The Assassins' Gate Read online

  Thus Paul Wolfowitz in the year 2000—sounding like a prudent expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—the same man who within a few years would acquire the epithet “Wolfowitz of Arabia” after unlearning in Iraq everything quoted above. There are no pure ideas and straight lines in the history of great events. When policy makers change their views, “Usually it’s because circumstances change,” Kagan told me, “or they got insulted by somebody in power.” In Wolfowitz’s case, he might have been angling for a job in the administration of the leading Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, whom he served as a foreign-policy adviser during the campaign and who made it clear that crusades to transform the world after America’s image were not going to be his thing. Bush’s guide to the world could be found in a Foreign Affairs article—not Kagan’s and Kristol’s from 1996 but an essay in the January 2000 issue by the provost of Stanford University, Condoleezza Rice, which called for a return to the great-power realism of Nixon, Kissinger, and Bush’s father.

  But after the disputed election, when the younger Bush’s national-security team began to take shape, one found sprinkled throughout the government the names of neoconservatives who knew one another from years in and out of power, and whose ideas for the post–Cold War world had come into focus during the nineties: Wolfowitz, Eeith, Wurmser, Shulsky, Stephen Cambone, and others at the Pentagon; Wolfowitz’s former aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, John Hannah, and William J. Luti in Vice President Cheney’s office; Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Zalmay Khalilzad on the National Security Council; John Bolton at State; Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and R. James Woolsey on the advisory Defense Policy Board. Their patrons were Cheney and the new secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was a hard-edged old Cold Warrior, an aggressive nationalist. Cheney, Rumsfeld’s protégé, colleague, and pal through several administrations, came from the same stock.

  Many of these officials had served at the middle levels under Reagan, embracing his hawkish idealism. The fall of communism and the emergence of the United States as the world’s only superpower had given them a sense of historical victory. Then they had spent the nineties watching the first Bush administration return to narrow realism and the Clinton administration founder from crisis to crisis, squandering Reagan’s triumph. They had made their long march through the think tanks and policy journals, honing their ideas and perfecting their attacks. Now they were coming back to power as insurgents, scornful of the entrenched bureaucracy, the more cautious moderates in their own party (including the new secretary of state, Colin Powell), and the tired, defeated Democrats. They were supremely confident; all they needed was a mission.

  I asked Robert Kagan how his ideas had traveled from the pages of Commentary to the foreign-policy apparatus of the Bush administration. He waved me off. It didn’t work that way, he said. “September 11 is the turning point. Not anything else. This is not what Bush was on September 10.”

  The ideas of the neoconservatives had nothing to do with it?

  Kagan sighed. “Here’s what I’m willing to say. Did we keep alive a certain way of looking at American foreign policy at a time when it was pretty unpopular? Yes. I think probably you need to have people do that so that you have something to come back to. And, in a way, then you have a ready-made approach to the world.”

  2

  FEVERED MINDS

  IN THE SPRING of 2002, I met Kanan Makiya for one of our irregular coffees in a Harvard Square basement café. By then I’d moved from Cambridge to New York, where on the morning of September 11, 2001, I rushed down Fifth Avenue against the current of ash-covered men and women who were streaming uptown from the place where the World Trade Center towers had been, and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in an exodus of red-faced workers as smoke and dust poured into the sky.

  Six months and one war in Afghanistan later, Makiya was talking about another war, this one in Iraq. It would be the war he had called for, to no avail, back in 1991—a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

  As early as January 2001, at the new administration’s first national security meeting, officials floated plans to the freshly sworn-in president for the removal of Saddam, in accord with the largely symbolic Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (though this would emerge only three years later, in an insider’s account by Bush’s first, short-lived treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill). In April, at the administration’s first meeting on terrorism, Richard Clarke, the leading counterterrorism official of three administrations, found that Bush’s new appointees, especially Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, were far more interested in the threat from states like Iraq than from the stateless and shadowy band of global jihadis called al-Qaeda. “I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden,” Clarke later quoted Wolfowitz as saying. “You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor.” Wolfowitz meant Iraq. Having fought and—as they saw it—won the Cold War with their hard-line policies, officials like him who had come back to power still viewed the world of dangers in terms of heavily militarized enemy states. The 1990s hadn’t changed their thinking. To them, those were lost years: Under Clinton there had been far too much focus on globalization and international institutions and “soft,” borderless threats like poverty and ethnic conflict.

