The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (74 page)

Rumsfeld took a different course. Although he believed that Iran would eventually obtain a nuclear weapon, he did not view it as an immediate crisis.
¹¹
Instead he called for a comprehensive review of U.S. policy toward Iraq. Rumsfeld had served as Reagan’s Middle East envoy when the United States played a balancing act between Iran and Iraq. “I wondered if the right combination of blandishments and pressures might lead or compel Saddam Hussein toward an improved arrangement with America,” Rumsfeld wrote in his memoirs. He advocated a throwback to the days when Iraq served as a bulwark to contain Iran. “While a long shot,” he wrote, “it was not out of the question.”
¹²

Iraq also galvanized the conservative intellectuals filling the political appointee positions within the Pentagon. This included Rumsfeld’s number two, a rumpled ideologue named Paul Wolfowitz. Collectively known as neoconservatives, or “neocons,” they were a loose grouping of like-minded men who sprang from the political left and merged with the anti-Soviet hawks of the Cold War. They argued for a unilateralist foreign policy centered upon America’s moral superiority and her willingness to use military force as an instrument to confront the world’s evils. They were not shy about using force to remake the globe in an image pleasing to America.
¹³

Wolfowitz viewed Saddam Hussein as the principal threat to American security. A polite, likable, soft-spoken man, Wolfowitz exemplified the absentminded professor, possessing a quick mind and exhibiting perpetual personal disorganization. He had first raised the Iraqi threat thirty years earlier when he headed a 1979 limited contingency study for Secretary Harold Brown. Wolfowitz viewed Iraq through the lens of the Holocaust and the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party represented the modern face of fascism. In a 2004 memo after the U.S. invasion, in response to proposed reconciliation with former Baath
officials, Wolfowitz killed the idea, scrawling in the margin, “They are Nazis!”
¹⁴

During the Republican exile between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, the neocons pushed for the overthrow of the Iraqi regime using covert action and armed exiles backed by American airpower.
¹⁵
Now back in power, they pressed for using U.S. military muscle to establish safe havens in which free-Iraq forces could muster to overthrow the Iraqi government.

President Bush’s national security adviser, Condi Rice, had a close rapport with the president, having served to educate the neophyte candidate on foreign policy. A bright policy wonk and Russia expert, she was more than just an adviser, becoming a close friend to the president and First Lady. Her frequent contact with them gave her both the insight and access needed for an effective national security adviser. But the president used her as his personal foreign policy adviser and not as the heavy hand to coordinate and implement his policy goals.
¹⁶
Instead, Rice worked to build consensus decisions within the National Security Council. When senior officials differed, rather than raising these differences to the president for his decision, Rice sent it back to senior officials for them to try and hash out the issue once again. On contentious policy issues, endless discussions never led to a decision on which course to take. This made for a feeble national security adviser and a dysfunctional national security process.

George W. Bush was chiefly responsible for this inertia. By his own admission, the swaggering Texan was not introspective. He showed little interest in second-guessing his policy decrees.
¹⁷
Bush fashioned himself as a decisive captain and titled his memoirs
Decision Points
, in which he discusses a series of case studies, all of which show the self-described “decider” confidently making the important decisions of his presidency, guided by his religious faith and the righteousness of the cause. In actuality, Bush avoided making stark choices. Detractors and admirers alike who worked in the White House agreed that the president wanted his subordinates to form a consensus on foreign policy and then present the decider with a single course of action. The problem with this managerial style occurred when his subordinates could not come to an agreement. In other administrations, such as that of President Reagan, the national security adviser simply forwarded both views with a cover sheet on which the president would check either choice A or B, sign it, and everyone knew, unequivocally, how the commander in chief
had ruled. “This never happened in the Bush administration,” lamented a midlevel NSC official. Instead, the president ordered his national security adviser back to hash out the issue again, in spite of the fact that it would never have been brought to the Oval Office had his advisers been able to form a collective decision.
¹⁸

O
n June 1, 2001, Condi Rice chaired a meeting with Rumsfeld, Powell, and Cheney on Iraq. The Pentagon urged quick action, and was supported by the equally hawkish vice president. They argued that time was not on Washington’s side. Saddam Hussein had kicked out UN inspectors three years earlier and, unchecked, “Saddam could possess nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction,” a Defense Department point paper warned.
¹⁹

In the heat of the Washington summer, the Bush inner circle met twice more to examine regime change in Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell advocated for targeted or smart sanctions, and not military action, to keep Saddam Hussein in his box. The outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Hugh Shelton, agreed. The U.S. military’s air campaign had reduced the Iraqi military to a hollow shell—a brutal dictatorship but no threat to its neighbors, he argued. Rice offered no strong opinions either for or against the Pentagon’s recommendations. But Shelton grew concerned that those advocating military action had begun to sway others in the interagency debate.

The one person in the administration fixated on Iran, perhaps more so than Iraq, was John Bolton, the new undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. With his shock of graying hair and a white walrus mustache, Bolton advocated a muscular foreign policy. Unlike the idealism of Wolfowitz, Bolton’s views stemmed from the need for unilateral American action and hawkish Middle East views similar to those of Israel’s Ariel Sharon. This placed him at odds with the more temperate Powell and Armitage running the State Department. But Powell accepted Bolton in part to deflect criticism by the more hawkish people in the administration. Armitage suspected he had been placed deliberately by the vice president to keep an eye on the powerful top diplomat, and referred to Bolton as one of the “bats.” “When the day ended and the sun went down, they left their caves and flew back to report to the White House,” Armitage said.

