Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (29 page)

President Bush and all his senior advisers knew that if we took strong unilateral political and economic action against Russia, we ran the risk of the United States, rather than the Russians, becoming isolated over the invasion. A statement by the European Union criticizing the invasion by was predictably tepid. So as much as most of us wanted strong action against Russia, we suppressed our feelings and agreed to march in lockstep with our NATO allies. (It reminded me of my initial crisis in government when, during my first week on the job at CIA in August 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. As horrified as the Europeans said they were by the brutal invasion, for them, everything was back to business as usual with the Soviets within three or four months.)

The Bush administration was out of time, energy, and patience to try to get the relationship with Russia back on track. With less than five
months left, nobody really cared. There was one ancillary, modest gain after the Russian invasion: six days later, the Poles signed a deal with us to allow ten missile defense interceptors to be based in their country.

S
YRIA

Syria had been a problem for the United States for the last two decades of the Cold War. The regime, controlled by the Assad family, had fought several wars with Israel, invaded Jordan, allied with Iran, and supported a number of terrorist and militia groups causing trouble in the Middle East. In the spring of 2007, the Israelis presented us with compelling evidence that North Korea had secretly built a nuclear reactor in Syria. The administration was divided about how to respond, our options constrained by the fact that the Israelis had informed us of this stunning development and therefore were in a position to significantly influence—if not dictate—what could be publicly divulged and when. The case for the existence of the reactor and the North Korean role in building it depended heavily on Israeli intelligence. Our debates during the ensuing months as to whether to take military action, and about how closely to work with the Israelis, were important regarding Syria, but they also prefigured in many respects the arguments regarding the Iranian nuclear program in 2008 and later.

Contacts between North Korean nuclear organizations and high-level Syrians were believed to have begun as early as 1997. In 2005, we found a large building under construction in eastern Syria, but its purpose became clear only with photographs of the inside of the building provided by the Israelis in 2007. The design was very similar to that of a North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, and our analysts concluded that the reactor would be capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Syria for years had been a high-priority intelligence target for the United States, as was anything having to do with possible development of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons in particular. Early detection of a large nuclear reactor under construction in a place like Syria is supposedly the kind of intelligence collection that the United States does superbly well. Yet by the time the Israelis informed us about the site, the reactor construction was already well advanced. This was a significant failure on the part of the U.S. intelligence agencies, and I asked the president, “How can we have any confidence at all in the estimates
of the scope of the North Korean, Iranian, or other possible programs” given this failure? Surprisingly, neither the president nor Congress made much of it. Given the stakes, they should have.

As the Bush national security team discussed what to do about the reactor, I asked Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, acting commander at Central Command, to provide us with a number of military options and different target lists associated with each. I sent Dempsey’s report to National Security Adviser Steve Hadley on May 15 for the president to see. The report also focused on how we might disrupt Syrian support for Hizballah in Lebanon and, specifically, how we might prevent Hizballah from toppling the weak Lebanese government in retaliation for a military strike on Syria. Successfully restraining Hizballah would require using American ground forces, and that the president would not do. I told Hadley there were a number of other considerations to be taken into account as well, including the impact in the broader Middle East of a military strike on Syria—after all, we were already in two wars in or near the region. We also had to consider whether the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan would publicly support a strike. And what about the risk to the 7,000 Americans in Syria?

In the coming weeks, Cheney, Rice, Hadley, and I frequently discussed our options in Syria. Cheney thought we should attack the site, the sooner the better. He believed not only that we had to prevent Syria from acquiring nuclear weapons, but also that a military strike would send a powerful warning to the Iranians to abandon their nuclear ambitions. We could also, he said, hit Hizballah weapons storage sites in Syria at the same time to weaken them—always a key priority of the Israelis. By attacking, we might even be able to rattle Assad sufficiently so as to end his close relationship with Iran, thus further isolating the Iranians. Cheney often raised the question of what our actions, or inaction, would have on our relationship with the Israelis and their own decisions about what to do. As always, Dick laid out his views logically and analytically. He, Rice, Hadley, and I—often joined by Mike Mullen, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, and CIA director Mike Hayden—would sit around the conference table in Hadley’s White House office and, while eating lunch or munching on chips and salsa, go over the choices facing the president. Cheney knew that, among the four of us, he alone thought a strike should be the first and only option. But perhaps he could persuade the president.

Our first long meeting as a group with the president was on the evening of June 17. Cheney, Rice, Hadley, and I were joined by Mullen, White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, and several NSC staff members. My views then, and for the next four years, were shaped by several overriding considerations: we already had two ongoing wars in Muslim countries, our military was overstretched, we were already considered by most countries as too quick to use military force, and the last thing America needed was to attack another Arab country. I also thought we had both time and options other than an immediate military strike. Using notes, I spoke bluntly:

• Without specific proof of a state taking hostile action against Americans (Libya—1986; Panama—1989; Afghanistan—2001), I am aware of no precedent for an American surprise attack against a sovereign state. We don’t do “Pearl Harbors.” Remember, President Reagan condemned the Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.

• U.S. credibility on weapons of mass destruction is deeply suspect at home and abroad as a result of the Iraq legacy.

• Israeli credibility is equally suspect, if not more so, in the Middle East, Europe, and maybe significant elements of the U.S. public. An act of war based principally on information provided by a third party is risky in the extreme. U.S. and Israeli interests are not always the same.

