Iraq War II, Part 1: Taking Advantage

Looking back at Iraq War II, 20 years later.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the "wholly unjustified and brutal invasion" of Iraq, as George W. Bush himself now characterizes it, we are serializing that chapter from my 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism over the next few weeks exclusively here at Substack.

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen.

Taking Advantage

From the moment President George W. Bush delivered his statement from the Oval Office on the night of the September 11th attacks, the die was cast. There was no mention of al Qaeda, even though the government already knew who had been responsible for the attack.

In his speech to Congress nine days later, Bush declared war on “terrorism,” a mandate so broad it could include the targeting of almost any violent political group in the world. Now, we were told, everything had changed. It was the dawn of a new era of war to “end evil” on Earth. It is clear why the administration framed the conflict the way they did: The president and his men had already decided, the very day of the attack, that they would be launching a project far greater than a mere hunt for the leaders of the group that was responsible. The Terror War, like the Cold War with the Soviet Union, would serve as a larger framework for numerous smaller wars. “There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries,” Bush claimed. “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

Before the sun had gone down on September 11th and anyone could even be sure the attacks were completely over, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was already telling his staff to plan for war against Iraq. Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone took notes:

Hard to get good case. Need to move swiftly. Near term target needs — go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not. … Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at same time — not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]. Tasks. [Pentagon General Counsel] Jim Haynes to talk with PW [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz], for additional support [for] connection with UBL.

Over at the White House, Richard Clarke, the head of counter-terrorism, was doing everything he could to keep the focus on Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, forcefully debunking Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s immediate conflation of bin Laden’s group with the government of Iraq. Wolfowitz had long associated himself with the mainstream conspiracy crank Laurie Mylroie. She blamed Iraq for secretly orchestrating the entire al Qaeda war against the United States. Mylroie claimed that Saddam Hussein was behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the deadly shooting outside CIA headquarters later that year, which in reality was a lone-wolf attack tied to neither Iraq nor bin Laden. She even blamed Iraq for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and all the al Qaeda strikes overseas in the years since. The CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies had dismissed her ravings, which all hung on the provably false claim that al Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef was actually an Iraqi secret police agent who had stolen Yousef’s identity. But for Wolfowitz, former Clinton-era CIA director James Woolsey, influential neoconservative Richard Perle and a few of their fellow travelers, it was the ultimate case of confirmation bias, if not simply lying in the pursuit of other agendas.

By November 2001, Rumsfeld and CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks were working on plans for invading Iraq, including floating proposed excuses for it, such as showing an Iraqi link to September 11th or the anthrax attacks, or an alleged violation of international restrictions against their possession of weapons of mass destruction. Gen. Franks briefed President Bush about the plan on December 28.

In the words of the CIA’s Michael Scheuer, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was America’s “hoped for, but unexpected gift” to Osama bin Laden and his movement. The American people had given the president the writ to get the men responsible for the attack on the U.S., “dead or alive.” Bush had other plans. Like the bootleggers and Baptists of last century, the American politicians and the terrorists did not need to secretly be in league to remain strategic allies. Both sides have continued to benefit from each other at the expense of the people of America and the Middle East.

General Wesley Clark, who had been the supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe under President Clinton’s administration, later told a story about going to the Pentagon a few weeks after September 11th. He was shown a memo by an officer from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff explaining, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Not one of those governments had an alliance with al Qaeda, nor the slightest thing to do with the September 11th attack. But the administration decided that rather than being diverted from their long-term goal of regime change in Iraq and the other countries on the list due to the danger of anti-American terrorism, they would just use terrorism as their excuse to go ahead and go through with it anyway. They thought it was going to be easy. In this case, the entire thing completely blew up in the hawks’ faces, costing the United States much of the influence that it had in the region, rather than strengthening their position. The Iraq invasion of 2003 also fatefully touched off a regional sectarian war that for various reasons will probably last, in one form or another, for the rest of our lifetimes.

