Negotiations with repressive regimes like Syria’s require cautious realism. One cannot sensibly assume the other side’s good faith. It is dangerous for Israel to deal naively with a regime murderous of its own people, openly aggressive toward its neighbors, criminally involved with international drug traffickers and counterfeiters, and supportive of the most deadly terrorist organizations.
The task force then suggested that Israel open a second front in its expanding war, with a “focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”
For years the killing of Saddam Hussein had been among the highest, and most secret, priorities of the Israeli government. In one stroke it would pay Saddam Hussein back for launching Scud missiles against Israel, killing several people, during the Gulf War. Redrawing the map of the Middle East would also help isolate Syria, Iraq’s ally and Israel’s archenemy along its northern border. Thus, in the early 1990s, after the U.S.-led war in the Gulf, a small elite team of Israeli commandos was given the order to train in absolute secrecy for an assassination mission to bring down the Baghdad ruler.
The plan, code-named Bramble Bush, was to first kill a close friend of the Iraqi leader outside the country, someone from Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. Then, after learning the date and time of the funeral to be held in the town, a funeral Hussein was certain to attend, they would have time to covertly infiltrate a team of commandos into the country to carry out the assassination. The murder weapons were to be specially modified “smart” missiles that would be fired at Hussein as he stood in a crowd at the funeral.
But the plan was finally abandoned after five members of the team were accidentally killed during a dry run of the operation. Nevertheless, removing Saddam and converting Iraq from threat to ally had long been at the top of Israel’s wish list.
Now Perle, Feith, and Wurmser were suggesting something far more daring—not just an assassination but a bloody war that would get rid of Saddam Hussein and also change the face of Syria and Lebanon. Perle felt their “Clean Break” recommendations were so important that he personally hand-carried the report to Netanyahu.
Wisely, Netanyahu rejected the task force’s plan. But now, with the election of a receptive George W. Bush, they dusted off their preemptive war strategy and began getting ready to put it to use.
The new Bush policy was an aggressive agenda for any president, but especially for someone who had previously shown little interest in international affairs. “We’re going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the Mideast conflict,” Bush told his freshly assembled senior national security team in the Situation Room on January 30, 2001. “We’re going to tilt it back toward Israel. . . . Anybody here ever met [Ariel] Sharon?” Only Colin Powell raised his hand.
Bush was going to reverse the Clinton policy, which was heavily weighted toward bringing the bloody conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to a peaceful conclusion. There would be no more U.S. interference; he would let Sharon resolve the dispute however he saw fit, with little or no regard for the situation of the Palestinians. The policy change was exactly as recommended by the Perle task force’s “Clean Break” report.
“I’m not going to go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon,” Bush told his newly gathered national security team. “I’m going to take him at face value. We’ll work on a relationship based on how things go.” Then he mentioned a trip he had taken with the Republican Jewish Coalition to Israel. “We flew over the Palestinian camps. Looked real bad down there,” he said with a frown. Then he said it was time to end America’s efforts in the region. “I don’t see much we can do over there at this point,” he said.
Colin Powell, Secretary of State for only a few days, was taken by surprise. The idea that such a complex problem, in which America had long been heavily involved, could simply be brushed away with the sweep of a hand made little sense. Fearing Israeli-led aggression, he quickly objected.
“He stressed that a pullback by the United States would unleash Sharon and the Israeli army,” recalled Paul O’Neill, who had been sworn in as Secretary of the Treasury by Bush only hours before and was seated at the table. Powell told Bush, “The consequences of that could be dire, especially for the Palestinians.” But Bush just shrugged. “Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things,” he said. “Powell seemed startled,” said O’Neill.
Over the following months, to the concern of Powell, the Bush-Sharon relationship became extremely tight. “This is the best administration for Israel since Harry Truman,” said Thomas Neumann, executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a pro-Israel advocacy group. In an article in
The Washington Post
titled “Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy,” Robert G. Kaiser noted the dramatic shift in policy.
“For the first time,” wrote Kaiser, “a U.S. administration and a Likud government in Israel are pursuing nearly identical policies. Earlier U.S. administrations, from Jimmy Carter’s through Bill Clinton’s, held Likud and Sharon at arm’s length, distancing the United States from Likud’s traditionally tough approach to the Palestinians.” Using the Yiddish term for supporters of Sharon’s political party and referring to the new warm relationship between Bush and Sharon, a senior U.S. government official told Kaiser, “The Likudniks are really in charge now.”
With America’s long struggle to bring peace to the region quickly terminated, George W. Bush could turn his attention to the prime focus of his first National Security Council meeting: ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein. Condoleezza Rice led off the discussion. But rather than mention anything about threats to the United States or weapons of mass destruction, she noted only “that Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region.” The words were practically lifted from the “Clean Break” report, which had the rather imperial-sounding subtitle: “A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
Then Rice turned the meeting over to CIA Director George Tenet, who offered a grainy overhead picture of a factory that he said “might” be a plant “that produced either chemical or biological materials for weapons manufacture.” There were no missiles or weapons of any kind, just some railroad tracks going to a building; truck activity; and a water tower—things that can be found in virtually any city in the United States. Nor were there any human intelligence or signals intelligence reports. “There was no confirming intelligence,” Tenet said.
It was little more than a shell game. Other photos and charts showed U.S. air activity over the “no-fly zone,” but Tenet offered no more intelligence. Nevertheless, in a matter of minutes the talk switched from a discussion about very speculative intelligence to which targets to begin bombing in Iraq.
