Role of Military Establishments in US Invasion of Iraq | ||
Role of Military Establishments in US Invasion of Iraq For a decade before the election of George W. Bush as President, many of the men and women who would become his top foreign policy advisers argued for several major propositions. The present essay is an attempt to examine the role of military establishments in making a decision to invade Iraq, codenamed the Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) decision. In order to shed light on the role of military establishments, attempts have been made to focus on the role of US military institutions and figures as well as administrative officials with close ties with the military establishments in making the final decision to invade Iraq.
Introduction For a decade before the election of George W. Bush as President, many of the men and women who would become his top foreign policy advisers argued for several major propositions. Two of the leading ones were that American power ought to be vigorously asserted to bring order to a potentially disintegrating post-Cold War world, and that Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power. The first of these goals had been on the minds of key Republican foreign policy leaders for nearly a decade: the writer James Mann contends that the roots of the Iraq war can be found in the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance (DPG), drafted at the tail end of the first Bush administration. ‘‘The underlying rationale’’ for OIF ‘‘was both broader and more abstract: The war was carried out in pursuit of a larger vision of using America’s overwhelming military superiority to shape the future,’’ he contends (Mann 2004b). Mann explains that the author of the first DPG draft was not, as commonly reported, Paul Wolfowitz, but ZalmayKhalilzad later a main player on U.S. Iraq policy. The most enthusiastic early reader was then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. And a second version of the report, allegedly ‘‘toned down’’ after the first draft had been publicly revealed, in fact preserved and in some ways even extended the core ideas of American dominance offered in the first draft. In fact, a continued argument for U.S. power could have been expected, because the official given responsibility for editing and revising the draft was Lewis (‘‘Scooter’’) Libby, then serving as principal deputy undersecretary of defense for strategy. Rather than walking away from the idea of American predominance, Mann writes, ‘‘Libby’s rewrite encompassed a more breathtaking vision: The United States would buildup its military capabilities to such an extent that there could never be a rival.’’ It also built up the suggestion that the United States would ‘‘act to ensure events moved in ways favorable to U.S. interests’’, an early statement of what was to become the preemption doctrine in the second Bush administration. When the draft was done, Defense Secretary Cheney ‘‘took ownership of it,’’ according to Khalilzad. Mann draws a number of lessons from the episode. One is that an especially crucial player in the second Bush administration, Richard Cheney, was a bold, aggressive thinker years before 9-11. A persuasive analysis in The New Republic by Spencer Ackerman and Franklin Foer (2003:17–18) agrees: They describe, for example, Cheney’s unsuccessful battle in the first Bush administration to shift U.S. Soviet policy away from Mikhail Gorbachev and toward an effort to collapse a tottering Soviet Union and promote democracy. Their sources pointed to a willingness, even then, on Cheney’s part to ‘‘circumvent the typical bureaucratic channels to gain advantage over his rivals.’’ In retrospect, Cheney probably felt he had been right about the Soviet Union: Gorbachev did not survive; Yeltsin, for whom Cheney had urged support, had arisen to power in Russia and proved a friendly, if unsteady, interlocutor; and the Soviet Union had collapsed in a wave of democratic reforms. If Dick Cheney learned a lesson from the event, it was probably to trust his instincts, to favor rollback rather than incrementalism, to scoff at those who saw all problems as ‘‘intractable,’’ and to favor bold moves. The importance of expressions of American power to many men who would become senior officials in the second Bush administration was joined by, and closely related to, a second foreign policy preoccupation: that Saddam Hussein must be driven from power. During the first Persian Gulf War, Hussein had revealed aggressive regional ambitions; afterwards, U.S. intelligence tried to project him to have been much closer to a nuclear arsenal than had been thought. This episode was intentionally promoted by key members of the U.S. national security policy community: that Saddam would do anything to obtain weapons of mass destruction; that he was skilled in concealing his WMD programs from inspectors; that U.S. intelligence tended to underplay, rather than exaggerate, emerging threats; and that no scenario would safeguard U.S. interests short of regime change (Mann 2004a: 182–183, 234–238). It should be borne in mind that Weapons of Mass Destruction were never found in Iraq. After the war not a single weapon of mass destruction was found. Even as of May 1991, therefore, President George H. W. Bush had signed a presidential order authorizing the CIA to spend over a hundred million dollars on various covert operations to ‘‘create the conditions for [the] removal of Saddam Hussein from power’’ (Mayer 2004:61). Dealing with Saddam would directly support the first goal, of restoring American credibility: George Packer (2005:36) suggests that the conservatives saw Iraq ‘‘as a test case for their ideas about American power and world leadership.’’ Clearly the conservatives have close relations with the military establishments.
