No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

12 SADDAM AGAIN

THAT WAS NOT the case with Saddam Hussein, who had plunged the region into war a second time in 1990 with his invasion of Kuwait. It was well understood that Iraq was systematically violating the ceasefire agreement that it had signed in 1991 and evading the sanctions that had been levied against it. Periodic crises had flared in the intervening years, leading arms inspectors to exit Iraq in 1998 and leaving Saddam’s WMD programs unmonitored. Unlike the situation in Iran, the international community had already employed virtually every tool to deal with Saddam—diplomatic isolation, weapons inspections, economic sanctions, travel bans, oil and arms embargoes, military containment through no-fly zones, and even the use of military force (to reverse his aggression against Kuwait in 1991 and to destroy suspected WMD sites in 1998).

Upon taking office in 2001, that was the situation we inherited and tried to address by strengthening the containment of the regime. Those efforts were frustrating and largely unsuccessful. September 11 had diverted our attention from the problem of Saddam, with the President making clear that the immediate problem was the al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan. Now, in the spring of 2002, examining the WMD threat and its nexus with terrorism, the question of what to do about Saddam—who had a record of using chemical weapons against Iranian targets and ethnic minorities within his own population—was on the table again.

The President was becoming deeply concerned about our inability to deal effectively with Iraq. The intelligence picture concerning Saddam’s military programs and his intentions was darkening. There were indeed uncertainties about the precise state of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. But it is rare that policy makers are fortunate enough to have incontrovertible evidence about adversaries’ weapons programs. Rogue regimes seeking WMD will try feverishly to evade detection: they will build front companies to trade in illicit goods, ship equipment and materials under false flags, and make inspections—when they consent to them—difficult with cat-and-mouse games that almost always lead to deeply qualified assessments of the state of their programs. Unlike the Soviet Union, which was a declared nuclear weapons state and actually paraded much of its military hardware through Red Square, virtually nothing about rogue regimes’ weapons proliferation activities is conducted out in the open. That means intelligence analysis of such covert activities is the art (not the science) of piecing together information and drawing a picture of what is transpiring.

For instance, it takes certain materials and equipment to produce chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. But many of the materials can also be used for more conventional purposes. The international community was well aware of the problem, which is why restrictions were placed on Iraq’s ability to import those so-called dual use items in the 1990s. Saddam violated the prohibitions. So an intelligence report might say that Saddam had established front companies that were purchasing chlorine used in producing nerve agents or high-quality aluminum tubes that could be used in either conventional weapons, such as artillery, or centrifuges for uranium enrichment. There was always the chance that Saddam had large numbers of swimming pools to clean, but that hardly seemed like the most probable explanation for large chlorine purchases.

The next step is to assess whether a country has the capability and know-how to build weapons from these materials. In the case of Saddam, the answer was yes—the scientists who’d produced Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the first Gulf War were still alive and serving the regime.

Then there is the question of infrastructure, laboratories, warehouses, and production facilities. Because there had been no inspectors in the country since 1998, the United States and others were dependent on maps and satellite imagery to monitor Iraq’s construction of complexes in which weapons could be produced. There was no doubt that many new buildings were springing up in places associated with military activities. But of course no one could actually go in and inspect them.

Finally, there is the issue of intent: does a country have an incentive to make weapons of mass destruction? The same facts about, say, Japan’s capabilities would not lead to the same conclusions. Saddam had produced weapons of mass destruction in the past and used them. His desire for WMD was not a theoretical proposition.

That led the intelligence communities of the United States, Europe, and even Russia to assess that Saddam was skirting the sanctions and likely going down a path to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction. The question was how fast his WMD programs were proceeding and, most important, how soon he would have a nuclear weapons capability. That calculation was influenced by the fact that intelligence failures usually come from underestimating the maturity of such programs. In 1949 the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon nearly five years ahead of intelligence estimates. Although the intelligence community had suspected that India was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, decision makers were caught off guard when New Delhi conducted its first nuclear test in 1974. And in 1991, after the first Gulf War, inspectors found an Iraqi nuclear program far more advanced than analysts had believed: Saddam was a little more than a year away from having a crude nuclear device.

