Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [225]
Various commentators asserted that Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, was intent on “fixing” his father’s error of leaving Saddam in power.9 From what I saw, that was not the case. Before his inauguration, when I met with the President-elect in Austin, Texas to discuss defense policy, the subject of Iraq did not even come up. The first person I remember mentioning the issue to me in 2001 was Clinton’s outgoing Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen. He and the senior military officers in the Clinton administration were fully aware of the dangers our aircraft crews faced in the skies over Iraq. Despite the risks, Cohen believed that discontinuing our patrols of the no-fly zones was not an option. It would be a victory for Saddam and further erode an already fraying coalition of nations committed to containment of his brutal regime.
Iraq’s repeated efforts to shoot down our aircraft weighed heavily on my mind. Iraq was the only nation in the world that was attacking the U.S. military on a daily basis—in fact, more than two thousand times from January 2000 to September 2002.10 I was concerned, as were the CENTCOM commander and the Joint Chiefs, that one of our aircraft would soon be shot down and its crew killed or captured.* In my first months back at the Pentagon, I asked General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to brief me on CENTCOM’s plans in the event Iraq successfully brought down one of our planes. The plan, code-named Desert Badger, was seriously limited. Its goal was to rescue the crew of a downed aircraft—but it had no component to inflict any damage or to send any kind of message to Saddam Hussein that such provocations were unacceptable. Our friends in the region had criticized previous American responses to Iraqi aggression as weak and indecisive and had advised us that our enemies had taken comfort from America’s timidity. The Desert Badger plan was clear evidence of that problem. I asked Shelton and General Franks to have their planners come up with a range of other options the President could consider. If an aircraft was downed, I wanted to be sure we had ideas for the President that would enable him to inflict a memorable cost. The new proposals I ordered included attacks on Iraq’s air defense systems and their command-and-control facilities to enable us to cripple the regime’s abilities to attack our planes.
Several weeks into the administration we had reason to signal to Baghdad that the days of mild and ineffective U.S. responses to their repeated provocations were coming to a close. Iraq was working to strengthen its air defense and radar capabilities in the no-fly zones by installing fixing-optic cables to make it more difficult for us to monitor their communications. The network was a direct challenge to the UN no-fly zones. On February 16, 2001, after Iraqi ground units had again targeted our aircraft, twenty-four American and British aircraft launched a coordinated attack on five Iraqi air defense sites, destroying them.*
Though Iraq was discussed occasionally at the senior levels of the administration, by the summer of 2001, U.S. policy remained essentially what it had been at the end of the Clinton administration—adrift. I decided to bring my questions about our inherited Iraq strategy to the members of the National Security Council to seek some clarity and presidential guidance.
In July, I sent a memo to Cheney, Powell, and Rice asking that we hold a principals committee meeting to discuss Iraq. In the document I raised two scenarios that could have the effect of forcing the President to make a decision on Iraq under unfavorable circumstances. The first involved its neighbor Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, which would dramatically change the balance in the region and possibly spark a regionwide arms buildup. Second was the possibility