Why did U.S. intelligence fail to anticipate India’s nuclear tests in the spring of 1998? The CIA director George Tenet was sufficiently chagrined about the lapse to ask a retired former vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Vice Admiral David E. Jeremiah, to head a commission to investigate and report back within ten days. The Jeremiah Commission report has not been made public, but Jeremiah indicated at a 2 June 1998 press conference that one serious problem with Indian intelligence collection had been competition for resources. Asked if the lapse had been a U.S. intelligence failure or an Indian intelligence success, Jeremiah responded, “About equal.39 I guess I’d rather not say that it was a success on the part of anyone in keeping secrets from us. But, in fact, that happens, and some of that occurred here. And some of it was not putting enough assets against it and the competition for assets to deal with other things.” The “other things” that the U.S. intelligence community had been dealing with had been Iraq, a CNN reporter noted after the Jeremiah press conference: “In retrospect, the U.S.40 might have overcommitted those resources to the Persian Gulf, where U.S. forces were massed against Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.”
FOR THOSE IN THE United States and elsewhere who dealt with nuclear proliferation, the final years of the 1990s felt like pushing a heavy stone up a steepening hill. India and Pakistan had broken away. Bill Clinton had signed the CTBT, but the Republican Senate kept pushing new roadblocks into the path to its ratification. Iraq, having disgorged thousands of pages of documents following Hussein Kamel’s defection in 1995, writhed like a desperate snake seeking release from U.N. sanctions and IAEA intrusions, while the debate among American policy elites over how to deal with Saddam Hussein shifted toward regime change. Downsizing the U.S. arsenal and committing the United States to an international treaty banning testing were anathema to the new class of Newt Gingrich Republicans, who were parochial in background and generally suspicious of international agreements.
The CTBT, in Republican thinking, “was basically a Democratic41 issue,” Keith Hansen told me. “It never really had bipartisan support.” Along with maximum deterrence, the Republican Party had carved out an approach to dealing with the nuclear threat more suited to its unilateralist spirit: national missile defense. Ronald Reagan’s space-based Strategic Defense Initiative had been cancelled in 1993 after a cumulative expenditure of $32 billion, with little to show for the investment. To replace SDI, the Republican Party’s 1994 Contract with America proposed that the U.S. invent and build a ground-based national missile defense (NMD). (From 1996 through 2009, NMD swallowed another $90 billion without even demonstrating that it could reliably track and destroy a missile warhead.)
CTBT ratification became a divisively partisan issue in 1999, after North Carolina Republican senator Jesse Helms had kept the treaty locked away in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for two years on the grounds that earlier treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming had to be delivered up first for slaughter, something the Clinton administration was loath to do. Beginning in the spring of 1999, Arizona Republican senator Jon Kyl quietly canvassed his party colleagues to solicit their votes against treaty ratification. “By the end of September,”42 wrote the historian Terry Deibel, “Kyl and company had 42 out of 55 Senate Republicans pledged to vote against the CTBT, 8 more than were needed to defeat it.”
When a Democratic senator, Byron Dorgan, then unwittingly staged a filibuster on the Senate floor to force a vote on ratification, the Republican majority leader, Trent Lott, on 30 September abruptly agreed to schedule the vote within a week under a unanimous consent agreement, “with no guarantee43 of hearings or committee reports, very restrictive conditions on amendments, and only ten hours of Senate debate.” The Democrats realized too late that they had been outmaneuvered.
They were sandbagged as well by the Clinton administration’s failure to campaign publicly for the treaty, largely because Clinton had been distracted while fighting off impeachment for perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power following his affair with Lewinsky. (He was impeached by the House on 19 December 1998 but acquitted by the Senate on 12 February 1999.) “Clinton had not mounted44 a public campaign on the treaty’s behalf,” wrote Deibel, “he had not appointed a high-level official within the administration to lobby for its passage, and he had not recruited a senior Republican senator to work for the CTBT in the Republican caucus.”
When the Democratic leadership found out what Kyl and his colleagues had done, they tried to have the Senate vote postponed. The Republicans blocked a postponement. Two weapons lab directors, Paul Robinson of Sandia and Bruce Tartar of Lawrence Livermore testified against the CTBT, as did the former Nixon administration secretary of defense James Schlesinger. Henry Kissinger, Deibel observed, after advocating postponement, “wrote on the day45 of the vote opposing approval.” The vote fell out at 48 to 51, not only not the required two-thirds but not even a majority.
