No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

13 CONFRONTING THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY WITH A CHOICE

AS WE PREPARED the President’s speech to the United Nations, we were mindful of two requirements. The first was that the President wanted to remind his audience of the dangers of Saddam’s regime and of its long history of defying international opinion. The language of the speech was thus appropriately uncompromising and tough but broke no new ground.

The second purpose of the speech was to put the world on notice that the United States would act—alone if necessary—to deal with the threat. “We will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions,” the President said before the General Assembly. “But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced—the just demands of peace and security will be met—or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.”

We had to be aware of the need to address various audiences. This is an enduring problem for policy makers; a message meant to rally and reassure allies that you will be firm but prudent has to simultaneously strike fear into your adversary. The same words need to be heard differently by different listeners. It isn’t an easy balance to find.

Sitting in the UN chamber, Colin and I realized about halfway through the President’s speech that there had been an editing error. The President was supposed to call for a new resolution; that had been the whole debate inside the administration. Somehow it had been left out. How could we get word to him on the podium? Fortunately, we didn’t have to. The President had been deeply involved in the debate about the resolution. He immediately noticed the omission and ad-libbed a line that put the fate of Saddam into the hands of the UN Security Council.

A week before the UN speech, the President sought authorization from Congress for military action against Saddam. There had been a spirited debate inside the White House as to whether it was wise to go to the United Nations first or to Congress. The President decided that our hand would be strengthened with the international community and with Saddam if Congress had already approved the use of military force. That was very much in line with his belief that Saddam would finally comply with his obligations only if he believed that this time he had no choice.

Coercive diplomacy requires the simultaneous conduct of military preparations and diplomatic engagement, and the success of the latter is dependent on the intensity of the former. But the required choreography is complex and rife with contradictions. The mobilization of the military has a certain rhythm and inexorable movement forward, and it cannot be sustained indefinitely. On the other hand, the pace of diplomacy is uncertain and erratic, and it is rarely clear whether or not the desired breakthrough is going to be achieved.

Colin launched the negotiations for a new United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) almost immediately after the address to the General Assembly. Within days Resolution 1441 was predictably bogged down in haggling over its exact wording. There were arguments over who would carry out the inspections, what the inspectors would be allowed to challenge, how often there would be reports to the Security Council, and so on. Not surprisingly, the biggest bone of contention was what was meant when Saddam was threatened with “serious consequences,” a phrase that is often understood to mean the use of force if necessary if he failed to comply. The United States and Great Britain wanted to make the resolution the only necessary step before action could be taken. The French and the Russians insisted on language that left open the need for a second resolution.

It took more than six weeks to resolve those issues, but when the resolution finally passed it did so unanimously. That was a triumph for U.S. diplomacy, for John Negroponte, our ambassador to the United Nations, and for Colin Powell. I felt good about it too because I’d run interference for State in the process, taking up practically every controversy directly with the President rather than allowing continued haggling among the various agencies. I know that caused some unhappiness in Defense and within the Office of the Vice President, but the process was taking long enough at the United Nations; we didn’t need to slow it down with divisions within our own ranks.

Once the resolution was passed, events moved rather quickly—at least by UN standards. Iraq was given one month, until December 7, 2002, to make a full and accurate declaration of the state of its weapons programs and to receive international weapons inspectors to begin the process of verifying the declaration’s claims.

The truth is, though, the clock was ticking. We were trying to do three things simultaneously: assess the progress of the weapons inspectors; refine military plans and begin the mobilization of our forces to pressure Saddam; and plan for a postwar, post-Saddam Iraq should diplomacy fail.

The job of monitoring the progress of the inspections fell largely to me. I established a relationship with both Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat who oversaw the effort, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who had responsibility for the nuclear component of the inspections regime. The Pentagon and the White House regarded both men with deep suspicion. I therefore took responsibility for reassuring the President that Saddam was not being allowed to cut corners.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Blix to be honest and pretty tough. He would later, like many others, become a critic of the war and claim that we hadn’t given him enough time to complete his inspections. But in our two key conversations, at the United Nations in January and in Washington in February, he was extremely skeptical of Saddam’s veracity. His report to the UNSC on January 27 was telling: “Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.” The second report, on February 14, was more ambiguous. I know that he’d received significant criticism from the Europeans, who believed that his first presentation had given the United States a pretext for war.

ElBaradei and I established a reasonably good relationship as well. He told me that he did not believe that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear program. I reported this to the President, but the fact that the IAEA had been wrong in 1991 made it difficult to accept the assessment at face value.