The final step in the process of providing an intelligence estimate is for the various agencies (the United States had twelve at that time, seventeen today) to produce a joint assessment called a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). There are almost always differences among the agencies. Some will be reconciled in the process. Others will be reported as unresolved in the text of the assessment. And some will be noted as dissenting footnotes. The process usually requires months and takes place wholly within the intelligence community; the National Security Council is not involved. The NIE is then delivered to the Congress and the executive branch.

From the time he took office, the President had been receiving, almost daily, increasingly alarming reports about Saddam’s progress in reconstituting his weapons of mass destruction program. The director of the CIA, George Tenet, was at the time responsible for providing to the President the collective assessment of the intelligence agencies. George was a tough-talking, cigar-chewing easterner who stated his case compellingly. Even in retrospect I don’t think he overstated the evidence; he drew conclusions that pointed clearly toward Saddam’s progress in reconstituting his WMD.

The NIE, in October 2002, would sum it up this way: “Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”

The NIE also included an alternative view from the State Department’s assistant secretary for intelligence and research (INR) concerning nuclear weapons, though State joined the consensus on chemical and biological capabilities. While the INR view recognized Saddam’s desire for a nuclear capability, it stated, “The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing … an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq may be doing so, but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment. Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, INR is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors or to project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening. As a result, INR is unable to predict when Iraq could acquire a nuclear device or weapon.”

A policy maker confronted with one assessment that says that Baghdad “could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year” should it “acquire sufficient fissile material from abroad” and the INR alternative view that could not speak to timing is not likely to take the risks of accepting the latter, particularly after 9/11 and the specter of WMD terrorism.

Saddam was known to support terrorists. He paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers $25,000 apiece after attacks. He had harbored Abu Abbas, who’d hijacked the Achille Lauro and killed a paraplegic American. In the shadow of 9/11, the possibility that Saddam might arm terrorists with chemical or biological weapons or even a nuclear device and set them loose against the United States was very real to us. We’d failed to connect the dots on September 10 and had never imagined the use of civilian airliners as missiles against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; that an unconstrained Saddam might aid a terrorist in an attack on the United States did not seem far-fetched.

Some observers said that Saddam would never transfer WMD to terrorists out of fear of retaliation should the weapons be traced back to their source. He had, however, established a pattern of recklessness, particularly in failing to anticipate the international community’s strong response to his 1990 invasion of Kuwait and his 1993 attempt to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush. When coupling his proclivity toward miscalculation with his past support for terrorist activity, it was not unreasonable to suspect that he might supply extremists with a weapon that could be detonated in an American city. And in any case, it was a chance we were not willing to take.

Certainly, the debate was influenced briefly by the question of whether Saddam had a hand in the September 11 attacks. It was reasonable to ask whether this implacable enemy of the United States had aided and abetted the attack on the Twin Towers. Some suggested that Saddam and al Qaeda were unlikely allies, given the dictator’s brutal secularism and his likely fear of bin Laden’s ambition to change the status quo in the Middle East. I was never convinced by that argument. There had been too many times in history when the explanation was simply “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But as the CIA reviewed the evidence, there was simply no convincing case to be made for a link between 9/11 and Saddam.

The Vice President and his staff, however, were absolutely convinced that Saddam was somehow culpable. Given to personally sifting through raw intelligence data (not assessments that have been analyzed, checked for credibility, and integrated with other intelligence, but undigested information coming straight from the field), the Vice President latched on to every report of a meeting between Iraqi agents and al Qaeda affiliates. Many of the reports were of highly questionable origin and reliability—so much so that the CIA felt strongly that there had been no complicity between Saddam and al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks and said so. But the Vice President’s office remained convinced that there had been. At one point the Vice President asked Lewis “Scooter” Libby to present the evidence to the President. That was highly unusual. We sat in the Oval and listened to Scooter, whose eloquence actually made the case sound plausible. But after he was done, much to my relief, the President just said, “You keep on digging.”

