By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 December 2019

Douglas Feith was the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005, one of the most senior positions at the Pentagon, during one of the most consequential periods in recent history that covers the 11 September 2001 atrocities and the dawn of the “War on Terror”. Feith later wrote a highly illuminating memoir that tried to drain some of the hysteria out of the public “debate” about Iraq by explaining the internal arguments in the Bush administration leading up to the decision to finish with Saddam Husayn in 2003, and trying to set those arguments in their proper historical context, both in relation to Iraq—where “the war” had begun twelve years earlier—and the altered American threat perceptions in the shadow of 9/11. Unlike a lot of the gossipy tomes that emerged from former officials, Feith’s book is notably light on opinion and contains reams of declassified documents so readers can check his analysis against the source material. One of Feith’s key judgments is that “the chief mistake was maintaining an occupation government in Iraq for over a year”.[1] As Feith explains in great detail in the book, this was never supposed to happen. So how did it?

A DIVIDED ADMINISTRATION

Whatever one’s political and moral views of President George W. Bush’s decision to end the Gulf War in 2003, the invasion phase went remarkably smoothly: the U.S. deployed troops six-thousand miles from home and in three weeks put an end to one of the most grisly despotisms then-existing in the world. Though it would later become a staple of the polemical discourse to deny that any Iraqis welcomed this and the celebratory pulling down of Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square was dismissed as a staged propaganda event, reporters in Baghdad as it fell documented that “crowds greeted U.S. troops with flowers, candy and, occasionally, kisses. ‘We love you!’ some shouted. Others, with more anger, cried out, ‘No more Saddam Husayn!’” Apparently there really were “sweets and flowers”. The serious problems began after Saddam had been overthrown.

The roots of the gross mismanagement of Iraq in the post-Saddam phase are the poisonous bureaucratic feud in the U.S. that, roughly speaking, pitted the State Department and the CIA (as well as their British counterparts, the Foreign Office and SIS/MI6) who were at best half-hearted about the Iraq invasion and certainly opposed the idealistic version that came to be associated with the phrase “regime change”, against the U.S. Defence Department or Pentagon and elements of the White House (particularly around Vice President Richard Cheney), who all saw the invasion as a necessary security measure and some of whom hoped it could be a transformative project for the region.[2] The State/CIA faction would often be called “realist” and the Pentagon/Cheneyite forces were (much more problematically) called “neoconservatives”.[3]

In February 2002, the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), a Pentagon initiative to develop strategies to counter jihadist ideology and coordinate information-related work within the Pentagon, was closed down, having only been created four months earlier. The cause was a fabricated “leak” saying that the OSI was going to spread what we would now call “fake news” within America. This was at a moment when the OSI’s charter was still being drafted. The source of this attack on the OSI was the public affairs team at the Pentagon, which was displeased that the OSI—whose mission included information operations against the enemy, as well as (for example) providing laptops to children in Pakistan so they had access to information outside the madrassas—was going to provide not only policy advice to military officials for essentially battlefield deception operations, but would have some role in giving guidance to public affairs officers. The public-relations staff had a reasonable concern about damage to the credibility of their office if it was even perceived as having connections to the “psyops” team, but, instead of setting this internally, bureaucratic warfare was waged by passing a completely false story to the newspapers that caused tremendous damage to the credibility of the entire U.S. government. It also, right after 9/11, crippled the development of a “war of ideas” apparatus in the U.S., the kind of war so many argued should be waged in place of a military one. Everyone remembered this fiasco and the personal cost to the team involved in it; it served as a deterrent for many years against anybody trying again.[4] In the meantime, however, the fact that the anti-OSI campaign was bureaucratic warfare remained hidden: journalists, either willingly or unwittingly, never reported to the public that the real story was bureaucratic faction fighting and instead acted as weapons in this fighting. The OSI experience would serve as a template, particularly for the State Department and the CIA.

The rancorous inter-departmental fighting became somewhat public with the mid-August 2002 op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal by Brent Scowcroft, an arch-“realist” who had been President Bush Senior’s National Security Adviser (NSA) and was at that time Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.[5] James Mann rather overstates his case in arguing that the dispute among sections of the Republican foreign policy elite over Scowcroft’s op-ed was “America’s only serious public debate” about forcefully deposing Saddam,[6] but it was undoubtedly an important moment for the administration as it mapped out its Iraq policy.[7]

The next month, September 2002, a similar though smaller debate occurred, also drawing in former officials, as President Bush prepared to speak before the United Nations: there was serious disagreement about what the U.N.’s role ought to be. The “hawks”, notably Vice President Cheney, had said President Bush should simply rely on Saddam’s defiance of U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 to declare that the ceasefire agreement that called off the troops at Iraq’s border in 1991 no longer holds, and President Bush agreed that “[f]rom a legal standpoint, [any further] resolution was unnecessary”.[8] Nonetheless, a political decision was made to go the “doves’” route, trying to build out as large an international coalition as possible—and with some success: forty-nine states joined in this “coalition of the willing”. After Bush’s U.N. speech, calling for the organisation to enforce its own resolutions, he secured UNSCR 1441, which restarted the inspection process and promised “serious consequences” if the Saddam regime breached the resolution by refusing compliance, albeit with the unfortunate side-effect of focusing the multi-pronged argument about the dangers Saddam posed near-exclusively on the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) issue.[9]

Where Mann has the ghost of a point about the lack of debate on Iraq—and not just in public—is that the decision-point for the invasion remains somewhat mysterious even now. So much of President Bush’s focus went on managing the factions in his administration—arbitrating trade-offs between zealous bureaucratic turf-warriors— that this central strategic issue got rather lost, it seems even to him. Feith identifies Saddam’s submission of the ridiculous 12,000-page “declaration” on WMD in early December 2002—the dictator’s contemptuous response to UNSCR 1441, which had given him a final chance to tell the truth and have the slate wiped clean—as the moment President Bush decided Saddam would never voluntarily disarm and would have to be forcibly disarmed.[10] President Bush in his memoir provides some indication that Feith is correct about this, but the truth is that Bush writes about the path to the invasion in such a way that it can be read as saying he had not made a decision to invade until he appeared on television on 17 March 2003 giving Saddam, Uday, and Qusay forty-eight hours to leave Iraq.[11] David Frum, a speechwriter involved in the team that put together the “Axis of Evil” speech in January 2002, wrote in his reflections on the invasion a decade on: “For a long time, war with Iraq was discussed inside the Bush administration as something that would be decided at some point in the future; then, somewhere along the way, war with Iraq was discussed as something that had already been decided long ago in the past.”

There are two qualifications to be added to this.

First, there was a major public debate before Congress voted—on an overwhelming, bipartisan basis—for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq in October 2002, which supported the President’s diplomatic efforts at the U.N. and “authorized” him to use the Armed Forces “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate” to enforce those resolutions and otherwise “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq”. The AUMF contained about twenty reasons—only one of which hinged on Saddam possessing an ongoing, active nuclear-weapons program—why American security would be enhanced by the removal of the Ba’thi regime.

The reasons included Saddam’s record of aggression, specifically his abolition of Kuwait’s existence, and his defiance of the terms of the ceasefire that had stopped American-led troops taking that open road to Baghdad after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. Saddam had never made restitution for the economic damage to Kuwait, nor returned even the bodes of the 600 “disappeared” Kuwaitis and American serviceman Michael Scott Speicher. Saddam continued to pose a threat to Iraq’s neighbours. There could not be peace and security on the Gulf, a vital American interest, while Saddam remained. Saddam had demonstrated his “continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States” by firing on the planes patrolling the no-fly zones and his brazen attempt to assassinate George H.W. Bush on his visit to Kuwait in 1993. The large-scale human rights abuses against Iraq’s civilian population were ongoing and would continue so long as Saddam had power. The Iraq Liberation Act (1998) made it official policy to replace Saddam’s government; the AUMF would enforce this.

Then AUMF documented Saddam’s support for a wide range of international terrorist groups for decades; this continued. At the moment the resolution passed, too, Saddam was sheltering senior Al-Qaeda members. A week earlier, the CIA had released a public letter, after constructive criticism from the Pentagon of its shoddy work on Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda—suppressing information and constructing its analysis around a bogus theory that Ba’thists and jihadists (the twin pillars of the post-Saddam insurgency) could not cooperate—admitting that Al-Qaeda was present in Iraq and the Agency had “solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al-Qaeda going back a decade”. The premise of the War on Terror was that states harbouring Al-Qaeda and its allies would be treated like the Taliban-Qaeda regime: the war could not succeed if Saddam’s “ongoing” support for international terrorism was allowed to persist, the AUMF said.