By the beginning of 2003 I was convinced that we would have to use military force. Saddam seemed to be playing games with the inspectors, refusing interviews with his scientists or sending “minders” along with them for their meetings with the inspectors. That was what passed for cooperation, and it seemed to be producing minimal information. Nonetheless, UN inspectors did, despite the limitations, gather evidence that Iraqi officials were moving various items and hiding them at suspect sites prior to inspection visits. The Iraqi dictator seemed to be up to his old tricks.

I frankly couldn’t understand it. Maybe he just didn’t believe us. In 1990 he had underestimated the world’s reaction and invaded Kuwait. I was in the White House when Operation Desert Storm was launched in 1991 and helped manage the run-up to the invasion. It had been remarkable to watch Saddam, with U.S. and coalition forces sitting on his doorstep, refuse to withdraw from Kuwait despite the warnings from his friends, including the Russians, who told him that his days were numbered. In 1991 he had been either stubborn or delusional, and it seemed to me that he had not changed.

Still, the question of how to get Saddam out short of war was constantly on my mind and the President’s. We reached out to Arab leaders, asking them to tell him that we would indeed overthrow him if he didn’t comply. The Egyptians claimed at one point that Saddam’s son had sent a message: Saddam would leave in exchange for one billion dollars. The President sent word that we would gladly pay. Nothing came of it. Frankly, I’m not sure it would have been a good idea to pay the dictator to leave. What kind of precedent would that have set? But sometimes you face unpalatable choices. That was not the first time the international community had faced the tension between bringing a murderous tyrant to justice and offering him exile to avoid violence and war. In this case, the President was prepared to opt for the latter.

A few weeks before the President’s UN speech, I was visited by Charles Boyd, a retired air force general who had previously been in the employment of the Council on Foreign Relations. He had a novel idea: perhaps the United Nations could authorize armed inspections of Iraq, giving them more credibility with Saddam’s henchmen. The very sight of the humiliation of the Iraqi dictator might also lead someone, maybe even the army, to overthrow him. The President was attracted to the idea, and so was I. But we could never figure out how to make it work. What would armed inspectors do, shoot their way into restricted sites? What if Saddam’s guards fired back? Moreover, it is hard to imagine the Russians and French agreeing to what they would have undoubtedly seen as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. The idea didn’t get to first base with the NSC Principals either. When I raised it at a Camp David meeting a few weeks before the war, Colin, Don, and the Vice President were united in their disdain for the concept.

The fact is, we invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options. The sanctions were not working, the inspections were unsatisfactory, and we could not get Saddam to leave by other means. The President did not want to go to war. We had come to the conclusion that it was time to deal with Saddam and believed that the world would be better off with the dictator out of power. We thought that there was a small chance that Saddam without his WMD, disarmed before the world, might not last long. He ruled through fear and cunning. Stripped of that he couldn’t survive, and if UN action could achieve that result, all the better. His ouster would give us time, having dealt with the WMD threat, to advocate for further steps such as a transition to elections.

Moreover, we did not go to Iraq to bring democracy any more than Roosevelt went to war against Hitler to democratize Germany, though that became American policy once the Nazis were defeated. We went to war because we saw a threat to our national security and that of our allies. But if we did have to overthrow Saddam, the United States had to have a view of what would come next. When the NSC had that discussion, some members, including Don, argued that we had no such obligation. If a strongman emerged, so be it. But the President believed that the use of U.S. military power had to be followed by an affirmation of the United States’ principles. If war occurred, we would try to build a democratic Iraq. And democracy in the Arab heartland would in turn help democratize the Middle East and address the freedom gap that was the source of hopelessness and terrorism.

AS THE INSPECTIONS dragged on, the military component of the strategy was gaining momentum. To carry out Tommy Franks’s plan, Don was putting the lead elements of an invasion into place—moving equipment and supplies to forward bases, for example. Military forces also had to be mobilized and troops called up. That is usually done in neat packages, with the troops and their equipment moving together. But Don, sensitive to the President’s concern that the military preparations not outstrip the pace of diplomacy, deliberately delinked those elements and tried to slow everything down. That was frustrating to the uniformed military but was one of the requirements of coercive diplomacy.

The NSC Principals reviewed the military plan at least once a week during the run-up to the war. Several questions arose in the discussions. We were worried about Saddam’s potential use of WMD against our troops or, again, against his own people. That led the coalition to take extraordinary measures, including the deployment of specialized chemical warfare teams from the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The Warsaw Pact had been better prepared against battlefield WMD than had NATO, a fact about which I had written as a young East Europeanist. There were always debates about the reason for that, some suggesting that it was because the Soviet military intended to initiate the use of their vastly larger store of the nasty weapons. Whatever the explanation, we had inherited the superior capabilities to protect against WMD when the former Warsaw Pact states had joined NATO. Now those assets would be very useful.