Beyond the obvious partisanship and factionalism, beyond the vindictive Republican desire to humiliate Clinton once more by rejecting what he had called “the longest-sought, hardest-fought prize in arms control history,” the Senate’s failure to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty sounded the fundamental dissonance of the Faustian bargain that the United States and the other nuclear powers have made with nuclear weapons. We have feared them even as we have tried to convince ourselves that they protect us, and so we have found it possible neither to employ them nor to break them and throw them away. Deibel concludes:
It would be a mistake46 to interpret the CTBT’s defeat as a lesson only on the salience of politics, procedure, and partisanship. Substance also mattered, primarily because of the Clinton administration’s decision … to go for a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing, one that prohibited all nuclear tests forever. The scope and finality of the commitment seemed to require near-certainty about a lot of things—the effectiveness of the stockpile stewardship program, the capabilities of monitoring and challenge inspections, even the future of deterrence and war itself—that were uncertain at best. By making the treaty absolute and permanent, the administration raised the stakes for the Senate, and it did so despite a lack of cooperation from significant numbers of the opposition. It thus presented the treaty’s opponents with the opportunity to use their dominant legislative position to deny senators time to sort out their concerns about the treaty and satisfy themselves that its benefits were worth its risks.… The rushed procedure … made it difficult for senators to learn about the many highly technical aspects of the CTBT and to get comfortable with the political issues it posed. Lacking that knowledge and comfort, senators were unwilling to commit themselves and their country in perpetuity.
“It would be fair comment,” Richard Butler wrote, “to declare all of this a circus, in every sense of that fine Latin word: something that simply goes around and around, or a tragicomedy with glitzy performers, none quite real. What has been and remains in play is raw power, massive and unequally distributed, the indelible, primary manifestation of which is the possession of nuclear weapons.”
It follows, as Butler has also written, that “the problem of nuclear weapons47 is nuclear weapons”—the weapons themselves, that is, not the tangle of political disputes among the declared and undeclared nuclear powers. As ideological competition among nuclear powers lessened in the aftermath of the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., the irregular but unmistakable trend in international relations has been toward the reduction and elimination of nuclear arsenals. When all is said and done, more nations gave up their nuclear ambitions during the 1990s than sought to acquire those weapons of terror and mass death. That achievement was a promising sign of fundamental change, but few would recognize its implications until the United States resolved its conflict with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
* The bikini, still mildly scandalous in the United States in 1965, had been designed by a French engineer in 1946 and named after the exciting new sport of atmospheric atomic-weapons t
esting, initiated that year with U.S. tests in the air and underwater at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
* A film in which a president starts a war to distract the nation from a sexual affair.
PART FOUR
AN INTOLERABLE THREAT TO ALL HUMANITY
FOURTEEN REGIME CHANGE
GEORGE W. BUSH CAME TO the presidency in 2001 already committed to regime change in Iraq should an opportune casus belli arise. In a 1999 conversation with his ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz, candidate Bush told Herskowitz, “One of the keys1 to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it.” In a primary-campaign debate that year Bush confirmed that he meant regime change: Asked what he would do if Saddam Hussein were discovered to have weapons of mass destruction, he said, “I’d take ’em out, take out the weapons of mass destruction.” (Herskowitz also recalled Bush expressing a more general principle of executive action. “He said, ‘All I’ve heard for years is, what has the boy done on his own?’ So he said, ‘I’ve got to make a clear distinction between myself and my father.’”)
Many were shocked when Herskowitz’s story was reported in 2004, but Bush’s Clinton-era commitment to regime change in Iraq was hardly original. Had Al Gore won the decision in the U.S. Supreme Court which resolved the disputed 2000 presidential election, he too would have been committed to regime change. Gore had first called for overthrowing Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Persian Gulf War—Bush’s father’s war—writing in The New York Times in September 1991, “The only way we can hope2 for long-term relief from Saddam Hussein is if Saddam Hussein ceases to hold power.” Gore did not propose preventive war, to be sure, but neither at the outset did George W. Bush. “In general,” Gore wrote of Saddam, “the formula for deposing him involves these elements: blocking his access to international support, building up his opponents and cutting off resources for rebuilding his military machine.”3 Gore had criticized Bush’s father for stopping short of Baghdad: “We can no more look forward to a constructive long-term relationship with Saddam Hussein,” he complained, “than we could hope to housebreak a cobra.” The vice president reiterated his support for regime change in October 2000 during his second presidential-campaign debate with George W. Bush, as did Bush himself.
Many others had also been critical of the elder Bush’s prudence, which his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, had vigorously defended through much of the 1990s. But as the decade wore on and Iraq did its best to thwart the work of UNSCOM and the IAEA, the notion of regime change as the answer to the problem of the untamed cobra in Iraq grew in favor with the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. From 1996 onward it was heavily promoted by neoconservatives, the policy scholar Russell Burgos has pointed out, but it was endorsed as well by a broader consensus in Washington and in the media:
From 1993 to early 19984 most advocates of regime change proposed to support an exile government tied to an underground army, like the French Maquis in World War II, promoting the existence of a rhetorical fiction they called the “Free Iraqi Forces”—thousands of regime opponents said to be waiting for the opportunity to take on the Republican Guard. With limited American military support, this “democratic opposition movement” would oust the regime by undertaking military operations from within the northern and southern safe havens. Though he alone did not create it, this rather fanciful notion was often called the “Wolfowitz Plan,” and it comprised the opening gambit in the ideational competition to redefine Iraq policy.… The United States would also formally recognize Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress [INC] as a “Provisional Government-in-Exile,” supporting the INC economically, militarily, and politically as it led the attack on what remained of rump Ba’athist Iraq.
