New
Memos Challenge Claims Made by the Bush Administration About its Pre-war Iraq Policy
On May 17, 2005, the
Democratic Policy Committee released a report on a July 2002 British government
memo regarding U.S. and British policy toward Iraq (http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-doc.cfm?doc_name=fs-109-1-29).
The so-called "Downing Street Memo," which suggested that the Bush
Administration was manipulating facts and intelligence to fit its already-made
decision to invade Iraq, was followed by seven other British government memos
leaked to the press earlier this month:
-
A July 21, 2002 memo circulated
within the Cabinet office, entitled, "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action;"
-
A March 25, 2002 memo from
Secretary of State Jack Straw to Prime Minister Blair entitled,
"Crawford/Iraq;"
-
A March 22, 2002 memo from
political director Peter Ricketts to Secretary of State Straw entitled, "Iraq:
Advice for the Prime Minister;"
-
A March 18, 2002 memo from
Ambassador to the U.S. Christopher Meyer to foreign policy advisory David
Manning entitled, "Iraq and Afghanistan: Conversation with Wolfowitz;"
-
A March 14, 2002 memo from
foreign policy advisor David Manning to Prime Minister Blair entitled, "Your
Trip to the US;"
-
A March 8, 2002 memo from
the Overseas and Defence Secretariat entitled, "Iraq: Options Paper;" and
-
A March 8, 2002 memo from
legal advisors in the Foreign and Commonwealth cabinet office entitled, "Iraq:
Legal Background."
The authenticity of each
of the British memos has been confirmed by the British government. These memos,
when read together, provide significant insight into the Bush Administration's approach
to dealing with Saddam Hussein's regime prior to the invasion of Iraq.
Memos Express Doubts About the Administration's Case for
War
Finding: Evidence
lacking for Administration's claims on Iraq's WMD program. The authors of the British memos express
continuing doubts about the strength of the case regarding Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) programs. The March 25 memo preparing Prime Minister
Blair to visit President Bush at the President's ranch in Crawford, Texas,
states, "in the documents so far presented it has been hard to glean whether
the threat from Iraq is so significantly different from that of Iran and North
Korea as to justify military action," and that "the threat from Iraq has not
worsened as a result of 11 September." The March 22 memo addressed to
Secretary of State Straw from political director Peter Rickets notes that "even
the best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent
years on the nuclear, missile, or CW/BW [chemical and biological weapons]
fronts."
These concerns are
echoed by other sources. The original "Downing Street Memo" of July 23 stated, "the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening
his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea
or Iran." Carne Ross, a former British diplomat who worked closely with U.N.
inspectors in Iraq, recently undermined the pre-war WMD case even further,
saying, "I'd read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and
there's no way that it could sustain the case that the government was
presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too." (Guardian, 6/20/05)
And the British intelligence service MI6 reportedly delivered a Joint
Intelligence Committee Assessment on March 15, 2002, during the same time frame
that many of the newly leaked memos were written, asserting that intelligence
was "sporadic and patchy" and that "[w]e
believe Iraq retains some production equipment, and some small stocks of
chemical warfare agent precursors, and may have hidden small quantities of
agents and weapons. There is no intelligence on any biological agent
production facilities." (London Daily Telegraph, 9/18/04)
Finding: "No credible
evidence" for Bush Administration's claims about Iraq's links to terrorism. In addition to casting doubt upon the
Administration's case regarding Iraq's WMD capabilities, the British memos
reflect an almost out-of-hand dismissal of the Administration's claims about
Iraq's links to terrorism. The March 25 memo to Prime Minister Blair states
bluntly, "there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with UBL [Osama bin
Laden] and Al Qaida." The March 22 memo to Secretary Straw says "US scrambling
to establish a link between Iraq and Al [Q]aida is so far frankly
unconvincing."
Finding: Strong doubts expressed to Bush Administration
about its efforts to link Iraq and 9-11. Bush Administration officials repeatedly charged that Iraqi
intelligence officials had met with Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker in the
September 11, 2001 attacks. In September 2002, Vice President Cheney asserted,
"We've seen in connection
with the hijackers, of course, Mohamed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did
apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one
occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi
intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center."
(Meet the Press, 9/8/02) Also in September 2002, then-National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated on CNN's Late Edition that "We continue
to look at evidence of that meeting. And it's just more of a picture that is
emerging that there may well have been contacts between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's
regime." (9/8/02) Earlier, unnamed Administration officials had peddled the
story to leading newspapers. (Los Angeles Times, 8/2/02; William Safire
op-ed, New York Times, 5/8/02; New York Times, 12/16/01; Associated
Press 9/18/01)
Undersecretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz appears to have played a significant role in
developing the claim that the meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence
officials did occur. In August 2002, Newsweek reported that "Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an Iraq hawk, summoned two FBI officials to
brief him on claims by Czech intelligence that 9-11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had
met last year in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent. Wolfowitz wanted the
FBI to endorse the Czech account to show ties between Saddam Hussein and Al
Qaeda. But when FBI counterterrorism chief Pat D'Amuro and a case agent
expressed skepticism, Wolfowitz vigorously challenged them, says one source."
