The 9/11 Wars (20 page)

The same was the case with the idea that al-Qaeda fugitives making their way to Iraq were being sheltered and co-opted by Saddam. Again Powell was right in saying that militants had reached Iraq from Afghanistan. However, he failed to make clear that almost all were heading for the Kurdish zones outside the control of Saddam Hussein at the time. This was not just misleading but revealed once again the fundamental misunderstanding of the real nature of Islamic militancy that had crippled the American response to the threat revealed by the 9/11 attacks hitherto. The whole concept of a link between Saddam and bin Laden was underpinned by the belief that radical Muslim activism could (a) only exist with the support of an individual state or of a shadowy coalition of states and (b) was largely the result of the activities of bin Laden himself or those around him. Yet the situation in northern Iraq in 2002 clearly demonstrated how badly wrong both those presumptions were. Though some militants did make their way to Baghdad, they did not do so at the invitation of Saddam, nor were they welcomed by the Iraqi regime. Indeed, a letter found after the invasion revealed that Saddam was not aware of the arrival of the militants in the Iraqi capital nor particularly happy about it when he did finally learn of their presence. Concerned about the potential threat the new arrivals posed, his intelligence chiefs had in August 2002 been ordered to comb the city to find them as a ‘top priority’.
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Equally, militancy in northern Iraq dated back to the early 1990s and, like almost all such activism at the time, had developed entirely independently of any contact with bin Laden or his associates. Its roots lay in factors as diverse as the civil war between secular Kurdish factions in the middle of the decade, the rejection of radicals at elections in the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq in the early 1990s and a long tradition of political Islamism in cities such as Mosul and Arbil.
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Contact between the various groups operating in northern Iraq and bin Laden had come very much later.

In 2000 two of the three largest groups based in the enclave they had been able to create north of the town of Halabjah had sent emissaries to bin Laden in Afghanistan to solicit logistical aid and training. Bin Laden had provided some meagre resources but exploited the opportunity to first establish relations with the third group and then finally, months before September 11, seal a union between the three factions. The group created was called Ansar ul Islam but could in no sense be considered a creation of bin Laden comprising as it did local militants already active in some cases for decades.
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Powell also claimed that the group had constructed a chemical and biological weapons facility in the mountains of north-eastern Iraq, where they had carved out an enclave. Again, when the author was able to visit the site in April 2003, there was little evidence to back up the statement. An exhaustive investigation by American intelligence agencies found indications that experiments with poison such as cyanide had taken place but nothing to support any claim of any link with al-Qaeda.
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A final element that had fed the claim that al-Qaeda and Saddam had cooperated was a report filed by the CIA on September 17, 2001, noting that ‘a foreign intelligence service’ – in fact the Czechs – had reported that the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met ‘the local Iraqi intelligence service chief’ in Prague in April 2001. Subsequently, this too was contradicted by both the FBI and the CIA after analysis of Atta’s cell and bank card records in the USA during the relevant period.

