Who's Grilling the White House on Iraq?
Pacific News Service, Commentary, Larry Everest, Posted: Apr 12, 2004
Editor's Note: Lost in the sometimes heated exchanges in the 9/11 commission hearings and the recently released 9/11 memo was the matter of the administration's pre-Sept. 11 obsession with Iraq.
Lost in the sometimes-heated exchanges in the 9/11 commission hearings and in the debate over the recently released August 2001 memo on Al Qaeda were revealing glimpses of the Bush administration's priorities, in particular its obsession with Iraq. The full record -- pre and post-911 -- of the Bush decision to invade must be unearthed so we can fully understand why the U.S. invaded Iraq and why we may be there -- at enormous human cost -- for years to come.
Both before Sept. 11, 2001, and after, mainstream U.S. newspapers of record had reported that Iraq was a key focus, indeed a far more urgent priority, for the Bush administration than was al Qaeda. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was viewed as essential to maintaining the U.S. position in the Middle East and asserting U.S. power more forcefully around the world. In fact, the 9/11 attacks were quickly used as an opportunity to implement this agenda.
The new Bush administration began to target Iraq as soon as it took office. On Jan. 11, 2001, a New York Times headline read, "Iraq is Focal Point as Bush Meets With Joint Chiefs." A year later, the Washington Post reported that at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz began studying military options for ousting Hussein immediately upon taking office. An effort was undertaken -- including a grilling of Richard Clarke about possible connections between Hussein and Osama bin Laden at an April 2001 meeting -- to try to link Saddam to terrorism, according to an October 2002 report in the Wall Street Journal,
By July 2001, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that, "Senior officials have held almost weekly meetings on the issue to discuss whether to push for the [Hussein] government's ouster." The Washington Post would later report that in the week before Sept. 11, Vice President Cheney was "worried about the strength of our whole position in the Middle East -- where we stood with the Saudis, the Turks and others in the region."
The focus on Iraq intensified after Sept. 11. According to CBS News, some five hours after the attacks, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told an aide to begin drawing up plans for war -- on Iraq. Rumsfeld wanted to know if U.S. intelligence was also "good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]." His admonition: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and no."
In January 2002, Bob Woodward and Dan Balz of the Washington Post reported that the day after Sept. 11 (and after the CIA had concluded that it was "virtually certain" that the bin Laden network was responsible for the attacks, not Iraq or other states) top Bush officials discussed whether to "take advantage of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Hussein immediately."
On Sept. 17, 2001, after six days of debate, the Bush team decided not to strike Iraq. The reasons were tactical, not strategic, contrary to Rice's assertions of an exclusive focus on al-Qaeda and Sept. 11. According to the Washington Post, the team felt it would "need successes early in any war to maintain domestic and international support." Bush told Woodward, "[I]f we could prove that we could be successful in this theater [Afghanistan], then the rest of the task would be easier. If we tried to do too many things -- two things, for example, or three things -- militarily, then ... the lack of focus would have been a huge risk."
That day, according to a USA Today story published one year after Sept. 11, Bush signed secret orders authorizing war on Afghanistan and instructing the Pentagon to begin planning for combat in Iraq.
Two days later, on Sept. 19, the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board met behind closed doors. According to The New York Times, the purpose was to assess "the geopolitical significance of the attacks and chart a U.S. response." After 19 hours of discussions, the Times reported in October 2001, "The group agreed on the need to turn on Iraq as soon as the initial phase of the war against Afghanistan was over."
According to reports in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New Republic, published in late 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration had secretly decide to move against the Hussein regime by late October or early November 2001, some seven weeks after Sept. 11 and following the defeat of the Taliban. USA Today concluded, "President Bush's determination to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall...he decided that Saddam must go more than 10 months ago...seven weeks following the attacks on Sept. 11."
For all the 9/11 commission's discussion of "actionable intelligence" with regard to Al Qaeda, no one made the obvious comparison that the Bush team decided to invade Iraq even though it had no credible intelligence that Iraq either possessed weapons of weapons of mass destruction or was linked to 9/11 or Osama bin Laden.
The full record of this rapid post-911 march to war must be made public. Who's officially grilling the White House about it? So far, no one.
PNS contributor Larry Everest is author of "Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda" (Common Courage Press 2004/www.larryeverest.com).
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