In My Time - Dick Cheney [248]
Much of our conversation focused on the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. That experience made some key policymakers very reluctant to consider robust options for dealing with the Syrian plant. I found that regrettable. In this instance there was no question based on the information we were getting from the Israelis and now from our own intelligence services that what we were looking at in the Syrian desert was a clandestine nuclear reactor, built by two terrorist-sponsoring states.
I thought back to the history of World War II. U.S. intelligence had failed to predict the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. A few months later, when Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, received intelligence that the Japanese fleet was headed for Midway, he did not hesitate to act. He could have questioned the accuracy of the intelligence or ignored it, based on the error at Pearl Harbor, but he didn’t. He sent what was left of the American Pacific Fleet to intercept the Japanese, sank four of their frontline carriers, and turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. Had Admiral Nimitz refused to act on intelligence warnings in the aftermath of the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor, the outcome of the war in the Pacific may well have been different. I was afraid we were doing just that in this case. Although the evidence about the Syrian nuclear reactor was solid, the intelligence community’s failure on Iraq was still affecting our decision making.
At our weekly private lunch on June 14, 2007, the president and I talked about the danger of nuclear proliferation. I noted that it was still our biggest long-term security challenge. It was clearly the ultimate threat to the homeland. Since taking office we had made significant progress on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons technology to rogue states or terrorist organizations. We had removed Saddam Hussein and the threat he posed. Libya had handed over its program, encouraged in large part by watching what happened to Saddam. We had taken down the A. Q. Khan network, which had been a source of centrifuges, uranium feedstock, and weapons design for Libya, North Korea, and Iran. But North Korea’s robust program continued. Estimates were that they now possessed enough plutonium for six to twelve warheads, and they had conducted their first nuclear test on our watch. They had admitted having a program to enrich uranium, a second path to obtaining the material needed for a nuclear weapon, and we believed that they had provided a key ingredient in the enrichment process—uranium hexafluoride—to Libya. We now also knew they were proliferating nuclear technology to the Syrians.
The picture on Iran was no better. They had a robust program under way based on uranium enrichment centrifuge technology. Estimates were they could have three thousand centrifuges in operation by the end of 2007.
Syria and Iran, both working to develop nuclear capability, were two of the world’s leading state sponsors of terror. Syria was facilitating the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, where they killed U.S. soldiers. Iran was providing funding and weapons for exactly the same purpose, as well as providing weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were both involved in supporting Hezbollah in its efforts to threaten Israel and destabilize the Lebanese government. They constituted a major threat to America’s interests in the Middle East.
I told the president we needed a more effective and aggressive strategy to counter these threats, and I believed that an important first step would be to destroy the reactor in the Syrian desert. He was well aware of the dangers