January 2003: This Far and No Further

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Plans and anticipated problems in postinvasion Iraq ignored by White House and Pentagon leaders. Bogus terror alerts. More tax cuts for the wealthy. Increasing resistance to US plans to invade Iraq from other countries. Bush's State of Union address; lies about WMDs abound.

"If you invade Iraq you will create a hundred bin Ladens." -- Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to George W. Bush, January 2003

Early 2003: Bashar Assad, the young and inexperienced leader of Syria, decides not to support the US occupation of Iraq. He also decides to limit Syria's cooperation with the US over finding Osama bin Laden, after over a year of overtures and rebuffs from the Bush administration. While Assad claims he is driven by moral concerns, he is also driven by internal politics, trying to remain in control of a fractious, divided, and financially corrupt government. Assad may, or may not, wish to terminate Syria's association with such Muslim organizations as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, but refuses to do so until the US and Israel make some major concessions concerning the Palestinians' claims to areas such as the Golan Heights. In return, US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld issues a series of virtually baseless allegations, accusing Syria of providing Iraqi insurgents with military materiel, and suggesting that Iraq might have stashed its cache of WMDs in Syria's western deserts. For a time, the Bush administration begins ramping up a war of words against Syria, leading many to believe that the US is preparing for war against Syria as well as Iraq. "I think Rummy was at least testing the waters -- to see how far he could go," says a former State Department official, "but the White House was not ready."
Many officials are angered at the Bush administration's choice of pointless belligerence against Syria instead of choosing cooperation in the hunt for bin Laden. "The [CIA] guys are unbelievably pissed that we're blowing this away," says a former high-level intelligence officer. "There was a great channel at Aleppo. The Syrians were a lot more willing to help us, but they [Rumsfeld and his cronies] want to go in there next." Between September 11 and now, the Syrians have provided critical assistance and intelligence, but no more, says a former State Department official. Until now, the Syrians, desperate to keep the lines of communication and cooperation open with Washington, have kept Hezbollah quiet during the Iraqi occupation. This was "a signal to us," says a Defense Department official involved in Iraq policy, "and we're throwing it away. The Syrians are trying to communicate, and we're not listening." (Editor's note: journalist Seymour Hersh may be unwilling to speculate, but it is my opinion that, like everything else this administration does, the decision to alienate Syria with public tough talk was political -- red meat for the Republican base of voters and financiers.) (Seymour Hersh)
Early 2003: For months, the CIA's Joint Task Force on Iraq has been trying without success to find solid proof -- any proof -- of Iraq's putative WMD programs. Valerie Plame Wilson, one of the JITF's senior supervisors and the husband of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, has had, like her colleagues, little success in developing reliable assets within Iraq. What information they have been able to ascertain has been all negative, with one Iraqi scientist and technician after another claiming that whatever WMD stockpiles or programs Iraq once had are long since destroyed. But since the JITF reports are anecdotal and come from a relatively small number of sources, the CIA's WINPAC (the Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control) finds it easy to dismiss the reports. And even CIA analysts more pragmatic and less ideologically driven than the WINPAC analysts couldn't be sure how much weight to give the Iraqi denials. "The working theory," recalls one CIA officer who worked with the JITF, "was that we were dealing with a similar mentality we had seen in Soviet scientists. These people were living in a society where lying was a way of life, a way to survive. We didn't just take their first answer when they said there was nothing or they themselves hadn't been involved in WMDs." Plame and her colleagues couldn't be sure if they were getting accurate information or if they just weren't doing their jobs well enough to find the Iraqi WMDs. "The fact that we were not getting affirmation of the WMDs did not mean they were not there," recalls the CIA officer.
But, as with the Niger and Curveball information, the WINPAC analysts were bound and determined to come to the conclusion that Iraq did indeed possess WMDs, and as a result were making one spectacularly wrong assessment after another, and fighting off criticism and dissent from other agencies and even within the CIA itself. It would be the systematically erroneous conclusions drawn by WINPAC, who was determined to give the White House what it wanted no matter what, that would inform Bush's January 28 State of the Union address, and Colin Powell's hard-hitting, and tremendously wrong, February presentation to the United Nations. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
Early 2003: Lieutenant General John Abizaid, General Tommy Franks's deputy and the US's senior military Middle East expert, discusses the Iraqi WMD "master list" with General James Marks, in charge of on-the-ground intelligence in Iraq and the senior official in charge of finding the putative WMDs. Marks is unusually frank with Abizaid, who is his superior officer but also his friend. "Sir, I don't give a sh*t," he says when Abizaid asks what he thinks about the WMD sites. "Whether it's there or not -- and I need to tell you, I can't confirm it's there -- but whether it's there or not I still have to do something with that site. I'm going to have to put American men and women at risk to get in there and do something with that site." Marks, like Abizaid, is coming to the realization that for practical purposes, it doesn't matter if the WMDs actually exist or not, he has to operate on the assumption that the weapons are there and risk American lives accordingly. (Bob Woodward)
Early 2003: Republican senator John Warner, the head of the Armed Services Committee, visits Afghanistan. He is surprised to be greeted by a French officer. "What are they doing here?" he demands of his US military escort about the French. "They mucking things up again?" His escort replies, "If they weren't here, we'd be failing." The French picked up the monthly payroll for the training of Afghan officers when the US refused. Both France and Germany have contributed troops to Afghanistan, though their contributions have gone virtually unacknowledged by the US. (Wall Street Journal/Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
Early 2003: Retired general Jay Garner, in charge of the postwar reconstruction of Iraq, calls General John Abizaid for advice. Abizaid, the deputy to chief military war planner General Tommy Franks and Garner's former subordinate, tells Garner that one of the most important things will be to "provide an opportunity for the Iraqi army to emerge with some honor." Abizaid reminds Garner that the Iraqi army is largely Sunni, and the Sunnis, used to having preferential treatment under Hussein, couldn't be allowed to feel as if they had lost everything once the Hussein regime is overthrown. (Donald Rumsfeld later says that he agrees with Abizaid's assessment, that it was important that US decisions were "fair and representative of them.") Garner agrees, musing that the best use of the defeated Iraqi army might be for reconstruction, from everything from rebuilding bridges to handling border and building security. "Keep them busy," Garner believes. "An idle army would be trouble."
Abizaid warns Garner that the hard part will come after the US defeats the Iraqi army. IN the aftermath, he warns, "[t]here's going to be a lot of terrorism. There's going to be a lot of things we have to put up with -- disgruntled people, pockets of resistance, and guerrilla activity." (Bob Woodward)
Early 2003: Colonel Steve Rotkoff, the deputy to General James Marks, leads an informal brainstorming session of Marks's staff members, dubbed the "Sunday Afternoon Prayer Sessions." Marks and his group are in charge of finding and neutralizing Iraq's WMDs. In the session, staff member Colonel Steve Peterson gives a PowerPoint presentation entitled "Saddam Hussein's Black Hawk Down Strategy," referencing the infamous "Black Hawk Down" situation in 1993, where Somalian irregulars killed 18 US servicement in urban street fighting and resulting in Clinton's decision to withdraw US troops from that chaotic country. Somalia has come to symbolize America's unwillingness to tolerate casualties in war. Peterson believes that the overarching assumption that Hussein will resort to a "Fortress Baghdad" scenario, where in response to the US invasion, he withdraws his forces to Baghdad and creates an ugly, house-to-house urban warfare conflict in the streets of the capital city, may be dead wrong. Instead, Peterson theorizes, Hussein may order his forces to "melt away," later to resurface as a native insurgency that will conduct seemingly random guerrilla attacks on US occupation forces. The "Fortress Baghdad" scenario would be difficult, but doomed to failure, Peterson argues. But what if Hussein "got smart" and realizes his better strategy is a campaign of small, sophisticated attacks by Iraqis -- "a kind of continuous, random, urban terrorism? That way US forces would have to contend with unending violence, with little knowledge of who was carrying it out, or where or when they might strike."
US intelligence has confirmed that Hussein had had Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down translated into Arabic, and distributed to his senior officers. The assumption was that the book was merely to buck up Iraqi morale, Peterson says, to show that if you kill a few Americans, they'll go home. But what if the real lesson from the Somali incident is that insurgents can have local tactical successes against a much superior military force? Also, in October 2002, Hussein had opened Iraq's prisons, freeing tens of thousands of inmates -- political prisoners and criminals alike. What if Hussein planned on those former prisoners forming bands of troublemakers to be agents of disruption? And US intelligence knows that, while the evidence of Iraqi WMDs is weak, there are definitely caches of conventional weapons all over the country, just waiting to be used by insurgents. Finally, Hussein's Ba'ath Party is organized much like the classic Communist cell structure, small cells in each town held together by loose, informal, personal relationships, quite effective for communications in guerrilla insurgencies. Add it together, says Peterson, "and a logical strategy for Saddam might be to run and hide, and use the Ba'athist cell structure to develop an insurgent army that would have weapons and explosives for a prolonged fight until the Americans grew exhausted and lost their political will."
Peterson's idea is radical and flies in the face of conventional Defense Department strategizing. Rotkoff gives it credence, but the others in the session dismiss it as an unlikely theory. Unfortunately, Peterson's idea is quite prescient, and never receives any real consideration. (Bob Woodward)

January: UN weapons inspectors' preliminary reports indicate that Iraq possesses no nuclear weapons, and no evidence of biological or chemical weapons are turned up; the inspectors ask for more time to finish the job. Bush refuses. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, says that his agency possesses no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. And the National Intelligence Council, the agency that coordinates the nation's intelligence community, drafts a memo that concludes the entire Iraq-Niger uranium claim is completely without substance. (The White House will ignore the NIC's findings.) The news that Hussein has no WMDs comes as a shock to most observers, who belatedly realize that Hussein has been bluffing the world for years. The news doesn't change the US plans to invade in March, which is now defended as a necessary start date because to invade later would have the invasion taking place during the height of Iraq's blistering summer. Even private pressure from Britain's Tony Blair to move the invasion date back and let the inspections run their course proves fruitless. "This was the war [Bush] wanted," writes Ian Williams, "and this was when he wanted it." (Guardian, Frank Rich [PDF file], Ian Williams)
January: The CIA finally balks at being assigned over and over to confirm what it views as phony intelligence. In a heated conversation with Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin snaps, "I'm not going back to the well on this. We've done our work." And two reports from the National Intelligence Council warning of sectarian violence in Iraq if Hussein is overthrown, and expressing doubt at the administration's claims of Iraq trying to acquire uranium, are ignored, as is a State Department intelligence report from January 13 asserting that the documents surrounding the Iraqi uranium purchase are "probably a hoax." Adding to the uncertainty, an informal National Intelligence Estimate concludes unanimously that Saddam Hussein is unlikely to attack the US unless attacked first. (Washington Post, Mother Jones, Frank Rich [PDF file])
January: The Scorpions, the group of CIA-trained Iraqi saboteurs and commandos slated to provoke an incident with Saddam Hussein that could be used as a pretext for war (see the items in the 2002 and "They Said It" pages for more information on the Scorpions and Operation Anabasis) are flown to Jordan. Over a hundred members, led by CIA agent John Maguire and his partner, "Luis," await further orders. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)

Plans and anticipated problems in postinvasion Iraq ignored by White House and Pentagon leaders

"The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious." -- report by the Strategic Studies Institute, January 2003