The Decision to Attack Iraq During the 1990s, a group of dedicated anti-Saddam activists emerged, largely outside government (because most of them were Republicans with close ties with the military establishment), who worked together to understand and promote the issue and who would later assume senior policy positions in the administration of George W. Bush. This group kept abreast of developments in Iraq; spoke to Iraqi exile groups and leaders; published articles and op-eds on the Iraq issue; held conferences and informal meetings on the subject; lobbied members of the administration and Congress and the military establishment to get tougher on Saddam; and fed key information about Saddam’s behavior to U.S. and international news media. By the late 1990s, they had become convinced that U.S. policy toward Iraq and its twin pillars of economic sanctions and no-fly-zones was collapsing, that time was on Saddam’s side. Their policy recommendations centered largely around plans such as one developed by leading Iraqi exiles, including Ahmed Chalabi that envisioned a Bay of Pigs-style regime change option (Mayer 2004:58–72). Chalabi made his case in the draft plan called ‘‘End Game’’ by claiming that ‘‘The time for the plan is now. Iraq is on the verge of spontaneous combustion. It only needs a trigger to set off a chain of events that will lead to the overthrow of Saddam’’ (Hersh 2001:58).This process was well underway by 2000. Even Hans Blix (2004:53–54; Interviewee 13) stresses this fact in his book, noting the ‘‘sanctions fatigue’’ that was afflicting leading powers at the time, the popular outrage at the effects of the sanctions. Baghdad was becoming filled with businessmen; the oil-for-food program was enriching Saddam and strengthening his hold on power ironically, creating just the sort of kleptocracy that would prove unable to function as an effective government, thus consigning Iraqi infrastructure to a gradual decline, requiring vast new investments to rescue something U.S. planners did not recognize until it was too late. Former CIA case officer Robert Baer reports being briefed on the End Game plan in August 1994, by which time, according to Baer, it had been ‘‘well shopped around Washington’’ (Baer 2002:188; See also Gordon and Trainor, 2006:12–13). In February 1998, this group of anti-Saddam activists, all of whom had close ties with military establishments, sent President Clinton a letter recommending that regime change in Iraq become a major foreign policy priority. The letter claimed that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, and charged that the existing policy of containment was ‘‘bound to erode,’’ and ‘‘only a determined program to change the regime in Baghdad will bring the Iraqi crisis to a satisfactory conclusion.’’ Iraq ‘‘is ripe for a broad-based insurrection,’’ the letter contended. ‘‘We must exploit this opportunity.’’ Signatories of the letter included a host of people who had strong ties with the military establishments and would become senior officials in or advisers to the Bush administration, the defining core of the group of anti-Saddam activists: Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Paula Dobrianski, ZalmayKhalilzad, Peter Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, David Wurmser, and DovZakheim. All these figures have close ties with the military establishments. In October 1998, partly under the prodding of this same group, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act. It provided for assistance to radio and television broadcasting into Iraq, $97 million in military assistance to ‘‘democratic opposition organizations,’’ and humanitarian assistance to Iraqis living in liberated areas. That November, President Clinton stated that containment of Saddam was insufficient, and committed the United States to regime change. In January 1999, Secretary of State Madeline Albright took this message throughout the Middle East bringing with her on the trip State’s ‘‘special representative for transition in Iraq,’’ an official charged with developing a strategy to ‘‘create the environment and pressures inside Iraq’’ to overthrow Saddam Hussein (Perlez 1999:A3). Little practical actions came of these statements, however, and even as the Iraq Liberation. Act was passing in the Congress, Secretary of Defense William Cohen tempered expectations by saying that Clinton ‘‘was not calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’’ (Loeb 1998:A17). As it became clear that the Clinton administration was not interested in near-term regime change, Chalabi and others turned more of their attention to the anti-Saddam policy activists outside government (Mayer 2004:64–65). During the campaign, both Bush and Cheney threatened to take action in Iraq. ‘‘If I found in any way, shape or form that he was developing weapons of mass destruction,’’ Bush said, ‘‘I’d take ’em out’’ a reference, he quickly claimed, to the weapons, not to Hussein himself (Lancaster 2000). In a later television appearance, Bush quipped: ‘‘I will tell you this: If we catch him developing weapons of mass destruction in any way, shape, or form, I’ll deal with him in a way that he won’t like.’’ Cheney, when asked about the ‘‘take ’em out’’ quote, said that ‘‘If in fact Saddam Hussein were taking steps to try to rebuild nuclear capacity or weapons of mass destruction, we’d have to give very serious consideration to military action to stop that activity’’ (Lemann 2001:34). A number of quiet, largely behind-the-scenes clues also hinted that they planned a greater emphasis on Saddam Hussein’s regime. One account, from June of 2000, suggests that an adviser to Bush mentioned during a briefing session that ‘‘we ought to have been rid of Saddam Hussein a long time ago,’’ and implied that candidate Bush agreed with the sentiment (Lancaster 2000:A1). Once George W. Bush was elected, key members of the new administration quickly turned their attention to Iraq. In January 2001, even before Bush had been inaugurated, Vice President-Elect Cheney reportedly asked outgoing Secretary of Defense William Cohen to brief President-Elect Bush. He did not, however, want the ‘‘routine, canned, round-the-world tour,’’ according to Bob Woodward’s account; instead, he ‘‘wanted a serious discussion about Iraq and different options.’ . . . Topic A should be Iraq’’ (Woodward 2004:9). On January 30, 2001, the new Bush national security team held its first NSC meeting. This session is recounted at length in the Ron Suskind book on former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, The Price of Loyalty. O’Neill describes a session heavily focused on Iraq at which Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, President Bush, and others seemed intent on taking action soon. O’Neill contends that the next NSC meeting, on February 1, also focused on Iraq (Suskind 2004:73–74, 85–86). What was clear to many in the administration was that sanctions were collapsing, that Saddam was growing stronger by the year, and that U.S. policy badly needed attention. What a new policy would become, however, was far from clear; and no one with whom I spoke read the meeting as an indication that George Bush was anxious to go after Saddam. These early questions and discussions morphed into an administration-wide debate about the future of sanctions against Iraq, proposals for new models of ‘‘smart sanctions,’’ and dialogue about various plans to move against Saddam short of an all-out U.S. attack. At both the principals’ and deputies’ levels (both with close links with the military), options were examined that included coups and support for opposition or insurgent groups within Iraq. The broad goal was to put more pressure on Saddam Hussein, but beyond that there was little consensus of what precisely the United States should do or how far it should go. But there was little urgency to the debates, no clear goal, a fragmented policy process, no focusing event to rally policy change, and apart from a decision on a revised sanctions program the result was inaction. One report suggests that the ‘‘process swiftly became bogged down in bitter interagency disagreements’’ and ‘‘remained stuck’’ in ‘‘gridlock’’ until September 11 (Burrough et al. 2004:234), showing that the military establishment had not yet decided to go into war. Planning did continue, however. Between May 31 and July 26, 2001, the deputies committee met several times to discuss options for how to push Saddam’s regime toward collapse. Their resulting proposal, called ‘‘A Liberation Strategy,’’ seems to have been a cobbled-together set of initiatives, increased support for opposition groups, tighter economic sanctions, more intrusive weapons inspections, more muscular use of no-fly-zones, and other U.S. military presence in the country, designed to make Saddam more uncomfortable and his people more tempted to revolt (Woodward 2004:21). But it did not envisage direct U.S. military action, and little immediate result came of the plan. Again it seems that the military establishment had not yet concluded a military action. Although, the nature of those behind the September 11 attacks is not yet clear, there are a number of groups in the United States and Europe arguing that the US intelligence and military establishments are behind the attacks. However, there is little question that the attacks of September 11, 2001 brought a new urgency, and readiness to take bigger risks, to the administration’s thinking on Iraq. And again the final decision to attack Iraq was taken by men who had close ties with the military establishments. Endnotes BLIX, HANS. (2004) Disarming Iraq. New York: Pantheon Books. HERSH, SEYMOUR. (2001) The Iraq Hawks: Can Their PlanWork? The New Yorker, December 24 and 31. LANCASTER, JOHN. (2000) In Saddam’s Future, A Harder U.S. Line. Washington Post, June 3. LEMANN, NICHOLAS. (2001) The Iraq Factor. The New Yorker, January 22. LEMANN, NICHOLAS. (2003) How It Came to War. The New Yorker, March 31. LOEB, VERNON. (1998) Saddam’s Iraqi Foes Heartened by Clinton. Washington Post, November 16. MANN, JAMES. (2004a) Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet. New York: Viking. MANN, JAMES. (2004b) The True Rationale? It’s a Decade Old. Washington Post, March 7, 2004. MAYER, JANE. (2004) The Manipulator. The New Yorker, June 7. MAYER, JANE. (2004) The Manipulator. The New Yorker, June 7. PERLEZ, JANE. (1999) Albright Introduces a New Phrase to Promote Hussein’s Ouster. New York Times, WOODWARD, BOB. (2002) Bush at War. New York: Simon and Schuster. WOODWARD, BOB. (2004) Plan of Attack. New York: Simon and Schuster. HamidehHosseini is a MA student, University of Tehran | ||
Statistics View: 1,873 |
||