother Jones, 7/28/03

Gellman, Barton and Pincus, Walter, “Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence,” Washington Post, 8/10/03

Gordon, Michael and Miller, Judith, “Threats And Responses: The Iraqis; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest For A-Bomb Parts,” New York Times, 9/8/02

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

Landay, Jonathan, “Iraq has been unable to get materials needed for nuclear bomb, experts say,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, 9/13/02

Miller, Judith and Gordon, Michael, “White House Lists Iraq Steps to Build Banned Weapons,” New York Times, 9/13/02

Mukhopadhyay, Dipali, “The Bush Administration on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Capabilities,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004

New York Times Editors, “The Times and Iraq,” New York Times, 5/26/04

Risen, James, State of War; The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Free Press, 2006

Saad, Lydia, “Top Ten Findings About Public Opinion and Iraq,” Gallup News Service, 10/8/02

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

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

Berry, Jessica, Sherwell, Philip and Wastell, David, “Alert by Saddam points to Iraq,” Telegraph 9/23/01

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

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

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

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

Karon, Tony, “Draining Bin Laden’s Swamp,” Time, 9/20/01

- “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
- “In Their Own Words: Who Said What When,” Truth, War and Consequences, 10/9/03

- “Rumsfeld’s War - Transcript,” Rumsfeld's War, 11/10/04

- “The War Behind Closed Doors – Transcript,” War Behind Closed Doors, 2/20/03

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

Siddique, Haroon, “Chilcot inquiry hears Bush began Iraq war drumbeat three days after 9/11,” Guardian, 11/30/09

Strobel, Warren, “Experts say Iraq, Hussein not likely tied to terrorist attacks,” Knight Ridder, 9/21/01

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

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

-The Price of Loyalty, London, Sydney: Free Press, 2004

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