January: Surprisingly little time or effort has been spent on planning for post-Hussein Iraq. During one NSC meeting where the topic comes up, Bush inquires of General Tommy Franks, the chief of CENTCOM and the main war planner, who will maintain law and order after Saddam is gone? Franks replies that the US military will keep the peace. Each major Iraqi town and village will have a "lord mayor," a US military officer in charge of maintaining law and order, and administering basic services. At least one NSC official recalls being completely flummoxed by the idea of a "lord mayor." The subject doesn't come up again until March 10, when either Bush or Rice brings it up. The brittle Franks replies, with some irritation, that he has already explained the idea of a "lord mayor." No one presses for any more details. In actual fact, the idea is never implemented or even introduced in Iraq. Colonel Kevin Benson, the Army officer assigned to oversee the planning for postinvasion Iraq, says later, "I never heard anyone talk of lord mayor. I never heard that term used."
Benson also takes issue with the commonly held concept that little planning for postinvasion Iraq had taken place. An enormous amount of planning had indeed taken place by himself and his staff, he recalls later. The problem was, the plans were all but ignored. His estimate for troop requirements were similar to that of Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, on the order of several hundred thousand. But Shinseki will be rudely and publicly shot down on February 25-27 (see the item below), and when that happens, Benson realizes the enormity of the disconnect between his work and the planning at the top. Benson never could understand how Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz were coming up with their numbers and assumptions. Like so many other second- and third-tier officers and officials, he had to assume that the higher-ups had information he did not have. "I never saw any intelligence that led me to the conclusion that the people in DC were making," he recalls. "I never saw intelligence that we would be met with cheering crowds and bands and people throwing flowers at us. I never saw any intelligence that would allow me to conclude it would be a cakewalk."
Unbeknownst to Benson, the same disconnect will be experienced by planners in other agencies. In October 2002, Lieutenant General Richard Cody, the Army deputy chief of staff for operations and plans, asked the War College's Strategic Studies Institute for a study of the same topic. SSI produces its report by January 2003 that notes that "ethnic, tribal, and religious schisms could produce civil war or fracture the state after Saddam is deposed," that Iraqi reconstruction would require "a considerable commitment of American resources," and that the "longer US presence is maintained, the more likely violent resistance will develop." An occupation, the report says, would last for "an extended period of time," and the Iraqi populace will be more suspicious than grateful to the US. The SSI study predicts that political parties will form based on those religious, ethnic, and tribal identities, and free elections based on ethnically divided political parties could actually "increase divisions than mitigate them." The report predicts that armed militias will become an increasing problem. Terrorists would rampage throughout Iraq, conducting suicide bombings and other lethal operations, that would alienate the Iraqi citizenry from the Americans. The American occupiers will find it "exceptionally challenging" to supply the population with the basics of electricity, water, food, and security. The oil infrastructure will not generate the revenues necessary to pay for reconstruction. Sabotage will be a "serious threat."
The SSI report lists 135 critical tasks that will have to be properly performed to achieve a democratic viable post-Hussein government. These include securing the borders, establishing local governments, protecting religious, historical, and cultural sites, establishing a police system, restoring and maintaining power systems, operating hospitals, reorganizing the Iraqi military and security forces, and disarming militias. The SSI recommends against disbanding the Iraqi army after the war. Overall, "[m]assive resources need to be focused on this [postoccupation] effort well before the first shot is fired." The authors know that the Pentagon isn't spending the time or effort needed on such planning. Only recently has the Pentagon bothered to establish an office -- the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance -- to address the needs of postinvasion Iraq, and named retired Army general Jay Garner to head ORHA. "The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious," the paper concludes.
Though the War College staffers mail out over a thousand copies of the report, including to members of Congress, they receive surprisingly little response. "We heard that Central Command really liked it," recalls one military analyst who worked on the report. But they receive no feedback whatsoever from the civilian leadership in the Pentagon. Apparently Rumsfeld, Feith, and Wolfowitz don't like the conclusions the report draws, and therefore ignore it entirely. "At that point, the Bush administration was moving rapidly to war," the analyst recalls. "Nothing would derail them, and their assumption was that it would be a lot easier than we had put it. They felt arguments that it would be hard were actually designed to cause people to rethink whether the war was worth doing in the first place. This was appalling. They were trying to rig the cost-benefit analysis. So they ended up not properly planning for the aftermath of the invasion because that might interfere with getting the war they wanted. Paul Wolfowitz's whole reason for living was to start that war. They didn't have to listen to me. Somewhere along the line they had decided they were smarter than the rest of us."
Military analysts are not the only ones ignored. In January, Paul Pillar, the CIA officer in charge of the Middle East, produces his own report examining the challenges facing the Americans in postinvasion Iraq. Pillar echoes many of the conclusions drawn by Benson's team and the SSI report. Establishing a liberal democracy in Iraq will be exceedingly difficult, Pillar concludes, and warns that Iraqi governmental traditions stand in the way of establishing such a new and different system. The US will have to maintain an enormous presence in Iraq to ensure peace and stability for a new government. And a debt-ridden Iraq will not be able to finance its own reconstruction. Pillar and his CIA analysts foresee a long, deadly, and expensive occupation -- the exact opposite of the happy picture painted by Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other Bush officials. Pillar's report, like the others, is forwarded to the White House. The only response? According to Pillar, he is told by an administration official he refuses to identify, "You guys just don't see the possibilities. You're too negative."
The White House also shelves the State Department's huge, sprawling "Future of Iraq" project, though it will be briefly used by Garner's ORHA. State Department analyst Thomas Warrick set up 17 working groups in the spring of 2002, relying largely on groups of Iraqi exiles (lawyers, businessmen, engineers, academics, and others) for the raw information they need to put together a prospectus for postinvasion Iraq. State spent $5 million on the enormous project, which covered everything from restoring electricity and water to the citizenry, to creating a new legal system, to establishing law and order, all in thirteen informative volumes. The Pentagon ignores the entire deal. One reason for that decision centers on Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi -- the neocons in the Pentagon plan on establishing Chalabi as the new ruler of Iraq, a plan Warrick and the State Department refuse to support. Chalabi's INC has no input in the Future of Iraq project, and Chalabi has no use for the project. Years later, David Phillips, a conflict prevention expert from the Council on Foreign Relations who worked on the project, recalls the bitter squabbling between Warrick and Pentagon officials, in large part over Chalabi. The Pentagon later forbids ORHA to have any dealings with Warrick, and Rumsfeld will deny Garner's request to have Warrick and 31 other State Department officials work with the organization. Many of those State Department officials were "blacklisted" because of their opposition to Chalabi's coronation. Phillips later writes in his book Losing Iraq, "They were victims of the ideological rivalry that caused a virtual collapse of interagency process. ...By February 2003, State and Defense officials were barely on speaking terms."
In their book Hubris, authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn write, "Postwar Iraq planning paralleled what happened with prewar Iraq intelligence. The work of government experts and analysts was discarded by senior Bush administration policy makers when it conflicted with or undermined their own hardened ideas about what to expect in Iraq. They were confident -- or wanted to believe -- that the war would go smoothly. They didn't need other views, notions, or plans -- not from the State Department, the CIA, or the military. It was their war, and they would run it as they saw fit." (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
January: US defense contractor SAIC participates in a management strike in Venezuela, as part of the US's attempt to destabilize the leftist government of Hugo Chavez. SAIC refuses to provide the Venezuelan energy ministry with critical information needed to keep the oil refineries open; Venezuela's oil company managers are a key element in the attempt to overthrow Chavez and replace him with one of their own. (Amy and David Goodman)
January: A Brookings Institute study concludes that "Bush vetoed several specific (and relatively cost-effective) measures proposed by Congress that would have addressed critical national vulnerabilities. As a result, the country remains more vulnerable than it should be today." (Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
January: A thoughtful analysis by terrorism expert John Scherer asks if the threat of terror attacks on American soil isn't being overblown by the Bush administration. "The threat of terrorism in the US is not over, but Sept. 11 may have been an anomaly," he writes. "Intelligence agencies are unlikely to uncover an impending attack, no matter what they spend on human intelligence, because it is virtually impossible to infiltrate terrorist cells whose members are friends and relatives. At least five of the 19 al-Qaeda hijackers came from Asir province in Saudi Arabia, and possibly eight were related."
He continues, "Although there will be small-scale terrorist attacks in the U.S. in the next 10 years, major al-Qaeda operations are over. Of the more than 1,200 people arrested after 9/11, none has been charged in the conspiracy. This suggests the hijackers did not and do not have an extensive operational American network. Some intelligence officials have estimated that up to 5,000 'sleepers' -- persons with connections to al-Qaeda -- are living in this country, including hundreds of hard-core members, yet nothing significant has happened in more than a year. The arrests in the Buffalo, N.Y., area back up the possibility of such sleeper cells. Al-Qaeda attacks are more likely to occur abroad, but the danger of this group is being exaggerated overseas as well. Members of al-Qaeda cells have been arrested in Spain, Italy, England, Germany, Malaysia, and elsewhere, but scarcely more than a score anywhere except Pakistan. The threat of terrorism in the U.S. has greatly diminished, but al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners realize they can terrorize citizens merely by 'confessing' to plans to blow up bridges in California, attack schools in Texas, bomb apartments in Florida, rob banks in the Northeast, set off a series of 'dirty bombs,' and have scuba divers operate in coastal areas. A recent book on al-Qaeda states that the organization plans 100 attacks at any one time. This is nonsense. There have been a handful of small-scale attacks with fatalities linked to al-Qaeda since Sept. 11, nothing near 100. These include a church bombing in Islamabad (five deaths); the explosion of a gasoline truck and bus outside a synagogue on Djerba Island, Tunisia (19 dead); a bus bombing outside the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi (14 killed); and a bombing at the U.S. consulate in Karachi (12 fatalities). Three of these incidents occurred in Pakistan. In addition, al-Qaeda links are suspected in late-2002 bombings in Bali and Kenya. The claim by Sept. 11 terrorist suspect Zacarias Moussaoui of an ongoing al-Qaeda plot in this country is a subterfuge to save himself." Of attacks with weapons of mass destruction, Schemer writes, "Chemical, biological, and nuclear (CBN) attacks are possible, but difficult and unlikely. Only one has succeeded over the last two decades--the 1995 Sarin incident on the Tokyo subway. Thousands were injured, but just six people died. There have been no CBN attacks with mass fatalities anywhere. Terrorist 'experts' simply have thought up everything terrible that can happen, and then assumed it will. Terrorists would encounter problems dispersing biological toxins. Most quickly dilute in any open space, and others need perfect weather conditions to cause mass casualties. Some biological agents, although not anthrax, are killed by exposure to ultraviolet light. The Washington, D.C., subway system has devices that can detect biological toxins. New York has the highest-density population of any American city, and for this reason might have the greatest probability of such an attack, but it also has the best-prepared public health system."
Of the FBI, he writes, "The FBI may need reorganization, especially since its failures preceding Sept. 11 resulted from officials making bad decisions. It is well-known that in mid August, 2001, officials at a flight school in Eagan, Minn., told the FBI that a French citizen of Algerian descent, Moussaoui, had offered $30,000 cash for lessons on a flight-simulator to learn how to fly a Boeing 747. He had no interest in learning how to land the plane. Moussaoui was arrested three weeks before the attacks. One week before the hijackings, French intelligence informed the FBI that he was an Islamic militant who had visited Afghanistan and had links to al-Qaeda. FBI agents could have entered Moussaoui's computer and obtained his phone records using the Federal statutes already in place, but which were ignored or forgotten by officials. Reorganizations refuse to acknowledge that some individuals are smarter and more knowledgeable than others, and new personnel will eventually resolve these problems. The new Department of Homeland Security will disrupt normal channels of communication and create even more bureaucratic confusion. It will compete for resources with the National Security Council and it will be costly trying to coordinate 46 agencies and, judging from actual terrorist events in the U.S., wholly unnecessary. Americans must remain vigilant, of course, but there is no need to raid the Treasury or turn the country upside down pursuing phantoms." (USA Today)
January: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pays a fifteen-hour visit to Kabul, Afghanistan, and afterwards declares, "We're clearly moving into a different phase, where our priority in Afghanistan is increasingly going to be stability and reconstruction. There's no way to go too fast. Faster is better." While talk of increasing security for the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections is rife, virtually no one is discussing money for military and economic resources. "I don't think the administration [understands] about winning hearts and minds," says a former administration official. (Seymour Hersh)
January: Bush discontinues a monthly mass layoff report formerly issued by the Labor Department -- a report first discontinued by Bush's father and reinstated by Bill Clinton. After much criticism, the report will be restored later in the year. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
January: Frank Miller, who heads the Pentagon's Executive Steering Group, which coordinates the Iraq issues among the various federal agencies, isn't sure he can continue working with the fractious and petty Donald Rumsfeld. Miller believes that Rumsfeld is making his, and many others', jobs almost impossible. Much of what Rumsfeld does is tremendously petty and designed to ensure that everyone knows Rumsfeld is in charge of just about everything. During briefings between Bush, Rumsfeld, General Tommy Franks, and other senior officials, Rumsfeld ensures that the slides for the presentations are distributed just before the meeting, and are taken back immediately after. Rumsfeld might provide a 140-page brief to Bush, and 40-page excerpts to the lesser lights such as Miller. In one case he didn't bring enough packets to a briefing for the principals, forcing Condoleezza Rice to look on with her neighbor. Unable to get informational packets, Miller and others would scramble to write down notes, only to be thundered at by the finger-pointing Rumsfeld, who would bark, "People shouldn't be taking notes. People shouldn't be taking notes in here." Miller couldn't see how he could advise Rice or Stephen Hadley or even Bush if Rumsfeld wouldn't provide him with important information or let him keep notes on that information. And Miller was no security threat: he had the highest security clearance, had handled the most sensitive nuclear war plans issues for Dick Cheney during Cheney's term as Secretary of Defense, and had won the Defense Department's highest civilian award, the Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Medal, five times. Miller found Rumsfeld's actions deeply insulting, and self-defeating -- after all, weren't they all on the same side?
Miller can see that his longtime friend, General Richard Myers, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is suffering as well. Rumsfeld routinely orchestrates Myers's and other senior military officers' statements in meetings, ensuring that Myers and others say only what Rumsfeld wants them to say and retaining control at all times. Rice has already given Miller permission to use "back channels" to work around the overcontrolling, dictatorial Rumsfeld.
But even Rice is thwarted by Rumsfeld. She is angered by Rumsfeld's repeated refusals to return her phone calls when she has questions about troop deployments or war planning. When she complains to him, he reminds her that the chain of command does not include the national security advisor, and she doesn't need to know the answers to her questions. Rice complains to Bush, who treats the entire problem as a joke. Miller is astonished. The entire thing would be funny, he muses, if the issues don't involve war, life, and death. (Bob Woodward)

