To Start a War

An excerpt from the must-read book that everyone missed

Last week, I linked to Austin Kleon’s smart blogpost about the importance of surprise in being able to perceive something. “It’s easy to surprise your brain by looking around a foreign country, but much harder to do in your everyday environment,” argued Kleon. But what if you’ve got all king’s spies and all the king’s telescopes pointed at a foreign country? Can you accurately perceive what you see when you look at a country you label foreign? In the following excerpt of his brilliant and infuriating To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq, Robert Draper shows how an inability to accurately perceive what was in broad daylight set in motion the misbegotten Iraq War.

by Robert Draper

One of the most flabbergasting paradoxes in the history of American foreign policy came to pass in the years following the conclusion of Operation Desert Storm. From 1991 until 1998, under the terms of Iraq’s surrender, an inspection team known as the United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM, scoured the defeated country for evidence of Saddam’s weapons program. UNSCOM’s team—twenty-one of them at its inception, and eventually over three times that amount—included several American inspectors; embedded in their ranks were a few CIA analysts pretending to be inspectors. U-2 reconnaissance aircraft watched from above, videotaping imagery that would later be reviewed by the inspection teams. It was a period of maximum visibility, an unprecedented seven-year window into the military ambitions of Saddam Hussein.

Somehow, the United States managed to peer into that window and misunderstand nearly everything there was to see.

In April 1991, Saddam convened his Revolutionary Command Council. He emphasized to them a singular postwar goal: to get out from under the economic sanctions set forth by UN Resolution 687. This would mean complying with the UNSCOM inspectors—but only up to a point. Because Saddam’s army had been decimated by the Gulf War, and because Iran had massed more than a million troops at the border, the dictator wanted to maintain both an operational ballistic missile capability and enough chemical weapons to blunt a military assault. Thus, he instructed his RCC: Declare as little as possible. Get them in and get them out, and then the shackles will come off.

The Iraqis offered up a weapons declaration that, in its dubiousness, UNSCOM deputy executive director Robert Gallucci would term “laugh-out-loud funny.” The Iraqis declared only about half of its Scud missile inventories. Unnerved by the realization that the UN inspectors possessed better intelligence than anticipated and that an armada of naval ships had been moved into the Gulf, the Iraqis revised their declaration a year later.

Even so, the inventory was still incomplete: the Iraqis had divulged their destroyed missile sites but not the purchasing documents—apparently because they hoped to be reimbursed for a few undelivered parts after sanctions were lifted.

The Iraqis claimed to have only a peaceful nuclear program. In short order, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) discovered two facilities that were not on the list provided. Then, inside a supposed petrochemical building in downtown Baghdad, the inspectors discovered four trunks of documents describing just what the two facilities were. One was a uranium enrichment plant, the other a nuclear weapons development facility. After two months’ worth of denials, the Iraqis acknowledged the true purpose of the structures.

The Iraqis claimed, in a 1992 declaration, to have only a very limited chemical weapons stockpile. Unfortunately for them, UNSCOM would soon be in touch with the companies that had sold Iraq the chemicals in question. Confronted with the gaping discrepancies, Saddam’s bureaucrat cobbled together a new declaration in 1995—and then, after being caught in more lies, a third inventory. Though Iraq’s principal chemical weapons complex at Al Muthanna had been bombed during the Gulf War, many of the bulk containers full of mustard, sarin, and tabun had been buried to escape damage. UNSCOM excavated more than seven hundred tons of chemical agents and chemicals. The inspectors did not, however, discover any chemi-

cal weapons. The Iraqis claimed to have already destroyed their entire CW arsenal. Given their early prevarications, UNSCOM had just cause for skepticism.

Finally, the Iraqis claimed to have “obliterated” their biological weapons program immediately after the war. It took a tip from Israeli intelligence officials in January 1995 for the inspectors to learn about the thirty-nine tons of bacterial growth media that Iraq had imported from a British company during the 1980s. Traces of that bacteria had been found earlier, at a rather peculiar research laboratory at Al Hakam, where an unprepossessing female scientist named Dr. Rihab Taha worked. The inspectors decided to look at U-2 imagery of Al Hakam. They were stunned to discover on the roof of the modest facility, as UNSCOM’s director, Rolf Ekéus, would recall, “an extremely advanced system of aerial ventilation, among the most expensive in the world.”

In August of that same year, Hussein Kamel—Saddam’s son-in-law and the head of Iraq’s Military Industrial Commission—defected to Jordan.

