In My Time - Dick Cheney [205]
IN MID-AUGUST FORMER National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal urging us not to attack Iraq. “It is beyond dispute that Saddam is a menace,” he wrote, noting that Saddam brutalized his own people and had launched wars on two of his neighbors. Scowcroft also thought it a settled matter that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but he thought it “unlikely” that Saddam would provide WMD to terrorists, overlooking the fact that Iraq had already provided safe haven, training, and material support to terrorists. Brent went on to argue that we could rely on the UN Security Council and international inspections to contain the threat posed by Saddam, overlooking the fact that Saddam had repeatedly ignored the United Nations since Brent and I served together eleven years earlier in the first Bush administration.
As I read Brent’s piece, I found myself thinking that it reflected a pre-9/11 mind-set, the worldview of a time before we had seen the devastation that terrorists armed with hijacked airplanes could cause. We had to do everything possible to be sure that they never got their hands on weapons that could kill millions.
Brent was very close to the president’s father, and he and I had been good friends since the Ford administration. He’d had a hand in recommending me to be secretary of defense in the previous Bush administration. He obviously had major disagreements with the policies of the second Bush administration, and he didn’t hesitate to express those differences publicly.
Brent was quoted later saying he believed I had changed since we’d worked together in the first Bush administration. In reality, what had happened was that after an attack on the homeland that had killed three thousand people, the world had changed. We were at war against terrorist enemies who could not be negotiated with, deterred, or contained, and who would never surrender. This was not the world of superpower tensions and arms control agreements in which Brent had served.
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DURING AUGUST I BECAME concerned that too much emphasis was being placed on getting UN inspectors back into Iraq. One proposal talked about in the White House was for an “aggressive” inspection regime—a set of inspections so intrusive they might result in toppling Saddam. National Security Advisor Rice advanced this idea, and the president and Tony Blair discussed it. I didn’t buy it. It seemed fanciful to me. Saddam Hussein, who had faced so much worse, was not going to be ousted by teams of UN inspectors, no matter how insistent they might be.
Inspections, I thought, could too easily be a source of false comfort, allowing us to think that we were doing something significant about the threat Saddam posed, when, in fact, we were not. I decided to press the issue in a speech I gave to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002. Saddam had “made a science out of deceiving the international community,” I said to the audience assembled in Nashville, Tennessee. I recalled how surprised analysts were after the Gulf War to find that he was perhaps within a year of acquiring a nuclear weapon. I also cited what had happened in the spring of 1995:
The inspectors were actually on the verge of declaring that Saddam’s programs to develop chemical weapons and longer-range ballistic missiles had been fully accounted for and shut down. Then Saddam’s son-in-law suddenly defected and began sharing information. Within days the inspectors were led to an Iraqi chicken farm. Hidden there were