In January 2002, Bush announced in his State of the Union speech that an “Axis of Evil” threatened the U.S. and peace in the world and that this gathering danger would have to be dealt with sooner rather than later. Marvel at the blatant lie that bin Laden’s al Qaeda, Hussein’s Iraq, Khamenei’s Iran and Kim’s North Korea were an “axis,” comparable to Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Hirohito’s Japan in World War II — an alliance at war against the United States of America, no less. It was just nonsense. In fact, Iraq and Iran were enemies of each other and al Qaeda. North Korea’s only connection to any of the above was having sold some medium-range missiles to Iran years before. Just five months after al Qaeda’s attack on the U.S., President Bush was announcing an entirely new aggressive foreign policy that had nothing to do with fighting those who had attacked the United States or the terrorism that threatened American civilians’ lives whatsoever. It was just a giant bait-and-switch. The administration claimed to be so concerned that these countries could pass “the world’s most dangerous weapons” to terrorist groups like al Qaeda, but all three countries were members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and, despite administration claims, were verified not to have nuclear weapons programs at the time, much less a working relationship with Osama bin Laden. Any supposed threat from any of the three could have easily been contained without violent conflict.

It is remarkable that the government was able to announce a year and a half before starting a war that they were going to attack this country, Iraq, and that they were going to come up with whatever propaganda was necessary to get the people to allow them to do it. It did not matter that Iraq was a small, poor country that the U.S. had already been bombing for 12 years straight, which had a gross domestic product the size of northern Arkansas, possessed no navy, no air force and no ability to project power beyond its borders whatsoever. Nor did it matter that secular Saddam Hussein, with his clean-shaven chin, Western suit and French beret, was no ally of the fundamentalist radical bin Laden. The Bush government and the media’s narrative was that the lesson of September 11th is that we must start all the wars from now on ourselves. That way, no one can ever attack us because we already attacked them first. This was just an excuse for aggression. Certainly this was the case with Iraq, which had no means, motive or plans to attack the United States for Bush to “preempt” at all.

The White House Iraq Group (WHIG), led by Bush political adviser Karl Rove, decided that “preemption” of an impending Iraqi attack would be their sales pitch to average Americans. They just had to repeat it enough times, and the people would start to repeat it back as if it was their own idea. “You think we should just wait around for Iraq to attack us?!” they would ask, the false conclusion assumed.

There is no question that the administration knew they were lying about Iraq’s alleged “threat” to America. In early 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had both stated that Saddam Hussein could easily be contained. Saddam “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors,” stated Powell in February. In April, Rice admitted, “Saddam does not control the northern part of the country. We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.”

Bush’s real motive for launching the war was to guarantee his own reelection and to prove that he was smarter and tougher than his father, or at least good enough for him. As then-Texas Governor Bush told his biographer Mickey Herskowitz in 1999,

One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of [Kuwait] and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.

His former press secretary Scott McClellan later wrote that “As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness, in part because the epochal upheavals of war provide the opportunity for transformative change of the kind Bush hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness.” Bush’s first secretary of the treasury, Paul O’Neill, the former CEO of Alcoa, the powerful aluminum firm, later confirmed that from the very first two cabinet meetings, the administration’s entire agenda surrounded the question of how to start a war against Iraq. He said the president’s attitude was, “Go find me a way to do this.”

As for Vice President Cheney, he had done a horrible job as CEO of the oil services firm Halliburton in the 1990s. He lost billions of dollars after buying the firm Dresser Industries right as they were being held liable for years of asbestos-caused cancer claims. Going to war was a convenient way to pay them back by putting the company and their subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), on the dole building bases for the army, working the Iraqi oil fields and providing fuel, food and other services to soldiers. In the ten years after the invasion, KBR received more than $39 billion in Pentagon contracts. Cheney also had a conservative ideological bent toward “privatizing” — really, contracting — as much of the grunt work as possible to free up fighting forces. All indications are that Cheney agreed with the neoconservatives’ claims about how easy the war would be and that it would enhance American dominance of the region and its oil and gas resources. His previously stated concerns from the Desert Storm era about pieces of Iraq “flying off” under the dominance of regional players were the Baghdad regime to fall had evidently been successfully allayed. The war would also be a great way to demonstrate the principles of the old Defense Planning Guidance that was now the official National Security Strategy of the United States. America was the world hegemon and any nation which tested that premise would find out the hard way. Iraq’s weakness, not its strength, was what made it a prime target. Iraq was “doable,” as Paul Wolfowitz put it.