  Then came September 11. Within minutes of fleeing his office at the devastated Pentagon, Wolfowitz told aides that he suspected Iraqi involvement in the attacks. A little past two in the afternoon, while the air in lower Manhattan and along the Potomac was still full of acrid smoke, assistants to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took notes as their boss held forth in the National Military Command Center: “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” That same afternoon, one of Bush’s speechwriters, David Frum, having been evacuated from the White House and taken shelter in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute, got on the phone with Richard Perle, Washington’s most assiduous proponent of regime change in Iraq. “Whatever else the President says,” Perle urged from his vacation home in the south of France, “he must make clear that he’s holding responsible not just terrorists but whoever harbors those terrorists.” That night, in a televised address from the White House, Bush followed Perle’s advice to the word and then expanded on it: The rest of the world was either with America or with the terrorists. The day after the attacks, according to Richard Clarke, Bush ordered his counterterrorism team to find out whether there could be any connection to Iraq. “See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.”

  “But, Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this,” Clarke replied.

  “I know, I know, but … see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.”

  Three days later, in a crisis meeting at Camp David, Wolfowitz kept returning to Iraq as the most important target for the initial American response, until the president finally shut him up. Afghanistan would be first, but the idea of Iraq was in play, and Bush was not unreceptive—after all, Wolfowitz had been given plenty of air time, much to the frustration of Secretary of State Colin Powell. On September 17, six days after the attacks, Bush told his war council, “I believe Iraq was involved.”

  “Until I’m persuaded otherwise, this is what I think,” Robert Kagan said. “Paul may have brought it up, but Bush from the beginning was thinking about Iraq. I think that Bush had Iraq on the brain. Paul, who is a deputy secretary of defense who does not get along with his secretary of defense and whose alone time with the president is probably minimal, fighting giants like Powell, who was much stronger than he was? I think it had to be the president. This is what the president wanted to do.”

  Richard Perle, Wolfowitz’s friend for more than three decades, agreed. Until September 11, he said, proponents of regime change in Iraq were losing the argument within the administration. “Nine-eleven had a profound
effect on the president’s thinking. It wasn’t the arguments or the positions held by me, or Paul, or anyone else before that. The world began on nine-eleven. There’s no intellectual history.” But there was already in place across the top levels of the national-security bureaucracy a group of people with a definite intellectual history, who could give the president’s new impulses a strategy, a doctrine, a world-view. Perle, like Kagan, cautioned against making too much of papers published in obscure foreign-policy journals. What mattered was who held positions of power. “The people are important, and the ideas are important in connection with the people,” Perle told me one winter afternoon in the living room of his large house just outside Washington. “But the ideas themselves—let’s put it this way: If Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker, which might well have happened, then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into it the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought to it. The ideas are only important as they reside in the minds of people who were involved directly in the decision process.”

  Bush’s two key appointments were Cheney and Rumsfeld. Neither man brought particularly original thinking to the discussion of America’s role in the world after September 11; their influence lay in position and force of character. Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford’s defense secretary, had been a businessman for almost a quarter century; his most passionate interest on returning to government was missile defense and, more broadly, the transformation of the military into a high-tech fighting force. He was an unmatched bureaucratic infighter, but if he had any well-considered foreign-policy views, he kept them to himself. During the Afghanistan War that followed September 11, he became the administration’s most visible face, handling the press with great panache, and when the Taliban fell more quickly and easily than the experts predicted, Rumsfeld became the strategic genius no one dared to doubt. But the aftermath of that war provided a clue to the administration’s thinking about postwar Iraq: The American commitment to securing and rebuilding Afghanistan was so thin that the government of Hamid Karzai controlled little of the country outside Kabul. Senator Joseph Biden, the Democrat from Delaware who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, told me in December 2003, “My bet from day one—I hope I am wrong—has been that the dominant element of this administration was going to be the neorealists, Cheney and Rumsfeld, who no more are committed to nation building than this table is committed to go home with me in my back pocket. And so I look at Afghanistan as a template. That’s the canvas on which you paint Iraq’s future.” No one at the top level of the administration was less interested in the future of Iraq than Donald Rumsfeld. Yet he would demand and receive control over the postwar, and he would entrust it to his more ideologically fervent aides, in whom he placed the same incurious confidence that the president placed in Rumsfeld.

  The administration’s great mystery was Cheney. With the possible exception of Rumsfeld, no one had a darker, more Hobbesian vision of international affairs. But he had a talent for keeping his thoughts to himself, and as George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense he seemed, publicly at least, to hold the same moderate Republican views as his boss. Unlike Wolfowitz, he never doubted the wisdom of how the Gulf War ended. Kenneth Adelman, Cheney’s old colleague and friend, who had introduced him and Rumsfeld to Wolfowitz in 1981, said, “Cheney didn’t reconsider leaving Saddam in place in ’91. It bothered Paul, not Dick.” Adelman added that Cheney wasn’t particularly engaged in foreign-policy debates in the nineties. Cheney sharply criticized the interventions of the Clinton years, but otherwise he was occupied running the oil-services giant Halliburton in Dallas, where, for obviously mercenary reasons, he advocated lifting sanctions on Iran. His name didn’t even appear on the PNAC letter.