We were also concerned that Saddam and his forces might just withdraw to Baghdad (we called this the “Fortress Baghdad scenario”), leaving us to launch a bloody assault on a heavily civilian area. Don raised and we discussed the possibility of retribution killings and ethnic violence as the Shia turned on the Sunnis, who despite their minority status had held the power and most of the wealth of the country. That was one reason we hoped to bring along a multiethnic interim authority as quickly as possible.

But I was most concerned about what seemed to be the Pentagon’s insufficient attention to two issues: first, plans for the North and the volatile Turkish/Kurdish mix, and second, the requirements of what we called “rear-area security.” Who would be responsible for maintaining order as coalition forces pushed through against Saddam’s military forces?

I was able to get the first of these issues addressed by going to the President with my concerns. We were having all kinds of problems with the Turks, who had initially agreed to let our forces transit through their territory but eventually refused to do so. That meant we had no northern entry into the country. After one of the briefings in the Situation Room, I followed the President into the Oval. I sat on the sofa to the right of the wing chair in which the President sat. The Vice President was on the other side. George Tenet was present too. “Mr. President,” I said, “you don’t have a northern strategy, and the Pentagon owes you one.” The Vice President immediately objected, letting it be known that the President should trust Don and the generals to do the military planning. I held my ground, though, and the President raised the issue with Don in his next meeting.

The plan wasn’t perfect by any means. Franks concluded that he could send the 4th Infantry Division through Kuwait if necessary but would, at the outset of the war, leave them on their transit ships in the north. That would give us a contingency force if there was trouble on the Turkish-Kurdish border or if Saddam’s forces tried to turn north. Because the Turkish government ultimately denied us permission to pass the 4th Infantry Division through its territory, around one thousand paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade dropped into the North.

On the issue of rear-area security, though, I failed to get a workable plan for the President. That turned out to be a big problem in the days immediately following Saddam’s overthrow. As our forces pushed through, chaos ensued behind them. Neither we nor the British had enough troops to keep order.

My several attempts to get the Pentagon to address the rear-area security issue seriously always led to uninformative slides and a rather dismissive handling of the question. When I finally arranged a briefing on the issue before the President in early February, he started the meeting in a way that completely destroyed any chance of getting an answer. “This is something Condi has wanted to talk about,” he said. I could immediately see that the generals no longer thought it to be a serious question. That is the weakness of the national security advisor’s position: Authority comes from the President. If he wasn’t interested in this issue, why should they care?

Steve Hadley followed me to my office after the disastrous meeting. “I would have resigned after that comment by the President,” he said.

“No,” I replied. “I’ll talk to the President, but we’ll just have to keep hammering away at the issue.” We did, knowing that the President would eventually share our concern and want the matter dealt with. He started to ask the question about rear-area security himself. The Pentagon briefed him several more times, but it always resulted in the same answer: “We’ve got this covered.” Maybe Defense thought it did. But this was an early indication that the military’s Phase IV (postinvasion) plans were lacking. As the importance of the issue was revealed in the days after the war, I wondered if Steve had been right.

ON THE OTHER HAND, I felt confident about our postwar planning on the civilian side. There were several contingencies that we just didn’t anticipate. But the idea that we did not take the postwar situation seriously is patently false. We examined war termination procedures, humanitarian issues, and reconstruction and political arrangements, producing hundreds of documents and almost as many meetings to review them.

Elliott Abrams of the NSC staff was charged with developing a plan for humanitarian relief with a careful ministry-by-ministry assessment of Iraq’s capabilities to deliver goods to the population. The group was concerned that there could be up to two million displaced Iraqis, and plans were made to engage UN agencies to handle the load.

In August I asked Frank Miller, the senior director for defense programs, to coordinate postwar planning efforts across the government. Frank was an experienced and respected civilian who had served in the Pentagon for twenty-two years. I had first gotten to know him in 1986, when he was working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and I was serving on the Joint Staff. Careful and earnest, he was a stickler for details and had a network of contacts and sources within the Pentagon.

That was crucial because responsibility for the execution of Phase IV would come to rest within the Defense Department. The decision to give unambiguous authority to the Defense Department would turn out to be one of the most consequential that the President and his advisors took—and it was not particularly controversial within the administration at the time.

The President wanted the United States to take the lead in the aftermath of the war. We considered two other options. The first was to let the United Nations and its various agencies lead the effort. But the President had been to Kosovo in 2001 and been appalled by the lethargic UN presence more than two years after the war had ended. The head of the mission, who frankly couldn’t have looked more disinterested in the discussion, had told us that the economy was starting to perform but unemployment was still rampant at more than 55 percent. On the flight back the President had opined that Kosovo seemed to be where European governments sent their washed-up diplomats rather than their best and brightest. I couldn’t disagree.