On the WMDs, much of what the AUMF was and is undeniable: Saddam had always in the past been further along in his construction than anybody knew, as in 1991 when he was on the brink of having a nuclear weapon; Saddam had continued work on chemical and biological WMDs into the 1990s; Saddam was in the rare category of rulers who had used WMD, against neighbouring states and the Iraqi population; Saddam had expelled the inspectors supposed to oversee disarmament after 1991; and in doing so he had breached the UNSCRs that governed the ceasefire. The only part of the AUMF affected by the lack of major stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, or an active nuclear-weapons program, was the reference to the risk Saddam would give these weapons to the terrorists he was harbouring—and even this is not as clear-cut as it conventional wisdom has it (see the last section below).

The terms in which people spoke during the debate, notably then-Senator Hillary Clinton, who spoke without reference to the Bush administration, relying on her own knowledge of the Saddam problem, underlined the fact that “the war” had in many ways been underway since 1990-91. The debate, very public and sometimes very bitter over twelve years, had been about how to bring it to an end. In the atmosphere after 9/11, the American willingness to accept the risks associated with the continued existence of Saddam’s regime had radically shrunk.

Second, the biggest single factor in ensuring non-invasion options lost traction was Saddam’s own behaviour. Given yet another chance save himself by providing a modicum of cooperation under UNSCR 1441 framework to alleviate the West’s worst fears, Saddam “would not step out of harm’s way”, as the late scholar Fouad Ajami put it.[12]

Saddam had ostentatiously welcomed 9/11, taunting America while the bodies were still under the rubble in New York. Even the Iranian theocracy and Colonel Qaddafi knew better than that. And at the very moment Saddam’s officials were handing over the falsified “declaration” on WMDs in December 2002, a letter from Saddam was read out on state television by Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Sa’id al-Sahhaf, the infamous “Baghdad Bob”, calling on “the mujahideen” in Kuwait to join with him in a common front of “jihad” against the infidels, specifying the U.S., Britain, and “the Zionist entity” (Israel). While Saddam tried to present this as an apology—his first—for ransacking and massacring Kuwait in 1990-91, the Kuwaiti government, obviously and quite correctly, interpreted it as incitement to terrorism, both against it and against the Coalition forces gathering on Kuwaiti territory. Given that two months earlier there had actually been an Al-Qaeda attack on U.S. forces in Kuwait, on Faylaka Island, and Saddam was in the middle of supposedly showing how responsible he was—coming clean on WMDs and denying all connections to the terrorist underworld—it was an extraordinary decision to publicly identify himself with the jihadists in Kuwait.

But this was reflective of Saddam’s situation (isolated from advice and information) and state of mind (believing in his own supreme wisdom and power) by the dawn of the twenty-first century. Saddam had interpreted the American-led “international community” as feeble in its dealings with him since 1991.[13] This combined with the fact Saddam had always had a mystical confidence in his own analysis of things—and in his luck.[14] Moreover, Saddam had lavishly paid for “friends” in France and Russia and thought those two states were capable of keeping the Americans at bay (they did try).[15] This all convinced Saddam that Bush would never pull the trigger. At worst, Saddam was expecting another round of DESERT FOX-like airstrikes.[16]

There was, however, a truly dangerous element in Saddam’s thinking. Saddam was convinced Iraq’s Army would overcome America’s if it came to a confrontation. This relied partly on beliefs about the state of the army, partly on some racialist ideas, and partly on beliefs that a combination of the international outcry (led by Paris and Moscow) and even quite minimal American casualties would force America to halt the invasion, a belief garnered from events like America fleeing Somalia in 1993. (In this, Saddam echoed Bin Laden, who regularly raised Somalia when saying of America “hit them and they will run”.) But an aspect to this that was less understood, except by some Russian officials who had regular interactions with Saddam, was that the Iraqi tyrant had turned seriously God. This had a number of general effects, including reinforcing Saddam’s confidence in his own decisions, since they were guided by the Heavens, and his belief that all would work out in his favour, since the Almighty grants luck to those on His side. One specific effect Saddam’s religious contemplation had was that at times he welcomed the idea of a full-scale American war against him, believing it would end in an American defeat and demonstrate the inferiority of decadent infidels against those who were loyal to Allah. It seems Saddam continued to believe the Americans would collapse before his state’s God-derived power even after the invasion began.[17]

Oscillating between believing an American invasion would never come and that Iraq would prevail if it did, the bottom line was that Saddam was never really concerned about the Americans—he never saw a need to seriously allay their fears. The threat that dominated Saddam’s mind was Iran: he believed the Iranians—and Shi’is within Iraq loyal to them—were his greatest security problem, not least because Iran was “the only power positioned to occupy Iraq physically”.[18] This is why Saddam continued to run an information operation that promoted the idea he did have WMDs right down to the end: the dictator’s focus was on deterring an Iranian invasion; he did not realise—and did not care—that this information operation had convinced the Americans, too, since he did not see an existential danger coming from that direction.[19]

These were the circumstances then, in which, to adopt this parlance and put it crudely, the “neocons” won the argument about doing the invasion, and then lost most of the debates about how to the State Department.

THE DERAILING OF PLANS FOR POST-SADDAM IRAQ

The initial idea was to follow the Afghan model of “liberation not occupation”: to turn over power rapidly after the elimination of the Ba’thi structure to Iraqis. The Pentagon and those around Vice President Cheney supported this proposal. The State Department and CIA decidedly did not, arguing that a prolonged occupation would be needed.

In the spring of 2002, Iraqi “externals”—leading political and intellectual figures from among the four million Iraqis forced out of their country by Saddam’s regime—began meeting as part of the “Future of Iraq Project”, which was nominally convened under the auspices of the State Department, but with a lot of input from Pentagon officials and other departments. This Project would become the subject of an extraordinary amount of myth-making later: it would be said the Project was a State Department-devised plan for the post-war situation that the Pentagon “neocons” subverted and rejected on-the-ground after Saddam’s ouster. The reality is that the Project was not a plan and it was not written by the State Department. The Project was the work of Iraqi “externals”, informally led by Kanan Makiya, and it produced concept papers on aspects of the democratic transition process and constitutional government. Nobody at State developed these papers so far as to turn them into briefing memos, let alone plans, thus there was nothing in the Project that could be adopted as State Department “policy”.[20]

The legend of a wonderful State Department post-war plan ignored by “the neocons” has its origins partly in a very personal grievance: the State Department official who overseeing the Future of Iraq Project was Thomas Warrick, a ferocious bureaucratic warrior, who openly trashed senior administration officials like Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to Iraqi participants in the Project. Warrick went so far as threatening Iraqi-Americans not to attend the meeting with Wolfowitz in Dearborn, Michigan, in February 2003—part of the effort to bring Iraqis into the effort of rebuilding Iraq after Saddam—or they would be excluded from the Future of Iraq Project. In the days after that, Warrick was removed from the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance of Iraq (ORHA), the civilian wing of the transitional authority body that was being put together. The State Department would pile upon its misrepresentation of the nature of the Future of Iraq Project and its outputs a further misrepresentation, that Warrick’s dismissal meant the Project’s work had been set aside, which it had not: the Project’s papers would be used by ORHA in many ways after Saddam’s ouster.[21] Ironically, the State Department was largely opposed to the Project’s concepts because—and this is the broader source of the myth—the Project argued for a swift transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis, the best-organised of whom were the opposition that had been living outside Iraq, and the State/CIA faction waged a scorched-earth campaign against the Iraqi “externals”—or, to be more precise, one of the “externals”. We will get to that.

