In My Time - Dick Cheney [195]
On December 28, 2001, I sat in my second-floor study at our home in Wyoming. Outside my window, snow covered the ground. On the desk in front of me was the secure videoconference monitor that allowed me to participate remotely in classified meetings with the president and other members of the NSC. For the meeting that morning, the president was at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, with General Franks. Don Rumsfeld was joining the meeting from his home in Taos, New Mexico; various others, including Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and George Tenet, joined from D.C.
After updating us on the situation in Afghanistan, Franks turned to the briefing he had prepared on Iraq. The current war plan, Op Plan 1003, was essentially the same as the one that we had gone to war with in 1991. Pentagon planners had been revising it, but it still called for more than four hundred thousand troops; required a six-month, very public buildup; and failed to take account of the way the world had changed. Saddam’s military, though formidable, was about half the size it had been during the first Gulf War. Our military was also smaller, but its capabilities had increased, largely because of advances in precision weaponry and the ability to coordinate air strikes with ground operations. Franks presented the beginnings of a reconceptualized war plan, one that would allow us to move faster by simultaneously targeting multiple centers of power within Iraq. He laid out several assumptions, a primary one of which was that Iraq would use weapons of mass destruction against our troops, and we needed to prepare for that. He also noted that should we go to war against Iraq, other parts of the U.S. government would have important roles to play. The State Department, which had worked with the international community to establish a provisional government in Afghanistan, would need to undertake a similar effort for Iraq.
All of us in the meeting were aware of the success we had just had in Afghanistan with CIA operatives working with special operations forces and Afghan fighters. George Tenet cautioned that Iraq would be a different matter.
I knew that Saddam Hussein’s regime was a hard target to penetrate, but I wanted a better understanding of just what the CIA could do inside Iraq, and so I asked Tenet to set up a briefing. On January 3, 2002, Tenet and two of his top officers, including the director of the Iraq Operations Group, came to my West Wing office to meet with me and Scooter Libby. The IOG director, whose name remains classified, began with a short history of agency involvement in Iraq, including a botched operation in the mid-1990s that Saddam had crushed. Then he moved on to a discussion of what lessons the agency had learned from its Iraq operations. At the top of his list, he emphasized that covert action could accomplish a good deal, but it could not, by itself, oust Saddam. Any U.S. covert action should be part of overall U.S. policy, and all elements of that policy needed to point to the same goal in a coordinated fashion. Second, it would be important to have a clear understanding of what we were willing to do militarily. Covert action would be much more effective with military support. Third, we needed a process for timely decision making. The success or failure of operations—and the lives of the people involved—might depend upon getting a fast answer from policymakers in Washington.
One of his most important points was the need to rebuild trust between the United States and the Iraqi people. They remembered that we had encouraged them to rise up during Desert Storm and then stood by while Saddam’s gunships slaughtered thousands and put down the uprising. They were terrified of Saddam and doubted our word. When CIA officers attempted to recruit sources inside Iraq, they were most often met with skepticism about our seriousness in wanting to oust Saddam. If we wanted to establish an effective covert action program inside Iraq, we would need to convince the Iraqis that this