meeting on terrorism, Richard Clarke, the leading counterterrorism official of three administrations, found that Bushâs new appointees, especially Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, were far more interested in the threat from states like Iraq than from the stateless and shadowy band of global jihadis called al-Qaeda. âI just donât understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden,â Clarke later quoted Wolfowitz as saying. âYou give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor.â Wolfowitz meant Iraq. Having fought andâas they saw itâwon the Cold War with their hard-line policies, officials like him who had come back to power still viewed the world of dangers in terms of heavily militarized enemy states. The 1990s hadnât changed their thinking. To them, those were lost years: Under Clinton there had been far too much focus on globalization and international institutions and âsoft,â borderless threats like poverty and ethnic conflict.
Then came September 11. Within minutes of fleeing his office at the devastated Pentagon, Wolfowitz told aides that he suspected Iraqi involvement in the attacks. A little past two in the afternoon, while the air in lower Manhattan and along the Potomac was still full of acrid smoke, assistants to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took notes as their boss held forth in the National Military Command Center: âbest info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.â That same afternoon, one of Bushâs speechwriters, David Frum, having been evacuated from the White House and taken shelter in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute, got on the phone with Richard Perle, Washingtonâs most assiduous proponent of regime change in Iraq. âWhatever else the President says,â Perle urged from his vacation home in the south of France, âhe must make clear that heâs holding responsible not just terrorists but whoever harbors those terrorists.â That night, in a televised address from the White House, Bush followed Perleâs advice to the word and then expanded on it: The rest of the world was either with America or with the terrorists. The day after the attacks, according to Richard Clarke, Bush ordered his counterterrorism team to find out whether there could be any connection to Iraq. âSee if Saddam did this. See if heâs linked in any way.â
âBut, Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this,â Clarke replied.
âI know, I know, but ⦠see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.â
Three days later, in a crisis meeting at Camp David, Wolfowitz kept returning to Iraq as the most important target for the initial American response, until the president finally shut him up. Afghanistan would be first, but the idea of Iraq was in play, and Bush was not unreceptiveâafter all, Wolfowitz had been given plenty of air time, much to the frustration of Secretary of State Colin Powell. On September 17, six days after the attacks, Bush told his war council, âI believe Iraq was involved.â
âUntil Iâm persuaded otherwise, this is what I think,â Robert Kagan said. âPaul may have brought it up, but Bush from the beginning was thinking about Iraq. I think that Bush had Iraq on the brain. Paul, who is a deputy secretary of defense who does not get along with his secretary of defense and whose alone time with the president is probably minimal, fighting giants like Powell, who was much stronger than he was? I think it had to be the president. This is what the president wanted to do.â
Richard Perle, Wolfowitzâs friend for more than three decades, agreed. Until September 11, he said, proponents of regime change in Iraq were losing the
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