(8/19/02) Time magazine later confirmed that, while certain officials
denied that Wolfowitz pressured the FBI for confirmation of the meeting, "the
FBI says the Pentagon team tried, with success, to persuade the bureau to
concede that reports of the meeting are at least possible." (9/2/02)
Wolfowitz
himself admitted to British officials, however, that this intelligence was uncertain.
Reporting on his conversation with Wolfowitz in the March 18, 2002 memo,
Ambassador Christopher Meyer wrote, "Wolfowitz said that it was absurd to deny
the link between terrorism and Saddam. There might be doubt about the alleged
meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11, and Iraqi
intelligence (did we, he asked, know anything more about this meeting?)." The
memo, along with reports that Czech president Vaclav Havel expressed doubts
about the meeting to the Bush Administration in the spring of 2002 (New York
Times, 10/23/02), adds further confirmation that the Bush Administration
was well aware of doubts about the meeting's occurrence even while selling it
as evidence of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Memos Highlight the Bush Administration's Planning
Failures
Finding: Bush
Administration lacked concern or understanding of the difficulty of managing
post-Saddam Iraq. British
officials predicted a situation following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's
regime that has now largely come to pass: a complicated, tenuous situation
that would require long and intense investment in terms of funding and troops.
The Cabinet Office's July 21 memo notes that "a post-war occupation of Iraq
could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise."
Unfortunately,
the British assessment was that the Bush Administration either did not
understand the strong possibility that such a complex post-war situation would
emerge, or did not engage in sufficient planning for such a contingency, or
both. The July 21 memo states, "the US military plans are virtually silent"
about the possibility of a long nation-building operation. The March 14 memo
from foreign policy advisor David Manning about his conversation with National
Security Advisor Rice says, "from what she said, Bush has yet to find the
answers to the big questions," including, "what happens on the morning after?"
He further notes, "I think there is a real risk that the Administration
underestimates the difficulties. They may agree that failure isn't an option,
but this does not mean that they will avoid it."
And
the Overseas and Defence Secretariat's March 8 "Options Paper" states that, for
a democratic regime replacing Saddam Hussein "to survive it would require the
US and others to commit to nation building for many years." Despite these
assessments, Bush Administration officials told the American people that
operations in Iraq "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
(Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 2/7/03)
Finding: Bush
Administration strongly allied with Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National
Congress. In the March 18 memo
recapping his conversation with Undersecretary Wolfowitz, British Ambassador
Meyer demonstrates a marked uneasiness about the close contact between the Bush
Administration and the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmad Chalabi.
Ambassador Meyer notes that Wolfowitz "said that he found himself between the
two sides (but as the conversation developed, it became clear that Wolfowitz
was far more pro-INC than not)." Ambassador Meyer also reports Wolfowitz
being "strongly opposed" to any coalition excluding the INC, defending the INC
against concerns that it was infiltrated by Iraqi intelligence, and brushing
off those opposed to the coalition, including the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA). Finally, Ambassador Meyer notes that "Wolfowitz brushed over my
reference to the absence of Sunni in the INC."
As
has been well documented, the concerns expressed by Ambassador Meyer and others
about the INC proved to be well founded. In the aftermath of Iraq's invasion,
Chalabi has been investigated for fraud, grand theft, and counterfeiting. Even
more troubling are allegations that Chalabi leaked critical information about
U.S. intelligence operations to Iran. The INC itself was found to have
provided the CIA, the Department of Defense, and Administration officials with
defectors who routinely lied, fabricated stories, and exaggerated the nature of
Iraq's threat to the United States in order to push the Bush Administration
toward war. Admiral Lowell Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
admitted to Congress that at least some of the intelligence provided by the INC
"was either fabricated or embellished" (Senate Armed Services Committee, 3/9/04), and
the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of pre-war intelligence was
sharply critical of a source provided by the INC, code-named "Curveball," who
provided inaccurate intelligence Nevertheless, the Bush Administration paid
the INC over $1 million for flawed intelligence, and continued making payments
until May 2004 -- over a year after the war began and months after the
intelligence it provided had been called into serious question by the absence
of WMD in Iraq.
Memos Call Into Question the Bush
Administration's Commitment to Diplomacy
Finding: Bush
Administration preoccupied with military option for regime change, not
diplomatic solution to disarm Iraq.
The British memos demonstrate a clear preoccupation within the Bush
Administration with invading Iraq, already evident in March 2002. British Foreign
Affairs advisor David Manning reported in his March 14 memo that, based on his
meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, "Condi's enthusiasm
for regime change is undimmed." Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's March 25 memo
likewise asserted that "most of the assessments from the US have assumed regime
change as a means of eliminating Iraq's WMD threat." And the July 21 Cabinet
Office memo states that "the US Government's military planning for action
against Iraq is proceeding apace." In fact, that memo presented military
action as a foregone conclusion, with timing dependent only on the length of
debate in Congress: "although the US military could act against Iraq as soon
as November, we judged that a military campaign is unlikely to start until
January 2003, if only because of the time it will take to reach consensus in
Washington."