In November 2002, the Future of Iraq Project produced a 102-page report, “Final Report on the Transition to Democracy in Iraq”, which proposed steps for a quick transition from a transitional authority to a transitional government, and this report was endorsed at the December 2002 conference in London that brought together the U.S. government and the Iraqi “external” opposition. The conference, comprising 340 Iraqi delegates, managed to arrive at consensus on many knotty issues—sectarian discrimination, the role of Islam in the state, the status of the Kurdish autonomous region—and selected a 65-person leadership council that was set to meet again two months later, on Iraqi territory in the Kurdish north. Crucially, the conference settled on a resolution rejecting “all forms” of external rule, whether occupation or Mandate or regional interference.[22]

By February 2003 meeting inside Iraq in Salahuddin, the “liberation not occupation” paradigm was already slipping: the President’s Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad laid out a plan for a “transitional civil authority” to follow Saddam’s downfall that would mean non-Iraqi rule for an indefinite period; the opposition reacted with outrage. The circle was squared by settling on an “Iraqi Interim Authority” (IIA), which President Bush approved on 10 March 2003. The IIA, staffed by Iraqis (“externals”, as well as internal notables), would operate alongside a brief U.S. occupation regime, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): power would be shifted as rapidly as practical to the IIA, as it demonstrated its capacity to handle more and more ministries of the state. The IIA’s main task would be to prepare for elections and writing a constitution, plus setting the terms of the U.S. presence to protect this transformation. During the debate in early March about the IIA, the Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage—a close friend of Secretary of State Colin Powell—had argued for allowing the U.N. to appoint the IIA members, agitated against the “externals” and the Kurds, and proposed delaying its creation for three months, requiring the U.S. to exercise sovereignty for all of that period—and, of course, for much longer since it would take time to set up the IIA, and then more time for the IIA to get on its feet sufficiently to take on state responsibilities. Cheney, in particular, was incredulous and asked what the point of this delay would be. The State Department officials again cited the need for “legitimacy”. Had Armitage just said that he favoured a multi-year direct U.S. occupation, this could have been debated. Instead, that policy was pursued surreptitiously, resulting in chaos—bureaucratically, and within Iraq.[23]

Jay Garner, the head of ORHA, arrived in Iraq with the IIA plan. ORHA had been created as the civilian wing to assist the CPA, which was initially a military institution, headed by General Tommy Franks, the Central Command (CENCTOM) leader. The CPA’s role under Franks was limited essentially to holding the fort in the very immediate aftermath of the Saddam regime as the pressures of three-and-a-half decades of totalitarianism were released, while ORHA held the state ministries in trusteeship, preparing them to hand over to Iraqis as quickly as feasible. Garner appeared quite close to achieving a broad-based IIA when Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad in May 2003. Garner had never wanted to stay long in Iraq and there had always been a plan from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to appoint a senior civilian official. This was to be a larger assignment, but at Bremer’s insistence it became even larger. Bremer was a career State Department diplomat who had worked for Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm. Rumsfeld’s idea was that having a State official in the role, answering to him, would allow the State Department and the Pentagon to better coordinate. Bremer was briefed on the IIA plan to turn things over to capable Iraqis as quickly as possible. Even after Bremer arrived and restructured things—effectively merging ORHA and CPA, and running the whole show—it was assumed he was still working on the idea of a swift transition to an IIA. Bremer definitely received mixed signals from the warring factions in the administration, but in his briefings he had indicated his understanding and acceptance of the IIA concept. Bremer heard what he wanted to hear, and soon aborted the IIA process.[24]

The critical point here is that when Bremer arrived in Iraq in May 2003, a month after Saddam fell, it was still not decided to have the year-plus occupation—indeed, as far as the nominal authority in the situation (the Pentagon) was concerned, the plan was not to do that. Bremer acted from the very outset almost to a parody script of an arrogant Imperial administrator, concerned that all should know his status as the man in charge and contemptuous of the Iraqi political figures in Baghdad. Bremer liberated himself from the chain of command. Bremer was supposed, like CENTCOM, to report directly to Rumsfeld, but in practice this was not true, and the reconstruction effort that relied on CPA-CENTCOM coordination suffered accordingly. Bremer resisted sending reports to Washington and when he did send sporadic reports they went to Rumsfeld, the President, NSA Condoleezza Rice, or Powell—with no consistency or reasoning.[25] It became clear only over time that Bremer saw himself as answerable only to the President.

The political progress Garner had made was terminated and the Iraqis were declared unready to assume responsibility. Bremer’s disdain for the Iraqi political leaders cannot be overstated as a factor in how things developed, and there is a nagging suspicion that Bremer’s view of the “externals” as incapable of taking over the governance of Iraq even for an interim period to organise elections was targeted at one “external” in particular, in line with the view taken by most of Bremer’s diplomatic colleagues at the State Department and their allies at the CIA, which had been a key factor in defeating the initial plans made in London, necessitating the IIA compromise. Regardless of motive, a dangerous ambiguity took hold: Bremer had set aside the entire IIA concept, without clearly saying so, and thus the steps he took in Baghdad, such as the creation of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) on 13 July 2003, were interpreted as working towards the IIA concept, while in fact Bremer was consolidating himself for a two-year or more role as viceroy. It was assumed at the Pentagon that the IGC would be gradually empowered, not that Bremer never envisioned the IGC as anything more than an advisory committee to his occupation regime. Rumsfeld only became aware that of Bremer’s total rejection of the IIA concept when an op-ed under Bremer’s byline appeared in The Washington Post on 8 September 2003—a month after the jihadist insurgency had definitively begun with the major bombings in Baghdad of the Jordanian Embassy and the United Nations compound, and the assassination of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim in Najaf. Bremer had not cleared the article with anyone. What Bremer set out was in effect the “transitional civil authority” idea the State Department had floated before the invasion, which envisioned keeping sovereignty out of Iraqi hands during a multi-year occupation. Bremer reveals in his memoirs that even before he arrived in Iraq, he believed sovereignty should be transferred to Iraqis after a constitution had been written and ratified, and there had been national elections; the IIA concept had called for a transfer of sovereignty to lead to elections and a constitution (which is, in fact, what happened—just after fourteen months had been wasted). In the last week of October 2003, Rumsfeld met with Bremer in the U.S. and—as delicately as possible, avoiding any sense of overruling or disrespecting Bremer—secured an agreement to shut down the CPA and have authority turned over to an Iraqi interim government by the end of June 2004. Bremer reached an accord with the IGC on 15 November 2003, setting the date for the transfer of sovereignty, though once again did not clear—or even communicate—the text of this agreement to Rumsfeld in advance. Having never really answered to Rumsfeld, throughout the last eight months of the CPA even the notional authority of the Defense Secretary over the proconsul in Baghdad collapsed. From conception to demise, the CPA had been a bureaucratic fiasco, and its real-world harms on the ground in Iraq were even worse, wasting precious time and political goodwill.[26]

To put it simply, what had happened was that the U.S. government collectively agreed on a post-invasion plan envisioning a rapid transfer of power to Iraqis, and the State/CIA faction prevailed in the field in instituting the occupation regime that they had advocated for—and been defeated upon—in the formal inter-agency decision-making process.[27] Because the State Department had succeeded by subversion on the ground, the U.S. was left running an occupation with the resources allocated for a plan that envisioned a much smaller and briefer U.S. role, producing the worst of all outcomes: a weak occupation—all of the costs, none of the benefits.[28] This meant, for example, the U.S. barely provided security to members of the IGC, who risked their lives joining a body in July 2003 that the Pentagon believed was going to gradually acquire power as an Iraqi interim government which would organise elections for a truly representative government that could write a constitution and put it to a vote, only to find that Bremer had no such intention.[29] This meant the IGC members were put in all the danger that the “collaborator” accusation brought, without having any real power. (The insouciance about the IGC’s security was not solely because of the CPA’s weakness; it was partly a political decision because the U.S.—relying again significantly on the CIA—was still denying there was an insurgency, and a program providing security to IGC officials would be an admission this was false.)[30]

Perhaps the occupation’s most damaging effect was to exacerbate Sunni Arab rejectionism—compounded, of course, by the manner in which the occupation had come about, meaning that once the problem made itself manifest it was both larger than it needed to be, and the occupation authorities were less well-placed to deal with it. (One can add that the further element that the abrupt reversal of the process Garner had started left even people well-disposed towards the Coalition feeling misled and bitter.) A Sunni Arab-based insurgency was inevitable in Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam: the fallen regime had prepared for it and imported jihadists to assist, and the operating ideas in the Sunni Arab community made them experience the regime’s fall as their loss, too. Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority was now, for the first time, being asked to think of itself as such: within the Arab nationalist framework, Iraq was simply an Arab state, where sect was a thing of the past—and the Sunni Arabs’ disproportionate power and privilege passed off as incidental.[31] The reality was that Arab nationalism had always been—and was recognised by most Shi’is as—a cover for Sunni domination, and in Iraq this Sunni ascendancy was especially acute: the Shi’a majority (60% of the population) was ruled over by a minority of  clans from within the Sunni Arab minority (20%).

