I can say without a doubt that this is one of the best books I've read this year. If you are wondering why America invaded Iraq, look no further. Draper does an amazing job of charting the path of the major players involved. Most of the book is told chronologically, but also by character. Starting with Paul Wolfowitz, Draper moves through key figures in the administration in each chapter, like Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, and Bush himself, giving some backstory and then progressing through the time from 9/11 through the invasion in March of 2003. As we get to the time Congress gets involved in late 2002, the narrative shifts to focus not on these key players, but the faulty intelligence that created the justification for invasion. Draper lays it out clearly. Not only were the weapons of mass destruction never found, but the experts were saying it from the beginning. Administration officials willfully disregarded intelligence they didn't like so that they could focus on bad sources that justified their plans. Bush administration officials were far less concerned with facts than they were with optics, and they were so sure of themselves that they never even planned for what would come after the invasion. It wasn't until the eve of Shock and Awe that Bush and others at the top started to ask what would happen after Saddam fell. And even after American troops landed in Iraq, Bush administration officials would answer that question by assuring one another that the Iraqis yearned for freedom and would create their own thriving democracy. They didn't think it would be necessary for US troops to be in Iraq for more than a couple of years. By the time Bush was running for re-election in 2004, they knew that they had been wrong.
The Buildup
Draper starts and ends the book with chapters on Paul Wolfowitz, who is popularly considered to have been the "mastermind" of the invasion, although that is somewhat misleading. Wolfowitz, writes Draper, spent "ten years evangelizing" about the need to bring down Saddam Hussein, and finally got his wish when he was Deputy Secretary of Defense to Donald Rumsfeld on September 11, 2001. Wolfowitz and others used 9/11 to build a justification for their long-desired invasion of Iraq by first fabricating a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam (which did not exist) and then by promulgating the idea that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (which he did not). It is hard to miss the fact that the Iran-Iraq war's end, the First Gulf War, the Fall of the Soviet Union, and the "End of History" all coincided at the end of the 1980's to the beginning of the 1990's. And it is a radical form of the end of history mindset that dominated the Bush team's foreign policy. They went further than Fukuyama's declaration that liberal democracy was the final form of History, which would defeat other forms of government. They took that as a prescription, thinking that it would be possible to easily install such a liberal democracy as long as they toppled the dictator preventing that from happening. And the unconcern went all the way to the top. In December 2002, just four months before the invasion, Bush was asking "how are we going to be running the postwar Iraq?" In fact, there was a total disinterest in what came after the invasion, with one staffer saying that General Tommy Franks' attitude was "We don't escort kids to school, that's Clinton stuff." Iraq would end up collapsing back into insurgency and then religious extremism under ISIS.
And so while Paul Wolfowitz had been pushing to depose Saddam long before most others, it was already on Bush's mind. When George W. Bush debated Al Gore on October 17, 2000, he was asked about the attack on the USS Cole by Al Qaeda. Draper writes that "Bush did not reply with any thoughts about terrorism. He did, however, observe, 'Saddam Hussein is still a threat in the Middle East." Another interesting note is relayed from Jeb Bush by way of Joe Manchin. The Bushes had gone to Kuwait in 1993 and were targeted for assassination by Saddam. The plan had been to blow up a car bomb, but the plan was foiled by ineptitude. That certainly didn't help mitigate any feelings of animosity. But while Bush considered toppling Saddam important--a matter of "when," not "if," he remarked to a CIA briefer in the spring of 2001, Draper relates that Iraq was still a problem to be managed and ignored where possible, as the President wanted to focus on his domestic agenda. However, once 9/11 came, everything changed. On September 15, at Camp David, Bush was already thinking about Iraq enough to poll his advisor on it. He asked Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Cad (chief of staff) whether to Iraq in addition to Afghanistan. But the mood wasn't right yet. All opposed except for Rumsfeld, who abstained.