Many war opponents misunderstood the role of oil in Cheney and the hawks’ thinking. Sure, profits for connected oil companies were meant to be a nice side benefit and payoff to political supporters, but this was not central to the plan, nor was cheap gasoline to benefit American consumers. The primary role of oil in the plan for war was a hare-brained neoconservative scheme, dreamt up by Ariel Cohen and Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr. at the Heritage Foundation. They wanted to privatize Iraqi oil to as many firms and as rapidly as possible in order to depress the global price and break Saudi Arabia’s OPEC cartel. James Baker III, Bush Sr.’s former secretary of state whose law firm Baker-Botts represented Exxon and just about every other oil company in America and Saudi Arabia, quickly put an end to this plan as soon as the war began. Iraq would have a national oil company, and it would work with Saudi Arabia and OPEC after all, thank you very much. The other significant role oil played in the motive for the war was in terms of military hegemony. As Cheney had testified to Congress back in 1991, whichever power controlled the Middle East’s “choke points” for petroleum has the ability to shut off energy supplies to enemies in times of war. The U.S. is not dependent on Persian Gulf oil, but our allies and adversaries in South and East Asia are. Power, not money, was the end the vice president and the Pentagon had in mind.

Donald Rumsfeld, who had previously been defense secretary under President Gerald Ford, was determined to transform the military’s war doctrines to emphasize airpower, special operations forces and light and fast strikes against enemy regimes. Iraq was to serve as the primary test-case for his strategy.

Though TV portrayed attacking Iraq as the only logical consensus of the American foreign policy community, this was not true. The president, vice president and secretary of defense were leading the charge, surrounded by a chorus of neoconservative hawks in the administration and in the media. While the Republican Party establishment and a great many liberal-Democratic hawks jumped on board for the cause, many leftist, progressive, libertarian, realist and paleo-conservative thinkers, writers and activists opposed the war from the beginning. So did millions of Americans who joined antiwar protests from coast to coast in February and March 2003. On September 26, 2002, 33 international relations scholars of the realist school signed an open letter in the New York Times, asking for the Bush government to rethink its decision to go to war. Later, Bush Sr.’s former national security adviser and close friend, retired General Brent Scowcroft, even wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal entitled “Don’t Attack Saddam.” Back during the Bush Sr. years, one of Scowcroft’s jobs as national security adviser had been to “keep the crazies in the basement,” that is, the neoconservatives away from Middle East policy. Now, as a favor to the father, Scowcroft was trying to warn the son not to listen to them. H.W. Bush’s second secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, also chimed in with “Msg. to Bush: Don’t Attack Iraq” for ABC News.

But it was too late. George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld had stacked the government with the men his father had labeled “the crazies.” Former leftists and Cold War Democrats, the neoconservatives were highly ideological about the beneficence of American military power and, in many cases, close to the nationalist Likud Party in Israel. They were determined to spread the War on Terrorism into Iraq as quickly as possible. It had been a major priority of the neoconservative “cabal” — their term — in Washington for years.

The New York Times’s Thomas L. Friedman, an Iraq war supporter but not a part of the neoconservative group, talked to the Israeli daily Haaretz just after the war began. They wrote, somewhat paraphrasing:

Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It’s the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It’s the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.

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Stay tuned to this space for the rest of Enough Already, Chapter 3 Iraq War II. They will be published every few days until the anniversary of the invasion in mid-March.

Looking to read ahead? Get a copy of my 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism on Amazon.

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