In My Time (64 page)

The next day, Tuesday, Blair won his vote in Parliament. A majority of Labour members supported him, and he got an even larger share of the Conservatives’ votes. At the request of the British, I had called a number of the Tories, including Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative leader. He was, on this issue, a rock of support for Blair.

On Wednesday, as the military operation was ready to begin, I made calls to a series of world leaders, letting them know that diplomacy had run its course. My schedule shows that I talked to the leaders of Egypt, Israel, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and South Korea. The Syrian president, Bashar Assad, was also on my call list, but when my office reached his, word came back that he was “unavailable.”

Somewhere during the series of phone calls, I was called down to the Oval Office. The president’s national security team was gathering to hear George Tenet, who had come to report that CIA sources inside Iraq believed they knew where Saddam Hussein would be that night. The agency had eyewitness accounts, George said, that Saddam and his two sons had been at a compound called Dora Farms and were likely to return. Amid a frenzy of activity, with new information coming in real time and staffers and principals hurrying in and out, Secretary Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Myers talked about our military options. If, in fact, Saddam was there, we had the possibility of striking
a decapitation blow in the first moments of the war. But we had to act fast, and there were risks. We would need bunker-busting bombs on the target, and that meant planes flying close to Baghdad before its air defenses had been destroyed.

We thoroughly discussed the pros and cons, and eventually the president kicked everyone else out of the Oval Office, looked at me, and said, “Dick, what do you think we ought to do?” I told him I thought we should launch. If the intelligence was right, we had the chance to shorten the war significantly by killing Saddam up front. I thought that was worth the risk. The president agreed. He called the others back into his office and told them to launch. Shortly after the deadline for Saddam to leave Iraq expired, two F-117 stealth fighters bombed Dora Farms.

The next day we got initial reports that the strike might have worked. An eyewitness reported a man looking like Saddam had been dragged from the rubble and left lying on a stretcher in the open air. It didn’t take long, however, to find out those first reports were wrong.

IN THE EARLY DAYS and weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I received nearly daily briefings on our progress. Tommy Franks also gave regular updates via SVTS from his forward headquarters in Qatar. He did so on the morning of March 30, and the news was encouraging. The oil fields had been taken intact, western Iraq was no longer a base for launching missiles against Iraq’s neighbors, and our air strikes were significantly degrading Iraq’s forces. We were already operating from Iraqi airfields; Khurmal, the al Qaeda poisons camp, had been destroyed; and humanitarian supplies were arriving in Iraq. Our forces had closed to within sixty miles of Baghdad on multiple fronts and were still over 90 percent combat capable. The list went on and on. Tommy concluded: “The regime is in trouble and they know it.”

One of our biggest concerns was that Saddam might concentrate his best forces around the city, use chemical or biological weapons against our troops, and then create a fortress for himself inside Baghdad. We worried we’d have to deal with a siege of the city that would be extremely
costly in lives and casualties. To avoid getting bogged down on the road to Baghdad, our commanders orchestrated and executed an operation that emphasized speed. They raced for the capital. Like millions of Americans, I watched news reports on television night after night as journalists embedded with the troops reported on the rapid advance toward the heart of Saddam’s regime.

At a briefing on the progress of the war on April 2, the Defense Department reported that in Najaf, people were “receiving us as liberators.” At an April 5 briefing, the report was “crowds beginning to turn out to welcome us.” On April 9, the day we marched into Baghdad, the conclusion was “situation really, really positive.” Banner headlines in the
Washington Post
reported, “U.S. Forces Move Triumphantly through Capital Streets, Cheered by Crowds Jubilant at End of Repressive Regime.” A few weeks before on
Meet the Press
, I had told Tim Russert that “from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” There were certainly difficult days ahead, but contrary to subsequent assertions by war critics, my assessment had been on target. We were greeted as liberators when we freed the Iraqi people from Saddam’s grip.

With improvements in technology and equipment, our forces had capabilities we could only have dreamt of during Desert Storm. Our ground forces had improved their combat power and increased the range and accuracy of their weapons. Every one of our air-to-ground fighters could now put a laser-guided bomb to the target, compared with only 20 percent in Desert Storm. In Desert Storm, we had only one kind of unmanned aerial vehicle. In Iraqi Freedom, we had ten different types, ranging from tactical systems that would allow our soldiers to look over the next hill to strategic systems that operated at high altitudes.

In 1991 Saddam had time to set Kuwait’s oil fields ablaze. In 2003 our special operations forces were sent in early to protect the six hundred oil wells in southern Iraq. During Desert Storm Saddam had fired Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia. In Iraqi Freedom our special operations forces seized control of the missile launch baskets in western Iraq and prevented their use.

The plan put together by General Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld for the liberation of Iraq was bold, impressive, and effective. By moving with astonishing speed, going with a small force, and without preceding air bombardment, they achieved tactical surprise. With less than half of the ground forces and two-thirds of the air assets used in Desert Storm, they achieved a far more difficult objective in less time and with fewer casualties.

