Recent Accounts of US Perfidy in Iraq

As tragedy unravels in Iraq, the perfidious claims made by the Bush administration and its apologists of fighting a ‘just war’ are coming undone. While President Bush may believe that he is carrying out ‘a mission that has been sanctioned by the divine’, as he recently indicated in a White House press conference, there is significant evidence from noteworthy sources which reveals otherwise.

‘Plan of Attack’, a recent controversial book by Bob Woodward, the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, is a captivating narrative that illustrates the role of forceful personalities, nebulous intelligence, rigid Pentagon timetables and self-righteous notions like exporting democracy in shaping the Bush Administration’s aggressive policies that created the momentum for war. Exposing the fact that Iraq was always uppermost on the White House agenda, ‘Plan of Attack’ begins with an intriguing disclosure; President Bush asking Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001, to start a war plan for Iraq, and to do so secretly because a leak could generate ‘enormous international angst and domestic speculation’.

Highlighting the Bush Administration’s faltering journey towards the Iraq war Woodward quotes the director of CIA, George Tenet, telling President Bush in December 2002 that intelligence about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction was ‘a slam dunk’. Tenet later told associates that the CIA should have stated up front that the evidence was not ‘ironclad’ and that there was ‘no smoking gun’. Gen. Tommy Franks, who got the Iraq assignment while he was busy prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, was among those who objected to this war from the beginning. Woodward describes him uttering a string of obscenities when he was ordered to develop a plan for invading Iraq and quotes General Franks saying in September 2002 that his people had been ‘looking for Scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for 10 years and haven’t found any yet’.

Woodward describes Vice President Cheney as being a ‘powerful, steamrolling force for military intervention’. According to Woodward, Cheney harbored ‘a deep sense of unfinished business about Iraq’ and reports that in January 2001 Cheney passed a message to the outgoing defense secretary, William Cohen, stipulating that the first topic in Mr. Bush’s foreign policy briefing should be Iraq.’ Woodward also remarks that Colin Powell believed that the Vice President had ‘an unhealthy fixation’ about Saddam Hussein and was constantly striving to draw connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq. ‘Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact’, he says. At a later point Mr. Woodward comments that Secretary of State Powell also cautioned President Bush in January 2003 that military action against Iraq would leave the United States responsible for rebuilding the country and dealing with the global fallout that this invasion would cause, but remarks that the President never asked Powell for advice, and that Mr. Powell never volunteered any. ‘Perhaps the President feared the answer’, Mr. Woodward says. ‘Perhaps Powell feared giving it’.

‘Against All Enemies’ is another scathing review of imprudent Washington policies by Richard Clarke, who has been called the ‘ultimate White House insider’. As the former counter-terrorism coordinator at the White House, he alleges that inspite of mounting intelligence of the danger Al-Qaeda presented, his urgent requests to move terrorism up the list of priorities in the early days of the administration were met with apathy and procrastination. Clarke recounts the disorganized counter-terrorism policy of the Clinton administration and notes that the Bush team didn’t hold its first cabinet-level meeting on Al-Qaeda until one week before the twin towers fell. These allegations are also corroborated in ‘Ghost Wars’ by Steve Coll, the managing editor of The Washington Post. Clark claims that even after the attacks took place the Bush team was preoccupied with Iraq even when faced with overwhelming evidence that it was Al-Qaeda that was attacking the United States. ‘I realized that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to protect their agenda about Iraq’, he says.

This book contains riveting details about President Bush’s obsession with Iraq, which recently created explosive headlines and incited the Administration’s wrath. The most infamous incident in ‘Against All Enemies’ deals with Bush’s keenness to link the Sept. 11 attacks to Iraq. Clarke writes that on the night of Sept. 12 he saw Bush wandering alone through the Situation Room. The President then stopped and asked Clarke and a few aides to ‘go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this’. Clarke said he was ‘taken aback, incredulous’. He told the president, ‘Al-Qaeda did this’. ‘I know, I know, but see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred….’. Clarke also presents several explanations for this fixation with Iraq such as strategies to improve Israel’s position, creating a model Arab democracy, establishing an easy source of oil for the US and vindicating the first ineffectual Iraq war. Clarke has not only done a brilliant job of underscoring the Bush Administration’s misplaced paranoia about Iraq he has also underlined various other irresponsible and injudicious White House policies that have shaped world events over the past thirty years.

Many assertions made by Clarke and Woodward, echo revelations made earlier by the former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in Ron Suskind’s book ‘The Price of Loyalty’, who also noted that Iraq was central to the Bush Administration’s agenda from its very first days in office. In his disturbing portrait of a White House, where evidence and argument seem to have been habitually pushed aside when they got in the way of previously decided political outcomes, O’Neill comments, ‘Politics, as it’s now played, is not about being right. Its about doing whatever’s necessary to win’. Another illustrative account, ‘Worse than Watergate’ by John. W. Dean also ratifies such contentions. Dean, who was the former White House counsel for President Nixon, claims that the Bush Administration’s compulsive secrecy about policy issues is ‘far worse than during Watergate’ and ‘not merely unjustified and excessive but also obsessive’. ‘This undue secrecy not only is undemocratic but also schools scandal by concealing and protecting errors, excesses, and all manner of impropriety’, he says as he describes ‘a presidency that seeks to control, if not suppress, everything’.

Hans Blix, the ex-Chief UN Weapons Inspector, also shares these opinions. In ‘Disarming Iraq’, he compares Washington’s policies to witch-hunting in the Middle Ages. ‘The witches exist; you are appointed to deal with these witches; testing whether there are witches is only a dilution of the witch hunt’. This book gives a detailed account of the surreptitious diplomacy surrounding the last UN weapon inspections in Iraq. While Blix admits that he too presumed that Iraq was hiding WMDs, he expresses tremendous frustration at the attitude of the Bush administration which he thought was both excessively confident that the weapons existed and totally uninterested in any evidence. Blix comments that he persistently complained to the US officials that their intelligence was insufficient or simply incorrect, pointing out that virtually every claim made by American policy makers about Iraq’s weapons programs proved to be false. The entire assessment of Iraq’s weapons program lacked any kind of ‘critical thinking’, he argues.

He was aware that the Bush administration was overly distrustful of the UN inspections and recalls a meeting with Cheney at which the Vice President tried to intimidate him, threatening to ‘discredit inspections in favor of disarmament’ if he did not produce quick results. He also felt that ‘the contempt which both Vice President Cheney and the leadership in the U.S. Department of Defense appear to have held for international inspections deprived them, in effect, of a valuable source of information’. In conclusion Blix emphatically criticizes the US for viewing diplomacy as an obstacle and it becomes apparent from his arguments that Washington could have easily worked with international structures and institutions to attain its objectives in Iraq if it had only wished to do so.



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Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward
Simon&Schuster . 480 pg. Publication, April 2004

Disarming Iraq by Hans Blix
Pantheon Books. 304 pg. Publication, March 2004

Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror by Richard Clark
Free Press. 320pg. Publication, March 2004

Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush by John W. Dean
Little Brown & Company 253pg. Publication, April 2004

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001by Steve Coll
Penguin Press 695pg Publication, Feb 2004

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill
by Ron Suskind
Simon & Schuster 368pg. Publication, Jan 2004