Review Expectation of Valor, Planning For The Iraqi War

Benson, Colonel Kevin, Expectation of Valor, Planning For The Iraqi War, Casemate, 2024

 

Colonel Kevin Benson who was the chief planner for the 3^rd Army wrote Expectation of Valor, Planning For The Iraqi War in response to the conventional wisdom that the U.S. military did not prepare for postwar Iraq in 2003. The author writes that the army did spend time coming up with ideas on how to secure and stabilize the country after the fall of Saddam. However he blames Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, General Tommy Franks and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for undermining the work that was done.

Former Dep Defense Secretary Wolfowitz Is Still Living In 2003 When It Comes To The Iraq Invasion

(Getty Images)

2023 marks the 20^th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Various media outlets commemorated the event through articles and interviews. PBS NewsHour talked with former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Johns Hopkins Professor Vali Nasr, and former deputy head of United Nations inspectors and head of the Iraq Survey Group Charles Duelfer. Wolfowitz was the defender of the Iraq war on the panel. His comments made it apparent he hadn’t moved on since 2003 repeating the same claims he made at that time.

Review A Time Of Our Choosing, America’s War In Iraq

Purdum, Todd, A Time Of Our Choosing, America’s War In Iraq, New York: Times Books, 2003

 

A Time Of Our Choosing, America’s War In Iraq was a disappointing read. Rather than being informative it showed all the faults of how the U.S. media covered the 2003 invasion. Written by New York Times Washington bureau chief Todd Purdum it largely presented the Bush administration’s argument for the war with no analysis and only a few criticisms and then gave the military’s view of the war. Most importantly it never really explained why the White House decided that Iraq was the number one threat to the country.

U.S. Army History Of Iraq War Vol 1 – Chapter 11 The Gathering Storm

The eleventh chapter of the U.S. Army history of the Iraq War covers the events at the start of 2004. The American military thought the insurgency was waning and that it could withdraw as soon as the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) were rebuilt, while the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was forced to bring in the United Nations to settle its dispute with Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani over elections. The U.S. was operating in a vacuum as it missed the maturation of the insurgency and was ignoring Iran’s growing influence in Iraq.

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 To Start A War: How The Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq

Draper, Robert, To Start A War: How The Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq, New York: Penguin Press, 2020

 

To Start A War: How The Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq is the latest book to try to explain why the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003. It brings together all the major issues such as the impact of 9/11 upon the White House, the claims about Iraq and its ties to Al Qaeda and its weapons of mass destruction, the divisions within the administration, the Iraqi National Congress, the war planning and the postwar fiasco, and most importantly why Bush wanted war. At the same time, there is little new in the book. All the major stories have been told before. What it does is bring them all together in one tome. Author Robert Draper’s main thesis was that the war was one based upon faith not fact and that Bush’s leadership style led to all the problems after 2003.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: Iraq War, 10 Years Later: Lessons From Paul Wolfowitz

MSNBC VIDEO: Hubris: Selling The Iraq War

“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

TELEGRAPH VIDEO: Sir Christopher Meyer At The Chilcot Inquiry

VIDEO: Leading To War

What Role Did Neoconservatives Play In American Political Thought And The Invasion Of Iraq?

