Plan of Attack, Part 5
I know, at the end of Part 3 I thought there'd be only one more part. I was wrong. I suck. I'm sorry. I'll keep the data flowing as quickly as I can, though. I'm feeling motivated again.
Bush and Rice asked the CIA to put together a written document detailing George Tenet's "slam dunk" case for WMD, since they had been unimpressed by John McLaughlin's presentation. The document was sent to the White House on 22 January 2003. Bush handed it over to two senior officials who were also experienced lawyers: Steve Hadley, the Deputy National Security Adviser, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff. Libby, in particular, had already been convinced both by Tenet's "slam dunk" language and by the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from October. However, as I wrote in
Part 3 of this series, lack of confidence in the intelligence that went into this NIE was deliberately kept out of the NIE's Key Judgments, since the CIA had wanted to avoid ambiguity. It is therefore questionable whether Libby was aware of the CIA's concerns.
On January 25, Libby presented his lawyer's case against Saddam to a group including Rice, Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz,
Dick Armitage, and
Karen Hughes (even though Hughes had formally left the White House staff by this time). Libby's presentation contained numerous strong, unequivocal statements: Saddam had WMD. Saddam was continuing to produce and conceal WMD. Saddam had many strong ties to al-Qaeda. Libby used many pieces of intelligence that McLaughlin had discarded for his own presentation because he felt they were unreliable, including unsubstantiated intelligence about meetings between
Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.
Dick Armitage found the presentation appalling because of its exaggeration and willful ignorance of the quality of CIA intelligence. The other attendees, however, found the case convincing, although they wanted to weaken Libby's unequivocal statements in order to allow people to make up their own minds about the information. Since any public case was going to be made to the UN, Rice and Hadley chose Colin Powell to make it, for two primary reasons: Powell was the chief diplomat in the administration, and Powell had the credibility to make the case believable, since everyone knew that Powell was softer on Iraq than any other member of Bush's war cabinet.
On January 27, Hans Blix gave a report to the UN Security Council. He said that cooperation by Iraq was good on the whole, but that there were still problems. "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance -- not even today -- of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace." A few Administration officials, including Condoleeza Rice, thought that inspections might end up working after all, if Blix was going to be this tough on the Iraqis. Cheney, on the other hand, didn't believe it for a moment. The intelligence on Blix's activities showed that he was at best disguising and at worst lying about what the inspectors were doing, which in turn meant that inspections and the UN process were wasting time while Saddam continued to consolidate his position. Cheney's opinion carried the day with Bush, who became even more determined to go to war.
It proved to be politically necessary ask the UN for a second resolution in order to retain the support of Tony Blair, who had promised it to his party. So Powell got to work, using Scooter Libby's case as well as additional data from the CIA, the NSC, and Cheney's office. The evidence for WMD was sketchy, but Powell, like others in the Administration, was influenced by Saddam's past behavior. Cheney and Libby wanted Powell to present information on the alleged Iraq-al Qaeda connection as well. For the most part, Powell thought the evidence was too weak to make such a presentation. He did, however, include information concerning
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had been operating in Iraq since 2002 with Saddam's knowledge.
Will the UN resolution pass? Find out in
Part 6!