I stayed behind to make sure that he knew that the presentation had not been vetted with the intelligence agencies. He assured me that he did. The President didn’t use any of the reports in a speech, briefing, or private conversation. He believed that the problem was not a connection between Saddam and September 11 but rather a potential link between Iraq’s WMD and terrorism going forward.

We began to reconsider our strategy toward Saddam on two separate tracks. The NSC Principals met repeatedly after January 2002 to consider our options: continuing the policy of containment, including establishing smart sanctions and no-fly zones; promoting regime change through expatriates and covert action; enhancing international pressure to get arms inspectors back into Iraq; persuading or pressuring Saddam to give up power; using military force to overthrow him. There was brief consideration of setting up a Kurdish protectorate in the North to pressure the regime from within, but that idea gained little credence. In any case, the prospect of an independent Kurdish political unit within Iraq would have been unacceptable to the Turks, who have tried for decades to calm the restive Kurdish population along their border and dismantle the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist organization.

The discussion the first few times was inconclusive. Yet no one believed that Saddam would give up power peacefully, and overthrowing him using the mixed bag that was the Iraqi National Congress seemed highly unlikely. We were really down to two options if we wanted to change course: increasing international pressure to make him give up his WMD or overthrowing him by force.

On a separate track, the President had asked Don Rumsfeld to examine U.S. military options. Having witnessed the United States’ decision not to push toward Baghdad at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, President Bush wanted to understand the feasibility of overthrowing Saddam. The President had also been highly frustrated with the military’s lack of readiness prior to the invasion of Afghanistan and sought an early outline of the Iraqi battle plan if it ultimately proved necessary.

Don formally began that work with a secret order to General Tommy Franks on December 1, 2001. Franks farmed out pieces to various parts of the Joint Staff’s planning apparatus, trying to prevent all but the highest levels of the Pentagon from knowing what question they were really asking. Tommy Franks gave a preliminary briefing to the NSC via videoconference on December 28. The prospect of a six-month buildup to 400,000 troops sounded daunting, and Tommy noted that he was examining options with a lighter footprint—a way to give U.S. forces a “generated start.”

The President was at Camp David in February 2002 after addressing a Republican Congressional Retreat in West Virginia. On the Sunday morning after church, Andy Card and I were standing with him in his office. Iraq was on his mind, and he was wondering how to use the threat of force to compel Saddam to comply with his obligations and destroy his suspected WMD. “All he cares about is staying in power,” the President said. “Maybe if he thinks we’ll overthrow him, he’ll change.” I told the President that in political science we called that “coercive diplomacy.” He loved the term, and in time the two remaining options—international pressure and military force—would merge into one.

THE REASSESSMENT of the Iraq strategy proceeded at a steady pace. In April the President and Tony Blair had an extended discussion about Iraq and the need to do something about Saddam. The President was clear that Saddam had to fear the international community if he was ever going to comply. He and Blair found common ground in that assessment, but what about the other allies?

The big event of the late spring was the President’s trip to Germany, Russia, and France, and then to Italy for a NATO summit. (NATO summits are convened in a member country or at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels as needed.) The trip was memorable for an audience with the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, and my first trip to the Vatican. I will always remember my Protestant faux pas. When the Holy Father took my hand, I said, “God bless you,” and then immediately realized that it should have been the other way around: you don’t bless the Holy Father—he blesses you. He simply said, “Thank you.”

The trip also included the first time we were treated to the hospitality of Silvio Berlusconi. The dinner took place at the spectacular Villa Madama. The sixteenth-century house overlooks Roman ruins on one side and the Vatican on the other. Standing on the balcony as the sun set on Rome, Andy Card quipped, “I guess the view from the Truman Balcony [at the White House] isn’t so great after all.”

As we turned to go in to a dinner consisting of tricolored pasta and beef and triflavored gelato matching the Italian flag, Berlusconi said, “Be sure to look at the ceiling frescos. They were painted by Raphael.”

I turned to Andy and said, “I guess the ceiling in the White House isn’t so special either.”

But the trip to Russia was the highlight of the journey. As a student of Russia, I found it personally satisfying to ride through the Spassky Gate of the Kremlin in the limousine of the President of the United States. I couldn’t help but flash back to my first time on Red Square as a somewhat insecure graduate student in 1979. I would never have dreamed then that I’d end up as the President’s national security advisor. I was a little sad that my mom and dad couldn’t see that moment.