In 2006, Francis Fukuyama published America at the Crossroads, Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. In it, he covered three important facets of American foreign policy with regards to Iraq. First, he went over neoconservative ideology, something often talked about with regards to the invasion of Iraq, but little understood. Second, he debunked the idea that it was solely neoconservatives within the Bush administration who were responsible for the war. Finally, he discussed how neoconservatives betrayed their own ideas by how they dealt with the invasion and reconstruction of the country. Altogether, the neoconservatives did contribute to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein that would in the end, help discredit them.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq brought neoconservatives to the attention of American pundits, but there was broad misunderstanding of their origins and ideas. For example, some believed that because many of the neoconservatives within the Bush administration such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and head of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle were Jewish, their main concern was protecting Israel. Others mentioned University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss as being an influential thinker behind the movement. James Atlas of the New York Times wrote an article in May 2003, which went into great length arguing that Strauss was the intellectual godfather of neoconservatives. Strauss had little direct influence on any of the neoconservatives involved with the Bush administration, and said little about foreign policy to begin with. Neoconservatism actually had its roots with a group of leftists in 1930s and 1940s New York City. Irvin Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Philip Selznick, and Nathan Glazer are considered the founders of the movement. All of them were initially socialists or communists who ended up turning against those ideas, because of the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. They came to see oppressive governments as being a threat to other countries, because if they were willing to mistreat their own citizens, they would not regard the interests of other countries either. During World War II and the Cold War, they became opponents of liberals and the New Left, because they believed they were soft or sympathetic to the Soviet Union. They also saw World War II as a great moral victory for the United States against dictatorship, fascism and oppression, which helped spread democracy around the world. Kristol and Bell went on to found the journal Public Interest that dealt with American domestic politics. They were opposed to things like President Johnson’s Great Society, which they thought was liberal social engineering that would make the recipients dependent upon the government. By the 1980s, neoconservatives backed President Reagan, and saw the end of the Cold War as another victory for democracy. Irving Kristol’s son William went on to found the magazine the Weekly Standard in the 1990s, and he, along with Frank Kagan began advocating for a neoconservative foreign policy. In 1996, they wrote an article in the journal Foreign Affairs, and then in 2000 published a book Present Dangers that advocated for “benevolent hegemony” by the United States now that the Soviet Union had been defeated. The U.S. was to use its power to spread democracy, and keep its opponents at bay using overwhelming military superiority. The move from Left to Right happened to many Americans in the 1930s to 1960s. The brutality of Stalin made them disillusioned not only with communism, but with liberalism as well, while the victories in World War II and the Cold War emboldened them. Neoconservatives eventually became a vocal element of the larger conservative movement within the United States.

Neoconservatism ended up contributing a fourth approach to foreign policy in the United States in the 1990s. There are two dominant views of foreign affairs amongst American elites, realism, and idealism. Realism is based upon states acting as rational actors that want to protect and expand their power. Idealists want to establish a world order based upon law and global institutions. Fukuyama noted a third trend, which he called nationalists who only care about national security, but also have a strong isolationist view as well. In the 1990s, neoconservatives like Kristol and Kagan added their ideas, which were based upon four main principals. First, their beliefs about dictatorships led them to believe that the internal politics of countries were of great importance, because oppressive countries were much more likely to cause trouble in the international system such as wars. Second, was that morals should play a role in international relations, namely the promotion of democracy and human rights. Third, there was a distrust of international law and organizations to solve anything. Finally, neoconservatives’ dislike of liberal American domestic policies led them to believe that social engineering in other countries would not work either. The movement’s early opposition to Stalinism shaped their opinions of foreign affairs. It was also an alternative to the realist and idealists in American political thought. During the 1990s neoconservatives were also in the odd position of supporting many of President Clinton’s policies such as the intervention in the former Yugoslavia to stop the slaughter there, which mainstream conservatives opposed. Neoconservatives therefore pushed for a liberal foreign policy, but through American military power.

During the 1990s, Iraq became a major concern of neoconservative foreign policy experts. That started with the 1991 Gulf War. Neoconservatives supported the war to stop Saddam Hussein from expanding his power, but became opponents of the first Bush administration’s decision not to support the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that followed the cessation of hostilities. Neoconservatives began pushing for regime change afterward, and supported various Iraqi exile groups such as Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Their concerns about dictators, especially aggressive and oppressive ones, made them opponents of Saddam, and push for his removal. Their distrust of international organizations made them believe that the United Nations would not solve the problem, so the U.S. needed to deal with Iraq unilaterally, perhaps using a pre-emptive strike. Many of these ideas were pushed within the second Bush administration, but they were not the dominant ones.

