The Assassins' Gate (6 page)

Among the causes of the liberal hawks of the nineties, Iraq never made the list. Iraq had been a humanitarian crisis in 1988, when Saddam committed genocide against the Kurds at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, and again in 1991, when Saddam massacred the Shia and Kurds who had risen up at the end of the Gulf War. Apart from Kanan Makiya and a few other lonely voices, no one was calling for armed intervention to overthrow the Baathist regime back then. The idea hadn't yet taken hold. Of course, one could argue, every day under Saddam's rule in Iraq was a humanitarian crisis. Human Rights Watch and other organizations meticulously documented the Baath Party's vast crimes. But without the eyes of the media, without reports of mass graves, and with the fear that war in Iraq would produce large-scale casualties, a dictator who had far more blood on his hands than Slobodan Milo&sbrave;ević managed to avoid the relentless opprobrium of the interventionists of the nineties. Perhaps the Arab world was somehow beyond the reach of human rights in a way that Bosnia and Kosovo were not. Perhaps the fact that the United States had strategic interests in the region (oil), and that the issue of Iraq involved unconventional weapons as well as mass murder, made the question of war more complicated for “airy humanitarians.” In any event, the Clinton years ended with no sense that the achievement in the Balkans should be followed up in Mesopotamia, or anywhere else. The liberal hawks had always been a minority, even among Democrats.

The small, inconclusive wars of the nineties raised but failed to answer the essential questions of the post–Cold War world: What do human rights have to do with national security? What should the United States do about threats that the world insists on ignoring? Is it necessary for war to have the sanction of an international body? What are the limits of sovereignty? Can democracy be brought by force? Whose responsibility does a defeated country become after a war? Most of all: What role should America's preeminent power play in shaping the answers? These questions hung in the air unanswered by the time the century turned. Soon the new administration in Washington would bring them all into focus, over Iraq.

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BY
2000, the lame-duck President Clinton showed no sign of wanting to deal once and for all with a defiant Iraq. The Iraq Liberation Act was on the books but had never been in Clinton's heart. Iraq became the neoconservatives' leading cause because the Clinton policy of sanctions and occasional missile attacks seemed to be failing, but for a larger reason, too: They saw Iraq as the test case for their ideas about American power and world leadership. Iraq represented the worst failure of the nineties and the first opportunity of the new American century. In the middle of the 2000 presidential campaign, Kagan and Kristol published a warning shot in the form of an essay collection pointedly, and perhaps nostalgically, called
Present Dangers.
It was a book-length exposition of the themes of their earlier articles, and the contributors included many of the leading figures in what was becoming a critical mass of hawkish foreign-policy opinion. Richard Perle's essay dripped scorn, claiming that Clinton's December 1998 bombing of Iraqi installations, widely ridiculed as a “wag the dog” distraction in the middle of impeachment hearings, “had no lasting effect” (an assertion that was refuted after the invasion by the Iraq Survey Group, which found that the missile strikes had helped to finish off what was left of Saddam's chemical weapons facilities). Without mentioning his friend Ahmad Chalabi by name, Perle proposed the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Chalabi, as the crowbar with which America could pry Iraq free from Saddam's grip. Finally, Perle broke the last taboo and broached the possibility of a U.S. military role: “As a last resort … we should build up our own ground forces in the region so that we have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq.”

Paul Wolfowitz's essay was far more judicious, an on-the-other-hand attempt to apply principles learned during the Cold War to the new world, with its many new dangers. Though this ex-Democrat was as contemptuous of the Democrats as the book's other essayists, Wolfowitz seemed in no mood to assert America's benevolent hegemony across the globe. He even glanced back worriedly at the trauma that had made so many liberals into pacifists. “We cannot ignore the uncomfortable fact that economic and social circumstances may better prepare some countries for democracy than others,” wrote Wolfowitz, who had served a stint as a widely admired ambassador to Indonesia (most of the other neoconservatives had spent their entire careers in Washington). “Oddly, we seem to have forgotten what Vietnam should have taught us about the limitations of the military as an instrument of ‘nation-building.' Promoting democracy requires attention to specific circumstances and to the limitations of U.S. leverage. Both because of what the United States is, and because of what is possible, we cannot engage either in promoting democracy or in nation-building as an exercise of will. We must proceed by interaction and indirection, not imposition. In this respect, post–World War II experiences with Germany and Japan offer misleading guides to what is possible now, even in a period of American primacy.”

Thus Paul Wolfowitz in the year 2000—sounding like a prudent expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—the same man who within a few years would acquire the epithet “Wolfowitz of Arabia” after unlearning in Iraq everything quoted above. There are no pure ideas and straight lines in the history of great events. When policy makers change their views, “Usually it's because circumstances change,” Kagan told me, “or they got insulted by somebody in power.” In Wolfowitz's case, he might have been angling for a job in the administration of the leading Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, whom he served as a foreign-policy adviser during the campaign and who made it clear that crusades to transform the world after America's image were not going to be his thing. Bush's guide to the world could be found in a
Foreign Affairs
article—not Kagan's and Kristol's from 1996 but an essay in the January 2000 issue by the provost of Stanford University, Condoleezza Rice, which called for a return to the great-power realism of Nixon, Kissinger, and Bush's father.

But after the disputed election, when the younger Bush's national-security team began to take shape, one found sprinkled throughout the government the names of neoconservatives who knew one another from years in and out of power, and whose ideas for the post–Cold War world had come into focus during the nineties: Wolfowitz, Eeith, Wurmser, Shulsky, Stephen Cambone, and others at the Pentagon; Wolfowitz's former aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, John Hannah, and William J. Luti in Vice President Cheney's office; Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Zalmay Khalilzad on the National Security Council; John Bolton at State; Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and R. James Woolsey on the advisory Defense Policy Board. Their patrons were Cheney and the new secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was a hard-edged old Cold Warrior, an aggressive nationalist. Cheney, Rumsfeld's protégé, colleague, and pal through several administrations, came from the same stock.