Early January: Donald Rumsfeld meets with Marine commandant General James Jones. Jones, who had turned down any consideration for him to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff eighteen months before, is now getting another plum assignment: the dual position of NATO supreme allied commander and US combatant commander in Europe. When the conversation turns to post-invasion Iraq, Rumsfeld says he is finding it difficult to find anyone who really knew about Iraq who could lead the post-invasion reconstruction and humanitarian efforts. Jones recommends retired Army general Jay Garner, whom he says is "a hero in Kurdistan." Rumsfeld is pleased with the recommendation, having worked with Garner on Rumsfeld's space commission during the Clinton years. Garner had led "Operation Provide Comfort," the reconstruction effort in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. The operation had become the "gold standard" of military humanitarian missions. Even better, Garner and his people had done their job in a matter of months and come home successful. (Bob Woodward)

January 3: Saudi investor Adnan Khashoggi sets up a lunch with Bush defense advisor Richard Perle and others; Perle, publicly a vocal critic of Saudi Arabia as friendly to terrorists, is attempting to line up Saudi and other investors to contribute money to his consulting and security firm, Trireme. The lunch takes place at a seaside restaurant in Marseilles, France, near Perle's vacation home. Part of the agenda is to provide Saudi industrialist Harb Zuhair with an opportunity to propose to Perle a peaceful alternative to the war with Iraq. The main agenda is for Zuhair to put together an investment consortium that would provide $100 million for Trireme. Perle, one of the Bush administration's strongest proponents for war, is unmoved by Zuhair's proposal for peace, and as of March 2003, Zuhair had not successfully arranged for the investments to be made. Later on, Perle's partner Gerald Hillman will deny that the meeting took place, saying that Trireme had "nothing to do" with the Saudis, until journalist Seymour Hersh confronts him with proof of Khashoggi's and Zuhair's involvement. Then Hillman will admit that the lunch took place, but will deny that Perle was trying to line up Saudi investments. He will claim that Perle "not a financial creature. He doesn't have any desire for financial gain." Perle will make similar denials. Khashoggi is amused at their tales, and points out quite logically that Trireme's entire business potential depends on there being a war with Iraq. "If there is no war," he tells Hersh, "why is there a need for security? If there is a war, of course, billions of dollars will have to be spent. ...You Americans blind yourself with your high integrity and your democratic morality against peddling influence, but they were peddling influence." The Saudi royal family is enraged to learn of the meeting, and close Bush family friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan confirms, "There is a split personality to Perle. Here he is, on the one hand, trying to make a hundred-million dollar deal, and, on the other hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail -- 'If we get in business, he'll back off on Saudi Arabia -- as I have been informed by participants in the meeting." Bandar adds, "There has to be deniability, and a cover story -- a possible peace initiative in Iraq -- is needed. I believe the Iraqi events are irrelevant. A business meeting took place."
For a brief time, Zuhair believes that he will have the opportunity to make his case for peace with Perle. A few days before the meeting, he receives a memo from Hillman that outlines 12 points Iraq will need to comply with before the US will reconsider its plans for invading Iraq. Among other things, the memo says that Saddam Hussein will need to admit to hoarding and building WMDs, and would need to resign and go immediately into exile. A second memo from Hillman to Khashoggi outlines further requirements for Iraq to prove its desire for peace, and recommends that Khashoggi and Zuhair arrange for a meeting with Prince Nawaf Abdul Aziz, the Saudi chief of intelligence, "so that we can assist in Washington." Zuhair finds the memos "absurd," and Khashoggi says he was amused by their simple-minded duplicity: "There was nothing to react to," he later says. "While Harb was lobbying for Iraq, they were lobbying for Perle." Hillman later denies that Perle had anything to do with the memos, and said he drafted the memos himself with the help of his daughter, a college student. Perle claims he knew nothing of the memos until after they were drafted. It is clear that the views in the memos are quite different from Perle's own views and Perle's fellow hard-liners in Washington. Hersh writes, "Given Perle's importance in American decision-making, and the risks of relying on a deal-maker with Adnan Khashoggi's history, questions remain about Hillman's drafting of such an amateurish peace proposal for Zuhair. Prince Bandar's assertion -- that the talk of peace was merely a pretext for some hard selling -- is difficult to dismiss."
The memo becomes a public scandal when its existence is reported in the Saudi-owned London newspaper Al Hayat. The Saudis are angered to read of the memos and the meetings that engendered it, and Perle is inextricably linked to them by the news report. The report says the memos are of "American" origin and bear Perle's imprimateur; it reports of a series of secret meetings surrounding a set of proposals that would allow Hussein to leave the country in return for a US promise not to invade his country. Days later, the Beirut daily Al Safir reports more fully, and less accurately, on the memos, claiming that Perle wrote them as part of an unofficial "outline [of] Washington's future visions of Iraq." This report elevates the lunch meeting to a series of "recent American-Saudi negotiations, and says, "Publishing these documents is important because they shed light on the story of how war could have been avoided." Of course, the documents did no such thing.
Of the business negotiations, Perle says it would be "malicious" of anyone to even hint of any conflict of interest. But, Hersh writes, "Perle, in crisscrossing between the public and private sectors, put himself in a difficult position -- one not uncommon to public men. He was credited with being the intellectual force behind a war that not everyone wanted and that many suspect, fairly or not, of being driven by American business interests. There is no question that Perle believed that removing Saddam from power was the right thing to do. At the same time, he set up a company that stood to gain from a war. In doing so, he gave ammunition not only to the Saudis but to his other ideological opponents as well."
Perle answers Hersh's articles on the subjects by comparing Hersh to a terrorist and announcing his plans to file a lawsuit against Hersh, a lawsuit that will never materialize. In November 2003, the Pentagon will release a heavily redacted report that confirms Perle's activities as a private agent soliciting business for private firms while at the same time drumming up support in Washington and abroad for a war that would make the firms he represented extremely rich. He was not found guilty of violating government laws, ethics and standards because, technically, he did not serve enough days during the year as chairman of the Defense Policy Board to have to follow government statues covering such activities by government employees. Perle will later become embroiled in a raft of financial scandals centering around his activities on behalf of Trireme, and in the spring of 2003 will resign from the Defense Policy Board. (Seymour Hersh)

Bogus terror alerts

January 4: Evidence surfaces that the Bush administration is manufacturing bogus terror alerts in order to keep American voters behind the president and to stave off questions about his handling of the so-called war on terror. The administration is pressuring the CIA and other intelligence agencies to come up with "something, anything" to support the non-specific terror alerts emanating from the Department of Homeland Security. One FBI agent testified, "Most alerts are issued without any concrete data to back up the assumptions." All recent terror alerts have been released without any specific threat information; the new color-coded alert system has not changed from its status of "elevated," since September 2002. Recent reports that five Arab men entered the country from Canada using phony IDs could be politically motivated, says terrorism expert Ronald Blackstone. "We have very, very little to support the notion that these five represent any more of a threat than any of the other thousands of people who enter this nation every day. It's a fishing expedition." (WorldNetDaily)
January 4: California Republican party vice-chairman Bill Back, vying for the leadership for the state GOP, torpedoes his efforts by releasing an e-mail newsletter that reproduces a 1999 article reading, in part, "history might have taken a better turn" if the South had won the Civil War and that "the real damage to race relations in the South came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won." Shannon Reeves, the California GOP secretary and an African American, says: "There's no room for bigotry in the Republican Party, and I don't think there's a lot of room in the Republican Party for people who distribute bigoted information. What's appalling is to have the vice chair of the Republican Party distribute this." Back claims to oppose the views he included in his newsletter, which are considered openly racist by many. The article is by William Lind of the radical right-wing Free Congress Foundation, who posed the question: "What If The South Had Won the Civil War?" Lind's answer, in part, stated: "Certainly Southerners would not be living under the iron rule of an all-powerful federal government, as we all do now. Northerners might not be, either; a Union defeat would have given states' rights a boost in both countries.... What would my great-grandfather, Union Army sergeant Alfred G. Sturgiss, say to all of this? If he could see the sorry mess the country he fought for has become, I think he might sadly say that he'd fought for the wrong side." Back will be defeated by chairman Duf Sundheim. (Washington Post, Eric Alterman and Mark Green)

