The present war against Iraq was not motivated by, and did not materialize directly from, the wreckage of September 11, 2001. It began almost from the moment that George W. Bush entered the White House in January, 2001. Two independently published depictions of that momentous time were written by persons intimately connected with the Bush presidency who actively participated in deliberations concerning the thrust of U.S. foreign policy in the new administration. Richard Clarke's recent book 'Against All Enemies' (Free Press) and O'Neill's (with Ron Suskind) concurrent book 'The Price of Loyalty' (Simon and Schuster) chronical and corroborate the events, the thinking and the demeanor of the President and his senior foreign policy advisors before, during and after the 9/11 debacle.
Richard Clarke's and Paul O'Neill's accounts of their respective receptions by the incoming White House staff are starkly similar and seemed to converge on the same basic idea: terrorism was low priority in the Bush II NSC agenda.
Richard Clarke had been Clinton's counterterrorism chief and was one of the few carry-overs into the Bush White House. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa and the attack on a U.S. destroyer in Yemen, the need to counter terrorism,domestic and foreign, had become the highest national security priority in the Clinton Administration.
During the transition period in January 2001 it was imperative to pass this urgency on to the incoming high-level Bush cadre. This effort, however, was doomed from the start, 1) because it did not conform with the new president's main national security agenda which was primarily dedicated to national missile defense, and 2) because all Clinton initiatives were anathema to Bush and his senior staff. 'Anything but Clinton' was to be the ringing paradigm in the new, morally superior administration.
Clarke was soon informed that his counterterrorism office would be reduced and downgraded. The counterterrorism chief would no longer report directly to the Cabinet-level Principals. However, during the transition period Clarke did brief the senior staff including Condi Rice, Steve Hadley and Colin Powell.
His message was simple and direct, "Al Qaeda is at war with us ... it is planning a major series of attacks... we must act decisively and quickly." Within days following Bush's inauguration he urgently requested a meeting of the NSC Principals to discuss the terrorist threat. This request was studiously ignored.
O'Neill attended the first meeting of the NSC staff chaired by the President on January 30, 2001. The al Qaeda threat was not mentioned. What was discussed, however, was the new direction of American foreign policy with respect to the Middle East. Henceforth, U.S. participation in Iraeli-Palestinian negotiations would be downgraded (it was, after all, a Clinton imperative) and Iraq would now occupy center stage -- because it was "destabilizing the region." Moreover,"Saddam now owned WMD."
O'Neil was struck by the revelation that a major shift in U.S. policy had occurred instantaneously, obliterating nearly 30 years of American engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. "Ten days in and its all about Iraq." He could not help but wonder, "Why Saddam, why now, why was this in the national interest?"
Eight months after Clarke's first request to brief the Cabinet-level Principals was denied, he was finally granted a hearing exactly one week before 9/11. Summoned to an urgent meeting following that calamitous event, expecting that the main topic would be U.S. vulnerabilities and how best to meet them, he was incredulous to find that the subject was Iraq. It was clear from the start that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to exploit the national tragedy to promote their preconceived agenda for Iraq.
After three years, sifting through mountains of testimony, on-the- ground searches, Congressional investigations and commissions, and best-seller insider revelations, there can be little doubt that Bush misled the nation into believing that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the al Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001. None of the information he received on that day or subsequently suggested that Saddam was involved in any way. Why then was he so insistent to implicate Iraq and why was he willing to take the extraordinary leap into an unnecessary war? Paul O'Neill's account of his early days in the White House may provide some valuable insight.
A most revealing document surfacing in those early days spelled out, in no uncertain terms, the Bush team's perspective concerning the disposition of Iraq's extensive oil assets in a post-Gulf-War II world. It was entitled, 'Foreign Suitors for Iraq's Oil Field Contracts' which listed companies from thirty countries and discussed "..how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors..", and how to dissuade them from "engaging in asymmetrical challenges to the United States." (The Price of Loyalty, p96.) Bush fired Paul O'Neill before this book was published in January, 2004 but the above statements remain a matter of record.
The first salient fact concerning the so-called 'war on terror', (meaning the invasion of Iraq), is that it is no war on terror. It is often called, correctly, an insurrection, a classic guerrilla war that is also proving to be a vast field for Islamic recruitment. The real war on terror which was launched half heartedly by the U.S. in Afghanistan in late 2001, employing mostly troops belonging to the Northern Alliance, essentially fizzled out after the al Qaeda forces had escaped into the Pakistani border lands.
The main reason why the United States did not pursue the al Qaeda enemy at the most opportune moment (while they were still in Afghanistan) may have seemed incomprehensible at the time, but with the passage of time and the parade of subsequent events, one plausibility stands out: Afghanistan was never the real target.
The second salient fact is that George W. Bush failed to act on the al Qaeda threat prior to 9/11 despite repeated warnings, but then chose to harvest a bumper crop of credit for taking obvious but ineffective steps after the attacks had materialized. By some amazing legerdemain which no doubt deserves its place in history, Bush succeeded in convincing 70% of the American public that somehow America is safer because he is leading the charge against terrorism. A significant number of Americans still adhere to that fiction while the rest of the world stands aghast at our gullibility and apparently limitless capacity for self-deception.
Howard Garcia is a retired Boulder physicist