In his first year in office leading up to 9/11, Bush missed the warning signs of a major Al Qaeda attack. The CIA even took an "unusual step" of joining with the FBI to create a brief on August 6, 2001, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The analyst who authored the brief, surprised at the lack of follow-up questions to the brief, remarked to Draper, "So what is this--you're not even curious?" Once the 9/11 attacks occurred, Bush of course completely reversed. Soon he was immersed in nonstop reports of every attack or possible attack.
Iraq's dictator didn't help himself when he said on September 12 that America "reaps the thorns its rulers have planted in the world." But it was all bluster. Although there had been a no-fly zone over Iraq that Saddam was contesting, his regime went silent after September 11, preferring not to risk a provocation by continuing attacks on US aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone. The regime sent missives through backchannels to the Bush team that they weren't looking for trouble (from Tariq Aziz to Frank Carlucci to Bill Burns). Meanwhile, American focus was dedicated far more to Afghanistan as 2001 came to a close. But American victory was swift, and with the Taliban crushed (for the moment), Bush felt comfortable turning his attention elsewhere. And Saddam didn't want to totally object to the idea that he had WMDs. As long as he thought Bush would never invade (which he did until the end), he preferred to let other Iraqi elites, generals, and the Iraqi people think he could have the power to destroy them all.
On December 28, General Tommy Franks of CENTCOM led a briefing for Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch about a possible Iraq invasion. Unlike Wolfowitz's modest scheme that he touted of taking over the oil fields in the south and letting the Iraqis overthrow Saddam while the Americans hammered Baghdad with air strikes, Franks proposed over 100,000 troops engaging in regime change and WMD removal. On January 29, 2002, Bush told Congress (I assume this was at the SOTU) that the War on Terror had just begun. He claimed that intelligence revealed that tens of thousands of terrorists had been trained in Afghanistan (hyperbolized by speechwriters over CIA objections) to jar Americans out of complacency. He dedicated one line each to North Korea and Iran before five sentences of condemnation on Iraq, culminating in the declaration of all three as an "axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."
The great irony is that Iraq made more sense as an American ally, at least to those in the foreign policy establishment dead-set on opposing Iran. Iraq had fought Iran to a standstill in the 1980s, and while the US remained officially neutral, Reagan switched to the Iraqi side when it looked like Iran would be victorious in 1982. The CIA ended up with a semi-regular presence in Baghdad. But that all ended when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990
All the meanwhile, Iraq was going through weapons inspections that had begun back in the 1990s to find WMDs. However, as CIA Special Advisor Charles Duelfer said later, "Saddam's compliance had been going up, while at the same time our confidence and willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt was going down." There was no "trust but verify" because there was no trust at all.
And at the White House, there was a bad atmosphere affecting analysis of the facts. Bush emphasized keeping a professional and disciplined work environment, but it veered into a groupthink environment, in which conflict was suppressed. That meant that thoughts weren't challenged enough, and especially not in front of Bush himself, who rarely heard greatly diverging views in the same room. Even Powell and Rumsfeld, who shared mutual hatred of one another, maintained collegiality in front of Bush. That might have been good for a work environment. But it was exactly wrong at a time when the President and the Secretary of Defense's urges to invade Iraq needed to be challenged. This was not how the Clinton administration operated, so we shouldn't imagine that this is just how things are. While Condoleezza Rice actively tried to insulate Bush from debates that she thought would waste his time, staffers to Clinton and Obama recalled to Draper that there were frequent debates aired by cabinet secretaries in front of both presidents. But Bush wanted a single recommendation that was issued by the team arrayed before him. So while he called himself "The Decider," Bush really preferred to just endorse or not endorse the recommendations of his staff. But his staff, generally, were giving him recommendations that confirmed what he wanted to believe.
No one major had the nerve to confront Bush until August 5, 2002, when Colin Powell spent two hours telling Bush what no one else would: "If you break it, you own it." Bush asked him what to do, and Powell told him to go to the United Nations. This would happen. But Draper points out that Colin Powell really missed his opportunity here. He went for the smaller ask that he was more likely to get, and not the bigger ask that was more likely to fail--to tell Bush plainly not to invade. Draper writes that, "Instead, by advising Bush to go to the UN, Powell had provided the president with the only politically feasible pathway to war."