More tax cuts for the wealthy

January 7: Bush unveils his second tax cut package during a speech at the Economic Club of Chicago. He proposes $726 billion in tax cuts over 10 years, twice as much as most political and economic observers had anticipated, and includes immediate implementation of tax cuts slated for 2004 and 2006 in earlier tax legislation, along with speeding up the planned expansion of the child tax credit. The most controversial portion concerns the elimination of most taxes on stock dividends, which accounts in itself for half of the cuts and will affect only those who invest in the stock market -- by definition the wealthier Americans. For this go-round, Bush claims, "Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money." Bush's math is beyond fuzzy, into the realm of the inexplicable; almost 80% of tax filers would receive less than $1,083, and almost 50% would receive less than $100. The truly average taxpayer would receive $265, not $1,083. David Corn writes, "To concoct the misleading $1,083 figure, the Administration took the large dollar amounts high-income taxpayers would receive and added that to the modest, small or nonexistent reductions other taxpayers would get -- and then used this total to calculate an average gain. His claim was akin to saying that if a street had nine households led by unemployed individuals but one with an earner making a million dollars, the average income of the families on the block would be $100,000. The 'radical' Wall Street Journal reported, 'Overall, the gains from the taxes are weighted toward upper-income taxpayers.' ...The $1,083 average -- which Bush and his lieutenants would repeat in the months ahead -- was a statistic designed to create a false impression, to provide Bush cover from the inevitable criticism that he was again favoring the well-to-do with a package mostly benefiting big-money earners. It was, for all intents and purposes, a lie."
Joe Conason reports the math slightly differently, noting the presidential claim that on average, the taxpayer will receive about a thousand dollars in tax cuts. Sounds good, but when the math is broken down, it turns out that the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers will receive an annual tax cut of around $45,000. The 20% in the very center of America's wealth distribution will receive about $265. The bottom 60% of American taxpayers will receive a virtually meaningless $95. Fuzzy math, indeed. His claims that his cuts will immediately "stimulate the economy" are specious for a number of reasons, mostly because the bulk of the tax cuts aren't scheduled to take effect until 2004 or later, and because the vast majority of the tax breaks go to the wealthiest Americans, who statistically tend to save or invest their largesse rather than plow it back into the economy in the form of paying off credit card debt, paying bills, or buying consumer goods. Even the White House's own economic forecasts predict that the cuts will do little or nothing to bolster the economy, but Bush presents them as such. The stock dividend tax cut is touted as a boon for the elderly, a claim more of a shell game than a flat lie. True, the elderly as a group will benefit from the dividend tax cut, but when broken down into the various strata of earners, most of the cuts will go to benefit the rich elderly. 40% of the dividend tax cut will land in the hands of the wealthiest 1.5% of senior Americans; almost 75% goes to the top 20%.
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities observes, "Most elderly have fairly low incomes and would receive little or nothing from this tax cut." Corn writes, "All in all, Bush's proposed 'relief' was another bonanza for the rich." Bush will defend his tax cuts by the simple method of accusing critics of indulging in "class warfare," a theme proven to cow many Democrats from becoming too critical of his economics. Ari Fleischer leads off the attack on January 9: "[I]t's class warfare to say that there are wrong people in America and these wrong people are not deserving of tax relief. ...The president believes that's a divisive approach." Fleischer will deny that the cuts are inordinately benefiting the wealthy, and accuses critics of attempting to "divide and play class warfare, in an effort to portray some Americans as worthy of tax relief based on their class." Soon after, Bush will appear at a warehouse in St. Louis to reiterate the class warfare defense, accusing critics of "trying to pit one group of people against another." He is photographed in front of a wall of cardboard boxes labeled "Made in USA." Viewers are not to know that almost all of the boxes originally read, "Made in China," and workers preparing for the event had taped or labeled over the Chinese labels and placed the "Made in USA" boxes directly behind the president. (The Nation, Joe Conason, David Corn)

January 9: Ari Fleischer says, "We know for a fact that there are weapons [WMDs] there [Iraq]. We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." (White House, Democratic Underground, Bob Woodward)
January 9: In flat contradiction to the Bush administration's assertions about Iraq's nuclear weapons, Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA and a future Nobel Peace Prize recipient, says that the Bush administration has been misinforming the world about Iraq's putative nuclear program. The aluminum tubes that have been such a source of dispute are nothing more than tubes used for constructing conventional rockets, ElBaradei says. Bush responds by accusing ElBaradei of being influenced by the Iraqis. The UN's chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, also appears before the UN to report that as of yet, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. Blix says that inspections are incomplete and demands more proof of disarmament from Iraq. The Bush administration spins Blix's statement to assert that he has "proof" of Iraqi WMDs.
In the days before the IAEA report, the CIA had conducted tests on the aluminum tubes and found that they were too weak to work properly in a nuclear weapons program. But the CIA's WINPAC analysts refuse to accept the findings, and in an astonishing departure from fact and procedure, simply lie and declare the tubes have been proven capable of working in a nuclear weapons construction module. Energy Department analysts sharply disagree. Meanwhile, IAEA inspectors rush to Iraq's Nasser 81 mm rocket production facility and find 13,000 complete rockets, all made from the same aluminum tubes.
The CIA's supposed "expert," Joe Turner, flies to Vienna and argues his case for the aluminum tubes' intended use in nuclear weapons production. But by this time the IAEA experts are sick of the lies and misrepresentations. The meeting is a disaster. "Everybody was embarrassed when he came and made this presentation," one participant later recalls. "Embarrassed and disgusted. We were going insane thinking, 'Where is he coming from?'"
Interestingly, one of the only mainstream American news outlets to report on the IAEA's findings, the New York Times, merely notes that a "key piece of evidence" to Bush's claims of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program has been challenged, and buries the story deep within its pages. Meanwhile, theTimes continues to publish front-page articles, many written by Judith Miller, claiming the veracity of the nuclear weapons claims. Miller also publishes other wild claims, including the sensational allegation that Iraq had purchased large quantities of a drug that could be used as an antidote for several chemical weapons. The drug purchase turns out to have been for heart attack victims, and was okayed by the UN, a fact which could have easily been checked by Miller had she bothered. Other articles by Miller about Iraq's supposed 1990 purchase of a virulent smallpox strain from a Russian scientist, and repeating allegations by Iraqi defectors that Hussein had an array of "secret programs to develop and conceal chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons that is starkly at odds with the findings so far of the United Nations weapons inspectors," are also baseless. (Mother Jones, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
January 9: Donald Rumsfeld tells his undersecretary of policy, Douglas Feith, that he has decided on retired general Jay Garner to head his postwar office for Iraq (see item above). Garner is currently heading a division at L-3, a huge defense contractor specializing in high-tech surveillance equipment and reconnaisance equipment. Garner is initially reluctant, but Feith calls him in for a meeting on January 13, and tells him that if he turns the job down, he will have to explain himself personally to Rumsfeld. Garner knows that, as a defense contractor, it would be virtual suicide, in a business and career sense, to turn Rumsfeld down. L-3 grants Garner a leave of absence, and Garner takes the post. "By the end of June, I'll be home," he tells his wife. "I'll be home for our Fourth of July cookout." (Bob Woodward)
January 9: Shannon Reeves, the Secretary to the Board of the California Republican Party and the highest-ranking African-American in that organization, writes an angry open letter to the party accusing it of treating its black members like "window dressing."
Prompted by an article distributed by Vice Chairman Bill Back that said the nation would have been better off if the South had won the war, an article that Reeves says "trivialized slavery...trivialized the impacts of slavery on my ancestors and people of African decent," and found by Reeves to be "personally offensive, abhorrent, and vile," Reeves writes, "I am sick and tired of being embarrassed by elected Republican officials who have no sensitivity for issues that alienate whole segments of our population. Republican leaders who consort with the Council of Conservative Citizens, highlight stump speeches at Bob Jones University, reminisce about segregationist campaigns, and sympathize with the bigoted views -- and the very real possibility that others in our party affiliate with the Free Congress Foundation and groups with similar offensive ideology -- perpetuate broad public opinion that Republicans harbor racist and bigoted ideals. ...This embarrassment is different for a black Republican. Not only do I have to sit in rooms and behave professionally towards Republicans who share this heinous ideology, I have to go home to a hostile environment where I'm called an 'Uncle Tom' and maligned as a sell-out to my community because I'm a member of the Republican Party. When I go to the barbershop on Friday or my church on Sunday -- wherever I go in the black community -- I have to explain that Trent Lott's affiliation with the Council of Conservative Citizens doesn't represent all Republicans, that it was just an isolated incident. When they then question me about the scores of Republicans who visit Bob Jones University, I tell them that Republicans visit black universities, too. ...Black Republicans are expected to provide window dressing and cover to prove that this is not a racist party, yet our own leadership continues to act otherwise. People judge people by their experience of them, and by their actions, and when those actions do not match their words, actions become the more honest means by which to measure a person. ...When I travel to speak at Republican conferences and events around the country, wandering through hotels, convention centers and social clubs, as I approach the rooms where I'm scheduled to speak, I am often told by Republicans that I must be in the wrong place. ...As a Bush delegate at the 2000 convention in Philadelphia, I proudly wore my delegate's badge and RNC lapel pin as I worked the convention. Regardless of the fact that I was obviously a delegate prominently displaying my credentials, no less than six times did white delegates dismissively tell me to fetch them a taxi or carry their luggage. Imagine how our Republican women would have felt if they had been mistaken for hotel maids. These people didn't see that I wasn't wearing a uniform; all they saw was a black face and they made an assumption." (Shannon Reeves/ChronWatch, Al Franken)

January 10: A highly classified intelligence assessment, titled "Questions on Why Iraq is Procuring Aluminum Tubes and What the IAEA Has Found to Date," states that the INR, the Energy Department, and the International Atomic Energy Agency all believe that Iraq's infamous aluminum tubes are to be used for conventional weapons and not for any sort of nuclear missiles. This Senior Executive Memorandum is circulated among Bush's senior officials, including Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. (Frank Rich [PDF file])

January 11: Donald Rumsfeld privately shares the administration's war plans for Iraq with Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, and assures Bandar, "You can count on this. This is going to happen." Two days later, Bush tells Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has been deliberately left out of the information loop, that he has decided to go to war with Iraq, and demands Powell's support. A hesistant Powell agrees to comply. (Mother Jones)

January 13: Bush tells Secretary of State Colin Powell that he has decided to go to war with Iraq. Powell is quite aware of the huge amount of war planning that has been going on for a year, but Bush is only now telling him that war with Iraq is a certainty. "You understand the consequences," Powell says. "You know that you're going to be owning this place?" Bush says he realizes that. "Are you with me on this?" Bush asks Powell. "I think I have to do this. I want you with me." Powell replies, "I'm with you, Mr. President." Bush then says to the veteran soldier, "Time to put your war uniform on." Bush later confirms, very reluctantly, to reporter Bob Woodward that he had asked Powell directly for his support, but adds pettishly, "I didn't need his permission." (Bob Woodward)
January 13: A State Department nuclear analyst sends an e-mail to several intelligence analysts "outlining his reasoning why, 'the uranium purchase agreement [between Iraq and Niger] probably is a hoax," according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's July 7, 2004 report on prewar Iraq intelligence. The report notes that the e-mail also indicates that "one of the documents that purported to be an agreement for a joint military campaign, including both Iraq and Iran, was so ridiculous that it was 'clearly a forgery.'" (Frank Rich [PDF file])
January 13: The British daily Guardian reports on the state of journalism in the US: "The worldwide turmoil caused by President Bush's policies goes not exactly unreported, but entirely de-emphasized. Guardian writers are inundated by e-mails from Americans asking plaintively why their own papers never print what is in these columns.... If there is a Watergate scandal lurking in [the Bush] administration, it is unlikely to be [Washington Post journalist Bob] Woodward or his colleagues who will tell us about it. If it emerges, it will probably come out on the web. That is a devastating indictment of the state of American newspapers." (Guardian)