On April 9 Lynne and I were visiting the D-Day Museum in New Orleans. Watching television in our hotel before I went onstage to speak, we saw the statue of Saddam in central Baghdad pulled down by Iraqis and American marines. We knew we were watching the end of Saddam’s regime.

Just before the statue came down, a young marine draped an American flag over Saddam’s face. Watching the scene on television, I completely understood. We all wanted to see an Iraqi flag up there soon, but our troops had just accomplished a stunning military victory. They had earned the right to plant the stars and stripes anyplace they wanted.

At the end of the day, back in the White House, my guest was Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident who had stood against Saddam for decades. A gentle, soft-spoken man, he had documented the atrocities of Saddam’s regime. It was an emotional meeting, and I’ll never forget Kanan’s words that evening: “Thank you,” he said, “for our liberation.”

D
uring the spring of 2003, stories began to appear in the press that a former U.S. ambassador had been sent to Africa in 2002 after I had asked questions about a report that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger. According to the articles the unnamed ambassador told the CIA upon his return that the report was wrong. His assessment was of interest to the media because it seemed to contradict a sixteen-word statement that President Bush had made in his 2003 State of the Union speech. “The British government,” he had said, “has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

I was surprised by the stories about the ambassador. Well over a year before, when I had read a Defense Intelligence Agency report about Iraq possibly trying to acquire uranium from Niger, I had done what I often did and asked for further information. What was the CIA’s opinion of the report? What did the CIA think were the implications for Iraq’s nuclear program? A few days later, around Valentine’s Day 2002, I received a CIA memo saying that Iraq had existing stockpiles of yellowcake,
or unenriched uranium ore, two hundred tons of which had previously been acquired from Niger, but that these stockpiles were in sealed containers that the International Atomic Energy Agency inspected annually. This was interesting information, since it indicated that if Saddam intended to restart his nuclear program, he was going to have to acquire uranium clandestinely—and he had a history with Niger. The mid-February memo said the agency was seeking to clarify and confirm the reporting on recent efforts by Iraq to acquire Niger uranium.

Fifteen months had passed and I hadn’t gotten an answer from the CIA, yet now I was reading in the newspapers that the agency had sent someone on a mission to Niger, an unnamed ambassador, who was intent on providing the results of his trip, which had never been provided to me, to members of the press, and he was doing so in order to call our truthfulness into question. In all my years working with the intelligence community—as White House chief of staff, as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, as secretary of defense supervising such intelligence organizations as the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Security Agency—I had never seen anything like this, and after I had read a couple of the stories, I picked up the secure phone on my desk and punched the button that gave me a direct line to CIA Director George Tenet out at CIA headquarters in Langley. “What the hell is going on, George?” I asked when he picked up the phone.

Tenet sounded embarrassed and seemed not to know much more than I did. He said neither he nor his deputy, John McLaughlin, had been aware of an envoy being sent to Niger. He did add one fact, though. He said they had learned that the wife of the fellow who went to Niger “worked in the unit that sent him.” George said he’d get to the bottom of it and get back to me. I shook my head as I hung up. It sounded like amateur hour out at the CIA.

On July 6, 2003, the retired ambassador, Joe Wilson, apparently tired of anonymity, wrote an op-ed for the
New York Times
titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” Wilson said that in response to my request for more information, the CIA had sent him to Niger, paying his expenses,
but not for his time, which he donated “pro bono.” As a result of his trip, he said, he concluded that the story about Iraq trying to acquire uranium in Niger was false, and he asserted that I surely must have been told that by the CIA. To round things out, Wilson brought up the president’s statement in the State of the Union address and accused the administration of twisting intelligence in order to justify the war.

I often clipped pieces out of newspapers, and that’s what I did with Wilson’s op-ed. I wrote a few comments in the margin that expressed my consternation: “Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an ambassador to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?”

After the op-ed appeared, there was a debate inside the White House, and at least one discussion in the Oval Office, about whether we should apologize for the inclusion of “the sixteen words” in the president’s State of the Union speech. The CIA had cleared the president’s address; but now with a spotlight on the words, Director Tenet was saying that they didn’t rise to an appropriate level of certainty. Some on the president’s senior staff believed that if we issued an apology, the story would go away. I strongly opposed the idea. An apology would only fan the flames, and why apologize when the British had, in fact, reported that Iraq had sought a significant amount of uranium in Africa?
The sixteen words were true.

It is worth noting at this point in a complicated story that when the British government later investigated prewar intelligence on Iraq, they confirmed their reporting. “Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999,” the Butler Review noted, and “the British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.” The British not only stood by their intelligence, they concluded that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union speech was “
well-founded
.”

I was under the impression that the president had decided against a public apology, and was therefore surprised a few days later when National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told the White House press pool, “We wouldn’t have put it in the speech if we had known what
we know now.” The result was the conflagration I had predicted. The media immediately wanted to know who was responsible. Suddenly the White House staff was consumed with reviewing drafts of the President’s State of the Union speech, going over communications with the CIA about the speech, and poring through previous speeches to determine how the sixteen words got into the speech. First George Tenet and later Steve Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, issued statements accepting the blame. It was a ridiculous situation—particularly in light of the fact that the sixteen words were, as the British put it, “well-founded.”