The second alternative for coordinating the war’s aftermath would be to follow the model of the postwar effort in Afghanistan. There we had used an “adopt a ministry” plan, with allied governments taking responsibility for various functions: the Germans had the police, the Italians had the Justice Ministry, we had the army, and so on. That was already breeding conflict and incoherence, and no one wanted to repeat that approach.

Moreover, with large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground, the President wanted one authority with full responsibility; that would be the Defense Department. No one challenged this assumption, most especially not the State Department. Colin had said that there was a reason that Douglas MacArthur hadn’t been a Foreign Service officer. The department was too small and was ill suited to oversee a complex operation in the middle of a war zone. Colin, for his part, wanted to make sure that State had an appropriate but supporting role. The President signaled in mid-October that the Defense Department would be the lead agency responsible for postwar planning in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, should one be necessary. This would be formalized in a National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) that officially established an office in the Pentagon to coordinate these efforts.

On December 18, having watched the inspectors play cat and mouse with the Iraqi government, the President told Don to jump-start the civil administration office that would help manage postwar Iraq. When I mentioned to the President the need to ensure coordination from Washington, he agreed but said I needed to use a “light touch.” He believed that once the Pentagon was given the authority on the ground, it had to be free to act.

But he didn’t mean that it should do so in the high-handed, dismissive way that emerged. Almost immediately the under secretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, made clear that the Pentagon neither needed nor welcomed the opinions of others. He treated Franks’s Executive Steering Group as a nuisance and the NSC Deputies Committee with only slightly more respect. At one point, Steve Hadley asked Doug if he realized that the President had given Don the Iraq ball and with it the future of his presidency. “Not only does he know it,” Doug intoned, “he welcomes it.”

Defense produced a lot of preparatory work, going so far as to issue a document called “Parade of Horribles,” which presented twenty-nine catastrophes that the war in Iraq might unleash. We asked the intelligence agencies to examine the likelihood of potential disasters. Most of the points on the list were self-evident, such as possible sectarian violence and Iranian support for our enemies in Iraq, though I suspected that the Defense Department’s motive was really to issue a documented warning just in case the whole endeavor failed. In any case, there were no implementation plans to address the conclusions.

On January 20, the President signed NSPD-24 that formally created the postwar planning machinery for postwar Iraq, including the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). The NSPD outlined nine tasks for ORHA to address, including humanitarian relief assistance, the reestablishment of key civilian services, the restructuring of the Iraqi military, and a variety of other political and economic issues. Retired General Jay Garner was put in charge of ORHA. He seemed the perfect choice, since he had overseen the successful implementation of Operation Provide Comfort in support of humanitarian relief for the Kurds after Saddam’s attack on them in 1991. Jay Garner briefed the NSC after a “rock drill” (an exercise to simulate various contingencies) his office conducted with representatives of the military and civilian agencies that were to be involved in the administration of Iraq. The drill uncovered a number of problems, which were then sent back to the agencies for review and resolution.

All those plans were reviewed at the Principals Committee meetings on March 1 and March 7. At a full National Security Council meeting on March 10, Doug Feith briefed the President on a political plan to transfer governance to an Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA) composed of Iraqi exiles and Kurdish leaders. The interim authority, which would be charged with developing a constitution for the country and organizing the country’s permanent elections, was designed to be representative of Iraq’s Shia and Sunni sects. There were differing views about how long the transfer of authority and governance to the Iraqis would take. Defense, which was more willing to rely on exiles, believed that the United States would not have to bear responsibility for managing the country very long. State was less optimistic about the ability of the Iraqis to govern the country and concerned about too heavy a reliance on people who had not lived in Iraq for decades.

President Bush resolved the differences among his advisors by making clear that he wanted some government ministries placed under Iraqi control as soon as possible. But he also worried that placing Iraqi expatriates at the highest levels of government might stir resentment among locals who had suffered under Saddam’s rule. The power dynamics of the country had likely shifted since those exiles had fled, he reasoned, preventing them from having any natural domestic constituencies that would align behind them and potentially denying the interim administration the legitimacy it needed. The President nevertheless agreed to the Iraqi Interim Authority framework on the condition that internals were “fully represented.” The IIA was meant to cooperate with the U.S.-led military coalition in carrying out political and military tasks. Iraqis would take as much responsibility as they could demonstrate the ability to take.

Another challenge confronting us was how to restructure the institutions of a multiethnic Iraq to enfranchise and protect populations that had been suppressed under Saddam’s regime without alienating those who had previously benefited from his rule. Frank Miller briefed the President on our plan for de-Baathification, a process designed to purge the government of Saddam’s loyalists without crippling basic services necessary to keep the state running. Although Saddam’s Baath Party had approximately 1.5 million associated members and supporters, Miller estimated that only 1 to 2 percent—or about 25,000—were “active and full” members who constituted the party elite. He argued that those full members should be removed from government posts and all positions of power and influence. The country had 2 million government employees, including military and police, and the de-Baathification process, as we conceived it, would eliminate only approximately 1 percent of them; as Frank put it, it “will not leave the public institutions without leadership.”

