Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [224]
CHAPTER 30
Out of the Box
In the first Gulf War’s aftermath, Iraq remained a festering problem. Though its army had been defeated in Kuwait, the regime remained intact. In an attempt to keep Saddam Hussein in check, and to pressure him to comply with demands by the United Nations, the Security Council imposed economic sanctions banning trade with Iraq, including in oil. The United States, Britain, and France imposed UN-sanctioned no-fly zones over the Kurdish-populated areas in northern Iraq and the Shiite-populated region in southern Iraq. American, British, and—initially—French aircraft patrolled the zones regularly.*
Undeterred, Saddam continued to use brutality on a massive scale. After suppressing the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings in 1991, Saddam drained the marshlands of southern Iraq, turning the region into a salt-encrusted desert. His purpose was to punish the “marsh Arabs” for their support of the rebellion against him. He drove some 150,000 Iraqis from their homes. His intelligence services were merciless in torturing suspected opponents. Arbitrary arrests and unexplained disappearances were commonplace. He built rape rooms to bring “dishonor” to the female members of families suspected of opposition to him.* And before long the Iraqi military began a near daily routine of firing on coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones.
Saddam’s regime claimed it had destroyed its arsenals of proscribed weapons, but the United Nations weapons inspectors were skeptical. Iraqi officials spied on the inspectors, sanitized suspect sites before the teams arrived, and barred them from examining Saddam’s vast palace complexes. He reorganized his biological weapons program creatively by closing his military-run weapons facilities while creating dual-use plants capable of making products for both civilian and military use.2 Facilities that produced fertilizer and antibiotics, for example, could be retooled quickly to create chemical and biological weapons. By 1998, Saddam had stopped cooperating with the UN inspectors altogether, effectively forcing them out of the country and ending even a pretense of complying with the UN Security Council’s demands. In response, the UN adopted still more resolutions expressing outrage at Saddam’s “totally unacceptable” actions.3 But few nations, other than the United States and Great Britain, appeared willing to do much, if anything, to enforce the UN resolutions.
In January 1998, I joined a group of former national security officials in signing a letter to President Clinton that called for stronger action against Saddam’s regime.4 “The only acceptable strategy,” our letter read, “is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.” For the short term, we endorsed military strikes on suspected weapons facilities. For the long term, we called for removing Saddam and his regime.5
Later in 1998, large bipartisan majorities in each house of the U.S. Congress generally endorsed the policies recommended in our letter to Clinton. The Iraq Liberation Act declared that the goal of U.S. policy should be “to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power.” The U.S. House of Representatives approved that legislation by a vote of 360 to 38.† It passed the Senate without a single dissenting vote. Clinton signed the legislation into law. Regime change in Iraq was now the official policy of the United States.
Even as Clinton endorsed regime change, some administration officials contended that the existing UN economic sanctions had kept Saddam reasonably under control—“in a box,” as Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, put it.6 However, the sanctions administered through the UN’s Oil-for-Food program had loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. The UN was generating billions of dollars in illicit, unrestricted funds for Saddam Hussein, who used the cash to finance, among other things, his dual-use weapons facilities.7