Panic-stricken, the Iraqis accosted Ekéus as he prepared to board a flight from Baghdad to Amman to debrief Kamel. The Iraqis confessed that they had some explaining to do. Over the next several days, they pronounced their initial BW declaration “null and void.” The new disclosure was staggering. As one of the lead inspectors, Rod Barton, would write, “Iraq told us that some 8500 liters of concentrated anthrax, almost 20,000 liters of concentrated botulinum toxin and 2200 liters of aflatoxin were produced and stored.” The Iraqis also drove Ekéus to the defector Kamel’s chicken farm, where they helpfully unearthed over one hundred metal footlockers containing documentation of a WMD program that, the Iraqis maintained with a straight face, Kamel must have ordered all on his own. The following year, UNSCOM demolished Al Hakam. Its superintendent, Rihab Taha, thereafter came to be known in the Western press as “Doctor Germ.”

The deceptions continued, however. And because they did, it followed logically that Saddam’s regime had something to hide. But what was that something? Could it be that the numerous chemical agents not accounted for might actually be a result of . . . poor postwar accounting? Could it be that two outstanding tons of anthrax were never inventoried because . . . they had hurriedly been dumped near one of Saddam’s palaces, a hanging offense had the dictator learned of the act? Could it be that the undeclared VX nerve gas residue found on fragments of destroyed warheads in early 1998 proved . . . merely that the Iraqis had been reluctant to admit to a program that they had already furtively destroyed?

Of course, the only straightforward explanation for such deviousness was that Iraq was hiding both an active weapons program and substantial weapons stockpiles. It did not occur to the UN inspectors and American policymakers that in authoritarian Iraq, the truth was necessarily nonlinear, lurking in the shadows. The irony, as UNSCOM deputy chief inspector Charles Duelfer would come to realize only years later, was that “Saddam’s compliance had been going up, while at the same time our confidence and willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt was going down.”

Something else had not occurred to the inspectors. Already the so- called 661 Committee—set up by the United Nations in 1990 to enforce sanctions against Iraq under UN Resolution 661—was withholding basic goods from the Iraqi population until Saddam’s government could prove that such goods would not somehow be used to make weapons. According to one of the committee’s members, “We were watching everything that came in like a hawk. We questioned the ink used for pens. We questioned plastic bags used for urine collection at hospitals. At one point, we moved to stop Iraq from obtaining powdered milk because we said it contains casein, which is a growth medium. It wasn’t like when Reagan said to the Soviets, ‘Trust but verify.’

Because we offered the Iraqis no trust at all.”

The inspectors did more than simply reinforce the view that everything the regime did warranted suspicion. Their invasive and at times arrogant behavior—ripping open a door with an ax when a site supervisor was slow to bring a key; prowling around a mosque that was not under suspicion of hiding weapons—bred hostility and, in turn, recalcitrance of the very sort that would lead UNSCOM to conclude that Iraq must be hiding something. On January 22, 1998, following accusations by UNSCOM that Iraq was maintaining a secret VX nerve gas program, Saddam ordered a freeze on further inspections. It was clear to the Iraqis that they were paying for their early deceptions and that the Americans would never take them at their word. As Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz would say years later to Duelfer, “Iraq could have sanctions with inspectors or sanctions without inspections.”

At the same time, the Iraqis maintained that their punishment represented a cruel double standard. True, they had not always been honest with inspectors. Yes, they had failed to obey UN resolutions, but couldn’t the same be said of countries favored by the West, such as Israel? As Iraq’s chief scientist, Dr. Amer al-Saadi, pointed out to the inspectors, “When Israel hit our atomic reactor [in 1981], it was a transparent program, a civil contract that was well known. Our intention was to go about this in a legal way under international safeguards . . . and what happened? In front of the whole world, the reactor was bombed. But instead of the world condemning it, they were cheering it. What are treaties worth?”

At the urging of the Clinton White House, nearly a hundred permanent staffers of UNSCOM quietly evacuated Baghdad overland to Amman in December 1998. Operation Desert Fox followed, involving four days of bombing—the targets ostensibly being Iraqi weapons sites, but of course if any such sites had been known, the UN inspectors would already have visited them.

Not surprisingly, Saddam did not permit the inspectors to reenter Baghdad after the bombings. UNSCOM was disbanded in 1999 without fanfare. Anew, more internationally diverse inspection body, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Committee, or UNMOVIC, immediately took its place but likewise could not gain entry. Once again, a heavy curtain fell over Iraq.

Robert Draper is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing writer for National Geographic Magazine. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He lives in Washington D.C. with his fiancee, Kirsten Powers.

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