Rounding out the meeting, Treasury Secretary John Snow outlined a plan for a new currency in Iraq to replace the two official ones that were now in place, a Swiss dinar in the north and a Saddam dinar in the south. John advocated the temporary use of the U.S. dollar as a stable replacement in the interim, and President Bush approved the plan. (By mid-October 2003, new Iraqi dinar banknotes were available and the U.S. dollar was phased out.)

Two days later, on March 12, Feith briefed the President on ORHA’s postwar plans for the Iraqi military and intelligence services. It was clear that, like the existing government institutions, the country’s security apparatus needed to be purged of its politicized elements and Saddam loyalists who had committed atrocities on behalf of his regime. The Defense Department planned to completely dismantle Iraq’s paramilitary forces, including the Baath Party Militia, the Jaysh al-Tahrir al-Quds (“Jerusalem Liberation Army”), and Fedayeen Saddam (“Saddam’s Martyrs”). He said that Iraq’s entire intelligence service needed to be demobilized and consolidated and that Iraq’s Republican Guard would be completely disarmed, detained, and dismantled, with some of its members prosecuted for war crimes, given its heinous record of abuse.

Regarding the regular standing Iraqi army, the plan presented to the President on March 12 did not call for its full dismantling but actually the retention and reintegration of some of its elements into Iraqi society. To be sure, Iraqi society needed to be demilitarized, with the armed forces subordinated to civilian control. The army was plagued by sectarian prejudices between Sunni senior officers and Shia conscripts. But the advantages of preserving some elements of the Iraqi military were its assets: a formal chain of command, trained personnel, and sophisticated infrastructure. Furthermore, it was clear that we would not be able to immediately demobilize 250,000 to 300,000 military personnel. No one wanted desperate, once armed, now-unemployed young men out in the streets.

The plan put before the President therefore called for the preservation of three to five army divisions that would form the “nucleus” of a new Iraqi army. Elements of the Iraqi army would be permitted to retain their current status in assembly areas and permanent garrisons. Those troops would be used as a national reconstruction force that would have the dual benefit of training and identifying new military leadership and rebuilding the country that they would work to protect.

Finally, together with Tom Ridge, the NSC developed a plan for security here at home just in case terrorist groups believed that there was a window of vulnerability during the war. That would likely never have been a consideration before 9/11, but the world had changed.

In short, we needed to get ready because the President was increasingly convinced that Saddam had blown his last chance. Now it was a matter of explaining to the American people and the rest of the world that “serious consequences” had to have meaning.

THE PRESENTATION of the case against Saddam had three elements. First, we would review his transgressions against the international community and against his own people. Saddam had signed a ceasefire agreement in 1991 and was systematically violating every aspect of it. Second, we would inform the world of what we knew about his continuing pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, his support for terrorism, and his oppression of his own people. Finally, we would paint a picture of the dangers inherent in failing to address the decade-old threat of Saddam Hussein.

The President had begun this effort at the UN, but there was much more to say. The entire NSC team spoke to the issue in television appearances and print interviews. The “Sunday shows”—Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday, Face the Nation, ABC This Week, and CNN Late Edition—were particularly important venues. The audiences of those shows are not huge (Meet the Press is the largest, with only a few million viewers), but they’re influential among policy elites and often drive the Monday headlines.

When I became national security advisor, I had planned to follow Brent Scowcroft’s example and keep a low profile, deferring to the cabinet secretaries for public appearances. After September 11, though, I was pressed into action in large part because I could be a reliable surrogate for the President. In the run-up to the Iraq war, that became even more the case. Between September and March, I appeared on twelve Sunday shows.

I didn’t mind doing the press interviews, though the appearances tended to ruin any remaining semblance of a weekend. Because of their importance, I devoted late Saturday afternoons to preparing for them after working in the morning and early afternoon. If more than one official was appearing, we participated in a long conference call to coordinate our responses. And then Sunday morning had to begin unusually early, with a full review of the news and updates from the press staff about overnight events. The President and I talked every Sunday morning anyway, and he sometimes passed along his thoughts about what I should try to achieve.