For many Iraqi Sunni Arabs, the overthrow of Saddam was not in itself the source of resentment; it was the loss of the Sunni-dominated power structure that fell with him and the enfranchisement of the Shi’a that followed which provoked their ire. There was a general sense that Sunni Arab hegemony was the natural order of things and, to heap insult upon injury, this was done by alien outsiders.[32] As part of this pan-Arabist ideological tapestry, the Sunni Arabs flatly rejected—and still do—the demographic realities of Iraq, insisting their numbers are double what they really are. Moreover, in this view, whatever Sunni Arabs’ technical numbers are within the borders of Iraq (drawn by Western imperialists), within the “Arab nation” Sunni Arabs are the overwhelming majority, and this is what should count. Such a majoritarian, supremacist mindset was reinforced by having Sunni-ruled states around Iraq. A common refrain from the Sunni Arabs expressing this outlook, mocking the Shi’is’ Ashura festival, was, “lana al-hukum; wa lakum al-latum” (for us political power; for you self-flagellation).[33]

As such, the Islamized remnants of Saddam’s regime and the jihadists would always have led a campaign of sabotage and mayhem against the “New” Iraq, and they would always have had a sympathetic Sunni Arab population to operate in. The Sunni Arabs’ relative disempowerment, and resentment at the rise of the Kurds and the Arab world’s “Shi’a stepchildren”,[34] was not going to be peacefully accepted.[35] Having a formal, lengthy occupation after the invasion fed into the darkest suspicions that the Americans intended to colonise and exploit Iraq: what might have been passive support for the insurgency turned into active support in many more cases than it needed to.[36]

The CPA’s incapacity was a running joke as early as the autumn of 2003, with people saying it stood for “Can’t Provide Anything”, and this was on display most clearly in April 2004, when the Zarqawists in Fallujah and the Mahdi Army (Jaysh al-Mahdi) of renegade Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr erupted simultaneously, and the Bremer regime completely failed. Four contractors delivering food in Fallujah had been lynched, and their bodies dragged through the streets, burned, and then gruesomely strung up over the iconic Iron Bridge—all on video, shown to the world.[37] As one observer noted, “The mob could have cooked and eaten its victims without making things very much worse.” The Zarqawists had taken over Fallujah and Bremer’s order to retake the city dissipated, as did his instruction for the arrest (or killing) of Al-Sadr, who had been wanted for his role in the murder of Abdul-Majid al-Khoei, a Shi’a cleric from a storied family, the day after Baghdad fell.

The Sadr problem the CPA had failed to smother in its cradle would never be solved. A second round with the Sadrists at the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf in August 2004 had exposed the interim government’s ham-fisted authoritarian intent and practical weakness. In reaction, the fractious Shi’i Islamists had united, and united with Al-Sadr, whom they otherwise did not like, under the protection of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.[38] From Al-Sadr’s loose network, the Iranians would spin off some of their worst “Special Groups”—the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)-controlled Shi’a militias—that murdered countless civilians and hundreds of Western troops. And the pressing problem of the Zarqawists’ construction of an emirate in Fallujah that was being used as a launchpad for mayhem all around the country, allowed to take shape under the CPA, now could not be tackled immediately because the political centre in Baghdad was not yet there to sustain it and it was too sensitive for politics in the U.S., being too close to the 2 November 2004 Presidential Election.[39]

To say the occupation wasted fourteen months would be to credit it; it did active, substantial, lasting harm. The main arguments in favour of the occupation were that it would provide security and create a framework for Iraqi politics. Instead, the occupation had fed into the worst fears of a frightened and paranoid society that the outsiders intended to dominate and exploit them, swelling the ranks of an insurgency that would always have been able to rely on the resentment of a Sunni Arab community deprived of its primacy. And most of the CPA’s laws and regulations were swept away, seen as illegitimate foreign impositions, but the few things that did stick—like the proportional electoral system—were disastrous. All the work of reviving Iraqi politics after it had been terminated a quarter-century earlier was still to do when the CPA ended, and an occupation regime put in place supposedly to ensure stability in the transition had entered office with little evident disorder and left to its successor a full-blown insurgency on two fronts.[40]

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST AHMAD CHALABI

An enormous part of what guided the State Department and Bremer on the course they took was a hostility to Ahmad Chalabi, one of the most prominent “externals” who had brought the Iraqi opposition together under the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in the 1990s. The London conference was a harbinger of so much that was to come. The State Department, led from the very top by Powell and Armitage, who did most of the running, managed to delay the conference by a year and until days before it took place tried to prevent Chalabi and the INC from participating. When one speaks of the State/CIA campaign against the “externals” or their advocacy of an extended occupation, these should not be seen as separate views that emerge from their analysis of the situation, but as component parts of a political campaign to prevent Chalabi having an important role in post-Saddam Iraq. The actual effect these policies would have in Iraq, in other words, was secondary at best: they were tactical anti-Chalabi positions. The White House intervened to ensure there was no discrimination against any pro-democracy groups attending the London conference, but the anti-Chalabi campaign was far from over.[41]

The State/CIA antagonism to Chalabi traced to the events around the failed June 1996 coup attempt against Saddam. Chalabi told them that their conspiracy against Saddam was compromised by the Iraqi mukhabarat, and when it duly collapsed Chalabi did the unthinkable in going public about it, embarrassing Langley and the Near East Bureau. Even worse, Chalabi took his case directly to the American public—and he won. Chalabi played an important part in convincing the U.S. public, opinion-makers, and congressmen that coexistence with Saddam was too dangerous. In October 1998, the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA) was passed unanimously by the Senate making it official U.S. policy from that time forward—three years before President Bush took office—to overthrow Saddam’s regime. (The October 2002 AUMF was partly phrased as licensing the use of direct U.S. force to implement the ILA.) For this, there would be no forgiveness. The State/CIA hostility to Chalabi was so extreme that they de facto liquidated the “Free Iraqi Forces” program, which would have trained Iraqis to participate alongside Coalition troops and give some concrete backing to the idea of helping Iraqis liberate themselves,[42] and would not even allow the INC to help America with intelligence, translators, and the like.[43]

The argument the State/CIA forces put forward for a protracted occupation was that the “externals” lacked “legitimacy” inside Iraq, and, because of this alleged yawning chasm between “externals” and the Iraqi population, time would be needed to cultivate “internals” as political leaders. This was illogical on its face: what was being proposed was for the “externals”—along with any “internals” who made themselves known, such as tribal leaders—to oversee an interim government that would handle the preparations for an election that would lead to a representative government. A lack of representativeness was a weird objection to raise about an interim government. Moreover, having defined the representativeness of these Iraqis as the problem, it was bizarre to propose direct, prolonged American rule as the answer. But, again, the policy positions were not coherent results of analysis; they were determined by the desire to thwart Chalabi. One way to see this is that Chalabi and most other “externals”, whom the CIA believed incapable of attracting political support, favoured a quick transfer of sovereignty and elections, while the State/CIA faction wanted to hold off elections; economists would call it “revealed preference”. Over time, the bitterness of this campaign was added to by State/CIA coming to believe that the Pentagon wanted to “anoint” Chalabi as leader—“an Iraqi Karzai”—after the invasion.[44] The role of regional states like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, whose views were most influential at the State Department and in the CIA, which had (and has) long-standing liaison relationships with these regimes, was also significant: none of these Sunni-led Arab states wanted a “secular” Shi’i with links to Iran leading Iraq. Truth be told, none of the regional governments wanted the Shi’is, the overwhelming majority of Iraq’s population, emancipated at all: their ideal was an Iraq ruled by a figure from Saddam’s circle, who would hold together the structure of Sunni Arab minority rule, while being less unpredictable and aggressive.[45]

The proof that this anti-“externals” argument—which absorbed the most time and created the most turmoil in the “Phase IV” planning[46]—was made in bad faith as an attempt to thwart a perceived plot to install Chalabi in Baghdad was that in mid-2004, when the State Department and the CIA thought they had Chalabi down and out,[47] their long-standing “analysis” that “externals” lacked legitimacy among the Iraqi population—one of the foundational political “facts” about post-Saddam Iraq used to justify their policy preferences at every stage—suddenly evaporated.[48] The argument for the occupation was to create political institutions that could form the basis of constitutional government, which would then be handed to Iraqis. All the work to create the institutions was still to be done and now there was a raging insurgency. One might have thought these adverse political and security conditions strengthened the argument for an occupation to stabilise things. But State and CIA now warmly welcomed the reins in Baghdad being handed to Iyad Allawi, a long-term “external”, no less, and former Ba’thist, whose Iraqi National Accord (INA)—a rival organisation to the INC—had been set up with CIA assistance.[49] The only thing that had changed was Chalabi’s apparent removal from the picture.