January 14: A group of 25 Republican business leaders jointly submit a letter to the Bush administration, reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, asking that the President find another solution to dealing with Saddam Hussein than a war. The signees include a retired Vice Admiral, the former CEO of Hotjobs Inc., the co-founder of a leading chemical company and the chairman of another, the managing partner of a leading Wall Street investment firm, and others.
The letter reads in part, "Let's be clear: We supported the Gulf War. We supported our intervention in Afghanistan. We accept the logic of a just war. But Mr. President, your war on Iraq does not pass the test. It is not a just war. The candidate we supported in 2000 promised a more humble nation in our dealings with the world. We gave him our votes and our campaign contributions. That candidate was you. We feel betrayed. We want our money back. We want our country back. War is the most extreme action a society can take. It can only be unleashed after exploring every other road. You have not explored all the roads. How many young American lives will be lost in this dubious war? How many more innocent Iraqis will be killed and maimed and made homeless? Haven't they suffered enough, after two decades of terrible wars and sanctions? Among the one billion Muslims in the world there is now a steady trickle of recruits going to al Qaeda. You will turn the trickle into a torrent. ...And out of war may rise an Iraqi regime every bit as brutish as the present one. What will you do then? Our jaws drop when we read that you may decide we have to occupy Iraq for years, that the next ruler of Iraq may be...an American general! Is there anyone who thinks that will work? Your odds of success are infinitesimal! The world wants Saddam Hussein disarmed. But you must find a better way to do it. Why would you lead us into a situation where we are bound to fail? You cannot keep proclaiming peace while preparing for war. You are waltzing blindfolded into what may well be a catastrophe. Pride goeth before a fall. Show the humility and compassion that led us to elect you." Like virtually all of the conservative opposition to the upcoming war, the letter is all but ignored by the American media, which seems bent on portraying all opposition as coming from the far left of the political spectrum. (Anita Roddick)

January 15: Former Iran-Contra figure Elliot Abrams, a staunch neoconservative and war hawk, has been working tirelessly in the NSC to coordinate the humanitarian efforts in postwar Iraq. Working closely for months with General Tommy Franks's CENTCOM, Abrams has drawn up numerous no-strike lists, mostly of hospitals, water plants, and electrical grids, in hopes of keeping Iraq's infrastructure as operational as possible after the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Abrams tells Bush that the war would displace as many as two million Iraqis. The US is stockpiling food, water, and tents for the new refugees. Money was quietly being moved to UN agencies and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) so they would be ready. The exact number of refugees, and the conditions in Iraq, would be largely determined by interethnic tensions among Iraq's three major religious and cultural groups, the Kurds, Sunni, and Shi'a, as would the level of violence and reprisals. In one PowerPoint slide, Abrams shows how Hussein might order the blowing up of dams to flood parts of the countryside. It could shape up to be one of the worst humanitarian crises of modern history. Bush is primarily worried about the public relations impact. "This is an opportunity to change the image of the United States," he tells his war cabinet. "We need to make the most of these humanitarian aid efforts in our public diplomacy. I want to build surge capability. ...I want loaded ships ready to provide food and water and relief supplies so we can go in very promptly. ...There are a lot of things that could go wrong, but not for lack of planning.
Retired general Jay Garner, Rumsfeld's pick to head the military's reconstruction and humanitarian efforts, is not invited to take part in Abrams's presentation. On January 16, he meets with Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith in Rumsfeld's office. Rumsfeld assures him that "regardless of what you're told, there's been an awful lot of planning throughout the government for this." However, it has all been done in the "vertical stovepipe" of each of the federal agencies, including Defense. "I recommend that you try to horizontally connect the plans and find out what the problems are and work on those problems and anything else you find." Feith is contemptuous of the way Afghanistan was handled after the October offensive, laying most of the blame on the State Department, which he calls the "Department of Nice." Feith believes that Afghanistan was not stabilized fast enough, and that the fault lies with State. He wants Defense to handle postwar Iraq until State can stand up an embassy. Until then, Feith argues, State must be subordinate to Defense. Garner is worried about the time factor. In World War II, he reminds Rumsfeld, the allies had started planning for reconstruction of Europe years before the end of the war. "You're taking on this problem to solve what will need a solution in somewhere between five and ten weeks." Rumsfeld agrees, and advises Garner to "just maximize the time available." (Bob Woodward)
January 15: Bush chooses Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday to unveil the Justice Department's brief against the University of Michigan's affirmative action program. Four times he claims that the program amounts to a "quota system," which is absolutely false -- such quotas have been illegal since the 1978 Bakke Supreme Court decision, and UM has no such set-asides. Even former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr says later, "I'm not sure I would say it is a quota system." In midsummer 2003, the Supreme Court rules in the two Michigan cases that no such quotas are in effect, and that the affirmative action plan followed by the UM law school is perfectly constitutional. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
January 15: Veteran spy novelist John le Carre, who has extensive knowledge and connections inside British and American intelligence agencies, tells the London Times, "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War." (London Times/Buzzflash)

January 16: UN inspectors find 11 empty chemical casings, possibly intended for use as missile warheads. (CCR)

January 18: A series of polls shows that the World War II generation of Americans is the most solidly opposed to the Iraqi war. While they almost uniformly backed the US invasion of Afghanistan and support US efforts to combat terrorism, most don't feel that the Bush administration has a legitimate reason for overthrowing the Iraqi government. Many are unconvinced by the stories of Iraq's WMD programs, and are suspicious that Bush and his war cabinet are motivated by a desire to avenge the first President Bush's mistakes or to capture a ready supply of oil. Strongly patriotic, they are still waiting for a convincing explanation of the invasion. "Now don't paint me as un-American," says Fred Thomas, 90, a former commander of an artillery battery in Europe. "I'm a solid, hard-rock American. I've been a Republican since 1934. I just don't like fighting the kind of war that I can't put my fingers on. With the Germans, you could depend on what they were going to do, but these people fight different." Retired signal corpsman Gibson Reynolds says he has "always been very pro-American, it's part of the history of being at war." But he sees no evidence so far that merits going to war in Iraq. "I'm willing to be convinced either way. But if there's some darned good reason for going to war, I haven't seen it yet. There was a reason for going into Afghanistan. I was in favor of that. There was a reason for going into Kuwait. I was in favor of that. In this present situation, I have not been given enough information to know." Ex-Marine Bill Berglund advocates military action against Saudi Arabia -- "They financed 9/11, and their young men flew the planes" -- but opposes the Iraq war. "I am dead set against it," he says. "It is a needless exercise of power by a certain group of people in Washington." Royden Sanders, the director of Sanders Design International in New Hampshire, says of Bush that he must have the necessary evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, or he risks "making the biggest mistake of his life. If this is just a sham, if we went in there and there wasn't anything, then he would be finished, he would not even run for a second term." Former Navy lieutenant William Gross says, "If we have to go into Baghdad, it will be another Vietnam." (Los Angeles Times/Truthout)
January 18: CNN's conservative pundit Robert Novak tells viewers, "The last thing that the hawks inside the administration, and their friends outside the administration, want is a coup d'etat that would replace Saddam Hussein. They want a war as a manifestation of US power in the world and as a sign that the United States is capable of changing the balance of power and the political map of the Middle East. ...[I was] talking to a senior official, and he said to me, he said, 'Well, if we don't hit in Iraq, where are we going to hit?' And they -- it's a desire that the United States, the superpower, is going to manifest its authority to the rest of the world." (CNN/Buzzflash)

January 20: In a complete reversal of 200 years of practice, Bush signs a secret National Security Presidential Directive, NSPD-24, authorizing the creation of an "Iraq Postwar Planning Office" in the Pentagon. This finishes the conflict between the State Department, traditionally the leader in handling post-war actions and policies, and Defense; State is now virtually shut out of the process, leaving the neocons in the Pentagon in complete control. The directive also creates the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the first organization to operate in post-war Iraq; the ORHA will later be subsumed by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
Part of the discussion centers around who will be the "proconsul," the temporary American ruler, of Iraq after Hussein is overthrown. Many senior Bush officials want General Tommy Franks to take the job, but many others oppose the idea of a military officer taking the spot. It would put an occupation face on the US presence in Iraq, they argue; no one needs another General MacArthur. Condoleezza Rice is particularly appalled at the idea. The question of how to structure the US ruling body is a thorny one, hence the creation of the IPPO. The handling of post-invasion Afghanistan was a complete bust, say both Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith. Rumsfeld says it is because responsibilities for the postwar period was parceled out to different countries, with Germany handling police training, Italy handling the emplacement of the new judiciary, and so forth. And even within the US government, different agencies had their different responsibilities. General Jay Garner's group is an attempt to handle this job.
According to Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley, Colin Powell agrees with Rumsfeld that Defense, and not State, should handle the entire postwar situation in Iraq, despite State's huge "Future of Iraq" project and in spite of Powell's own statements to the contrary. According to Hadley, Powell finds the idea of unity of command attractive, and acknowledges the historical precedent of what the US did in Germany and Japan after World War II. Garner, whose group is in charge of the on-the-ground humanitarian and reconstruction efforts, has no input on the decision. Days later, when he reads the directive, he is flabbergasted. Defense has the overall control of the entire postwar reconstruction effort, and Defense is putting his small, understaffed group in charge. Garner thought he'd be a glorified chief of staff, but the presidential directive makes him responsible for all the tasks normally run by national, state, and local governments in post-Saddam Iraq. Ten separate agencies will begin detailing experts to Garner's office, and the directive orders Garner and his staff to deploy to Iraq "to form the nucleus of the administrative apparatus that will assist in administering Iraq for a limited period of time." Garner gets Rumsfeld's approval for his approach to handling the enormous set of tasks, but he can see Rumsfeld is thinking about the invasion and not about the aftermath. In the weeks to come, Garner finds himself waking up in the wee hours to dictate to-do lists. He realizes he has been given an impossible task, but he has the military's can-do attitude. "I thought this was going to be superhard," he later recalls, but "I never failed at anything." (Mother Jones, Bob Woodward)
January 20: In a letter to Dick Cheney, Bush writes in regard to Iraq's supposed nuclear program, "The [Iraqi] report also failed to deal with issues which have arisen since 1998, including...attempts to acquire uranium and the means to enrich it." The CIA has already debunked the reports indicating Iraq was attempting to obtain weapons-grade uranium. Of course, within days of Bush's sensational claim of January 28 that Iraq had attempted to obtain weapons-grade uranium from Niger, the public learns of the lies and deceptions behind the claims. Regardless, these claims are still made by Bush officials as late as mid-2006. (Bush on Iraq)
January 20: French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin attacks the US plans for an Iraqi war: "Nothing today justifies envisaging military action." This provokes a backlash among the Bush administration and the American public against all things French, which sometimes hits ludicrous extremes (i.e. renaming French fries "freedom fries"). Most of the nations that backed Resolution 1441 are warning the United States not to rush into war, and Germany, which opposes military action, will assume the chair of the Security Council in February, on the eve of the planned invasion. (The New Republic)
January 20: Time magazine reveals the existence of a set of memos by Republican pollster Frank Luntz telling Republicans how to deal with issues such as the environment, issues that the GOP finds itself in opposition to the majority of public opinion. "The first (and most important) step to neutralizing the problem and eventually bringing people around to your point of view on environmental issues," writes Luntz, "is to convince them of your 'sincerity' and 'concern'." Note the quotation marks around the terms "sincerity" and "concern." (Time/Paul Waldman)