Most of the time, the goal of these interviews was to state current U.S. policy and take the slings and arrows of the very capable and experienced journalists who anchored the shows. But we adopted a practice that in retrospect I believe to have been a mistake. In support of the public case, the intelligence community began declassifying pieces of information in order to describe the emerging threat fully. That was the source of some of the claims that turned out to be controversial and in many cases wrong: the high-quality aluminum tubes that were thought to be components for uranium enrichment; mobile laboratories for biological weapons development; the acquisition of mapping software for the territory of the United States that could be used in conjunction with pilotless drones. In one now infamous case, we used the CIA’s assessment that the aluminum tubes were for centrifuges—a key element in a nuclear weapons program. I misspoke during one of the interviews, saying that the tubes could only be for nuclear use. In fact, I had meant to say that they were most likely for nuclear use and corrected the language in subsequent statements. But the misstatement was taken as evidence that we were inflating the evidence. It was a lesson in the dangers of using individual intelligence points. As a result of this practice, these intelligence “nuggets” became too much the focus of the arguments about the dangers of Saddam. The entire case came to rest on those isolated intelligence statements about his programs.

The argument was really more straightforward: Saddam Hussein was a cancer in the Middle East who had attacked his neighbors, throwing the region into chaos. He had drawn the United States into conflict twice, once to expel him from Kuwait and a second time to deliver air strikes against suspected WMD sites because he would not allow arms inspectors to do their jobs. Saddam was routinely shooting at our aircraft patrolling under UN authority. The sanctions put into place to contain him had crumbled under the weight of international corruption and his considerable guile. He had tried to assassinate a former President of the United States and supported terrorists, harboring some of the most notorious of them in his country. There had been no arms inspections in Iraq for more than four years. And it was the unanimous view of the U.S. intelligence community that he had reconstituted his chemical and biological weapons programs. All but one agency believed that he was reconstituting his nuclear weapons capability as well and could have a crude nuclear device in one year if he got foreign help, by the end of the decade if he had to go it alone. Similar views were shared by many foreign intelligence organizations, including the British. The world had given Saddam one last chance to come clean about his weapons programs or face serious consequences. This time the word of the international community had to mean something.

In 2001 we had failed to connect the dots. We could not do so again. When I said, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” that is what I meant. Intelligence information is rarely certain. Waiting until a threat explodes was not an option after the experience of 9/11.

It is hard for many people now, knowing what subsequently occurred, to appreciate how compelling the overall intelligence case against Saddam appeared to be. I was a veteran of the Cold War, Gulf War I, and 9/11. I had served on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon and spent years trying to determine the direction of Soviet military programs. I had never seen a stronger case, and we knew Saddam had used weapons of mass destruction before. We reviewed the intelligence on numerous occasions. The NSC Principals, all experienced people, read the NIE cover to cover, and George Tenet repeatedly assured us of his own judgment that the intelligence was sound.

But what really should have anchored the argument was the problem of WMD in the hands of Saddam, not just the problem of WMD per se. In fact, Senator Robert Bennett of Utah reminded me that I had told a group of legislators exactly that. Russia had many times the number of WMD that Saddam was thought to possess, but there wasn’t much worry about Moscow using it or passing it on to a terrorist. Saddam was a unique threat on both counts. Intelligence was an input but not a substitute for our strategic judgment about what he was doing and, more important, what he might do. One cannot reliably judge the intentions of an adversary, but Saddam had shown a willingness to act recklessly before. We didn’t believe that we had the luxury of inaction.

Our public reliance on isolated intelligence nuggets was especially foolish when it turned the President of the United States into a “fact witness.” No one is to blame for this but me. We worked closely with the White House communicators, and they, not surprisingly, pushed the President to be specific in describing the threat. They loved the sporadic declassified nuggets, which had the added attraction of giving the American people a sense of being “let behind the spy’s curtain,” as one person put it. But knowing the uncertainties that always attend intelligence and how it is especially true in intelligence that the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts, I should have resisted.

The practice came to a head in the State of the Union address on January 28, 2003. The President knew that we were likely headed to war and wanted to give as detailed an assessment to the American people as possible. The speech included a long litany of what we knew about Saddam’s WMD. One of the nuggets referenced a British report that Saddam was trying to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger.

Three months earlier, George Tenet had suggested in a memo clearing another presidential speech that this reference be removed. At the time of the elaborate process for vetting the State of the Union, however, the Agency did not make the same request for the reference. In fact, the reference appeared in the 2002 NIE. Steve Hadley and I had a firm policy: if the intelligence agencies couldn’t support something the President was about to say, he wouldn’t say it. This time the red flag was not raised, and the line would embolden our critics in the months to come.

Late in February, Steve Hadley and I realized belatedly that the President had not made the broader argument. Somehow all that Saddam had done and what he meant to stability in the Middle East was getting lost in the discussion. The President agreed to deliver one last speech on Iraq and did so at the American Enterprise Institute. But the die had been cast. This was a war that had been justified by an intelligence judgment, not a strategic one. The rationale would rise or fall accordingly.