Many of these officials had served at the middle levels under Reagan, embracing his hawkish idealism. The fall of communism and the emergence of the United States as the world's only superpower had given them a sense of historical victory. Then they had spent the nineties watching the first Bush administration return to narrow realism and the Clinton administration founder from crisis to crisis, squandering Reagan's triumph. They had made their long march through the think tanks and policy journals, honing their ideas and perfecting their attacks. Now they were coming back to power as insurgents, scornful of the entrenched bureaucracy, the more cautious moderates in their own party (including the new secretary of state, Colin Powell), and the tired, defeated Democrats. They were supremely confident; all they needed was a mission.

I asked Robert Kagan how his ideas had traveled from the pages of
Commentary
to the foreign-policy apparatus of the Bush administration. He waved me off. It didn't work that way, he said. “September 11 is the turning point. Not anything else. This is not what Bush was on September 10.”

The ideas of the neoconservatives had nothing to do with it?

Kagan sighed. “Here's what I'm willing to say. Did we keep alive a certain way of looking at American foreign policy at a time when it was pretty unpopular? Yes. I think probably you need to have people do that so that you have something to come back to. And, in a way, then you have a ready-made approach to the world.”

2

F
EVERED
M
INDS

IN THE SPRING
of 2002, I met Kanan Makiya for one of our irregular coffees in a Harvard Square basement café. By then I'd moved from Cambridge to New York, where on the morning of September 11, 2001, I rushed down Fifth Avenue against the current of ash-covered men and women who were streaming uptown from the place where the World Trade Center towers had been, and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in an exodus of red-faced workers as smoke and dust poured into the sky.

Six months and one war in Afghanistan later, Makiya was talking about another war, this one in Iraq. It would be the war he had called for, to no avail, back in 1991—a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As early as January 2001, at the new administration's first national security meeting, officials floated plans to the freshly sworn-in president for the removal of Saddam, in accord with the largely symbolic Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (though this would emerge only three years later, in an insider's account by Bush's first, short-lived treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill). In April, at the administration's first meeting on terrorism, Richard Clarke, the leading counterterrorism official of three administrations, found that Bush's new appointees, especially Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, were far more interested in the threat from states like Iraq than from the stateless and shadowy band of global jihadis called al-Qaeda. “I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden,” Clarke later quoted Wolfowitz as saying. “You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor.” Wolfowitz meant Iraq. Having fought and—as they saw it—won the Cold War with their hard-line policies, officials like him who had come back to power still viewed the world of dangers in terms of heavily militarized enemy states. The 1990s hadn't changed their thinking. To them, those were lost years: Under Clinton there had been far too much focus on globalization and international institutions and “soft,” borderless threats like poverty and ethnic conflict.

Then came September 11. Within minutes of fleeing his office at the devastated Pentagon, Wolfowitz told aides that he suspected Iraqi involvement in the attacks. A little past two in the afternoon, while the air in lower Manhattan and along the Potomac was still full of acrid smoke, assistants to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took notes as their boss held forth in the National Military Command Center: “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” That same afternoon, one of Bush's speechwriters, David Frum, having been evacuated from the White House and taken shelter in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute, got on the phone with Richard Perle, Washington's most assiduous proponent of regime change in Iraq. “Whatever else the President says,” Perle urged from his vacation home in the south of France, “he must make clear that he's holding responsible not just terrorists but whoever harbors those terrorists.” That night, in a televised address from the White House, Bush followed Perle's advice to the word and then expanded on it: The rest of the world was either with America or with the terrorists. The day after the attacks, according to Richard Clarke, Bush ordered his counterterrorism team to find out whether there could be any connection to Iraq. “See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way.”

“But, Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this,” Clarke replied.

“I know, I know, but … see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.”

Three days later, in a crisis meeting at Camp David, Wolfowitz kept returning to Iraq as the most important target for the initial American response, until the president finally shut him up. Afghanistan would be first, but the idea of Iraq was in play, and Bush was not unreceptive—after all, Wolfowitz had been given plenty of air time, much to the frustration of Secretary of State Colin Powell. On September 17, six days after the attacks, Bush told his war council, “I believe Iraq was involved.”

“Until I'm persuaded otherwise, this is what I think,” Robert Kagan said. “Paul may have brought it up, but Bush from the beginning was thinking about Iraq. I think that Bush had Iraq on the brain. Paul, who is a deputy secretary of defense who does not get along with his secretary of defense and whose alone time with the president is probably minimal, fighting giants like Powell, who was much stronger than he was? I think it had to be the president. This is what the president wanted to do.”

Richard Perle, Wolfowitz's friend for more than three decades, agreed. Until September 11, he said, proponents of regime change in Iraq were losing the argument within the administration. “Nine-eleven had a profound effect on the president's thinking. It wasn't the arguments or the positions held by me, or Paul, or anyone else before that. The world began on nine-eleven. There's no intellectual history.” But there was already in place across the top levels of the national-security bureaucracy a group of people with a definite intellectual history, who could give the president's new impulses a strategy, a doctrine, a world-view. Perle, like Kagan, cautioned against making too much of papers published in obscure foreign-policy journals. What mattered was who held positions of power. “The people are important, and the ideas are important in connection with the people,” Perle told me one winter afternoon in the living room of his large house just outside Washington. “But the ideas themselves—let's put it this way: If Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker, which might well have happened, then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into it the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought to it. The ideas are only important as they reside in the minds of people who were involved directly in the decision process.”