The British MI6 had remained consistently sceptical of efforts to link al-Qaeda and Saddam throughout the run-up to war and their stance was reflected in the public positions taken by UK politicians. Even Blair avoided any direct claims of an actual current relationship, though he did raise on a number of occasions the possibility that one could be formed in the future.
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The British government issued a series of dossiers, first to MPs and then to a larger audience, in which a mix of intelligence material and public information was presented to argue that the Iraqi leader and his regime represented a clear and urgent danger to global security in general, to the West and to the UK in particular. They focused on the supposed threat posed by WMD. Such dossiers had long been a favoured means by which Downing Street influenced public opinion and had been presented to parliamentarians and journalists during the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and more recently to set out the case that bin Laden had been responsible for 9/11. Increasingly controversial, they were discontinued after the third prepared during the run-up to the Iraq war was revealed to be largely based not on secret intelligence at all but on hastily cut and pasted information from an out-of-date doctoral thesis found on the internet.
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One point worth stressing is that the debate about the potential threat from Iraq took place in a context where abuses of information had become almost banal. Reports of allied and civilian casualties in Afghanistan had been systematically proved to be inaccurate. The British government dossier on bin Laden issued in the autumn of 2001 had included a reference to al-Qaeda’s involvement in the narcotics trade, which was known by British officials at the time to be at the very least doubtful.
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(The 9/11 Commission was later to conclude there was ‘no reliable evidence that bin Ladin [
sic
] was involved [in] or made money through drug trafficking’.
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) More broadly there was the flagrant abuse of the patchy public understanding of what al-Qaeda was and what threat it posed. By early 2003, the list of governments seeking to exploit the atmosphere of fear inspired by the 9/11 attacks was long. States from Uzbekistan to the Philippines had claimed – without real challenge – that local Islamic militant movements owed their existence to the agency of Osama bin Laden rather than their own repressive, self-serving and incompetent policies. India, Russia and China labelled longstanding local separatist conflicts with roots dating back decades if not centuries as ‘al-Qaeda-led’ or at the very least ‘al-Qaeda-linked’.
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In Macedonia, senior elected officials went as far as staging a shoot-out with supposed al-Qaeda fighters set on attacking embassies ‘to impress the international community’. The victims were in fact entirely innocent Pakistani economic migrants whose bodies had been dressed in combat uniforms by officials before being displayed to the press.
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In the UK, as in the USA and many other nations, legislation granting radically enhanced powers to police and security services had been passed in an atmosphere of profound anxiety exacerbated by a series of high-profile arrests of terrorist suspects and a stream of sensationally reported alleged threats from terrorists, ranging from plots to release gas on the London Underground to schemes to plant a series of bombs at Old Trafford football ground, the home of Manchester United.
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Many turned out to be hugely inflated if not downright fantasy. Though police announced that ricin, a poison made from pounded castor beans, had been found in a raid in which a group of alleged Algerian militants had been arrested in a flat in north London, specialist scientists from Porton Down, the British government biological weapons centre, found that none had actually been manufactured. This did not stop the non-existent ricin being cited in Powell’s United Nations speech as a potential link between al-Qaeda, Iraq and Europe.
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The alleged plot to attack Old Trafford ran across front pages and led bulletins in Britain for two days but turned out to have been entirely based on the discovery by investigating policemen of a couple of ticket stubs and a scarf in the homes of one of the accused, who, ironically, were Iraqi Kurdish refugees who had fled Saddam Hussein’s regime.
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When in August 2002 a man was arrested in Stockholm’s Västerås airport with a gun in his toilet bag the mere fact that he had been travelling on a plane with a group of Muslims who were on their way to a conference on the Salafi strand of Islam in the British city of Birmingham was enough for UK newspapers to splash a ‘bin Laden link’ on their front pages. Prosecutors found no such connection or indeed any terrorist intent at all.
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In America, there was much talk of ‘dirty bombs’, devices laced with sub-explosive radioactive material, largely based on the interrogation under torture of Abu Zubaydah and of an American Hispanic former gang member and convert detained in 2002.
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One major scare, which led to flights to the USA from Britain and France being cancelled and warnings from officials of a looming ‘spectacular attack’ to rival 9/11, was based on an elaborate confidence trick by a compulsive gambler who claimed to have developed software that allowed him to decrypt messages to al-Qaeda sleeper cells buried deep in America hidden in al-Jazeera broadcasts.
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Official statements, such as the leaked intelligence estimates that there were as many as 5,000 ‘al-Qaeda terrorists and supporters’ and warnings by FBI director Robert Mueller of a ‘support infrastructure’ in America ‘which would allow the network to mount another attack on US soil’, stoked further fears.
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The strand of extremist ideology that bin Laden had propagated over previous years had indeed penetrated some American communities – a group of young men of Yemeni origin from the nondescript New York state town of Lackawanna who had travelled to an Afghan training camp before 9/11 were arrested amid massive publicity – but its purchase was extremely limited. The impression that a few deliberately fuelled the fear of many to build support for a deeply divisive policy is strong.

For though Bush’s memoirs and other similar accounts emphasize the supposed threat posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the idea that Iraq posed a clear and present danger to the United States or more broadly to world security was only one of the reasons for going to war. It was the most prominent in the run-up to the conflict because, as Paul Wolfowitz later admitted, ‘it was the one reason everyone could agree on’.
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There was never a single instant when a categoric decision was taken to militarily depose Saddam Hussein but rather a growing consensus within the inner circle of the Bush administration that built on the original impulses of key individuals like Cheney and Rumsfeld in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and made conflict inevitable.

This consensus comprised many strands. There was the original logic of the Global War on Terror: that only through aggressive, forceful and pre-emptive action by the US could potential aggressors be dissuaded and future terrorist attacks averted. There was also a strong sense that, after what was now felt to be aimless drift and weakness under Bill Clinton, a moment had come to radically change the status quo in the Middle East region in America’s favour. Here both ideological visions of an invasion of Iraq triggering a wave of liberal-democratic and free-market capitalist reform in the region, forever draining the ‘terrorist swamp’, and more realist views based on securing the long-term future of Israel, implanting American power in the Middle East region more fully and assuring that key strategic resources such as oil flowed freely on to the world market for the foreseeable future came together.
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Iraq, after all, had the second-largest oil reserves in the world. The human rights record of Saddam Hussein played a role too, though very much a secondary one, in the collective thinking at senior levels of the Bush administration, as did the Iraqi dictator’s earlier attempt to kill President Bush’s father. A desire to eliminate or at least severely weaken a perceived threat to Israel, carefully focused and reinforced by senior Israeli politicians and army officers in repeated interactions with administration officials, also contributed. One element that was notable in all these calculations was the degree to which they were ‘driven by theory – general ideas about what might or could happen’.
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Like the intelligence about whether Saddam Hussein had WMD or a relationship with bin Laden or the strength of the regime’s popular support, few of these theses could be tested in a definitive fashion other than, as historian Lawrence Freedman pointed out, by the supreme empirical test of a war and, more importantly, whatever would follow it.
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This apparent unwillingness to consider or analyse potential negative outcomes and their consequences when so much was at stake was rooted in a deliberate attempt to deal with risk at a strategic level in a radically new way. ‘We don’t exactly deal in “expectations” … and … we’re not comfortable with predictions. It is one of the big strategic premises of the work that we do,’ Douglas Feith at the Department of Defense explained.
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Historical precedents were thus dismissed as irrelevant. So instead of viewing the war in Vietnam as an example of the limits of American power, the earlier conflict was seen instead as a warning that policy-makers had to have enormous determination and dedication to a given policy to achieve victory. Nor was the example of British rule in Iraq – or Western rule more generally in the region in the first half of the twentieth century – considered worthwhile of study. Doubt was seen as likely to lead to self-fulfilling failure.
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