AS THE INSPECTIONS dragged on and military preparations accelerated, splits began to emerge within the international community. The President conducted almost daily phone calls with his counterparts and could hear firsthand the divergence among them. Colin reported the same. We had always known that France and Russia harbored deep reservations about action against Saddam. Their policies, quite frankly, had contributed to the weakening of the containment regime against Saddam, and they had been unwilling to strengthen those constraints earlier in 2001. Russia was at least honest in citing its economic interest as a principal rationale for avoiding war. But we were not sure whether Moscow and Paris would actually oppose military action if the United States and Great Britain decided on that course.

We decided to call for an extraordinary session of the UN Security Council on February 5 at which Colin would present the case against Saddam. At first Steve and I proposed two separate sessions: one on WMD and the other on the remainder of Saddam’s behavior in violating terrorism and human rights resolutions. The State Department felt that the world would rally only on the charges concerning his weapons of mass destruction but agreed that there should be a second resolution charging him with the other violations. That resolution never happened, as attention shifted to refining and passing Resolution 1441.

So, with the subject matter chosen, it fell to the CIA to prepare a brief. Colin reviewed it and found it lacking. George Tenet and John McLaughlin presented the case to the President in an Oval Office meeting just before Christmas. He was equally underwhelmed and asked about the strength of the evidence. That was the context for Tenet’s “slam dunk” comment, which was meant to convey, I think, that the intelligence was indeed strong. I didn’t take it as anything more than that, but the President asked me to review the intelligence one more time. I did so with an analyst in a long session in the Situation Room on December 23. Scooter Libby and the Vice President, reacting to the CIA presentation, wrote a “litigator’s case,” which not only focused on WMD but reintroduced a good deal of the questionable evidence on al Qaeda and Saddam.

Colin decided that he had to take the pen and vet the intelligence personally. He devoted several days to sessions at Langley, where he examined every claim, asking about the underlying sources and methods and throwing out a significant portion of what had been written for him. Colin had been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he knew the pitfalls of intelligence. I joined him for two nights and couldn’t have felt more confident about the case he would make.

I watched the first part of Colin’s presentation on TV in my office, eventually joining the President in the dining room adjacent to the Oval to view the end of it. I thought at the time that it was a tour de force. The evidence didn’t allow for an “Adlai Stevenson moment,” a reference to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and his surprise revelation of satellite photos showing Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. But it was impressive nonetheless, particularly in light of Saddam’s record with the international community.

The response broke along expected lines, with Spain’s fiery foreign minister, Ana Palacio, and Britain’s Jack Straw calling for action and France and Russia arguing for giving the weapons inspectors more time. When Hans Blix gave a report on February 14 that was more ambiguous than the one of January 27, it was clear that we had our work cut out for us with the world community.

Our sense of urgency was driven by two factors. First, our military forces were approaching levels of mobilization that could not be sustained for very long. We were not on a hair trigger, but a decision was going to have to be made to keep moving forward with the mobilization or start to pull back. It wasn’t possible just to stand still, since doing so would leave our forces vulnerable in-theater without sufficient logistical support. I found it ironic that some diplomats, including Hans Blix, liked the backdrop of U.S. military power as a means to force Saddam’s hand. They seemed to have no idea that we couldn’t stand ready forever while Saddam played cat and mouse as he always did. Second, the President believed that the only way to avoid war was to put maximum and unified pressure on Saddam. That argued for continued mobilization, not pulling back. Maybe he would get the message and decide to save his own skin.

Unfortunately, the international community was starting to send mixed messages. The moment was approaching when we would have to reconcile conflicting views over the admittedly ambiguous language in Resolution 1441 concerning the need for a second resolution to authorize war. Tony Blair came to the White House for a meeting on January 31. He made it clear that he would need a second resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force. It was not a matter of legality but politics: he would have to face the House of Commons in a vote on the use of force that could bring down his government. The President already had congressional authorization, but if the British needed a second resolution, we would seek a second resolution.

Colin believed that we had a strong chance of getting nine or ten votes in the UN Security Council and might be able to persuade the Latin Americans—Mexico and Chile—to go along. Yet if Russia, France, or China voted against the resolution, it would fail due to their veto as permanent Security Council members. Russia had made clear that it was concerned mostly about its economic interests in Iraq. France was more principled if patronizing, viewing the Iraqi dictator as a necessary evil in an area of the world that needed strongmen to ensure stability. China was difficult to read.