January 21: Bush says, "It appears to be a re-run of a bad movie. [Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] is delaying. He's deceiving. He's asking for time. He's playing hide-and-seek with inspectors. One thing is for certain -- he's not disarming." He adds, "He has weapons of mass destruction -- the world's deadliest weapons -- which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens and our friends and allies." (Democratic Underground, White House/Doug Long)

Increasing resistance to US plans to invade Iraq from other countries

January 22: Donald Rumsfeld insults France, Germany, and by extension most of Europe in his statements about Europe's relative lack of support for military intervention in Iraq. " Germany has been a problem and France has been a problem" over US plans for a UN resolution to invade Iraq. He continues, "You're thinking of Europe as France and Germany. I don't. I think that's old Europe...vast numbers of other countries in Europe [are not] with France and Germany...they're with the US." (Pakistan Daily Times)

January 23: The Senate passes an amendment that all but suspends John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project for use inside the US, one of a very few Congressional defeats for Bush's policies. The TIA is widely seen by both Democrats and Republicans as a massively unconstitutional incursion into Americans' privacy and civil rights. Although opponents of the TIA celebrate a victory, the TIA will not die a quiet death, but instead is subsumed into the Pentagon, where it will continue to illegally compile data on Americans. (Senate Amendment 59 to H.J. Res 2 on Total Information Awareness, Mother Jones)
January 23: Condoleezza Rice pens an op-ed for the New York Times titled "Why We Know Iraq is Lying." Rice's own lies and misstatements pepper the editorial; most notable is her accusation that Iraq has failed "to account for or explain" its supposed efforts to buy uranium from Niger. A week later, Bush will issue his famous accusation in his State of the Union address about Iraq attempting to purchase African uranium for a nuclear weapon. Both Rice and Bush are knowingly lying about the fraudulent accusations, but they are also keenly aware of the sensational and inflammatory nature of the charges. It is also interesting that Rice, though more than willing to speak out publicly about her beliefs on Iraq, refuses to discuss the matter with Congress. (Frank Rich p.68)
January 23: One of the most astonishing examples of media pandering for George W. Bush comes from a New York Times column written by Nicholas Kristof. During the 2000 campaign, Bush indignantly denied to Kristof that, as a boy, he was rejected by the St. Johns private school in Houston. The next day a Bush staffer called Kristof to correct the story: it seems that Bush had indeed been rejected. In relating the tale in his column, Kristof writes, "I found his willingness to confirm this unflattering detail an impressive example of his political integrity, and it was this kind of honesty that won Mr. Bush the respect of many journalists who were covering him." Fellow journalist Paul Waldman remarks, "The fact that Bush said something untrue then admitted his mistake is evidence to Kristof and apparently to other journalists of impressive integrity. Just as journalists found the most trivial inaccuracies to be proof of pathological mendacity when spoken by Al Gore, admitting to faulty memory about an inconsequential event decades before yields Bush a glowing tribute." The editor of this site notes that Bush had a staffer call to issue the correction, and didn't bother to do it himself. It also speaks to Bush's character that, even if one considers his denial an honest mistake, his immediate reaction to the question was an indignant denial. (New York Times/Paul Waldman)
January 23: Actor, comedian, and liberal gadfly Janeane Garofalo says that she is booked on Fox, CNN, MSNBC and "Good Morning America," among others, to argue against the war in Iraq: "They have actors on so they can marginalize the movement," she says. "It's much easier to toss it off as some bizarre, unintelligent special-interest group. If you're an actor who is pro-war, you're a hero. If you're an actor who's against the war, you're suspect. You must have a weird angle or you just hate George Bush." Garofalo has suffered the same ridicule and character assassination as dozens of other liberal entertainers, from Sean Penn to Barbra Streisand, but unlike some of her colleagues, Garofalo is both outspoken and well-informed. However, you wouldn't know it from some of the treatment she's endured. "I'm being treated like a child, and that's how I think the American people are being treated by their media," she says. She recalls CNN's Connie Chung asking her about American soldiers: "Don't you feel a bit of responsibility in the sense of being supportive of them?" Garofalo says the question "was so silly that it actually had me flummoxed. If you are in the antiwar movement, you obviously don't want the troops to be hurt." Of the media, she says, "These same corporate entities have an interest in war, have an interest in profiting from war. They represent corporate America. Corporate America dictates the news we are getting." Of news anchors and talking heads, she says that all too many of them "are willing to be a mouthpiece for the establishment and for White House propaganda." Garofalo will join the staff of liberal radio network Air America as an on-air host until mid-2006. (Washington Post)

January 24: The IAEA tells the Bush administration that the aluminum tubes once considered possible devices for the construction of nuclear weapons are confirmed to be nothing but conventional rocket parts. One tube even has the word "Rocket" stamped on its side. "It may be technically possible that the tubes could be used to enrich uranium," says one official, "but you'd have to believe that Iraq deliberately ordered the wrong stock and intended to spend a great deal of time and money reworking each piece." Bush officials shelve the report. (Mother Jones)

January 25: After weeks of work on Colin Powell's February speech to the UN, spearheaded by NSC deputy Stephen Hadley and Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby, Libby presents the assembled material to a meeting of senior White House officials, including Hadley, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, Bush's advisor Karen Hughes, and Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage. Libby brazenly presents the same long-debunked material "proving" Hussein's WMD stockpiles and al-Qaeda ties as fact; he calls the various assertions a "Chinese menu" that the speechwriters can pick and choose from to build the most powerful presentation possible. Armitage is appalled, but Wolfowitz and Rove are impressed. Hadley cautions Libby to stick to what can be proven. The group agrees again that Powell, the most credible member of the administration, should make the presentation.
Powell harbors deep doubts about the entire rationale for invading Iraq, but first and foremost Powell is a good soldier. He has already agreed to back Bush in the runup to war, but has continued to try to create a diplomatic solution that might avert the "necessity" of an invasion. Powell and his deputies, Armitage and Mark Grossman, still have hopes that they can mount a diplomatic end-run around Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the war-lusting neocons in the White House. Powell's plan centers around keeping the UN inspections process going, while using the military buildup to pressure Hussein -- either to step down, to trigger an internal coup by his opponents, or spark other significant changes. But days before, Powell and his group had all but accepted defeat. There was no likelihood of the UN sanctioning any kind of military action against Iraq, not with the implacable resistance of Security Council members like France, Germany, and China. War seems the only option left.
On January 29, Powell hands his chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, a draft script for the UN presentation in early February, that he has received from Cheney. The draft was constructed by Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. Powell instructs Wilkerson to begin working through the draft, coordinating with the White House and the CIA to make the speech as solid as possible. The rubric for the speech is Adlai Stevenson's dramatic 1962 speech to the UN where Stevenson, the US's ambassador to the UN, displayed aerial photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba and demanded an explanation from the Soviet ambassador. "I'm prepared to wait until hell freezes over," Stevenson said. Powell and Wilkerson will study tapes of Stevenson's presentation as a model for Powell's own.
Wilkerson begins by going to CIA headquarters and meeting with senior CIA officials, including director George Tenet, deputy director John McLaughlin, the head of nuclear issues Robert Joseph, John Hannah (a staunch neoconservative) from Cheney's office, and Will Tobey from the NSC, to go over the draft. Wilkerson insists on seeing the source material for every assertion and claim in the draft, a tedious and irksome process. As the meeting drags on, Wilkerson becomes increasingly impatient with the lack of solid source material. "It was clear the thing was put together by cherry-pocking everything from the New York Times to the DIA," he later recalls. Sources contradicted one another, and source materials were being stretched far out of context and sometimes just ignored. Some sources are patently unreliable, such as op-ed columns from the Washington Times based on "leaks" from right-wing hardliners in the Pentagon. And much of the material comes from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, a source long proven unreliable.
Wilkerson halts the process after six frustrating hours, saying, "This isn't going to cut it, ladies and gentlemen. We're never going to get there. We're going to have to have a different method." Then Tenet makes a startling suggestion: junk the entire Libby draft and use the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. Wilkerson agrees, and the NIE, as contradictory and badly sourced as it is, gives the presentation at least the illusion of solidity. Some items are still hotly contested, such as the notorious aluminum tubes supposedly "proving" Hussein's nuclear program. At one point, someone suggests that Powell actually hold up one of the tubes as a visual aid, but a staffer for Condoleezza Rice, Anna Perez, balks, warning that the photo will dominate the next day's news. "Do you really want to do that?" she asks. Perez is no national security expert, but, as a veteran of the Walt Disney empire, she knows marketing and communications. The entire speech would be hooked onto a visual of the most shaky evidence in the entire presentation. The idea of using one of the tubes themselves is scrapped. But the group wants a visual. Eventually, they come up with the idea of having Powell hold up a small medical vial and intoning that the vial, if it contained "less than a teaspoon of anthrax," could inflict the same kind of damage that had, in 2001, shut down the US Senate, killed two postal workers, and forced several hundred Senate staffers and postal workers to get emergency medical treatment. (See the 2001 page of this site for more information on the anthrax attacks.)
Interestingly, no serious criticism of the claim that Iraq had tried to buy large quantities of uranium from Niger ever takes place.
On January 31, the State Department's own intelligence bureau, the INR, completes its vetting of the new draft, and flags 38 allegations in the speech as weak or unsubstantiated. 35 of the items will eventually be deleted, but three remain, leading Powell to make claims in his speech that even his own department's specialists do not believe. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
January 25: After the annual Alfalfa Club dinner at the Capital Hilton Hotel, where Bush and his mother are guest speakers, Barbara Bush speaks privately with former Democratic senator David Boren, an old Bush family friend and Washington insider. She asks Boren, "Are we right to be worried about this Iraq thing? ...Do you think it's a mistake?" and Boren replies, "I think it's a huge mistake if we go in right now, this way." Mrs. Bush tells Boren that her husband, the former president and the current president's father, is "losing sleep over it. He's up at night worried." But, she says, the elder Bush won't talk to his son about it unless the younger Bush asks for his advice, and so far he has not. "I understand the feeling of a father but he's the former president of the United States and an expert in this area." Mrs. Bush just shakes her head. (Bob Woodward)

January 26: Colin Powell tells European reporters that the administration has "evidence of" the asserted links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. "We are not suggesting that there is a 9/11 link," he says, though Bush and Cheney have both made such assertions repeatedly, "but we are suggesting -- we do have evidence -- of connections over the years between Iraq and al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations." (Frank Rich [PDF file])
January 26: Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, one of the first and most vociferous critics of the Bush administration's lies about Iraqi WMDs, is the target of a renewed probe into allegations that he attempted to entice an underage girl into watching him perform a sex act from an Internet chat room. The charges, which were filed in January 2001 in Albany, New York, were dismissed, but local prosecutors have responded to a federal request to examine the evidence once again. Ritter says that he is being targeted by the Bush administration in an attempt to force his silence. No charges are ever brought against Ritter as a result of the attempt to reopen the case. (Dawn)

