Truth - Al Franken [92]
But by September 12, Bush was back in the saddle. At a White House meeting of top officials, counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was surprised at the lack of singular focus on the perpetrators of the previous day’s mass murder. Don Rumsfeld was concerned about the lack of good bombing targets in Afghanistan, and suggested bombing Iraq, which he said had better targets. Clarke thought Rumsfeld was joking. As Clarke wrote in his book Against All Enemies:
Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.
But Rumsfeld was deadly serious.
President Bush disagreed with Rumsfeld, but for a very different reason than Clarke. He thought we needed to do more than bomb Iraq. We needed to change the government.
Later that day, the President took Clarke and some of his aides aside. “Go back over everything, everything,” Bush told them. “See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.”
Clarke was incredulous:
“But, Mr. President, al Qaeda did this.”
“I know, I know. But—see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred—”
“Absolutely, we will look—again.” I was trying to be more respectful, more responsive. “But you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.”
“Look into Iraq, Saddam,” the president said testily and left us.
We can’t know whether Bush made the decision to invade Iraq that very moment, whether he had made the decision years before, or whether he was still months away from deciding to pull the trigger. If we believe President Bush, and why would we, he wouldn’t make up his mind until just before the invasion. As he told the nation on March 8, 2003, “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq.” But even though the administration didn’t feel the American people were entitled to know whether they were going to war, the Bush team did let the British government in on the secret.
On July 23, 2002, Prime Minister Tony Blair met with his top diplomatic, military, and intelligence advisers at 10 Downing Street, the secret headquarters of the British government. The minutes of the meeting, which were leaked to the British press in May 2005, offer a valuable window into the state of play at the time. One paragraph describes the report of “C,” head of British intelligence. James Bond fans will know “C” as “M.” Not to be confused with “Q,” the gadget guy, who in real life is known as “P.” To the best of our knowledge, “P” was not present.
Here’s how the minutes describe what C, whose real name is Sir Richard Dearlove,4 told the group:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
The fixing of the facts was proceeding apace. All over official Washington, intelligence was being cherry-picked, stovepiped, and twisted by the administration, or when necessary, manufactured out of whole cloth by the humming workshop of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. But as C reported, there was one aspect of the war preparation that was getting hind tit:
There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
The July 23 minutes were only the first of what would prove to be a Klondike of “Downing Street Memos,” secret documents that exposed the United Kingdom’s growing agitation about unsettling events unfolding in its former colony. C wasn’t the only Brit who expressed concern about the Bush administration’s blithe attitude toward postwar planning.
In a March 14 memo, Blair’s foreign policy adviser David Manning (“Z”) reported to the prime minister on recent