Truth - Al Franken [91]
But what about the issue he raised before—that if Saddam were kicked out, someone would have to replace him? Luckily, Wolfowitz and the neo-cons had found the perfect guy, a guy who could run the country and eliminate the need for a costly, prolonged, and maybe even bloody U.S. occupation. Ahmed Chalabi, the smooth-talking, power-hungry, CIA-backed, multi-multi-millionaire mathematician, who had left Iraq when he was just twelve years old, was, according to Chalabi, wildly popular in his native country. America could merely hand him the reins and never again worry about its interests in the Gulf. Ahmed Chalabi was the missing piece in the Iraq puzzle.
In 1997, Wolfowitz and a coterie of neo-cons formed the Project for a New American Century, funded by money from Richard Mellon Scaife and his nutty, ultra-right-wing friends, the Olins and the Bradleys. Perhaps you’ll recognize some of PNAC’s current and former members: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and its intellectual furnace, Dan Quayle. All would become key players in the George W. Bush administration, with the mysterious exception of Quayle.
In 1998, after Saddam kicked the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, PNAC sent a letter to then-President William Clinton, urging that “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power . . . needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.” Clinton complied, but not in the way they wanted. He declared “regime change” to be the new policy of his administration, but he didn’t invade. Instead, he launched a series of targeted bombing strikes, which, as Bush’s handpicked weapons inspectors would later confirm in the Duelfer Report, knocked out all that remained of Saddam’s atrophied WMD capacity. The threat to America was obliterated once and for all, even though Saddam was still in place. The neo-cons were enraged. It was so Clinton.
But two years later, with a new president occupying the Oval Office, a president who had traveled overseas only three times in his life, the neo-cons could do more than just write letters. They could plan and execute the invasion of Iraq themselves.
They got to work right away. In Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill, which chronicled the former treasury secretary’s encounter with the impenetrable ideological clique at the center of the Bush administration, O’Neill was startled to discover that “Mideast Policy,” the designated topic of the first National Security Council meeting, referred not to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but to a possible preemptive attack on Iraq. The January 30, 2001, meeting ended with the President asking Rumsfeld to “examine our military options” and see “how it might look” to put U.S. ground forces into north and south Iraq.
Within a month, the NSC principals—including Rice, Rumsfeld, and Cheney—were examining maps of Iraqi oil fields and lists of foreign oil companies that might be interested in divvying them up. Of course, before the divvying could take place, a certain Saddam Hussein would have to be removed from the picture. As Suskind wrote, channeling O’Neill:
Already by February, the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why, but the how and how quickly.
In retrospect, you have to admire these guys for thinking, before 9/11, that they’d be able to drag their countrymen into a preemptive war against Iraq. I can’t for the life of me imagine how they thought that would have worked.
But when the buildings fell on September 11, the neo-cons saw their opportunity. Even though intelligence linking Osama bin Laden to the attacks started flowing immediately, Rumsfeld told his aides that very day to start looking at ways to attack Saddam.
In the chaotic hours following the strike, our resolute president resolutely allowed himself to be ferried around in Air Force One,