In My Time - Dick Cheney [194]
In the wake of 9/11, after the United States had gone into Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom, CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “We have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.” The CIA had “solid reporting” of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda and “credible reporting” that al Qaeda was seeking contacts in Iraq that could help them acquire capabilities in weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein was by this time providing $25,000 payments to the relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers, and, Director Tenet noted, “Iraq’s increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al-Qa’ida, suggest that Baghdad’s links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.”
In Senate testimony in 2003, Director Tenet also noted that Iraq was providing safe haven to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born terrorist who had trained in Afghanistan and become a key al Qaeda lieutenant. He had arrived in Iraq in 2002, spent time in Baghdad, and then supervised camps in northern Iraq that provided a safe haven for as many as two hundred al Qaeda fighters escaping Afghanistan. At one of those camps, called Khurmal, Zarqawi’s men tested poisons and plotted attacks to use them in Europe. From his base in Iraq, Zarqawi also directed the October 2002 killing of Laurence Foley, a U.S. Agency for International Development officer, in Jordan.
For a period extending back to the first Gulf War, the U.S. intelligence community had been providing detailed assessments concerning Saddam Hussein’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons, carry on biological and chemical weapons programs, and support terror. The National Intelligence Estimate that we received in 2002 was a continuation of earlier evaluations, and sobering as its judgments were, what the president and I read in our daily briefings was even “more assertive,” as Director Tenet would later write.
After 9/11 no American president could responsibly ignore the steady stream of reporting we were getting about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. We had experienced an unprecedented attack on our homeland. Three thousand Americans, going about their everyday lives, had been killed. The president and I were determined to do all we could to prevent another attack, and our resolution was made stronger by the awareness that a future attack could be even more devastating. The terrorists of 9/11 were armed with airplane tickets and box cutters. The next wave might bring chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.
When we looked around the world in those first months after 9/11, there was no place more likely to be a nexus between terrorism and WMD capability than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. With the benefit of hindsight—even taking into account that some of the intelligence we received was wrong—that assessment still holds true. We could not ignore the threat or wish it away, hoping naïvely that the crumbling sanctions regime would contain Saddam. The security of our nation and of our friends and allies required that we act. And so we did.
THE PRESIDENT AND I spoke about Iraq privately in the weeks following 9/11. I was aware that Secretary Rumsfeld had set up a process to review all Department of Defense war plans, and I suggested to the president that it would be useful to make certain that Rumsfeld had assigned priority to planning for possible military action against Saddam Hussein. I knew from my experience as secretary of defense during Desert Storm that good military planning takes time. Instructing Rumsfeld to have the military update our Iraq war plans was the best way for the president to ensure that he would have effective, responsible options should military action become necessary. I also suggested that our planning be undertaken at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida. CENTCOM, under the command of General Tommy Franks, was responsible for the Middle East, including Iraq, and planning