  When Cheney came back to power as vice president, Iraq was nowhere near the top of his agenda in the first months of 2001, and spreading democracy around the world didn’t make the list. But September 11 confirmed Cheney in his essential instinct about the nature of the world. His speeches after the terror attacks conveyed almost a sense of relief that here finally was a global enemy on the scale of communism. The Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, written by former Cheney aides who were all back in the new Bush administration, had laid the framework for a post–September 11 foreign policy a decade earlier. Cheney now emerged from his self-created obscurity as its godfather and the hardest of hard-liners on Iraq. Though he never let the nation in on his change of mind, he had reversed his own position on the end of the Gulf War. Richard Perle said of Cheney, “Nine-eleven was a turning point with respect to tolerating the risk of leaving Saddam unmolested. And how far behind that this caboose of democratization was placed on the train, I’m not sure.” Once Cheney had Saddam and Iraq in his sights, he never blinked.

  Like Rumsfeld, Cheney surrounded himself with ideologues for aides. Unlike Rumsfeld, after September 11 he took a serious interest in what they thought. He invited intellectuals to the White House to talk about the future of the Arab-Muslim world. He showed a relish for grand strategy (without ever abandoning his disdain for the messy details of postwar reconstructions in which Clinton had gotten bogged down). Still, his role in shaping policy remained elusive to almost everyone who encountered him. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said a senior official who had occasional dealings with Cheney and his staff. “He comes to meetings, sits there, never says a word, or asks one or two really good questions—you never knew where they were standing, you never knew what their viewpoint was, except occasionally when you would rub them wrong on something like Taiwan. But most often they disguised it marvelously well. And then twenty-four hours later, forty-eight hours later, ninety-six hours later, you thought a decision had been made—and all of a sudden policy was being implemented 180 degrees opposite that decision.”

  Until Biden’s invitations to the White House stopped coming in the buildup to war with Iraq, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would meet with the president in the Oval Office, and Bush would listen and nod, seeming convinced by Biden’s arguments for more troops in Afghanistan or more money to secure Russian nuclear material, while Cheney sat mute and motionless, “like a big bullfrog on a log.” Suddenly, the vice president would open his mouth and croak, “No, Mr. President, that’s not right.” Soon the meeting would end, and Biden would realize that his arguments had gone nowhere. “I underestimated Cheney’s power,” Biden admitted. His power came not just from the dependence of a new president on his far more experienced number two, but on Cheney’s character. He had what Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, called “great presence at table. Cheney is shrewd, a quick thinker, a good arguer, the best I’ve ever seen. So much better than the Democrats.” Compared with Democrats, Gelb said, Cheney and the other top Bush officials “are far more ruthless. They scare the shit out of Democrats and the foreign-policy establishment, the same way the Committee on the Present Danger did in the late 1970s—by talking about threats.” Cheney’s ruthlessness made him a formidable partisan. He didn’t just want to win; he wanted to destroy the opposition as well.

  If Cheney and Rumsfeld were the bureaucratic heavyweights, the leading intellect of the post–September 11 policy was Wolfowitz. In the weeks after the terror attacks, there was a surprising convergence between the former oilman president, whose favorite philosopher was Jesus and who could mock his own submediocre academic record because it didn’t matter when your last name was Bush, and his brilliant deputy secretary of defense, a secular Jew with a Cornell BA in mathematics and a Chicago PhD in political science, whose influences were Albert Wohlstetter, Leo Strauss, and Allan Bloom. Bush and Wolfowitz—both of them now free of the stifling authority of Bush’s father—saw the world in the same way. They believed in the existence of evil, and they had messianic notions of what America should do about it. Bush once said of Saddam, “He tried to kill my dad,” but on Iraq it was Bus
h himself who seized the chance to cast off the Oedipal burden and prove that he was his own man, better able than his father to deal with an old enemy.

  In January 2002, at his first State of the Union address, Bush set down a rhetorical marker for the coming year: Iraq, he declared, belonged to an “axis of evil.” In February, he ordered General Tommy Franks of the Central Command to begin shifting forces from Afghanistan to the Gulf. In March, he interrupted a meeting between his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and three senators: “Fuck Saddam,” the president said. “We’re taking him out.” By the early spring of 2002, a full year before the invasion, the administration was inexorably set on a course of war.

  Throughout the spring, Richard Haass, the director of policy planning in the State Department, began to hear more and more “bureaucratic chatter” about a war, but he didn’t take it too seriously until, in June, he went to see Condoleezza Rice at the White House for their regular meeting on key foreign-policy issues. When they came to Iraq, Haass began to give the State Department’s reasons for misgivings about a war. “Save your breath,” Rice interrupted. “The president has already made up his mind.” This was news to Haass. Everyone at the top level of the administration could recite the arguments on either side by heart; the question was how to weigh them. Now the policy had been set without the weighing ever taking place. “It was an accretion, a tipping point,” Haass said. “A decision was not made—a decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.”