• Any Israeli action will be seen as provocative, aimed at restoring their credibility and deterrent after their indecisive war with Hizballah [in 2006] and at shoring up a weak Israeli government. Israeli action could start a new war with Syria.

• Any overt U.S. preemptive attack will cause a firestorm in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. Efforts to prove our case against Syria and North Korea, based on current available intelligence, will be unsuccessful or regarded with deep skepticism. U.S. military action will be seen as another rash act by a trigger-happy administration and could jeopardize our efforts in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and even with respect to missile defense in Europe. It would be seen as an effort to offset or distract from failures in Iraq.

I told the group that I agreed the reactor should not be allowed to become active, but that we shouldn’t use it as a pretext to try to solve all our problems with Syria and placate Israel by hitting other targets, as
Cheney had suggested. We should focus just on the reactor. I said that my preferred approach was to begin with diplomacy and reserve a military strike as the last resort. We should expose what the Syrians and North Koreans had done and focus on their violations of UN Security Council resolutions, the nonproliferation treaty, and more. At the United Nations, we should demand an immediate freeze on activity at the site and prompt inspection by representatives of the five permanent members of the Security Council (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China). We should be specific in saying that the United States would not allow the reactor to become operational but were turning to the Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Commission to negotiate its destruction or permanent immobilization. I said this approach would require Syrian president Bashar Hafez al-Assad either to accede or to prove that the facility was not what we said it was. If he did the latter, we would have used diplomacy to defuse a crisis; if, as we believed, he could not, then we could hold other governments’ feet to the fire—to put up or shut up on nonproliferation. As I would later tell the president, the option to delay operational status of the reactor by destroying the pump house (without a water supply, the reactor could not become operational) or by destroying the reactor itself would remain available to us throughout the diplomatic process. I concluded my remarks by saying, “I suspect no one in the world doubts this administration’s willingness to use force—but better to use it as a last resort than as a first step.” The next day, after a videoconference with Petraeus and our ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, the president pulled me aside and thanked me for my comments the evening before. He knew that Hadley, Rice, and I had discussed the “Tojo option”—referring to the Japanese prime minister who ordered the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor—earlier that morning and simply said, “I’m not going to do that.”

In the latter part of June, the debate intensified as the Israelis pressed us to act or to help them do so. The president was very pro-Israel—as was Cheney—and greatly admired Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and I was genuinely worried that Bush might just decide to let the Israelis take care of the reactor, forgoing any benefit of a sequenced approach and still leaving the United States with all the consequences of an attack. The administration’s senior leaders again staked out our positions in a meeting with the president on June 20. Cheney said we should hit the reactor immediately. Rice and I argued for a sequenced approach, beginning
with diplomacy, but if that failed, we should take military action. General Pace supported that approach, saying it “gives you two chances to win.” Hadley observed that if we gave Assad too much time, he would organize the Arab world against us. I warned the president that Olmert was trying to force his hand.

In early July, I communicated my views privately to the president. I told him that I had recently read various statements on the use of force by former defense secretaries Cap Weinberger and Don Rumsfeld, as well as by Colin Powell and Tony Blair, and that the only thing they all agreed on was that the use of force should be a last resort after all other measures have failed. I warned that a preemptive U.S. strike to destroy the reactor would lead to a “huge negative reaction” at home and abroad, risking a fatal weakening of remaining support for our efforts in Iraq, and that our coalition support there could evaporate. At the same time, if we let the Israelis take care of the problem, we would be regarded as complicit or a coconspirator and that this option also ran the risk of igniting a wider war in the Middle East and an unpredictable reaction in Iraq. I urged Bush to “tell Prime Minister Olmert that we will not allow the reactor to become operational but Israel must allow us to handle this in our own way. If they do not, they are on their own. We will not help them.” Further, I told the president he should tell Olmert very directly that if Israel went forward on its own militarily, he would be putting Israel’s entire relationship with the United States at risk.

The president talked to Olmert on July 13, and while he declined to put the matter to him in the way I had urged, he did push the prime minister hard “to let us take care of this.” Olmert responded that the reactor represented an existential threat to Israel that it could not trust diplomacy to fix, even if the effort was led by the United States. In the course of the conversation, the president pledged not to expose knowledge of the reactor publicly without an Israeli okay.

All the president’s national security team met the next morning, and the focus was on the Israelis. I was furious. I said that Olmert was asking for our help on the reactor but giving us only one option: to destroy it. If we didn’t do exactly what he wanted, Israel would act and we could do nothing about it. The United States was being held hostage to Israeli decision making. If there was a secret attack, all the focus would be on what the Israelis did, not what Syria and North Korea had done. I warned that if a wider war occurred after the attack, the United States would
be blamed for not restraining the Israelis. “Our proposal [the first step being diplomatic/political] will emerge, making it look like the U.S. government subordinated its strategic interest to that of a weak Israeli government that already had screwed up one conflict in the region [against Hizballah in 2006] and that we were unwilling to confront or cross the Israelis.”

I am, and always have been, strongly pro-Israel. As a moral and historic imperative, I believe in a secure, viable Jewish state with the right to defend itself. But our interests are not always identical, as I said earlier, and I’m not prepared to risk vital American strategic interests to accommodate the views of hard-line Israeli politicians. The president said that he was impressed with Olmert’s “steadfastness” and that he was unwilling to preempt the prime minister through a diplomatic initiative or even to put much pressure on him. Rice called me late that afternoon to express her deep unease over the situation. I said I might talk to the president again, and she said, “Use my name and count me in.”