By the time the meeting was over, Treasury Secretary O’Neill was convinced that “getting Hussein was now the administration’s focus, that much was already clear.” But, O’Neill believed, the real destabilizing factor in the Middle East was not Saddam Hussein but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—the issue Bush had just turned his back on. Ten years after the Gulf War, said O’Neill, “Hussein seemed caged and defanged. Clearly, there were many forces destabilizing the region, most particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict itself, which we were now abandoning.”
The war summit must also have seemed surreal to Colin Powell, who said little during the meeting and had long believed that Iraq no longer posed a threat to the United States. As he would tell German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer just a few weeks later, “What we and other allies have been doing in the region, have succeeded in containing Saddam Hussein and his ambitions . . . They don’t really possess the capability to attack their neighbors the way they did ten years ago . . . Containment has been a successful policy.”
In addition to the “Clean Break” recommendations, David Wurmser only weeks before the NSC meeting had further elaborated on the way the United States might go about launching a preemptive war throughout the Middle East. “America’s and Israel’s responses must be regional, not local,” he said. “Israel and the United States should adopt a coordinated strategy, to regain the initiative and reverse their region-wide strategic retreat. They should broaden the conflict to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza. That would reestablish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal. Many in the Middle East will then understand the merits of being an American ally and of making peace with Israel.”
In the weeks and months following the NSC meeting, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser began taking their places in the Bush administration. Perle became chairman of the reinvigorated and powerful Defense Policy Board, packing it with like-minded neoconservative super-hawks anxious for battle. Feith was appointed to the highest policy position in the Pentagon, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. And Wurmser moved into a top policy position in the State Department before later becoming Cheney’s top Middle East expert.
With the Pentagon now under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz—both of whom had also long believed that Saddam Hussein should have been toppled during the first Gulf War—the war planners were given free rein. What was needed, however, was a pretext—perhaps a major crisis. “Crises can be opportunities,” wrote Wurmser in his paper calling for an American-Israeli preemptive war throughout the Middle East.
Seeing little reason, or intelligence justification, for war at the close of the inaugural National Security Council meeting, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was perplexed. “Who, exactly, was pushing this foreign policy?” he wondered to himself. And “why Saddam, why now, and why [was] this central to U.S. interests?”
CHAPTER 11
CAPITOL HILL
Israel had always been a central focus for Perle, Feith, and Wurmser. As a young staffer on Capitol Hill working for Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Perle built his reputation as a pro-Israel activist. “Richard Perle and Morris Amitay [a staffer for Connecticut Democratic Senator Abraham Ribicoff] command a tiny army of Semitophiles on Capitol Hill and direct Jewish power in behalf of Jewish interests,” wrote Stephen D. Isaacs,
The Washington Post
’s former New York bureau chief, in his 1975 book
Jews and
American Politics.
“The new Jewish activists,” wrote Isaacs, “plunge forward on narrowly Jewish causes with scant regard for the ‘old liberalism.’ When once upon a time all Jews in positions of power would have concentrated their attentions on the naming of a new Supreme Court justice for the United States, one of the most important of the new Jewish activists was more concerned with arms for Israel.”
Isaacs was referring to Perle, who told him, “I had all three of my telephone lines tied up, juggling calls, working on a Jackson amendment on aid to Israel. The telephone rang, and it was the Washington representative of one of the Jewish organizations. I figured he was calling in with a report on the response of some senator to our [aid to Israel] lobbying efforts. He wanted to talk about [William H.] Rehnquist [nominated to the Supreme Court]. I said, ‘Jesus Christ, don’t you know we’re in the middle of a crisis?’ And he said, ‘Well, I also wanted to talk about that,’ and I said, ‘Well, what do you know?’ And the other crisis he had in mind was Bangladesh.”
Among Jackson’s greatest supporters were members of the neoconservative movement. Predominantly Jewish, they were turned off by the counterculture movements of the 1960s, disillusioned with the Great Society, offended by the “anti-American” sentiments of the left, and fearful of the expansionist aims of the United Nations. At the core of the movement was a small but prolific band of sedentary intellectuals and think tank warriors, including Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol. In limited-circulation journals, they wrote longingly of a muscular expansion of American power and influence around the world, a rollback of communism and an end to détente with the Soviets, and the creation of a seamless bond between Israel’s interests and America’s military and foreign policy.
“I think the term [neoconservative] has something to do with the sense that those of us who are now called neoconservatives were at one time liberals,” said Perle. “And I think that’s a fair description, and I suppose all of us were liberal at one time. I was liberal in high school and a little bit into college. But reality and rigor are important tonics, and if you got into the world of international affairs and you looked with some rigor at what was going on in the world, it was really hard to be liberal and naive.”
For Jackson, Perle was far more than a simple staffer, running around putting briefing books together or drafting constituent correspondence. One newspaper called him “the quintessential Washington operator,” because of his ability to manipulate the news and conventional opinions. He was also known as “a great collector of sensitive information,” something that occasionally raises security questions. Nevertheless, the two became a power team. “Jackson and Perle have established themselves as active players in the policy-making process, a status rarely achieved on Capitol Hill,” said reporter Robert G. Kaiser in
The Washington Post
in 1977. Others found Perle arrogant, difficult to deal with, and single-minded.
Aided by Perle, Jackson quickly became Israel’s number-one man in the Congress, constantly pushing for more and more money with fewer restrictions. In fiscal year 1970, Israel received military credits from the United States worth $30 million. But thanks to a Jackson amendment, the next year the amount skyrocketed to $545 million. By 1974, it had reached an extraordinary $2.2 billion, more than seventy times what it had been just four years earlier. “We have a hero, and his name is Henry Jackson,” gushed Mitchell Wohlberg, a Washington, D.C., rabbi. “More than any other leader on the American political scene, Senator Henry Jackson has been there in our times of trouble and pain.”