Therefore the emergence of a French, Russian, and German triumvirate publicly opposed to action in Iraq was the devastating last straw. The President was particularly shocked at the participation of Germany since, months before, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder had led us to believe that he might support the United States against Saddam “as long as it was quick.” Needless to say, it was also galling to see the United States’ NATO allies hug Russia in opposition to the United States on a matter of national security. Colin still hoped that we might get a plain-vanilla resolution that would perhaps simply reaffirm the language of “serious consequences” in Resolution 1441.

The President decided to call Tony Blair. They agreed to forge ahead on the second resolution, even though the prospects were dwindling. French President Jacques Chirac had let it be known that “nothing justifies war.” But there was still some hope that the French and Russians might abstain if enough members of the Council could be lined up. The resolution was introduced on February 24 and was almost dead on arrival.

The Latin Americans were proving to be more difficult than we had thought. The Chileans said they could not support a war resolution. When President Bush called Mexico’s president, Vicente Fox, Fox asked, “What resolution?” When his promised return phone call to the President had not occurred some hours later, I checked in with my Mexican counterpart to learn that President Fox had gone in for back surgery and would not be available. The chance of passing a second resolution now seemed very remote.

In early March the President called Blair again. I assumed it was just to review the status of the resolution, but he had something else in mind. He was concerned that the war might bring down Blair’s government and made clear that he would think no less of the prime minister if Britain did not participate in the invasion; perhaps there was some other way for the United Kingdom to be involved later in the conflict. Blair would have none of it, saying that he had promised to be by our side and had not changed his mind.

As I listened to that conversation, I remembered sitting with Margaret Thatcher in the Roosevelt Room in August 1990 as a young aide to President George H. W. Bush. The prime minister had come to the White House to discuss a response to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. The President was tied up with a congressional delegation, and Richard Haass, then the special assistant for Near East and South Asian affairs, and I sat with Mrs. Thatcher until he was ready. She would tell the President not to go “wobbly” on Saddam. What irony! I left the President’s office with the deepest respect and admiration for Tony Blair and the United Kingdom. It seems that when the chips are down, the British never go wobbly.

The President and Blair agreed to hold a meeting in the Azores for the key Security Council members who supported military action. President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and Prime Minister Aznar were joined by Prime Minister José Barroso of Portugal, their host, who had offered the Azores as a quiet meeting place.

Aznar and his foreign minister, Ana Palacio, had become stalwart allies against terrorism and tough critics of Saddam Hussein. The Spanish had their own terrorism experiences with the Basque separatist group ETA, and the President’s early support for their cause against the separatists had created a bond between the countries. Aznar’s party would be defeated in 2004, however, after a terrorist attack that many read as retaliation for Spain’s support of the war on terrorism and participation in the Iraq war. His successor, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, reversed course, precipitously withdrawing Spanish forces from Iraq and causing tensions in our relationship that were never overcome.

That Sunday evening in the Azores, we sat rather glumly, realizing that a united international community would not materialize. We would take on Saddam either with a coalition of the willing or not at all. The British had to leave early to prepare for Tony Blair’s moment of truth in the House of Commons. As they bade us good-bye, I turned to Andy Card and said, “I hope it’s not the last time we see them.”

TONY BLAIR survived the vote of no confidence in the House of Commons. I watched that Tuesday morning as Blair delivered his case for enforcing Resolution 1441. British parliamentary debates are theatrical. I found myself nodding even when listening to those with whom I disagreed. There is something about the accent and the beautiful way the British use what is purported to be our common language. They just sound so impressive.

In the end Blair prevailed by a larger margin than expected and committed British forces to the initial campaign to overthrow Saddam and liberate Iraq. Prime Minister John Howard of Australia and President Aleksander Kwaśniewski of Poland did the same. While France, Germany, and Canada stood aside, eighteen NATO members (including seven states who gained formal ascension into NATO in 2004) and several other states joined the coalition. Some of “old Europe,” as Don undiplomatically called them, refused to participate. But it was heartening to see the Baltic states, several of the East and Central Europeans, and even Georgia do what they could and with the best possible motive: they were finally free after years of tyranny and wanted to help others to achieve liberty. Japan and South Korea would anchor the effort in the north and south with forces carrying out humanitarian missions and helping to train Iraqi security forces. It was the first “overseas” mission for Japan in the post–World War II period. It was deeply offensive to those countries to see their contributions ridiculed by others as insignificant, and it was annoying to us that the military action against Saddam was dubbed unilateral. In fact, thirty-three countries from the coalition provided troops to support military operations in Iraq in 2003.

Neither was it the first time that the United States had acted without an explicit UNSC resolution. From the 1948 Berlin airlift under Truman to the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the coalitions involved were acting without that specific authority. But in this case, we believed that both Resolution 1441 and the sixteen before it were more than adequate to express the international community’s view that Saddam Hussein was a threat to international peace and security. And in our view, “serious consequences” had to mean something.