Bolton viewed Iran as a serious threat. Iran’s unrelenting nuclear program presented the gravest of challenges, and he sympathized with the Israeli
worries of the existential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. In his portfolio of arms control, he pushed the administration to pressure Russia to halt its aid to Iran’s nuclear and missile program, especially completing the twenty-year-old fledgling reactor at Bushehr.
²⁰

George Bush showed little interest in either Iraq or Iran. During the transition, Newbold briefed President-elect Bush on the current air operations over Iraq enforcing the no-fly zones. Bush asked only one question: how much money the Iraqi no-fly zones operation cost. Iran did not even come up in conversation.
²¹
As the heat of summer began to wane, the decider had yet to engage on Iraq. How he would have finally come down between smart sanctions or action remains speculative and would have been the great foreign policy debate of his first term. A terrorist attack by al-Qaeda ended the debate.

S
eptember 11, 2001, was a typical late summer day in Washington. A brilliant sunny blue sky superimposed itself over the white monuments and imposing granite buildings built with socialist grandeur during the 1920s. With Labor Day over and the kids back at school, hordes of government workers clogged the Beltway and the other highways running into Washington. While Cheney and Rumsfeld worked in their respective offices on opposite sides of the Potomac River, much of the government’s senior leadership was scattered across the globe: the president in Florida, Hugh Shelton on his way to Hungary, other senior defense officials scattered about Russia and Europe.

That morning, nineteen Middle Eastern men boarded four jets in Boston, Washington, and Newark. Air traffic controllers soon noticed someone had turned off the transponder of American Airlines Flight 11, a 767 bound from Boston to the West Coast. The aircraft did an abrupt course change, turning back east. At the controls was Muhammad Atta, the ringleader of the band of Muslim anarchists and supporters of the Saudi zealot Osama bin Laden. Flying fast and low across the Manhattan skyline and chanting “
Allahu akbar
”—God is great—Atta flew the large passenger jet straight into the side of one of the two tallest buildings in the world and a symbol of American capitalism.

When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, military officers monitoring the world hot spots in the dingy cubicle labyrinth of the highly secure
National Military Command Center learned of it from the television news. The NMCC was not the stuff of Hollywood. Rather than an impressive war room with high-tech electronic maps as described by fanciful writers, in reality it resembled more of an unkempt maze. A building within a building, it sat in the center of the Pentagon, easily accessible to the offices of the chairman and the secretary of defense, who could walk down the hall and enter from any number of guarded posts. At its heart was the current operations section. Here a host of officers toiled, monitoring crises around the globe in a large, narrow, open room that meandered back around large square pilings that supported the weight of the building. Off this room was a small office where a brigadier general sat twenty-four hours a day as the senior watch officer, and a small conference room, which served as the nerve center during a crisis, replete with phones arrayed around a large rectangular table and a video screen on the far wall. This was the station of the chairman, and frequently the secretary, during a crisis. Around corners and through other doors was the alert center, poised to launch America’s nuclear arsenal, and a room housing the communications link with Moscow, installed shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis to allow instant messages between the two countries.

At first, officers monitoring the plane crash in New York believed it might have been a civilian plane; a few even recalled the bomber that crashed into the Empire State Building during the Second World War. A call to the Federal Aviation Administration, however, dispelled this theory.

The Pentagon too was a target. Skimming over Arlington National Cemetery, another hijacked aircraft clipped a lamppost of a navy exchange gas station before its wing clipped a generator and it tumbled into the colossal five-story building. The jet’s momentum carried it through three of the building’s five expansive rings, finally depositing part of its landing gear in the center of an interior access road.

“There was a heat wave like haze extending from the back of the room up to the ceiling,” described a defense civilian, Christine Morrison. “Before I could register or complete that thought, this force hit the room, instantly turning the office into an inferno hell. Everything was falling, flying, and on fire, and there was no escaping it.”
²²

In a small conference room next to the desk of the senior watch officer at the NMCC, Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs vice chairman General Richard Myers monitored the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and prepared for
whatever else might come. It was a stifling environment; two dozen men crammed into the small conference room. Designed to be self-contained in the event of a nuclear war, the NMCC had been sealed shut, closing the two sets of airtight doors to prevent smoke from entering the sensitive area. Within a couple of hours the oxygen ran short and the doors were reopened until the choking smoke forced them closed again.

With the smoke thick in the corridors of the Pentagon, at two forty p.m. Rumsfeld met with Stephen Cambone, deputy to the undersecretary of defense for planning, Douglas Feith. They discussed what information they had about who had been behind the attack, and the secretary brainstormed about the military response. Iraq immediately came out of Rumsfeld’s mouth. Cambone jotted in his notebook, “Hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at same time—not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].”
²³

“The events of September 11 make it clear that we can simply no longer tolerate networks of state support for terrorism—particularly not those which are pursuing weapons of mass destruction—whether or not they were involved in this tragedy,” Wolfowitz wrote in one of a series of memos to Rumsfeld immediately after the attack. “If there is even a 10% chance that Saddam Hussein was behind Tuesday’s horrors, a maximum priority has to be put on eliminating that threat.”
²⁴

Not surprisingly, Wolfowitz wanted to start with Iraq. Iraq was assumed to have weapons of mass destruction and had shown a willingness to use them. He now couched it as a key component in the new global war on terrorism. “We can’t find all the snakes in the swamp…unless we drain the swamp,” he wrote to Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz raised doubts about al-Qaeda’s being responsible. He went so far as to suggest to the defense secretary that another country might have staged the attack to look as though 9/11 had been carried out by Osama bin Laden. “One could also imagine why someone would want it to appear that way even if they were, for example, Iraqis or Iranians or Syrians.”
²⁵