For the national security advisor, presidential trips are always busy and anxiety-filled. There is just so much to do to bring all of the agencies on board for various initiatives while attending to every detail of the President’s visit. But the trip to Moscow was relatively relaxed. We had the “deliverable” (that is, the breakthrough every President is expected to deliver during a major trip abroad), the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Strategic Offensive Reductions, also known as the Moscow Treaty, which dramatically reduced the offensive arsenals of the two sides. It was quite an accomplishment, coming less than a year after the United States had abrogated the ABM Treaty. Our relations with Russia were calm, even warm. Putin had visited the President at his ranch a few months earlier, and this was a return engagement for two men who enjoyed a certain degree of personal chemistry.

Crawford, Texas, was the President’s home, and an invitation to visit it signaled a personal commitment to a relationship with a head of state. That visit had been very successful, even though it had rained buckets upon Putin’s arrival. The President was annoyed that the visit to his special place had begun in foul weather. He was even unhappier when Putin, who was staying in the guesthouse, showed up for dinner an hour early. As Putin politely returned to his room, the President turned to Karen Hughes and me and barked, “Somebody forgot to tell Vladimir about the time change.” I knew that he meant me and I should have been chagrined. But for some reason I laughed. The thought that a former senior KGB officer somehow couldn’t get the time of day right—having failed to set his watch to the time change—struck me as funny. No harm was done, and the dinner was a great success. The next day, when the two men held a press conference before students of Crawford High School, the relationship seemed to be in very good shape indeed.

Putin reciprocated with an agenda of unusually personal activities when we visited him in his hometown of St. Petersburg. There is significant rivalry between Russia’s great cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, inhabitants of the latter considering themselves far more refined than Muscovites. The President was treated to the magnificent cultural sights of the beautiful city that Peter the Great had built along the Neva River. While in the Hermitage, the President’s staff was split off from his personal tour. I’ve been to the Hermitage numerous times, but Russia possesses so much fine art that the rotating exhibits always make the encounter fresh.

This time, though, we were shown one exhibit that I had not seen and will never forget: a life-sized doll of Tsar Peter the Great. The guide explained that the doll was wearing the tsar’s real hair. We Westerners who were listening recoiled. “They scalped him?” Apparently so. It might have been the refined side of Russia, but it was still Russia. Several years later I returned to the Hermitage and saw the same exhibit. This time the guide said that the doll was wearing a wig. Perhaps too many guests had found the original explanation unnerving.

That evening Putin and his wife, Lyudmila, the President and Mrs. Bush, and Sergei Ivanov and I sailed along the Neva to experience “white nights,” the stunning phenomenon of bright daylight at midnight due to St. Petersburg’s far-north location. During the caviar and champagne dinner, the President asked Putin about an old redbrick building on the other side of the river with the most extraordinary view of the Winter Palace. “That’s the prison,” Putin answered and went on to explain that he wanted to do something about the horrible conditions there. The President was incredulous. “The prison! You should give that land to a developer and put the prison somewhere outside the city.” It was one of the times when you could see that the capitalist impulse was not quite developed in the Russian leadership.

The President then mentioned that he’d seen a ballet barre in Putin’s gym in his Moscow dacha. “Yes,” Putin replied. “Lyudmila is learning ballet. She is dancing Swan Lake. Of course, if I tried to pick her up, I would be a dead swan.” It was impolite to laugh at this rather crude reference to his wife’s girth. But everyone did laugh, even the embarrassed Lyudmila.

The President used the remainder of the visit abroad to take the temperature of the Europeans concerning Saddam. There was general support for raising the profile of the Iraq problem, and we returned to Washington confident that it was time to do so.