What
is striking about these statements and others in the memos, however, is not
just that they mention that the Bush Administration was focused on regime
change, it is that there an absolute absence of discussion about what the
Administration presented to the public as its main objective: disarming Iraq
of its WMD. In fact, the July 21 Cabinet Office memo drew attention to this
fact, stating, "US military planning unambiguously takes as its objective the
removal of Saddam Hussein's regime, followed by elimination [of] Iraqi WMD."
If
disarming Iraq of its WMD was the Administration primary objective, why would
regime change be the first goal of military planning? More to the point, if it
were true that disarmament were the first objective, one would expect to see a
series of memos that questioned the best course of action to pursue this
objective, whether it be diplomatic, military, or otherwise. Instead, the
memos are singularly focused on determining the best course of action to secure
regime change, and there is an assumption from the beginning that the best
course of action was, in fact, U.S. military invasion. The centering of the
discussion in these seven memos on military action for the purpose of regime
change lends credence to the July 23 "Downing Street" memo's assertion that "military action was now seen as inevitable...
It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if
the timing was not yet decided."
Finding: The diplomatic
process prior to invasion was used as a pretext for war, not as a genuine effort
to avoid sending U.S. troops into battle. The memos clarify two additional questions about the Bush
Administration's commitment to diplomacy. First, they make clear that the
Administration was not willing to pursue the diplomatic track long enough to
maximize chances for international support for military action and showed very
little concern for international participation at all. Second, they reveal
that the British government invented the insertion of weapons inspectors prior
to the invasion as a pretext to legally justify British participation in the
U.S. war effort.
Several
memos hint at the Bush Administration's disdain for diplomacy and international
cooperation. The March 8 "Options Paper" states, "the US may be willing to
work with a much smaller coalition than we think desirable." Ambassador
Meyer's March 18 memo recounts him telling Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, "the US
could go it alone if it wanted to. But if it wanted to act with partners,
there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against
Saddam." And Foreign Secretary Straw's March 25 memo states, "the US are
likely to oppose any idea of a fresh mandate" from the United Nations
sanctioning military action.
Even
more disturbing, the memos reveal that the insertion of weapons inspectors
prior to the invasion was only a pretext for war, not a good faith effort at
diplomacy. The plan is stated most clearly in the July 21 Cabinet Office memo:
"it is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam
would reject (because he is unwilling to accept unfettered access) and which
would not be regarded as unreasonable by the international community. However,
failing that (or an Iraqi attack) we would be most unlikely to achieve a legal
base for military action by January 2003." Other memos make mention of this strategy
as well: the March 14 memo from foreign policy advisor David Manning states
"[renewed refusal] by Saddam to accept unfettered inspections would be a
powerful argument," and the March 18 memo from Ambassador Meyer says, "I then
went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors." These memos make
clear that the weapons inspections were not, as President Bush claimed, "one
last chance to disarm." (1/14/03) Rather, they were simply a tool to weaken
international resistance to the military invasion of Iraq.
Finding: Bush
Administration and the Blair government jointly launched secret offensive air operations
before Congress authorized military action. In the July 23 "Downing Street" memo, the British Defence
Secretary reported, "the US has already begun 'spikes of activity' to put
pressure on the regime." The July 21 Cabinet Office memo expresses concern
that such combative activities in the "No Fly Zones" could goad Saddam
Hussein's Iraq into war, warning of "the risk that military action is
precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the No Fly
Zones."
Recently, Lieutenant
General Michael Moseley, the commander of allied air forces during the
invasion, admitted that, in 2002 and early 2003, allied aircraft flew 21,736
sorties and dropped more than 600 bombs on 391 "carefully selected targets." (London
Sunday Times, 6/26/05) The U.S. began "spikes of activity" in the No Fly
Zones as early as May 2002, five months before Congress authorized the use of
force against Iraq, and intensified air assaults in an operation known as the
"Blue Plan" in August 2002, two months before Congress approved force. (London
Sunday Times, 6/19/05) Former U.S. Special Operations force member Timur
Eads said, in January 2003, "We're bombing practically every day as we patrol the no-fly
zones, taking out air defense batteries, and there are all kinds of CIA and
Special Forces operations going on. So I would call it the beginning of a war."
(Boston Globe, 1/6/03)
Primary Sources:
The
July 23, 2002 "Downing Street" memo can be viewed at the London Sunday Times
website, here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html.
The
July 21, 2002 "Cabinet Office" memo can also be viewed at the London Sunday
Times website, here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1648758,00.html.
The
other memos cited in this document can be viewed at Newsday website: http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usbrit0623,0,2433173.story?coll=ny-top-headlines.