It should be said that, just as the State/CIA animus to Chalabi was not simply bureaucratic manoeuvring to counter a perceived Pentagon stalking horse but a deeply personal vendetta, the State/CIA did not adopt Allawi simply by default to counter Chalabi. The “realists” in the Anglo-American intelligence agencies and foreign ministries were very sceptical democracy could stick in Iraq, as were the Western-aligned authoritarian Arab states, and with Allawi there was little pretence of being a democrat.[50] Allawi had been cultivated by SIS/MI6 in the 1980s and became a shared asset with the American cousins. An apparently reformed Ba’thist and nominal Shi’i, with connections to security and intelligence officials in Iraq who were disaffected with Saddam but not the system of centralised, militarised rule, Allawi was seen as an ideal candidate by SIS and CIA, and this preference was reinforced by the fact Allawi was also well-connected to Iraq’s Sunni Arab neighbours like Saudi Arabia and particularly Jordan.[51]

While serving as interim prime minister from June 2004 to May 2005, Allawi did not disappoint his Anglo-American supporters, with his strong-arm methods and stability-first rhetoric. The CIA’s preferred Iraq policy, aligning with the Saudi and Jordanian view, had long been what the Iraqi opposition called “Saddamism without Saddam”—hence the CIA’s preference for dealing with the Saddam problem, if it had to, via a military coup, as it tried in 1996. The CIA liked that there was no idealism to Allawi, that he was “operationally inclined to influence, bribe, and otherwise win over” the remnants of the Ba’thist structure, as against Chalabi, who “wanted to remove the old power structure root and branch”.[52] Allawi got what he wanted—enrichment through a patronage network of staggering corruption—and the State/CIA people in many ways got what they wanted: “[The overthrow of Saddam] was as if a huge, decrepit building had been struck unevenly by a demolition ball that succeeded in inflicting only minor damage to the edifice. The foundations, and a considerable part of the superstructure of the dysfunctional state, remained.”[53]

THE COLLAPSE OF THE ADMINISTRATION’S MESSAGING STRATEGY

The debacle over the “externals” that did so much to sabotage the post-invasion governance of Iraq was just one example of a persistent problem over Iraq, namely the CIA pretending to know more than it did to push for its preferred political outcomes—and being supported in these policy preferences by the State Department, which could claim it was simply following the facts. The CIA’s status as an intelligence agency nominally outside the political fray put it in a highly advantageous bureaucratic position relative to its rivals: it could make claims with an air of authority, letting stand the idea (or directly saying) it had secret sources to back the claims up, and be essentially shielded from scrutiny—nobody could check these sources, and if anyone tried the CIA could (and did) scream foul-play about the “politicisation” of intelligence. Despite the popular belief that the administration filtered CIA information or leaned on the Agency to come up with intelligence that supported its policies, Congressional investigations found not one single case of political leaders distorting intelligence or improperly pressuring the CIA.[54] The true “cherry-picking” of intelligence that did so much damage over Iraq came from the intelligence side, which suppressed evidence and slanted its analysis in line with preconceived notions and policy preferences it is not supposed to have (see also, the belief former regime elements and jihadists would not cooperate). This is not only disreputable behaviour, rebranding from-the-“gut” inclinations as evidence-based analysis, but the Agency—with a quite dazzling consistency—chose the wrong option.[55] One would have expected a better record by mere chance.

The compliment that vice paid to virtue on the “externals” issue was that at least the CIA knew it was arguing in bad faith, reasoning backward from a desired policy conclusion. Another damaging instance where the Agency spoke with assurance about the state things in Saddam’s Iraq was their view that the Iraqi police were viewed as “professional” by the Iraqi population, adding a confident prediction that after the decapitation of the Ba’thi system these policemen would remain at their posts to assist with law-and-order.[56] Similarly, the CIA said the Iraqi Army would remain intact and whole units would defect, thereby becoming available to assist with internal security in the aftermath of Saddam.[57] This assessment led to CENTCOM deciding it would need less troops for the invasion, with notorious consequences. There was no “agenda” being pushed here: the CIA was simply, disastrously mistaken. As it emerged later, the CIA had almost no visibility into Saddam’s Iraq at all: few human sources and those they did have of dubious reliability, compounded by the Agency’s “tunnel vision” in disregarding information from their sources that did not fit their preconceived theories.[58] With the CIA’s budget and twelve years to try, it might have been expected that the Agency would do a bit better than this, but there is no doubt Saddam’s Iraq “was an uncommonly challenging target for human intelligence”.[59] And the CIA could have just said that. If the CIA had been upfront about how little it knew about Iraq, when, for example, the question arose of how the police were viewed by the people in a police state, the proposition that they were looked upon as honourable public servants would have had to stand or (more likely) fall on its own merits, rather than prevailing simply because it was expressed by the CIA.

The most well-known instance of the CIA confidently predicting something about Iraq that transpired to be wrong is its pre-war WMD assessments. We now know that the CIA could not know what it claimed to know: “After 1998, the CIA had no dedicated unilateral sources in Iraq reporting on” the WMD programs and “the CIA had only a handful of Iraqi assets in total as of 2001”.[60] This incompetence, in tradecraft and then in presenting its findings with inappropriate weighting (e.g. the “slam dunk” comment of Director George Tenet), led to the Agency being singled out for public opprobrium. The CIA undoubtedly had political motives for undermining the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, and felt itself especially aggrieved since most of its officers opposed the invasion, but it was the desire for bureaucratic exculpation that formed the overarching reason the CIA was in “open revolt” as early as the autumn of 2003. The CIA’s drive for absolution—and seeking to offer an alternative scapegoat—waged as a public-relations campaign in the press, was to have catastrophic consequences for the U.S. government, compounding the material mistakes made in and over Iraq.

Probably the two most infamous pre-invasion statements on WMD came in September 2002, when then-NSA Condoleezza Rice said on CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”, and Britain released an intelligence summary then-Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote a foreword to, saying: “[Saddam’s] military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” These kinds of statements, which in context came with all kinds of caveats and were about weighing the risks of inaction, were highly embarrassing when it was found that Saddam did not have an active nuclear program. The paradox was that the invasion put an end to the state of uncertainty over Saddam’s WMDs—which could be claimed in itself as a security gain—and thereby eliminated the epistemic environment the decision was made in, where it seemed most reasonable.

As adumbrated above, if there was any one factor that foreclosed the non-invasion options, it was Saddam’s behaviour. Everyone knew the record of 1991, when the CIA’s error had been in the opposite direction—Saddam was far closer to “the bomb” than anyone realised. The defection of Husayn Kamel in 1995 brought news that four years of U.N. inspections had been successfully, vastly tricked, with biological WMD programs in particular continuing at very high levels. Only later was it revealed the extraordinary elaborate methods used—including the stripping and recreation of entire buildings—to prevent the detection of the ongoing nuclear-weapons work.[61] The inspectors were repeatedly expelled in the 1990s and Saddam had given no accounting of the weaponry he had previously admitted having. It did not seem likely that in the inspectors’ absence, Saddam had decided on unilateral disarmament and if he had destroyed the weaponry, he should have been able to prove that. Not only did Saddam not provide evidence he had destroyed the WMD: he actively refused to. Even after the inspectors returned in late 2002, the regime continued to hamper the inspectors’ work—physically blocking their access to sites, preventing them speaking to Iraqi scientists—and feeding them flagrantly false information.[62]

Why would Saddam behave like this if he had nothing to hide? We now know the answer: Saddam ran a deliberate deception operation to promote the idea he did have nuclear weapons to deter the clerical regime in Iran—and, as a by-product, convinced the U.S., all other Western intelligence agencies (including in France and Germany), and the Iraqi military leadership.[63] Saddam did not see a risk in his information operation deceiving the U.S. because he did not believe the U.S. would carry through on its threat to depose him, even as the armada built up in the Gulf (see above). The Iraqi leadership was under the impression Saddam had WMD to use right up to the eve of the invasion.[64] This is why intercepted communications from senior Saddamist officials showed them speaking as if Saddam still had WMD.[65] We only know all this in hindsight, though, because of knowledge gained by the invasion. With the information picture in 2002 and Saddam’s past record, imagine arguing that Saddam was pretending to have nuclear weapons because he feared Iran, not America. No intelligence service could have discovered that (certainly not the CIA) and they would not have been believed even if they had.[66] It would have been irresponsible not to assume the worst.