THE YEAR flew by, what with the President’s landmark speech on the Middle East in June, preparations for the establishment of a transitional government in Afghanistan, and the continuing assessment of our Iraq strategy. The pace was hectic, and I constantly reminded myself to keep exercising and find occasions to take a little time off. After 9/11, the thirty-plus days in a row of late nights and no break had taken a toll on me. When you’re single, you have to be careful not to be drawn into working every waking moment; there are no spouse and children demanding your time and attention. But there are many things that I love to do, and years ago I told myself that I wouldn’t become a workaholic. Even if I had very little time, it was important to get away. I particularly enjoyed an occasional Sunday afternoon at the piano.

The spring of 2002 gave me one of the best imaginable reasons to practice. One day in March, my assistant Liz Lineberry had come in to say that Yo-Yo Ma was on the phone and wanted to speak to me. “You mean the cellist?” I asked. “I think so,” she answered.

It was indeed the greatest living cellist of our time, and he had a proposition for me. He was receiving the National Medal of the Arts on April 22 and wondered if perhaps we could play something together at the ceremony. We’d met at Stanford several years earlier, when he’d given a concert there. At the time his “Let’s play together sometime” comment had seemed to be just a polite throwaway line. But now here he was, asking me, the failed piano major, to play with him. I readily accepted, and after some back-and-forth we decided to perform the second movement of the Brahms D Minor Violin Sonata, a piece that cellists often poach for their repertoire.

On the morning of the concert, we met at Constitution Hall to run through the piece. He was wonderful with such an easy manner that I felt very relaxed almost immediately. There were a few rough places in the rehearsal, but after about an hour we felt ready for the 5:30 P.M. performance. I returned to work and went downstairs to chair a 2:00 P.M. meeting. Steve met me at the door. “Do you realize that you’re playing with Yo-Yo Ma before the President of the United States and two thousand people in a few hours?” he asked. “Yes, but first I have to chair this meeting,” I said. “Then I’ll go to another place in my head and get ready.”

The performance went very well. The President was beaming as he congratulated us after we finished. It was one of the most memorable days of my life. I’d come full circle and back to music. But I wasn’t confused about what my real destiny was. I would never have played with Yo-Yo Ma had I stayed in music. He played with me because I was the national security advisor who could also play the piano. I had made a good decision when I changed my college major.

The experience was so enjoyable that I resolved to get more deeply into music again. Within a few months, I formed my own piano quintet. Robert Battey, Soye Kim, Lawrence Wallace, and Joshua Klein would become good friends and my “sanity” crew through the difficult times ahead. Bob, the cellist, and Soye, the first violinist, were practicing lawyers who had been professional musicians. Soye was a graduate of Juilliard, and Bob had been a professor of music at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Bob still occasionally played with the Washington National Opera Orchestra and was our “player-coach.” Larry, our violist, was a retired deputy solicitor general of the United States; he had tried more cases before the Supreme Court than anyone else in the twentieth century and still played the viola and violin professionally. Josh, the second violinist, was a Stanford Law grad who was Sandra Day O’Connor’s clerk and, like me, a good amateur who had never played professionally.

I had met the members of the group when a friend, the former Stanford Law School Dean Paul Brest, visited me in Washington. Paul and I had been a part of a string quintet in Palo Alto, and he wanted me to keep playing. His introduction worked. The group stayed together after that first session with Paul. They were high-quality musicians, and with them I rediscovered the joys of making music. We even managed to play concerts, including one at the British Embassy with none other than my friend the acclaimed pianist Van Cliburn in the audience, and the New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini did a profile of us in 2006. Playing was not an escape—it came with its own stresses—but it was transporting, a total immersion in the part of me that occasionally demanded attention and nourishment.

THROUGHOUT THE SPRING of 2002, we searched for a viable option concerning Saddam Hussein. The Principals were briefed again on the evolving military plan on May 10, and in the State Department, Colin launched the Future of Iraq Project, which researched and assessed various postwar reconstruction issues that the United States would confront after Saddam’s reign ended. The project joined dozens of Iraqi exiles with public administration experts, and together they formed working groups on topics such as health, finance, water, and agriculture. There was a sense of urgency to do something about Iraq, but we wanted to get it right.

