What We Learned by Confronting Saddam
BOOK REVIEW: CONFRONTING SADDAM HUSSEIN: GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE INVASION OF IRAQ
By Melvyn P. Leffler / Oxford University Press
Reviewed by Charles Duelfer
The Reviewer: Charles Duelfer was a political military officer at the State Department in the 1980’s, Deputy Chairman of the UNSCOM Iraq Weapons Inspectorate in the 1990’s and was head of the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group in 2004. He is the author of Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq and blogs at CharlesDuelfer.com
REVIEW — Professor Melvyn Leffler, in his book, Confronting Saddam Hussein, has produced a detailed and nuanced exposition of the dilemmas, debates and bureaucratic friction underlying the decisions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It is a great correction to the popular, but wrong narrative summarized in the bumper sticker, “Bush lied, people died”. I found his account grounded in reality (matching what I observed at the time) and insightful.
Leffler exquisitely describes national security decisions in the broader context of contemporaneous events. Such analysis takes effort and discipline to understand the mindsets and biases of actors in events 20 years distant. Latter-day judges can readily forget what filled the windscreen and rearview mirror of the drivers in 2003.
Leffler draws convincingly from documentary research and interviews with individuals directly involved in the process. It’s a gritty depiction of bureaucratic competition in a compressed and explosive environment. The competition was not selfish, but conducted over legitimate interpretations of risk and consequences for the United States and its allies at a time of great uncertainty.
We are reminded of the palpable fog of fear enveloping Washington after 9-11. The conventional wisdom was not “if” another attack would occur, but “when and how.” Innumerable intelligence reports forecast all sorts of attack vectors. Reports were so numerous and unfiltered as to be useless to senior leaders—especially the President. Having been surprised by 9-11, no one wanted to fail a second time…but how to judge the greater risks?
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The book calls out a key issue–the relationship between the Al Qaeda attacks of 9-11 and the concern regarding the failing containment of Saddam’s Iraq. Were they connected? No. But he describes the changed tolerance for any risk to the nation’s security and how President Bush and his team alternated in how to treat Saddam in that new context.
Professor Leffler reminds the reader of key events affecting the considerations of risk. He recalls the spate of anthrax attacks which occurred in October of 2001. They added to the fear of terrorist attacks using WMD (and reminding everyone that BW is a more readily attainable threat). BW was real and killing people in the America.
Further, Leffler reminds us that there was accurate intelligence about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a radical jihadist leader who ran his own terrorist camp in Afghanistan (not directly connected to Bin Laden). He relocated to Iraq and in spring 2002 his group was experimenting with chemical and biological agents for mass casualty attacks. His group was located near the small Kurdish village Sargat a few miles from the Iran border in northern (Kurdish) Iraq. Zarqawi had met with Bin Laden in Afghanistan. While not in an area Saddam controlled, Zarqawi was reported to have travelled to Baghdad. This bolstered the concern that Saddam, who had made and used these munitions, might tolerate, or assist in terrorist use of WMD. (After the invasion, Zarqawi became particularly infamous for his videotaped beheadings of hostages in Iraq.)
Professor Leffler limns an extraordinary panorama of interagency and interpersonal frictions as competing objectives/perspectives arose in response to the President’s national security concerns. It is not a pretty picture, but it is understandable. Good intentions were not harnessed to a common direction. There was chaos. It seemed to me at the time, if you can’t run Washington, how are you going to run Baghdad?
And as Leffler’s panoramic picture reflects, there was insufficient, to put it mildly, planning for post-conflict Iraq. The war was the relatively easy part. Leffler lets the reader see the deferral of that problem until no one would own responsibility or allocate resources. It’s a hauntingly accurate portrayal. Focus was on the invasion of Iraq and assembling international support if possible. Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks wanted to get in and out as soon as possible. They were not interested in getting involved in an extended presence. Bureaucratic mistrust between Defense and State, the absence of explicit White House direction, and grossly insufficient resources, made failures unavoidable.
Leffler also details the background to two salient decisions in May 2003 which had terrible consequences—the decisions regarding de-Baathification of Iraq and disbanding the Iraqi army. These two decisions, whose provenance I had never understood, are described in convincing detail.
While it doesn’t affect his overall picture, Leffler repeats the erroneous but common misstatement that Saddam threw the UNSCOM inspectors out of Iraq in December 1998. UNSCOM decided to withdraw inspectors as a matter of safety. We had been informed (by US Mission to the UN) that the US may initiate military actions in response to UNSCOM’s report to the UN Security Council, that it could not accomplish its mandated disarmament/monitoring tasks under the conditions Iraq permitted. Given that the US would likely be targeting suspected WMD sites, i.e. the same sites UNSCOM was trying to monitor, we evacuated our staff just before the US initiated Operation Desert Fox. In fact, Saddam later said in debriefings that he was surprised the UN inspectors had departed.
However, Saddam did not permit UN inspectors to return until four years later when the pending threat of the US invasion was palpable. This point Leffler makes clear—the objective of Bush’s “coercive diplomacy”, to produce a change in regime behavior (if not the regime leader) was not without effect.
