Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [226]
We can publicly acknowledge that sanctions don’t work over extended periods and stop the pretense of having a policy that is keeping Saddam “in the box ...”
A second option would be to go to our moderate Arab friends, have a reappraisal and see whether they are willing to engage in a more robust policy. We would have to assert strong leadership and convince them that we will see the project through and not leave them later to face a provoked, but still incumbent, Saddam. The risks of a serious regime-change policy must be weighed against the certainty of the danger of an increasingly bold and nuclear-armed Saddam in the near future.
A third possibility perhaps is to take a crack at initiating contact with Saddam Hussein. He has his own interests. It may be that, for whatever reason, at his stage in life he might prefer to not have the hostility of the United States and the West and might be willing to make some accommodation. Opening a dialogue with Saddam would be an astonishing departure for the USG, [U.S. government] although I did it for President Reagan [in] the mid-1980s. It would win praise from certain quarters, but might cause friends, especially those in the region, to question our strength, steadiness and judgment. And the likelihood of Saddam making and respecting an acceptable accommodation of our interests over a long period may be small.12
I thought a diplomatic overture on Iraq from the Bush administration—a “Nixon goes to China” approach—was worth suggesting to the President. As I wrote in my memo to the NSC principals, echoing my thoughts of some twenty years earlier when I visited Baghdad, “There ought to be a way for the U.S. to not be at loggerheads with both of the two most powerful nations in the Gulf—Iran and Iraq.” Though the Iran-Iraq War had ended more than a decade earlier, the regimes in Tehran and Baghdad still viewed each other with hostility. Despite that animosity, both still had poor relations with the United States. I wondered if the right combination of blandishments and pressures might lead or compel Saddam Hussein toward an improved arrangement with America.* While a long shot, it was not out of the question.
The National Security Council never organized the comprehensive review of U.S.-Iraq policy I requested in the summer of 2001. We can’t know how the Bush administration’s Iraq policy might have evolved if 9/11 had not occurred, but that event compelled our government to make terrorism a focus of intense attention. It demanded that American officials reexamine national security policy comprehensively in light of the vulnerabilities the attack exposed. It forced the still new administration to recognize the special danger posed by nations that both supported terrorist groups and possessed or pursued weapons of mass destruction.
Though intelligence did not report that Saddam was tightly connected to al-Qaida or that he was involved in the 9/11 attack, Iraq was included in almost any analysis of state supporters of terrorism. Iraq had been on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror since 1990. The regime’s links to individual terrorists and terrorist groups earned Iraq its place on the “axis of evil” list.14
When I was queried by reporters on links between Iraq and terrorists, I referred to an unclassified written statement I had requested of George Tenet and that was subsequently prepared by the CIA. The paper was taken directly from Tenet’s unclassified conclusions provided to Congress, which stated:
We have solid reporting of senior