The Evidence
In the buildup to the Congressional authorization to invade and the UN vote, the intelligence community put together a National Intelligence Estimate on the issue of Iraq's WMDs, meant to combine and summarize the information held by all the intelligence agencies. While most NIEs would take months if not a year, this one was done in three weeks.
Although large amounts of evidence existed to show that Osama Bin Laden wanted weapons of mass destruction, nothing made mention of Iraq as a potential supplier of such weapons but one. The US captured an Al Qaeda senior operative named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in December 2001. After getting little in interrogations, he was handed over to the Egyptians. Within days he "confessed" that some unnamed associate had told him that two Al Qaeda recruits were sent to Baghdad the year before to be trained in using chemical and biological weapons. He had been kept in a tiny box for an entire day at one point before being taken out and beaten. That confession was uncorroborated by any other detainee and was considered highly suspect by the CIA and DIA. It was later determined to be a fabrication to end the torture at the hands of the Egyptians, but that was only announced in March 2004, far too late. And the idea of a connection between Bin Laden and Hussein was nonsensical. Bin Laden was a radical Islamist. Hussein was a nationalist and secular. To the end, Hussein was mystified by the idea that the Americans thought he was a closet religious extremist.
The charge that Saddam had biological weapons began with circumstantial evidence. First, it was thought that Saddam used to have five hundred metric tons of biological weapons from the 1980s, although this was never proven. Since BWs tend to degrade, scientists had to be hard at work making more, which explained the movement of lots of trucks, although no one had ever seen inside them. Then, it was guessed that whatever the Iraqis would produce would be as big as their last stockpile. And so Larry Fox, who analyzed BWs for the NIE, told the author in charge, John Landry, that Iraq had zero to thousand metric tons of BWs. Landry said, "Zero? What do you mean, zero? Our assessment is that he has something." When Fox responded that there was a ten percent chance he had nothing, Landry said that wasn't very helpful (although he was unconcerned about the estimate of a thousand). Seeing that the floor was raised, Fox lowered the ceiling too, and made a guess at 100 to 500 tons of BWs. A guess. And that made it into the NIE, which declared in October 2002 that "Within three to six months these units probably could produce an amount of agent equal to the total that Iraq produced in the years prior to the Gulf War."
With nuclear weapons, the analysis was not any better. There was a complete fabrication that went around about Niger providing yellowcake uranium to Iraq, but that was also decisively debunked only too late. In fact, a Google search would reveal that the forged letters of agreement between Iraq and Niger listed a Nigerien foreign minister who had left office more than a decade before th instrument in question was "signed." There was also concern about tubes that could be used for missiles, although the experts all determined that the tubes were too small, and were not heeded. Shortly before his speech at the UN, Colin Powell asked State's in-house intelligence bureau, the INR, to evaluate the claims of Iraq's possession of WMDs. He got back six single-spaced pages on thirty-six items deemed weak or unsubstantiated. He gave the speech to the UN anyway in February 2003, but made some adjustments to eliminate what he viewed as the most egregious fabrications.
Politics
Unfortunately for the more sober-minded, things were reaching a fever-pitch by late 2002 when Congress would vote to authorize the invasion. By fall, shortly before the midterms, the majority of Americans believed, falsely, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. In Congress, those who were leaders in the Democratic Party who should have been the leaders of the opposition, were engaged in hand-wringing. Richard Gephardt, Tom Daschle, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Bob Graham were all looking beyond the midterms to 2004 and 2008, when they planned to run for president. They recalled the cautionary tale of the First Gulf War, when most Senate Democrats voted against the resolution, fearful that it would be another Vietnam. Instead it was a huge success, and it was considered to have tanked the presidential aspirations of Sam Nunn, the Georgia Senator who voted against it. It also made Gephardt, who opposed the First Gulf War, decide not to run for president in 1992.