January 27: Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix reports, "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it." Future reports from Blix are ambivalent, and are used by advocates of both war and peace to short up their positions. The director of the IAEA, Mohammed ElBaradei, reports to the UN that the infamous aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq are indeed used in the construction of conventional rockets, infuriating Bush officials. (FactMonster, Mother Jones)
January 27: The UN issues a press release on Resolution 1441 stating that it believes Iraq has demonstrated a clear intention to comply with the resolution, cooperating with UN inspectors to complete the disarmament of Iraq. It reports that after inspecting 106 sites, it has found no evidence whatsoever of any Iraqi nuclear programs. (Mother Jones)
January 27: Press spokesman Ari Fleischer says, "Nobody, but nobody, is more reluctant to go to war than President Bush." (White House/Doug Long)
January 27: Right-wing pundit and Bush crony Peggy Noonan tells the Wall Street Journal that Bush lives in fear of an imminent attack by Iraq: "[Bush] has had trouble sleeping, and...when he awakes in the morning the first thing he often thinks is, I wonder if this is the day Saddam will do it. ...[H]e wonders if this will be the day Saddam launches a terror attack here, on American soil." (Wall Street Journal/Mark Crispin Miller)
January 27: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is empowered to process public requests for access to certain information on a "need to know" basis, denying previously allowed access to information about America's energy infrastructure to FOIA requests. (Stephen Pizzo/Daily Misleader)

Bush's State of Union address; lies about WMDs abound

January 28: In Bush's State of the Union address, he continues to insist that Saddam Hussein is a clear and imminent danger to the US, ignoring the raft of evidence to the contrary. Bush claims that intelligence reports indicate that Iraq has (or, more accurately, might have) "the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard gas, and VX nerve agent," all of which could be used against targets in the United States. He says, "Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses, and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other planes -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known;" a powerful image, but not one rooted in evidence against Iraq. Despite UN inspectors or intelligence officials finding no concrete evidence of any of these materials, Bush will use allegations like this one: "our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production,"to justify the US invasion of Iraq. Bush indicates that he is willing to begin an attack on Iraq with or without UN approval: "If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him."
The prelude to the speech is carefully orchestrated and marketed to incite as much apprehension as possible. Visitors to the Capitol before the speech are instructed how to escape a bioterrorism attack and are informed about the location of protective gear in wooden cabinets in the hallway. One seat in Laura Bush's viewing box in the balcony is left empty, as a camera-friendly "tribute" to those who died on 9/11.
He accuses Iraq of having the materials to produce "as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." He also cites a supposed discovery that Iraq has purchased nuclear material from Niger, a supposition that has long been proven false. (His exact words, which have caused so much consternation, are: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa. ...Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.") Retired security analyst Greg Thielmann said in June 2003, "I was very surprised to hear that he announced that to the United States and the entire world." Thielmann referred to the forged document as a "stupid piece of garbage." Another analyst, David Albright, says, "One person who heard a classified briefing on Iraq in late 2002 said that there was laughter in the room when the uranium evidence was presented." The administration will later claim that its senior officials had no idea that the uranium evidence was so weak when Bush made his speech; this claim has been countered again and again, with evidence that Vice President Cheney knew that a diplomat sent to Africa to verify the claim had proven its falsity, that CIA director Tenet warned Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley not to use the claim in an earlier Bush speech, and that days before the State of the Union address, Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who reports to Rice on nuclear proliferation, was fully briefed by CIA analyst Alan Foley that the Niger connection was no stronger than it had been in October. Tony Blair will later claim that Britain has "other evidence" of the uranium deal; a diplomat says of the so-called evidence, "As far as I know, the only other evidence Britain has about the Niger connection is based on intelligence coming from other western countries which saw the same forgeries. Blair's claim that he has other evidence is nonsense. These foreign intelligence agencies are basing their claims on the same forgeries as the Brits."
Bush also continues to falsely claim that Saddam Hussein's government has clear ties to al-Qaeda, saying, "...Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help develop their own." The CIA and other US intelligence agencies have long since debunked any claims of a Hussein-al-Qaeda connection.
The Associated Press observes after the speech, "Americans are still being asked to take it on faith that the government knows what it has yet to show -- that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction and has ties to al-Qaeda. ...The allegations were thicker than the evidence...."
Bush also provides a huge, multilayered lie about Iraq's nuclear program: "The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb." Not only is Iraq's nuclear program defunct, and its remnants buried in a scientist's rose garden, but the IAEA clearly acknowledges that the program is defunct in documents readily available on the Internet. The statement has a grain of truth, in that Iraq did have a burgeoning nuclear program in 1990, before it was destroyed during the Gulf War and afterwards by UN inspectors. The IAEA reported in 1999, "All known indigenous facilities capable of producing uranium compounds useful to a nuclear programme were destroyed during the Gulf War; IAEA inspected and completed the destruction of facilities; IAEA monitored the sites as part of their OMV activities."
What the IAEA confirmed in the latter part of the 1990s is that they had confiscated Iraq's entire inventory of research reactor fuel, and destroyed all equipment and facilities for the purpose of enriching uranium. In 1998, the IAEA reported: "There were no indications to suggest that Iraq was successful in its attempt to produce nuclear weapons. Iraq's explanation of its progress towards the finalization of a workable design for its nuclear weapons was considered to be consistent with the resources and time scale indicated by the available program documentation. Iraq was at, or close to, the threshold of success in such areas as the production of HEU through the EMIS process, the production and pilot cascading of single-cylinder sub-critical gas centrifuge machines, and the fabrication of the explosive package for a nuclear weapon. There were no indications to suggest that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of weapons-grade nuclear material through its indigenous processes. There were no indications that Iraq otherwise clandestinely acquired weapons-usable material. All the safeguarded research reactor fuel was verified and fully accounted for by the IAEA and removed from Iraq. There were no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapons-usable nuclear material of any practical significance." After inspections resumed in November 2002, the IAEA confirmed that Iraq's nuclear program was still moribund.
As part of the orchestrated run-up to war, Bush announces that in a week's time, Secretary of State Colin Powell will brief the UN Security Council, where he will offer "information and intelligence" about Iraq's WMDs and links to terrorist organizations. (Powell's presentation is already in the works, with White House, NSC, and CIA staffers working overtime on it. See the January 25 item above.) Press secretary Ari Fleischer says the next day that Powell will go before the UNSC to "connect the dots." Fleischer adds, ominously, "There's a review under way. We are now entering the final phase."
Chillingly, Bush also gloats over the implied death by torture of a large number of suspected terrorists who have been arrested either by US or other authorities, and interrogated to death by other governments' torturers: "All told, more than 3000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries," Bush says. "Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and to our friends and allies." Bush is not only referring to the death by torture of suspected terrorists, but the assassinations of suspected terrorists by the CIA. One example is the death of six suspected al-Qaeda members in Yemen, who were killed by a missile fired from a Predator drone aircraft. One of the six was a US citizen. No charges were brought against any of them, and whatever evidence the US may have had about their complicity, or lack thereof, with al-Qaeda has never been released. Peter Singer writes, "The deprivations of liberty and of rights of due process that Bush has authorized and defended place national security ahead of rights so basic that they are usually taken for granted in a society governed by law." (The New Republic, White House, Sunday Herald, FactMonster, Dissident Voice, Working For Change, White House/Doug Long, IAEA, Mahablog, Bush on Iraq, David Corn, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Peter Singer, Seymour Hersh)
The story behind the State of the Union is interesting in and of itself. The speech has been in the works for all of January, and is largely the product of chief Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson and his colleagues John Gibson and Michael Scully. The goal is to make the strongest allegations and accusations they can against Saddam Hussein, and never mind the factual accuracy of the claims. The most notable element of the speech, as noted above, is the reintroduction of the specious claim that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger for the production of nuclear weapons. The speechwriters had been given unprecedented access to top secret material -- specifically, the unexpurgated National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002, which contains the Niger allegation. After a brief discussion, they decide to put the allegation in, figuring that if it crosses a line, Robert Joseph, the hardline NSC staffer who handles nuclear matters, will take it out.
The speechwriters have long been enamoured of definitive, declarative rhetorical statements. Bush says that "we know" Iraq has chemical weapons, "we know" that Iraq has biological weapons. Though the statements are false, they are powerful. The speechwriters write a similar line for the Niger uranium deal: "We also know that [Hussein] has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa." Joseph sends the line to the CIA for approval, where it winds up in the hands of the equally hardline WINPAC analysts.
The head of WINPAC, Alan Foley, lets the line stay in, though he knows full well that an array of State Department analysts and nuclear experts have pronounced the documents supporting the Niger claim to be entire fraudulent. The CIA itself had warned the White House four separate times not to use the claim. CIA director George Tenet had warned deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley not to make the claim. Deputy CIA director John McLaughlin had testified to the Senate in October 2002 that the CIA didn't find the uranium story "very credible." But Foley and WINPAC remain determined to present the claim, and Foley is a senior CIA official who isn't objecting to its inclusion. That is all Joseph needs to sign off on the claim's inclusion. Foley himself is a veteran Soviet analyst who knows relatively little about Iraqi weapons issues. He is aware, however, that the White House wants to make the claim. He also knows that the claim is in serious dispute. He raises the procedural issue that the line as written might be construed as revealing information from a classified source -- Italy's intelligence service, SISMI. So Foley and Joseph work out an alternative. The speech will refer to a British white paper, publicly released in September 2002, which makes the claim. This gives them, and Bush, enough wiggle room -- if the claim is later publicly pronounced bogus, Bush officials can always claim that the British source misled them. The unwitting British, not the Bush administration, is the ones who actually made the claim.
A senior CIA official later claims that neither Tenet nor McLaughlin are aware of the deal between Foley and Joseph. These two are more concerned with another element of the speech, the announcement of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center that would compel the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security to share and analyze threat information in a single location. None of the bureaucrats of any of the agencies involved wanted the center, or at least they didn't want the hassles and headaches involved in creating such a center. Tenet and McLaughlin spend most of their time working over this issue.
Meanwhile Karen Hughes, the former White House communications director who is now an "informal" consultant to Bush, wants the Iraq claims to be as specific and concrete as possible. She wants the "we know" phrasings eliminated and replaced with sources: "the United Nations concluded," "the International Atomic Energy Agency found," "Iraqi defectors say," and so forth. And who can we identify as the source of the Niger claim? The British. Hughes independently reaches the same conclusion as Foley and Joseph.
For his part, Gibson isn't worried that the Niger claim has been repeatedly excised from earlier speeches and statements. He isn't an expert, and he figures that someone must have concluded the claim is valid. Neither Gerson nor Hadley, both of whom had earlier been told by the CIA to dump any references to the claim, object to the claim's inclusion. As for Tenet, when he is given a near-final draft of the speech, he has it passed to the director of the intelligence directorate. He never reads the final draft for himself, and is apparently unaware of the uranium claim's inclusion.
Reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write, "The one line had become part of the speech due to a series of screw-ups and all-too-convenient memory lapses. But it was no simple accident. At the CIA, the NSC, and the White House speechwriting shop, officials were as eager to go as far as they could to depict Saddam as a danger. Nobody insisted on rigorous fact checking, which might end up diluting the power of the president's message. Bush's State of the Union speech would contain other assertions about Iraq that would be wrong or overstated, yet it would be his sixteen words about uranium and Africa that would cause the greatest havoc for the administration and come to represet the White House's inflation of the WMD issue." (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
Bush's State of the Union address also contains more of his standard rhetoric about his tax cuts benefiting the middle- and lower-class workers of America, rhetoric proven false almost from the moment he presented it. He falsely portrays his 2001 tax cuts as favoring the same poor and middle-income workers, he touts his education reform legislation without mentioning the firestorm of criticism from educators and experts, he takes credit for the establishment of a Department of Homeland Security without mentioning his stiff opposition to its creation, and takes credit for a white-collar crime bill without mentioning his successful efforts to water the bill down to virtual meaninglessness. He pledges to spend $15 billion over the next ten years to combat global AIDS, a pledge he will almost immediately break, and says that senior citizens should be able to keep their Medicare coverage "just the way it is" without mentioning that his aides are working on a package that would force seniors who wish prescription drug benefits to join a government-selected HMO. He also advances his idea for privatizing Social Security. One item he fails to mention at all is the ballooning federal deficit. (David Corn)
AAs a sop to environmentalists in his speech, Bush announces a five-year, $1.2 billion "FreedomCAR" program for the production of an automobile that runs on hydrogen fuel cells. The program requirements have no timetable, nor do they require even a prototype of such a vehicle. The $1.2 billion (spread out over five years) is less than 20% of what DaimlerChrysler spends on research and development in a single year. The Union of Concerned Scientists' Bud Ris says, "If it was a really serious effort, on the scale of the Manhattan Project, we'd be talking about a $24-to-$27 billion project. ...Hydrogen is the Holy Grail of the environmental movement, but it'll take twenty to thirty years. It's not worth doing it if we're robbing the money from things that are already working." The Bush administration's real priorities can be ascertained through its tax breaks for huge, gas-guzzling SUVs and Hummers, a tax break that allows the purchaser of a Hummer H1 to deduct a stunning $87,000 of its $102,000 price tag. (An Alaskan salesman calls it "a tax 'loophole' big enough to drive a Hummer H2 through.") As for those of us interested in buying fuel-efficient cars, we get tax breaks of zero. Eric Alterman and Mark Green note that the automotive industry, with its huge campaign contributions to both Republicans and Democrats, will continue to fight fuel efficiency in its cars, just as it fought seat belts in the 1960s and 70s and airbags in the 1980s.
Author Mark Crispin Miller calls the entire speech "a tapestry of lies," rolling up lies about Iraq with lies about Bush's environmental stance, the amount of US foreign aid, the benefits of his tax cut plans, and more. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Mark Crispin Miller)
The Bush administration goes to great lengths to insist that Bush himself, and not merely speechwriters, in large part wrote the State of the Union address himself. Though he did not write the speech himself, Bush edited the drafts, wrote notes in the margins, and gave his speech writers pointers. This is notable for the tremendous outcry over false and misleading information throughout the speech, and for Bush's later attempts to distance himself from it. (Consortium News)
Of all the mainstream news outlets, only the Associated Press bothers to dissect the farrago of lies and deceptions in the speech; the others vie with one another to see who can heap more praise on Bush. (One statement from the AP is quoted in the above item about the speech itself.) The AP is also the only mainstream American news outlet to report on the vilification the speech earns from the rest of the world's media. (Mark Crispin Miller)
Former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had gone to Niger to try to find evidence of the claims about Iraq's supposed attempt to purchase uranium and failed to find any, is puzzled by the reference in Bush's speech. The next day, Wilson calls a friend in the State Department and says that if Bush is indeed referring to the Niger claim, he may have misspoke. Not only had Wilson found no evidence of the claim, he tells his State Department friend, but a Marine Corps general had reported that such a deal was unlikely. Was there new information? Wilson asks. If not, then the record should be corrected. The State Department official delicately suggests that Bush might be referring to some other African country. Wilson later recalls, "I had no reason to doubt my informant -- his access and knowledge were more current than mine -- so I didn't pursue the matter. It was my business only if the president was referring to Niger." (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)