Still, even in retrospect, the findings on nuclear weapons need not have undermined the entirety of the rationale for the invasion. It is true that the diplomacy around UNSCR 1441 unduly focused the Iraq debate on nuclear weapons—and led, among other things, to Powell’s dismal, CIA-backed presentation at the U.N. in February 2003—but this is stylistic not substantive. The lack of stockpiles of fissile material damaged one part of one item on the “menu” of reasons to get rid of Saddam. As mentioned, when the U.S. Congress voted to authorise the invasion, it gave about twenty reasons, only one of which was affected by the failure to find WMD stockpiles. The Bush administration, however, decided against trying to defend itself in such terms. By the time the preliminary findings of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) were briefed to Congress by David Kay in October 2003, the administration had decided on a future-focused messaging strategy, so did not even distribute a fact sheet to the press highlighting that, while there were obvious mistakes of pre-war intelligence, most of what the ISG team found supported the case they had made for the invasion.[67]

When the ISG published its final “Duelfer Report” a year later—Kay was replaced by Charles Duelfer in January 2004—the evidence was even stronger, and the administration’s silence even more complete. What was found was that Saddam kept the nuclear-weapons program in stasis: the bureaucratic structure within the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) was preserved and continued to be funded right down to the end;[68] the capabilities—the specialised teams of scientists (“nuclear mujahideen”, as Saddam called them) with their intellectual property,[69] equipment, and facilities—were all maintained; and the intent of Saddam to activate this apparatus and build nuclear weapons when the sanctions were lifted was crystal clear.[70] The pervasive terror and threat to officials and their families meant there were things that simply could not be discovered without the removal of the Saddam government.[71] In February 1992, under orders from Qusay Husayn, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, the leader of Saddam’s centrifuge program, buried components and—most importantly—the designs in his garden.[72] At least one more scientist had kept together technology and components from the uranium enrichment program under regime orders.[73] Absent the invasion, this capacity would have remained there, hidden from the U.N. inspectors behind the Ba’thist wall of fear, until the day the sanctions were gone and the nuclear-weapons program was reactivated.

Incidentally, the list of dangers Saddam posed that could only be discovered after removing his regime was not limited to unconventional weaponry. Rummaging through remnants of the government offices after the regime’s cleanup operation as it withdrew from power, files were downloaded from a computer hard drive. Once translated, the contents enabled more specific questioning of several detainees, which pointed the U.S. to specific documents in the mountain of captured material. The process disclosed in late 2003 that for two years before the invasion, beginning in late 2001, Saddam had been negotiating with North Korea—in Syria, with the complicity of the Asad regime, which profited handsomely from Iraqi sanctions-busting activities—“not merely to buy a few North Korean missiles. Instead, the goal was to obtain a full production line to manufacture, under an Iraqi flag, the North Korean missile system”. The Iraqi side was represented by Munir Awad and two other men, acting nominally for “Al-Bashir Trading Company”, a front company controlled by Qusay Husayn. At the time the Americans put together what had happened, Awad was being sheltered in Syria by Bashar al-Asad’s despotism, along with much of the rest of the surviving Iraqi Ba’th Party’s leadership, which was running the nascent insurgency in Iraq. The Rodong deal was a flagrant breach of the U.N. sanctions that limited Iraq to missiles that could reach 150 kilometres (95 miles): the nuclear-capable Rodong missiles have a range of 2,000 kilometres (1,250 miles). (Note that Syria, while acting as the middleman for this illicit deal, was simultaneously on the U.N. Security Council.) Saddam could have attacked any American base or allied state in the region if this off-the-shelf missile-production apparatus had been transferred by the North Koreans. Saddam’s regime had given the North Koreans $10 million as a downpayment, but had become nervous because of the American attention on Iraq. The North Koreans started dragging their feet. A meeting (the last one as it turned out) was set up in Damascus in February 2003 between Saddam’s people and Kim Jong-Il’s envoys to speed things along—and to try to arrange the acquisition of “night-vision goggles, ammunition and gun barrels—mostly through European middlemen”. The Saddamists did not get anything from their shopping list, nor did they get the missiles, nor did they get their money back.

U.S. officials had not even known to accuse Saddam of trying to acquire long-range missiles, and the means of producing same, from North Korea. The CIA did not detect the negotiations. The Bush administration should have been able to claim this as a “win”: it was very clear that it was the build-up of American-led forces on the Iraqi border that frightened the North Koreans off. But there was a political problem, and it was not just the unyielding literal-mindedness of the administration’s critics. The administration’s main messaging set-piece, Colin Powell’s presentation at the U.N., had been based on specifics of intelligence to make the case that Saddam was an intolerable menace, rather than—as the dreaded “neoconservatives” at the Pentagon had advised—the broad threat picture from Saddam and the argument that in a post-9/11 world the risk of doing nothing about it was too great. Powell had made the whole case a hostage to fortune: he had made specific claims, mostly about one aspect of the Saddam threat (the WMDs), which would either be verified or refuted. This was an inherently defensive posture, where the attention was guaranteed to go mostly on those areas where Powell’s claims proved to be false; minimal credit would be given where Powell’s claims were found to be true, and no credit would be given for things—like disrupting the Rodong missile deal—where there had been no explicit pre-invasion claim. Powell put the focus squarely on the trees and allowed the forest to be ignored. By contrast, in the “neocon” paradigm that even-handedly presented the totality of the security problems related to Saddam’s regime and relied on the public historical record to stress the types of threat Saddam’s regime unceasingly posed, the missile deal with the North Koreans was exactly the kind of danger that was to be expected and which the invasion was supposed to—and had succeeded in—terminating.

In a slightly different register on the same subject, there were things that were known to some, but for various reasons would never have been divulged as long as the regime lasted. A couple of days after the tyrant’s statue was hauled down in Firdos Square, Eason Jordan, a CNN executive, wrote in The New York Times of the things he knew about the Saddam regime: the random “disappearances” of CNN’s local Iraqi employees; the reappearance of some of these employees after visible, gruesome torture; the terror that all Iraqi officials lived under, including the aide to Uday Husayn who had his front teeth pulled out and was not allowed dentures “so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss”; the threats CNN’s non-Iraqi staff worked under, as they were regularly accused of being CIA spies; and the “several Iraqi officials … [who] confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed.” Jordan’s network reported on none of this because it would have meant the murder of the Iraqis working for CNN who had “only” been tortured to that point, and it would have meant the closure of CNN’s Baghdad bureau.

When it came to biological and chemical weapons, it was the same problem: while the regime lasted, none of the Iraqi scientists could speak honestly to the inspectors; their lives and those of their families depended on saying exactly what Saddam told them to. And this problem did not go away when the regime came down. The Saddam regime was so compartmentalised and the WMD program was so dispersed that even senior scientists could not be guaranteed to know vital details about the WMD programs—and that is just the ones the ISG was able to interview. Many Iraqi scientists fled Iraq, never to be found, and other scientists were intimidated into silence or murdered by the regime remnants to prevent them telling the Coalition what they knew. Further, as Kay noted in late 2003, “even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two car garage”. Moreover, in the immediate aftermath of Saddam’s downfall, there was a wave of what is often called “looting”, but which was clearly a systematic military operation that completed a lot of the sanitisation of WMD facilities and destruction of evidence that the Ba’thi regime had demonstrably begun during its time still in power.[74]

The other open question is whether Saddam shipped WMD material to Syria during the invasion. There was a well-established cross-border infrastructure between Syria and Iraq that Saddam used to smuggle contraband into Iraq in defiance of the sanctions during the 1990s,[75] and even anti-war journalists concede that there was very heavy traffic in the other direction during the invasion. Saddam sent something—lots of something—to Syria. James Clapper, an intelligence official at the time and later Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, said the “obvious conclusion” was that what was sent was WMDs, and at least one Iraqi General, George Sada, said he had direct knowledge that “weapons of mass destruction had been moved to Syria”.

If this is what we do not know—the “known unknowns”, as Rumsfeld might say—then there is what we do know. The biological weapons program continued at scale until at least 1995, when it was finally uncovered by the U.N. inspectors, and the biological WMD program continued to be kept operational down to 2003, as did the chemical WMD program. The chemical weapons program was maintained under the control of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) up to 2003, with scientific staff and production capacities kept together in a heavily compartmentalised structure, plus a network of research and testing facilities the inspectors never found.[76] Saddam also “continued to develop delivery platforms”, i.e. missiles, for BWMD and CWMD until the end.[77] Stockpiles of BWMDs and CWMDs are not usually produced en masse unless there is an active need for them, i.e. during a war, because they are difficult and costly to store, so a regime that retains programs that can produce BWMD and CWMD within four to five weeks can be said to possess such weapons.[78] And in Saddam’s case there were actual stockpiles of BWMD and CWMD catalogued by the U.N. in 1999 that he never accounted for.[79] While the ISG said it “appears” that Saddam destroyed the “bulk” of the BWMD agents, they found no hard evidence for this, and American soldiers found some of the “seed stocks” after the invasion.[80] The final sweep after the fall of the regime left little of the stockpiles at the WMD facilities. Some of this weaponry was destroyed, but not all; some was taken and distributed to the regime’s pre-prepared insurgency apparatus, perhaps in Syria, from where the Iraqi Ba’thist leadership directed the insurgency for two years.