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Professor Leffler also reminds the reader that during the interregnum when no inspectors were roaming around Iraq, uncertainty about Iraq’s WMD mushroomed (not in the form of a “mushroom cloud”). In the absence of inspectors, and of any additional information, analysts were inclined to assess/guess Saddam was back at it.
The impact of the UNSCOM inspection process was, ironically, to increase the doubts concerning Saddam’s WMD. Saddam initially admitted to a limited capability—only Scud missiles and CW in 1991. For the next 7 years inspectors doggedly pursued various leads and Saddam ultimately admitted to much more. The result was an inverse relationship between the truth quotient of Saddam’s declarations and the inspectors trust in the same. By 1998, Saddam had revealed his militarily significant WMD. But deep skepticism remained among inspectors over any inconsistencies or gaps in verification (and likewise US policymakers like Madeleine Albright). In retrospect, UNSCOM did much better than we knew. But that was the problem, we could not verify the absence of weapons and production. Saddam, believed Washington knew the truth, but still demanded that he prove a negative and in meantime declared Iraq retained WMD to keep sanctions in place.
Leffler notes the fragility of containment linked to the UN maintaining sanctions. After the 1998 US bombing, UNSC unity was crumbling and so were sanctions. Moreover, Saddam’s technocrats had cleverly figured out how to manage the UN “Oil for Food” program to compensate (bribe) supporters of the regime. (I included the complete Iraqi lists in the 2003 Iraq Survey Group Report). There were many noteworthy recipients, e.g. the Russian presidential office, the Russian Foreign Ministry, the son of the Russian ambassador, the French ambassador to the UN, and a wide assortment of others to include a couple Americans who were later prosecuted).
Beyond the decay of sanctions, even if they were sustained in some fashion (e.g. Secretary Powell’s proposal for restricted, “smart sanctions”) there was a fundamental flaw in the original 1991 UN disarmament resolution. Sanctions would be lifted when there was a positive report from UN weapons inspectors indicating Iraq had adequately accounted for its WMD programs and a monitoring system was in place to detect violations. The flaw, which the Security Council never gave voice to, was that no one really believed that the Council could ever agree to re-impose sanctions once they were lifted. Saddam knew this and planned accordingly.
Critical to President Bush’s Iraq decisions and especially those involving the UN, was the role of UK Prime Minister Blair. Leffler details the interaction between the two sides and demonstrates the impact of Blair’s arguments for patience and seeking as much international support as possible—largely through the UN. There were many in the US who judged handling the Iraq threat via the UN would be reverting to the norm of “managing” the problem but not “solving” it. President Bush, as Leffler points out, wanted to solve the problem. Prime Minister Blair had substantial influence on channeling the US to go through the UN as far as possible on the way to solving the problem.
Given brief mention by Leffler, but possibly deserving more consideration in retrospect, was the possibility of engaging Saddam directly. Leffler points out that President Bush detested Saddam as a fundamentally evil person. He also notes that early in the administration, Rumsfeld suggested consideration of a variety of policy options to include engagement with Iraq.
During the Clinton Administration, Saddam had been making quiet inquires through third parties (recall there was no US embassy staffed in Baghdad from 1990-2003) to test whether Washington would be willing to re-engage with Iraq. When in Baghdad as deputy head of UNSCOM, I was asked more than once if Washington would agree to talk to Iraq. They recalled that the US and Iraq were close in the 1980’s (common enemy of Iran post-1979, Iraq was secular, westward leaning, etc.). They said Iraq would be America’s best friend in the region—bar none. They would turnover any terrorists in Iraq. They would help with the Palestinian problems. They understood the Kuwait invasion was a mistake. Why couldn’t Washington just talk to Iraq? Washington’s considered answer was–no answer. Understandable to anyone outside of Baghdad since President Clinton would have faced huge opposition to any hint of legitimizing Saddam Hussein. Incidentally, Donald Rumsfeld had met with Saddam in 1983, during the Iran-Iraq war as Reagan’s Middle East Envoy. (When Iraq was, without much US opposition, using vast numbers of sarin and mustard rounds to counter Iranian human wave attacks.). The notion of talking to Saddam was not absurd. Afterall, all regimes change, it’s just a question of when and can you wait. Saddam would be 86 today.
Leffler notes an earlier attempt to remove Saddam by supporting oppositionists in the 1990’s. The scheme was doomed from the start. But was there any subsequent consideration of removing Saddam without a full invasion? In 2004, Saddam’s presidential secretary Abed Mahmoud who was then in detention asked me: “Why did you have to go to war to just get rid of one person? We could have arranged that.” He was not too bright, but the question of destroying the lives of tens of thousands to just remove one guy is not irrational. Leffler notes that President Bush did not want to remove one evil person and have him replaced by some Sunni general as leader. Such an alternative may not have gotten to his desk, but it does seem, it must have been considered and not pursued.
My one mild disappointment in the book is the presentation of Saddam’s viewpoint. While obviously impossible to know with as much detail as Leffler has presented about the US (and UK), it would have been interesting to reflect Saddam’s reactions to US actions, especially in comparison to what the US was assuming at the time concerning Saddam’s thinking and objectives. But perhaps that is the subject of another book. If only an Iraqi could perform the research and analysis of Saddam’s government that Professor Leffler has done regarding the Bush Administration.
Confronting Saddam earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats 
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