Significantly for what followed, Burgos noted, this plan identified Saddam as the focus of the problem: “In the rhetorical contestation5 to redefine Iraq policy in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein had already been defined as a terrorist, a WMD threat, and a clear and present danger to U.S. national security.” The plan implied that removing him would liberate a country eager to be liberated under exile leadership.
With Kuwait freed from Iraqi occupation in 1991 and Saddam pushed back—“kept in his box,” Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright liked to say—the only real point of contact between the United States and Iraq was the United Nations–sanctioned inspections, which the United States followed closely through its intelligence agencies. Iraqi resistance to providing a full accounting of its WMD across seven years of inspections seemed to confirm that it must be hiding some portion of those assets, which had included at least biological-warfare agents, nerve gases, and uranium-enrichment facilities if not yet atomic bombs. Iraq’s claim to have secretly destroyed its WMD simply compounded the confusion, Richard Butler told the United Nations Security Council in June 1998:
This unilateral destruction,6 in violation of resolution 687, has created a major problem for UNSCOM in the verification of Iraq’s compliance.
The unilateral destruction was conducted by Iraq in such a manner as to hide the existence of these weapons, and to some extent to cover the level of achievement of its weapons programs. Iraq recognized this in a letter to the Security Council on 17 November 1997, which reads: “The unilateral destruction was carried out entirely unrecorded. No written and no visual records were kept, as it was not foreseen that Iraq needed to prove the destruction to anybody.”
Thus at the end of October 1998, when Iraq gave the U.N. an ultimatum—lift sanctions, restructure UNSCOM, and remove Butler as UNSCOM executive chairman or it would refuse all further cooperation—the stage was set for the campaign of American bombing, called Desert Fox, that began on 16 December 1998. Even the bombing, which lasted only four days, failed to resolve the issue of Iraqi WMD. Of one hundred bombing targets designated to be hit by a thousand bombs or cruise missiles, wrote the intelligence analyst William Ar kin, “only 13 targets on the list7 [were] facilities associated with chemical and biological weapons or ballistic missiles,” while forty-nine targeted “the Iraqi regime itself: a half-dozen palace strongholds and their supporting cast of secret police, guard and transport organizations.… National security insiders … convinced themselves that bombing Saddam Hussein’s internal apparatus would drive the Iraqi leader around the bend. ‘We’ve penetrated your security, we’re inside your brain,’ is the way one senior administration official described the message that the United States was sending Saddam Hussein.”
So few WMD targets were bombed, Arkin adds, because CENTCOM’s commanding general, Anthony Zinni, had “insisted that the United States8 only bomb Iraqi sites that had been identified with a high degree of certainty.” The journalist Fred Kaplan put it another way: “Iraq’s nuclear and chemical materials9 were not attacked. Part of the reason might have been that nobody knew where these materials were.” Arkin told Kaplan, “I think we’re hitting a lot of empty buildings.” The long Iraqi effort of obfuscation thus served not only to raise suspicions about hidden WMD but also to sustain and deepen them even after the Desert Fox bombing, which in any case was generally criticized as ineffectual. It escaped no one’s notice that Clinton’s impeachment was deliberated in the U.S. House of Representatives during Desert Fox. Who could disagree that the president was needed at the White House when bombs were falling on Iraq? The House could; it voted on Clinton’s impeachment on the last day of the bombing campaign.
After the 1998 bombing,10 Charles Duelfer has reported, Iraq communicated its interest in beginning a dialogue with the Clinton administration. As Tariq Aziz explained to Duelfer later, “It would have been normal11 for governments to proceed with a dialogue. All governments eventually change. We could have been on a different path now.” Doubtfully, Duelfer passed the offer along to Washington. “There was never any answer,”12 he recalled. “The Cli
nton administration could not have a dialogue with Baghdad, even if it thought dialogue was a good idea. Clinton was in the midst of being impeached. A dialogue with the Saddam regime would have been used by the Republicans to shred the administration.”
Scott Ritter, the former U.S. Marine intelligence officer and UNSCOM inspector whom Rolf Ekéus had appointed to head the UNSCOM concealment unit, came to a very different view of the state of Iraq’s WMD before and after Desert Fox. Writing in June 2000, at the end of the Clinton years, Ritter noted first that Iraq had refused to cooperate with the new United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) established in December 1999 under Hans Blix just as it had refused to cooperate with UNSCOM before, “on the grounds that this new13 inspection regime is merely a repackaged version of UNSCOM.” Eighteen months had passed since the last inspection, Ritter continued; Iraq and the Security Council were deadlocked, and there was “no hope for the return of inspectors to Iraq anytime soon. With each passing day, concern increases over the status of Iraq’s WMD programs because there are no inspectors in place to monitor them.”