In the middle of these preparations we learned that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist affiliated with al Qaeda, was operating a lab in the Zagros Mountains in northern Iraq. Zarqawi and his affiliates joined ranks with Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish terrorist organization seeking to produce WMD. The briefing read, “Al-Zarqawi has been directing efforts to smuggle an unspecified chemical material originating in northern Iraq into the United States.” There was some concern that Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam were conducting unconventional weapons work, testing cyanide gas and toxic poisons on animals and even their own associates.

The President’s advisors were split on what to do. The Vice President and Don favored military action, perhaps air strikes followed by “exploitation,” meaning gathering up evidence at the site after the strike. Colin believed that military action would destroy any chance of building an international coalition to confront Saddam. After one key meeting in mid-June, I followed the President into the Oval Office and told him that I agreed with Colin. I also asked him if he was comfortable with the military option that had been presented to him. Were we really going to put “boots on the ground” after a strike to “exploit” territory inside Iraq—even Kurdish-controlled territory? What would the Turks think? I was relieved to learn that the President had the same reservations. He decided to wait and let the larger Iraq strategy play out over the following months. But the incident was a reminder to all of us that terrorism, WMD, and Iraq were a dangerous cocktail.

As the military planning progressed, Don and Tommy had to broaden the circle of those “in the know” about the effort to update military options for Iraq. With the “axis of evil” rhetoric in people’s minds and our already established reputation for aggressive policies, those activities leaked into the press as the “march toward war.”

All manner of people were opining about the risks of war—economic, political, regional, and domestic. But when Brent Scowcroft entered the fray with an opinion column arguing against war in the Wall Street Journal on August 15, the debate took on a different coloration. Brent was thought by many to be speaking as a surrogate for the President’s father, who had, of course, in the first Gulf War, decided not to try to overthrow Saddam. I was known to be close to Brent, and some wondered whether he was speaking for me too. I found this particularly bizarre since I could, of course, speak for myself and enjoyed the President’s confidence.

The morning that Brent’s op-ed appeared, the President called me immediately upon opening his newspaper. It seemed early since I was on personal leave. “What is he doing?” he exclaimed.

I said that Brent was just extremely cautious on these matters but that I would call him.

“When are you going back to Washington?” he asked.

“Today,” I answered.

“And when are you coming to Crawford?”

“Tomorrow,” I answered. “But I’ll call Brent right now.”

When I later met with Brent, I explained to him that we were working through the issue of Iraq systematically and carefully. I told him that the day before his op-ed was published the Principals Committee had approved a National Security Presidential Directive on our goals and objectives for U.S. strategy. There was no rush to war, but the President felt that he could not leave the Iraq issues unaddressed. I also explained that the President had felt blindsided by the WSJ column. I asked him why he hadn’t called me to express his views or even asked to see the President. Brent was flummoxed by the whole uproar and said that he’d never meant to criticize the President or put him into a box. He was just expressing his perspective and thought it might be helpful to calm down some of the war talk.

I fully believe to this day that Brent was being completely honest about his motives. But several more times the same thing happened, and each time the level of trust between the President and Brent plummeted until there was nothing left. It was a rift that extended to my own relationship with Brent, one of my most important and revered mentors. We’ve worked over the years to repair the damage and we remain very close friends.

BEFORE LEAVING for Crawford, I took advantage of an interview with the BBC to say that there was a moral case and a national security argument for overthrowing Saddam. “We certainly do not have the luxury of doing nothing,” I said. That was taken as more evidence that the President was building his case for war.

Against that backdrop, the NSC met on August 16, and Colin argued that we should go to the United Nations in September. There was unanimous agreement that our new strategy should be launched at the United Nations, but we did not decide the question of what the President would say.

Then, on September 7, the President met with the NSC Principals again and solicited their views. The Vice President and Don argued that there had already been many chances for Saddam to come clean and that there should be an ultimatum of thirty to sixty days and then the United States should remove him by force if he did not comply. The Vice President argued that with the gathering evidence that Saddam was reconstituting his WMD, there wasn’t time for another resolution and more inspections. Colin pushed for a resolution, saying that it was the only way to get the allies to join and to gather support to execute the military plan if our “coercive diplomacy” failed.