Many commentators believed that the neoconservatives were the main reason why the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, but they were wrong. It seemed like almost every article that discussed the Bush administration’s decision to go to war mentioned the neoconservatives by talking about officials like Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and the desire to spread democracy in the Middle East. This argument ignored the fact that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were not neoconservatives, and were the ones that shaped Iraq policy. In January 2001, Rumsfeld distributed a report on asymmetrical threats to the United States now that the Cold War was over. Iraq was mentioned, because new technologies offered it and other countries the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and nuclear devices, which could threaten U.S. interests. That was the Defense Secretary’s main concern about Iraq from day one of the new administration, to remove the security threat Rumsfeld believed Saddam posed. There was nothing about dictatorships or democracy. President Bush too was concerned about Iraq from the start of his administration, but he voiced none of the neoconservative agenda. In the first two meetings of the National Security Council, the president simply allowed each agency within his administration to follow its own strategy with regards to Iraq from the State Department working on smart sanctions to the Treasury Department looking into cutting off Iraq’s finances to the Pentagon looking into reforming a coalition against Iraq and supporting Iraqi opposition groups. Only that very last point of backing Iraqi opponents was a neoconservative idea. It wasn’t until 9/11 happened that the Bush administration finally started pushing for invading Iraq. Bush thought that Saddam might be involved in the attack, and Rumsfeld hoped that 9/11 might provide an opportunity to strike Iraq. An Iraq-Al Qaeda connection and WMD were not original neoconservative arguments against Iraq, but were adopted by them, so that they could achieve their goal of overthrowing Saddam. That showed that the Bush administration was the one driving the agenda, rather than the neoconservatives.

Fukuyama believed that in backing the Iraq invasion, neoconservatives ended up betraying one of their own ideas, which was the belief that social engineering does not work. Neoconservatives had no ideas on how to build a democracy after the fall of Saddam, or how to develop the country. That’s because almost all of the neoconservative writing focused almost exclusively on using the U.S. military against the country’s enemies, but nothing about what would happen afterward. Neoconservatives in the government seemed to think that the whole process would be quick and easy. Wolfowitz for instance, said that the reconstruction of Iraq would cost little, and would mostly be funded by Iraqi oil revenues. Many neoconservatives also supported the disbanding of the Iraqi security forces having no idea that such institutions as the military were one of the things that held Iraq together, and would be necessary to fight the insurgency. Instead, many seemed to believe that once Saddam was removed, democracy would just come about naturally. Nine years later, Iraq is still struggling with establishing rule of law, building institutions, developing its economy, and creating a democratic form of government showing that the neoconservatives might have been right that grand attempts to change societies usually run into all kinds of problems.

Neoconservatives’ support for the invasion of Iraq brought them into the spotlight in America, but would also discredited many of their ideas immediately afterward. Almost every writing about the Bush administration’s war mentioned neoconservatives as being some of the major movers and thinkers behind the invasion. While they were strong proponents of getting rid of Saddam since the 1990s, they were not the main decision makers within the government. Their support for spreading democracy and concerns about the internal politics of other countries only came to the fore after the invasion when no weapons of mass destruction or Al Qaeda connection were discovered. Those two failures would also not only discredit the administration, but the neoconservatives in general since so many believed that they were the main architects of the war. Neoconservatism went on to cause more problems as they had little to contribute to rebuilding Iraq, because their ideology was originally opposed to such ideas, and they had only focused upon using military force against America’s enemies. Neoconservatives are still involved in American politics today, which is why its important to cut through all the myths about their involvement in Iraq, and understand what their real origins and ideas are.

SOURCES

Atlas, James, “The Nation: Leo-Cons; A Classicist’s Legacy: New Empire Builders,” New York Times, 5/3/03

Dickey, Christopher, “$1 Billion A Week,” Newsweek, 7/21/03

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

Fallows, James, “Blind Into Baghdad,” Atlantic, January/February 2004

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

Hersh, Seymour, “The Debate Within,” New Yorker, 3/11/02

Laura Ingraham Show, “Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with The Laura Ingraham Show,” U.S. Department of Defense, 8/1/03

Marshall, Joshua Micah, “Practice to Deceive,” Washington Monthly, April 03

Ricks, Thomas, Fiasco, New York: Penguin Press, 2006

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

Viotti, Paul, Kauppi, Mark, International Relations Theory, Realism, Pluralism, Globalism, Macmillan Publishing Company/Maxwell Macmillan: New York, Toronto, 1993

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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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

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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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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

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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