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May 23, 2004
Review: Mission Iraq
AS tragedy unravels in Iraq, the perfidious claims made by the Bush administration and its apologists of fighting a ‘just war’ come undone. While President Bush believes that he is ‘carrying out a mission that has been sanctioned by the divine’, as he recently indicated in a White House press conference, there is significant evidence from noteworthy sources which reveals otherwise.
Plan of Attack, the controversial new book by Bob Woodward, the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, is a captivating narrative that illustrates the role of forceful personalities, nebulous intelligence, rigid Pentagon timetables and self-righteous notions like exporting democracy in shaping the Bush administration’s aggressive policies that created the momentum for war. Exposing the fact that Iraq was always uppermost on the White House agenda, much before 9/11. Plan of Attack discloses that President Bush asked Defence Secretary Rumsfeld on November 21, 2001, to start a war plan for Iraq, and to do so secretly because a leak could generate ‘enormous international angst and domestic speculation’.
Highlighting the Bush administration’s faltering journey towards the Iraq war he quotes the director of CIA, George Tenet, telling President Bush in December 2002 that intelligence about Iraq possessing weapons was ‘a slam dunk’. Tenet later told associates that the CIA should have stated upfront that the evidence was not ‘ironclad’ and that there was ‘no smoking gun’. Gen Tommy Franks, who got the Iraq assignment while he was busy prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, was among those who objected to this war from the beginning.
Woodward describes him uttering a string of obscenities when he was ordered to develop a plan for invading Iraq and quotes General Franks saying in September 2002 that his people had been ‘looking for Scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for 10 years and haven’t found any yet’.
Woodward describes Vice President Cheney as being a ‘powerful, steamrolling force for military intervention’. According to Woodward, Cheney harboured ‘a deep sense of unfinished business about Iraq’ and reports that in January 2001 Cheney passed a message to the outgoing defence secretary, William Cohen, stipulating that Topic A in Mr Bush’s foreign policy briefing should be Iraq.
Woodward also remarks that Colin Powell believed that the Vice President had ‘an unhealthy fixation’ about Saddam Hussein and was constantly striving to draw connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq. ‘Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact,’ he says. At a later point Mr Woodward comments that Secretary of State Powell also cautioned President Bush in January 2003 that military action against Iraq would leave the United States responsible for rebuilding the country and dealing with the global fallout that this invasion would cause, but remarks that the President never asked Powell for advice, and that Mr Powell never volunteered any. ‘Perhaps the President feared the answer,’ Mr Woodward says. ‘Perhaps Powell feared giving it.’
Against All Enemies is another scathing review of imprudent Washington policies by Richard Clarke, who has been called the ‘ultimate White House insider’. As the former counter-terrorism coordinator at the White House, he alleges that in spite of mounting intelligence of the danger Al Qaeda presented, his urgent requests to move terrorism up the list of priorities in the early days of the administration were met with apathy and procrastination.
Clarke’s assertions also corroborate Woodward’s views of Washington’s Iraq mania as he claims that after the 9/11 attacks took place the Bush team was preoccupied with Iraq even when faced with overwhelming evidence that it was Al Qaeda that was attacking the United States. ‘I realized that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to protect their agenda on Iraq,’ he says.
This book contains riveting details about President Bush’s obsession with Iraq, which have recently created explosive headlines and incited the administration’s wrath. The most infamous incident in Against All Enemies is about Bush’s keenness to link the September 11 attacks to Iraq. Clarke writes that on the night of September 12 he saw Bush wandering alone through the Situation Room.
The President then stopped and asked Clarke and a few aides to ‘go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.’ Clarke said he was ‘taken aback, incredulous’. He told the president, ‘Al Qaeda did this’. ‘I know, I know, but see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.’ He also presents several explanations for this fixation with Iraq such as strategies to improve Israel’s position, creating a model Arab democracy, establishing an easy source of oil for the US and vindicating the first ineffectual Iraq war.
Clarke has not only done a brilliant job of underscoring the Bush administration’s misplaced paranoia about Iraq. He has also underlined various other irresponsible and injudicious White House policies that have shaped world events over the past thirty years.
In Disarming Iraq, ex-chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, compares Washington’s policies to witch-hunting in the Middle Ages. ‘The witches exist; you are appointed to deal with these witches; testing whether there are witches is only a dilution of the witch hunt.’ This book is an excellent analysis of the Iraq situation and gives a detailed account of the surreptitious diplomacy surrounding the last UN weapon inspections in Iraq.
While Blix admits that he too presumed that Iraq was hiding WMDs, he expresses tremendous frustration at the attitude of the Bush administration which he thought was both excessively confident that the weapons existed and totally uninterested in any evidence. Blix comments that he persistently complained to the US officials that their intelligence was insufficient or simply incorrect. The sites that he was directed to produced no evidence of the weapons that members of the Bush administration cited publicly. He points out that virtually every claim made by American policy makers about Iraq’s weapons programmes proved to be false and the entire assessment of Iraq’s weapons programme, he argues, lacked any kind of ‘critical thinking’.
He was aware that the Bush administration was overly distrustful of the UN inspections and recalls a meeting with Cheney at which the Vice President tried to intimidate him, threatening to ‘discredit inspections in favor of disarmament’ if he did not produce quick results.
He also felt that ‘the contempt which both Vice-President Cheney and the leadership in the US department of defence appear to have held for international inspections deprived them, in effect, of a valuable source of information’. In conclusion Blix emphatically criticizes the US for viewing diplomacy as an obstacle and it becomes apparent from his arguments that Washington could have easily worked with international structures and institutions to attain its objectives in Iraq.
Plan of Attack
By Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 0-7432-5547-X
468pp. Rs1,195
Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror
By Richard Clark
Free Press
ISBN 0-7432-6024-4
305pp. Rs995
Both books available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi
Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website: www.libertybooks.com
Disarming Iraq
By Hans Blix
Bloomsbury. Available with Paramount Books, 152/O, Block 2, PECH Society,
Karachi-75400
Tel: 021-4310030. Email: paramount@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 0747573549
285pp. Rs1,295
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