Real leadership in opposition to the war is identified by Draper with Senator Carl Levin, who led the Democrats in the minority on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Assured that the war was not an urgent necessity, Levin carried around a prop tube around the Capitol to show Senators that the tubes Saddam was accused of using for nuclear weapons could not be used as such. Levin still drafted a war resolution, but his wasn't a blank check. It required the president to show that Iraq represented an immediate threat, the standard used under international law for the use of force. It also mandated the president to seek authorization from the UN, and that Congress would convene to discuss unilateral action if Bush failed at the UN. Levin got some support, but not from the most prominent Democrats, who all worried it would make them look weak. Bush rejected Levin's multilateral approach on October 1, as well as a less restrictive approach favored by Biden and Republican Senator Richard Lugar that would require the president to seek approval at Congress a second time to show that Saddam was an imminent threat. But Gephardt ensured Bush would not have his hands tied. Gephardt, Lott, and Hastert all went to the White House and agreed to a resolution cosponsored by Democrat Joe Lieberman, infuriating Democrats in the Senate like Daschle and Biden. But Biden decided to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, and announced that he would support the deal. Bob Graham, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, had studied the NIE carefully and understood that Bush wanted to go to war no matter what. He was the only major presidential aspirant to oppose the war because he could tell it was all fake. But others did support it. John Edwards ardently supported the war as early as February 2002, attempting to draw a clear distinction between himself and Hillary Clinton, his likely rival in 2004. Clinton would also cast a vote for the war ("with conviction"), just like top Senate Democrat Tom Daschle, but by March 6, 2003, she was already heard to mutter, "I can't believe I signed up for this fucking war."
Shock and Awe
The invasion itself went very well. Within weeks, the United States controlled most of Iraq. But critically, the plan called for Iraqis to rise up and create their own democratic self-government. That was not happening. The United States installed the Coalition Provisional Authority to govern, but the CPA made two critical mistakes: dismantling the Iraqi Army and banning Ba'ath Party members from serving in government. This meant that 350,000 men who derived their income from military service went home without any work, but lots of military training. They quickly formed an insurgency. Then, those who were in the Ba'ath Party supported the insurgency. And being in the Ba'ath Party wasn't exactly special; you needed to be a member to hold normal jobs like being a teacher, so there were plenty of non-ideological party members who were forced into opposing the American presence by the fact that we took their jobs. There was also a third mistake, made later on: the decision to rotate out all the troops who had originally arrived. While everyone surely wanted to go home according to the pre-established personnel policy, Draper compares it to taking out the entire police department of a major city and replacing it with a bunch of new guys. It gave the insurgency time to breathe.
By December 2003, it was clear to anyone paying attention that after ten months of war, there were no WMDs to be found. While troops occasionally came int contact with residuals of mustard gas from the Iran-Iraq War from the 1980s, there was nothing of more recent vintage. Bush decided that this was splitting hairs, and that it was proof of WMDs. In the end, the War in Iraq would cost 4,400 American lives, wounding over 32,000. 300,000 of the 1.5 million Americans who served returned home with PTSD. The war would cost $2 trillion over its course. 405,000 Iraqis were killed.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Not really a fact, but its interesting that Draper says the majority Muslims voted for Bush in 2000 (although he would lose almost all that support by 2004). Bush was even endorsed by the American Muslim Political Council. It's interesting to think how different things could have gone seeing where the Republican elite's relationship went with the Muslim community by the time Trump was elected. Bush said that the teachings of Islam "are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends."
- In 1985, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta unwittingly provided Iraqi scientists with shipments of West Nile Virus thinking it would be used for vaccine research purposes, but instead they were probably used for making biological weapons.
- Condoleezza Rice had the most access to the President during his first term, being in the Oval Office seven times a day (by her own estimation).
- Abroad, America's only major supporters were the UK and Spain. Tony Blair in particular fought hard for Bush's war.