It was the culmination of a debate that had been playing out over the summer, and the President knew going into the meeting where the Principals stood. In fact, in August the Vice President had publicly stated his case in a speech to the VFW. That had led the President to feel that he was being boxed in. “Call Dick and tell him I haven’t made a decision,” he told me. I went back to the Governor’s House, a separate dwelling on the property where I stayed at the ranch. Once I had the Vice President on the phone, I said, “The President is concerned that your speech is being read as a decision to skip the UN and challenge Saddam unilaterally.” The Vice President immediately responded that it hadn’t been his intention to limit the President’s options. He asked that I call Scooter Libby and give him the exact language to use in a second speech scheduled for a few days later. The Vice President read the text verbatim.

After listening to everyone at the September NSC meeting, the President said that he’d decided to seek a resolution. That would clear up any ambiguity about where the international community stood. He wanted to make the case in an upcoming speech to the UN General Assembly.

The President had decided on a policy of coercive diplomacy. He would give Saddam a chance to respond to the united pressure of the international community, and the buildup of U.S. forces would make that pressure credible. The next several months would be devoted to that effort. The reputation of the United States would be at stake. One way or another, the threat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq would finally be removed.

Some people have claimed that the President never asked his advisors whether he should go to war against Saddam. At that September meeting, with the Vice President, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of Central Intelligence, and the national security advisor in attendance, the National Security Council, after a full and frank discussion, decided on a course of action. Everyone in that room heard the President say, “Either he will come clean about his weapons, or there will be war.” There was no disagreement. The way ahead could not have been clearer.

AS THE IRAQ STRATEGY was unfolding, I found myself dealing daily with economic chaos in Latin America. Though what confronted us there was not war and peace, at times it felt like it, especially in Argentina, where the presidency had changed hands four times in less than two weeks before January 1, 2002. In the midst of violent riots throughout Buenos Aires, President Fernando de la Rúa resigned and fled the Casa Rosada by helicopter, triggering a turbulent succession process. Days later, the Republic of Argentina officially defaulted on its sovereign debt.

When I had arrived in Washington the year before, Argentina had been mired in a perilous public debt cycle that had grown worse in the 1990s and was ballooning out of control. IMF loans were absorbed without stimulating even short-term benefits, creative debt-restructuring programs continually postponed repayment, and the Argentine peso, pegged to the U.S. dollar, was depreciating. Washington is full of academics turned policymakers, which was nice for me, since I often got to work with old friends from Stanford. When I asked my Stanford friend Anne Krueger, a highly regarded economist who was then first deputy managing director of the IMF, what on earth was going on in Argentina, she aptly compared the country’s embattled finance minister to Sisyphus: “Every time he pushes the stone up, it goes down a bit further in the wrong direction!”

The crisis posed serious risks to other fragile economies in the region. One might ask why this was an issue for the national security advisor since the President obviously had senior economic counselors. Well, the National Economic Council simply lacked the clout of the long-established NSC; my economic counterparts, Larry Lindsey and later Stephen Friedman, agreed that we should jointly convene the interagency process for resolution of these issues.

There were so many overlapping concerns that it was hard to separate foreign policy and economic considerations in any case. Was the United States willing to take the lead, through the IMF, in what amounted to a bailout of another country? Though the State Department was inclined to support a lending plan in order to mitigate the diplomatic fallout and back the President’s efforts to establish a free-trade zone in the Western Hemisphere, Treasury and the IMF were reluctant to do anything more. After all, Argentina had already eaten up $22 billion of aid with little to show in the way of reform. Profligate spending and corruption plagued the Argentine government. And what about all the other countries in dire need, such as Brazil and Turkey?

I found myself in endless phone calls and meetings, trying to broker a reasonable solution. The process was still going back and forth, but Spanish Prime Minister Aznar’s personal appeal to the President turned the tide at the close. “The President really wants to support Argentina,” I told Anne when we met for dinner. “The U.S. can’t be party to a default. We need you to find an arrangement with the Argentine government.” The decision was unpopular among some in the administration as well as in the IMF. Still, Argentina got its deal. Though the Néstor Kirchner government showed no gratitude for what we had done, the Argentine economy improved with five consecutive years of positive GDP growth after the crisis.