One of the Saddamist insurgent structures, known as “Al-Abud Network”, was rolled up by the Coalition soon after Saddam fell. The Abud Network was found in possession of some of the stockpiles of chemical WMD and, more importantly, had been able to “develop a program for weaponizing CW agents” because it was able to “mobilize key resources and tap relevant expertise … to acquire the necessary materials [and] fine tune their agent production techniques”. Had the Abud Network’s program reached maturity the consequences would have been “devastating” for the Coalition. Nor was the Abud Network, even at that early stage, the only insurgent force with access to the knowledge, equipment, and stockpiles of the fallen regime’s WMD programs.[81] The Islamic State movement had access to Saddam’s chemical weapons as early as 2004, when the Zarqawists plotted to use CWMD in an attack in Jordan, and thereafter U.S. troops were repeatedly attacked with CWMDs in the 2000s. ISIS retained these stocks and built its own CWMD program using the intellectual and technical foundations passed to it by the former regime elements. Into the “caliphate” era, in the 2010s, ISIS was developing and using CWMD against its opponents.

Beyond Iraq, the Bush administration was well-placed to claim that the impact of Saddam’s fall on counter-proliferation had been uniformly positive. The negotiations with Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya over its WMDs programs had been tortuous. In December 2003, days after Saddam was pulled out of his spider hole, the Libya process abruptly concluded with Colonel Qaddafi’s total capitulation, dismantling his WMD programs and turning over his nuclear and chemical holdings. When examined by the U.S., it turned out: (a) Qaddafi was much closer to a nuclear weapon than the CIA had assessed; and (b) he had acquired much of the nuclear material and expertise from outside, rather than developing it himself. The trail led to Abdul Qadeer Khan, a nuclear scientist in Pakistan, who had—with self-evident state support—been running an international black market in nuclear technology and know-how for rogue regimes, including not only Iraq, but North Korea and Iran, partly explaining why the nuclear-weapons programs in those two countries are so tightly connected. A.Q. Khan was hustled onto Pakistani state television to make a confession in February 2004, in English no less. Khan was soon pardoned by Pakistan’s then-ruler General Pervez Musharraf, and placed under “house arrest”—that is, Khan disappeared into the protective custody of the military-intelligence establishment that was behind Khan’s criminal activities in the first place. Not the ideal conclusion, perhaps: the U.S. would have liked access to Khan. But it shut down the A.Q. Khan network, and shone some more light on Clerical Iran’s nuclear program, which was itself temporarily paused—not “halted”, as the CIA later witlessly said—in late 2003 as the mullahs surveyed the fate of the last ruler to defy the Americans on this point.

Despite all of this, without the drums of chemicals in hand to display on CNN, the post-invasion messaging would always have been difficult, partly because of the some of the pre-war messaging, which took shortcuts in making the case for the anti-Saddam war, especially after matters became so concentrated on the U.N. process relating to disarmament. At root, the question being asked by Americans and around the world was, “What happened to the WMDs?”, and the honest answer was (and is) that to a significant extent: “We don’t know”. What the administration could say was that a, so to speak, “latent, not blatant” threat had been neutralised—that wherever the weapons were, they were no longer available for Saddam Husayn to blackmail the world economy; attack his neighbours, as he had done in the war with Iran; massacre the Iraqi population, as he had done with the Kurds in the 1980s and the Shi’a rebels in 1991; or to pass to his terrorist allies. (The other most outstanding controversy remains Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda: to prevent this post’s length being completely unmanageable, I am going to leave that out here, but I have discussed it in detail before.)

Trying to explain to the general public the intelligence methods by which facts became known, degrees of certainty, the infrastructure of WMD programs, the distinction between production capacity and stockpiles, the relationship of the insurgency to Syria, and risk assessments would be a challenge under any circumstances. In the toxic bureaucratic atmosphere of the Bush administration, what would in effect have been a sophisticated public education program was impossible. It all went back to the shut-down of the Office of Strategic Influence in February 2002: a single fabricated “leak” could derail the entire public-relations machinery of the government and damage the administration. The CIA has always played the “leaks” game better than most, and, motivated to deflect blame after 2003, it set to work. With a sympathetic press and a simple message—“We knew there were no WMDs and told Bush not to invade, but he intimidated us and cherry-picked our intelligence”—the CIA had an easy time of things, and the fact the administration chose not to fight back made it easier still.

In the end, the CIA and State Department basically ruined the President’s ability to make his case over Iraq: any facts or arguments presented by the administration would be undermined from within by counter-claims from anonymous sources, especially from the CIA, which, again, had an aura of authority as an allegedly apolitical intelligence agency, despite a record of utter cluelessness on Iraq in every direction. The very dynamic of the administration trying to defend itself and then being “leaked” against was felt to be so damaging to the administration’s message discipline, and to be such fuel to popular and partisan criticisms that the administration was dishonest, that around the autumn of 2003 the administration simply gave up making its case.

This decision, taken as it was becoming clear major WMD stockpiles were not going to be found in Iraq, compounded the problems: rather than have the argument on two fronts—against overt political opponents in the public arena and the covert political opponents within mutinous federal bureaucracies—President Bush ceased defending the concrete objectives he had laid out before the invasion based on the security considerations, and switched the messaging entirely to an abstract stay-the-course, future-oriented narrative of democracy-promotion, symbolised in his second inaugural address. One obvious consequence of this was to push the definition of “success” further out of reach: the original security objectives could be claimed to have been achieved by demolishing Saddam’s regime, with any development of democratic institutions as a bonus; now, the quality of Iraqi democracy was the yardstick, and no credit was claimed for eliminating the Saddam threats. The future-focused messaging strategy had two further terrible effects: (1) it reinforced the sense that the administration was dishonest—it looked like they were switching the grounds of the debate and making a tacit admission that the original arguments were mendacious; and (2) it incentivised attacks on the past, on the regime-change case, since anything critics chose to say in that area, no matter how hysterical, would not be rebutted. Even on its own terms, in short, this was illogical and ineffective. The media coverage and public discourse about Iraq after 2003 became almost entirely focused on the past and discounted even unarguable positive developments in the present as fruits of a tainted tree—the exact opposite of what the White House messaging policy was supposed to achieve. For the stay-the-course messaging to work, people had to believe the continued sacrifices were worth it, which could not happen if conventional wisdom was that the invasion was launched based on mistakes and/or lies. For the future-focused message to work, the administration needed to establish and defend a foundation of legitimacy about the origins and purposes of the invasion. By failing to defend its own case for the invasion, that legitimacy was eroded.[82] It was a dreadful strategic error, and one that is almost certainly beyond repair.

The above does not involve an argument one way or the other on the wisdom of the invasion. The September 2002 statements from Rice and Blair are still as open to criticism for being overwrought as they ever were, for example, and reasonable people can still arrive at a cost-benefit judgment that Saddam’s WMD capacities did not warrant an invasion to remove him. The WMD issue undoubtedly occupies a disproportionate place in general in the argument over Iraq, and the fault for that is with the American and British governments, whose contingent diplomatic-political decisions made it so central in the public messaging. Nonetheless, even if the issue is right-sized, a part of the debate will always be about the WMDs: it would be truer to the historical record if this component of the debate was on the terrain of threat tolerability, rather than the current denial that there was any WMD threat from Saddam’s Iraq, which is a facile attempt to dispense with the argument altogether. The hope is almost certainly forlorn. We can see this in the failure of the attempts to highlight that WMDs were found in Iraq. They all ran into the question: If this is true, why did the Bush administration not put this forward? We know the answer to that now, but the moment for a correction has passed. You cannot do for people what they will not do for themselves. Unfortunately, in this case the people in question were the government of the lone superpower and their strategic messaging decision, taken for domestic political reasons, has had global political ramifications and will have a distorting effect on the historical record long into the future.