"The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself." -- George W. Bush, January 29, 2003

January 29: The CIA releases a classified report casting serious doubt on the administration's claims that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta ever met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague, as has been claimed by Bush, Cheney, and other officials in support of their claims that Iraq has ties with al-Qaeda. The report is ignored by the administration. (Mother Jones)
January 29: Conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly says of the upcoming Iraq invasion: "I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?" Almost two weeks later, he adds, "There's no way. There's absolutely no way. They may bomb for a matter of weeks, try to soften them up as they did in Afghanistan. But once the United States and British unleash, it's maybe hours. They're going to fold like that." (Madison Times)

January 30: Poland declares its support for the US in the upcoming invasion. Poland will eventually contribute a small number of troops to the war. In return, Poland receives $6 billion from the US. $3.5 billion of that money will be used to buy 48 F-16 fighters from Lockheed Martin, an American defense contractor. "We can call this the contract of the century," says Polish defense minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski. "The $3.5 billion cost of the 48 F-16 Fighting Falcons comes cheaply for the Poles because of unusually generous American terms which will leave the U.S. taxpayer footing much of the bill for years to come," says an economic analyst in Britain's Guardian newspaper. "The U.S. government is, in effect, paying Lockheed Martin to supply Poland with the aircraft from 2006." In addition, many American manufacturing jobs will be lost due to the terms of the investment, which moves some of the production and assembly work to Poland where it can be done more cheaply. The deal was facilitated in part by Bruce Jackson, a military intelligence officer and former colleague of Cheney, Perle, and Wolfowitz at the Pentagon during the Reagan/Bush years, and who was a vice president at Lockheed until 2002, when he went to work as an independent political consultant pushing the NATO expansion. Jackson, who maintains close ties with Lockheed, also drafted the foreign-policy plank of the 2000 GOP convention. (Truth Seeker)
January 30: Former South African President Nelson Mandela issues a harsh criticism of Bush's preparations to invade Iraq. "It is a tragedy, what is happening, what Bush is doing. But Bush is now undermining the United Nations," Mandela says. "What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust. ...Why is the United States behaving so arrogantly? All that [Bush] wants is Iraqi oil." (CBS News)

January 31: In a private meeting with British prime minister Tony Blair, Bush makes it clear that he intends to invade Iraq with or without the passage of the second UN resolution. Though he will "put the full weight" of his administration behind securing the resolution, and will "twist arms and even threaten," the war is inevitable. He tells Blair that the invasion date has been tentatively set for March 10. He also tells Blair that he will invade Iraq even if UN weapons inspectors fail to find the vaunted weapons of mass destruction. This information is not publicly revealed until a March 2006 article in the New York Times, when it publishes information from a previously secret memo about the meeting written by Blair's top foreign advisor, David Manning. (Excerpts from the memo appeared in the January 2006 book Lawless World, by British lawyer Philippe Sands, and in February 2006 on Britain's Channel 4.) "Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," Manning wrote. "The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," he wrote. "This was when the bombing would begin." Five days after the meeting, Secretary of State Colin Powell will make a critical presentation at the United Nations that will convince many fence-sitters that Iraq is indeed an imminent threat.
According to the Manning memo, both Bush and Blair predict a quick victory and that the transition to a new, democratic Iraqi government will be complicated but manageable. Both agree, in a distressingly offhand fashion, that Iraq needs something else than another dictatorship: "As for the future government of Iraq, people would find it very odd if we handed it over to another dictator," Blair says. Bush confidently predicts that it is "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Blair agrees with that assessment. Both Bush and Blair agree that there are no WMDs in Iraq, and the likelihood of finding them before the invasion is increasingly small. Instead, Bush wonders alound how the US or UK can provoke a confrontation with Iraq. One of his suggestions is to paint a US surveillance plane in the colors of the UN in the hopes of drawing fire; another is to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, Hussein.
In March 2006, NSC spokesman Frederick Jones tries to spin the memo into irrelevance, claiming, "While the use of force was a last option, we recognized that it might be necessary and were planning accordingly. ...Our public and private comments are fully consistent."
Bush and Blair are not alone at the meeting. With Bush is Condoleezza Rice; Rice's aide, Dan Fried; and White House chief of staff Andrew Card. Blair is accompanied by Manning, his chief of staff Jonathan Powell, and Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide and the author of the "Downing Street Memo."
Possibly the most disturbing element of the memo is Bush's cavalier suggestions about ways to provoke a reaction from Iraq to "justify" an invasion in return. "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach." The memo continues, "The US might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's WMD." And the memo also mentions the possibility of assassinating Hussein, but offers no reaction from Blair. Unbeknownst to Blair, the CIA has already authorized Operation Anabasis, a covert plan for the provocation of a conflict with Hussein that will trigger a US military response. (See the 2002 page of this site and other pages for more on Anabasis.)
Blair, in particular, is insistent that their two countries do everything possible to ensure that the UN pass a second resolution, giving the US and UK a legitimate legal trigger for going to war that other nations would find acceptable. Blair says it is essential for both countries to lobby for a second United Nations resolution against Iraq, because it will serve as "an insurance policy against the unexpected." Blair adds, "If anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning the oil wells, killing children or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq, a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs." Bush agrees to seek the second resolution -- "The US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would twist arms and even threaten," Manning notes Bush as saying -- but the memo notes that Bush "had to say that if we ultimately failed, military action would follow anyway." Blair's support of Bush's warmongering is highly unpopular with his citizenry and his own Labour Party, and such a resolution would provide Blair some needed political cover. Interestingly, Dick Cheney sees no need for the resolution, and Powell doesn't think it can happen.
Bush has some specifics of the upcoming campaign. He tells Blair (summarized by Manning), "The air campaign would probably last four days, during which some 1,500 targets would be hit. Great care would be taken to avoid hitting innocent civilians. Bush thought the impact of the air onslaught would ensure the early collapse of Saddam's regime. Given this military timetable, we needed to go for a second resolution as soon as possible. This probably meant after Blix's next report to the Security Council in mid-February." Blair responds that both countries need to make it clear that the second resolution amounts to "Saddam's final opportunity," even though such an opportunity is entirely fictional. The memo describes Blair as saying: "We had been very patient. Now we should be saying that the crisis must be resolved in weeks, not months. Bush agreed. He commented that he was not itching to go to war, but we could not allow Saddam to go on playing with us. At some point, probably when we had passed the second resolutions -- assuming we did -- we should warn Saddam that he had a week to leave. We should notify the media too. We would then have a clear field if Saddam refused to go." Most of the meeting is spent with Bush outlining the military strategy, discussing how the air campaign "would destroy Saddam's command and control quickly," how he expects Iraq's army to "fold very quickly," and exulting over his prediction that the Republican Guard will be "decimated by the bombing."
As for postwar planning, Bush passes that off with apparent disinterest, repeatedly indicating that others were working on that aspect. "The prime minister asked about aftermath planning," the memo says. "Condi Rice said that a great deal of work was now in hand." Referring to the Defense Department, it adds, "A planning cell in DOD was looking at all aspects and would deploy to Iraq to direct operations as soon as the military action was over. Bush said that a great deal of detailed planning had been done on supplying the Iraqi people with food and medicine."
The memo concludes with Manning writing of his own hopes that UN inspectors will find weapons in Iraq, or Hussein voluntarily leaving Iraq, but that he worries Bush's timeline for war won't allow for either of these events. "This makes the timing very tight," Manning writes. "We therefore need to stay closely alongside Blix, do all we can to help the inspectors make a significant find, and work hard on the other members of the Security Council to accept the noncooperation case so that we can secure the minimum nine votes when we need them, probably the end of February."
During a joint press conference with Bush and Blair after their meeting, the two, who fail to mention any of the content of their discussion, are asked by a journalist, "Do you believe that there is a link between Saddam Hussein, a direct link, and the men who attacked on September 11?" Bush answers, "I can't make that claim." Blair adds, "That answers your question." But Bush and his officials have made that claim, or implied it, many times before, and will continue to do so as they continue their runup to war. (New York Times/CommonDreams, Frank Rich [PDF file], Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)

"Face it: a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality." -- Garrison Keillor, quoted in Buzzflash

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

January 2003

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Highlights of This Page

Plans and anticipated problems in postinvasion Iraq ignored by White House and Pentagon leaders

Bogus terror alerts

More tax cuts for the wealthy

Increasing resistance to US plans to invade Iraq from other countries

Bush's State of Union address; lies about WMDs abound

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