---

REFERENCES

[1] Douglas Feith (2008), War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, p. 515.

[2] The State Department and the CIA were particularly adept at using the news media for bureaucratic warfare, shaping public perceptions through anonymous statements and supposed “leaks” of information that were often simply fabrications or so distorted as to amount to fabrications. Sometimes this was to push for a particular policy outcome; sometimes, more pettily, to deflect blame. The personal bitterness that inflected this bureaucratic feud was quite extraordinary—and quite extraordinarily one-sided. A classic case is Secretary of State Colin Powell referring to Feith as running a “Gestapo” office in the Pentagon, despite knowing Feith for twenty years and knowing Feith’s father was a Holocaust survivor. See: War and Decision, pp. 388-89.

[3] The differences were not just over Iraq, either. For example, the “realists” worried that a democratic transformation in Baghdad would challenge Saudi Arabia’s regional influence, political and economic, and maybe even destabilise to the Saudi regime domestically. The “neoconservative” camp hoped that at least the former would prove true, and that Saddam’s fall would indirectly put the Saudis in their place. See: James Mann (2004), The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, p. 339.

[4] War and Decision, pp. 171-77.

[5] Scowcroft is an excellent case-in-point showing that “realist” is an ideological label, not a description of analytical prowess: shortly after this, Scowcroft unburdened himself of the view that the period involving the repeated efforts to destroy Israel, Colonel Qaddafi’s reign of terror, the Soviet conquest of Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq War, and Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait was “fifty years of peace” in the Middle East.

[6] The Rise of the Vulcans, p. 343.

[7] George W. Bush (2010), Decision Points, p. 238.

[8] Decision Points, pp. 237-39.

[9] For a useful overview of how the U.N debate and diplomacy in the autumn of 2002 played out within the administration, see: The Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 347-57.

[10] War and Decision, p. 342.

[11] Decision Points, pp. 237-56.

[12] Fouad Ajami (2006), The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, p. 54.

[13] Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) report (2005), ‘A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership’, p. 14.

[14] IPP, pp. 12-13.

[15] IPP, pp. 28-9.

[16] IPP, pp. 30-31.

[17] IPP, pp. 29-31.

[18] IPP, pp. 25-6.

[19] Christopher Andrew (2018), The Secret World, pp. 744-45; Decision Points, p. 269; War and Decision, pp. 338-39.

[20] War and Decision, p. 377.

[21] Ibid.

[22] War and Decision, pp. 375-79.

[23] War and Decision, pp. 402-06.

[24] War and Decision, pp. 422-24.

[25] War and Decision, p. 435.

[26] See: War and Decision, pp. 420-70, 496.

[27] War and Decision, p. 519.

[28] Donald Rumsfeld (2011), Known and Unknown: A Memoir, p. 513. The argument for an occupation was plausible: after Saddam had uprooted political life and corroded the state, a strong impartial authority could oversee the country for at least a few years to stimulate the growth of political institutions and mediate between the political factions. There were arguments against this, but a whole-hearted decision in either direction would have been better than what resulted. The outcome of the melee, as the Pentagon stuck with the troop numbers designed to a rapid transfer of sovereignty and fought to get the original plan the President had signed off on back online, was a compromise that agreed to the occupation and all its responsibilities, yet did not have the resources or last long enough to have a meaningful impact, and so far from stabilising the country it tainted Iraqi democrats serving on the powerless Governing Council as “collaborators” and abetted the forces of ruin—the fallen regime elements, the Zarqawists, and Iran—by feeding into the darkest suspicions of Iraqis emerging from the long night of Saddamism.

[29] War and Decision, pp. 446-49, 453-55.

[30] Dr. Aqila al-Hashemi, a senior diplomat close to Tariq Aziz under the old regime and then a champion of the new order, likely to become Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, was shot down outside her home on 20 September 2003, and died a few days later. Only then did the CPA begin taking the security of IGC members seriously. See: Ali Allawi (2007), The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, pp. 165-66.

[31] The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 135-36.

[32] The Occupation of Iraq, p. 136.

[33] Joel Rayburn (2014), Iraq after America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance, pp. 130-32.

[34] Fouad Ajami (1998), The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey, p. 138.

[35] The Occupation of Iraq, p. 94.

[36] War and Decision, pp. 497-98.

[37] Colonels Joel Rayburn and Frank Sobchak [eds.] (2019), The U.S. Army in the Iraq War: Volume 1: Invasion, Insurgency, Civil War, 2003-2006, p. 282. Available here.

[38] The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 322-33.

[39] Carter Malkasian (2018), Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State, p. 40.

[40] War and Decision, p. 497.

[41] War and Decision, p. 379.

[42] War and Decision, pp. 384-85.

[43] War and Decision, pp. 379-85.

[44] War and Decision, pp. 239-45, 254-56, 380.

[45] War and Decision, p. 380.

[46] War and Decision, pp. 239-45.

[47] Having failed to discredit Chalabi before the invasion, the CIA believed it had finally revenged itself a year after the invasion: it had cast the blame onto him for all the mistakes of pre-war intelligence, blocked the INC’s role during the invasion, hindered Chalabi politically at every point during the occupation phase, and damaged Chalabi’s relations with the White House by getting into circulation silly stories about Chalabi endangering American forces by colluding with the Iranians. (Note: it is not that the general charge is untrue: Chalabi really was close to the Iranians, including a personal closeness to the commander of Iran’s spy-terrorist apparatus, Qassem Sulaymani, which continued even after Sulaymani put together IRGC-run militias that were killing Americans and Coalition soldiers and Iraqi civilians, and when Sulaymani later helped Bashar al-Asad mobilise a system of industrial slaughter to face down rebellion. The issue is the specific stories the CIA came up with a leaked to the press in May 2004.) Allawi’s interim government then tried bringing corruption charges against Chalabi in August 2004 that were so flagrantly bogus, the interim justice minister threatened to resign unless the indictment was rescinded. See: The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 323-24.

[48] War and Decision, p. 490.

[49] The Occupation of Iraq, p. 52.

[50] The Occupation of Iraq, p. 330.

[51] The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 51-2.

[52] Bernard Trainor and Michael Gordon (2012), The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, p. 79.

[53] The Occupation of Iraq, p. 162.

[54] ‘Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq’, 9 July 2004, pp. 284, 361-63. Available here. ‘Report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction’, commonly known as “The Silberman-Robb Commission Report” (or “Robb-Silberman Commission Report”), 31 March 2005, pp. 188-89. Available here. On the specific issue of Saddam’s connections to Al-Qaeda, the Select Committee found that the Pentagon’s “questions had forced [CIA analysts] to go back and review the intelligence reporting, and that during this exercise they came across information they had overlooked in initial readings. The Committee found that this process—the policymakers probing questions—actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) products” [italics added] (p. 34).

[55] War and Decision, pp. 517-18.

[56] War and Decision, pp. 363-66; Known and Unknown, pp. 464, 476.

[57] War and Decision, p. 517; Known and Unknown, pp. 464, 517.

[58] Silbermann-Robb Commission, pp. 158-62.

[59] Silbermann-Robb Commission, p. 158.

[60] Silberman-Robb Commission, p. 158.

[61] Mahdi Obeidi (2004), The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind, pp. 148-50.

[62] War and Decision, p. 329.

[63] Silberman-Robb Commission, p. 156.

[64] ‘Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq WMD’, commonly known as “The Duelfer Report”, Volume I, 6 October 2004, pp. 65-66. Available here.

[65] War and Decision, p. 329.

[66] War and Decision, p. 331.

[67] War and Decision, pp. 470-75.

[68] The Bomb in My Garden, p. 183.

[69] ‘Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq WMD’, commonly known as “The Duelfer Report”, Volume II, 6 October 2004, p. 66. Available here.

[70] The Duelfer Report, Volume I, pp. 41-44.

[71] The Bomb in My Garden, pp. 217-24.

[72] The Bomb in My Garden, pp. 150-53.

[73] The Duelfer Report, Volume II, p. 73

[74] ‘Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq WMD’, commonly known as “The Duelfer Report”, Volume III, 6 October 2004, pp. 37, 55, 78-9. Available here.

[75] The Duelfer Report, Volume I, p. 73.

[76] The Duelfer Report, Volume II, p. 3.

[77] The Duelfer Report, Volume III, p. 46.

[78] War and Decision, pp. 226-27.

[79] War and Decision, p. 224.

[80] The Duelfer Report, Volume III, p. 2.

[81] The Duelfer Report, Volume III, p. 95.

[82] War and Decision, pp. 475-77.