First Stop, Iraq

(11 of 14)

When Powell took over at state in 2001, he had no illusions that Clinton's policy on Iraq was a success, because he had to cope with its failures. Every day news would arrive of another violation of the U.N. sanctions--civilian planes from Arab nations making direct flights to Baghdad, brazen exports of oil and imports of prohibited goods. Powell didn't want to ditch the sanctions, as he thought they had some value, but he wanted to make them more effective. "Though [the Iraqis] may be pursuing weapons of mass destruction of all kinds," he said in February 2001, "it is not clear how successful they have been. We ought to declare this a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box."

That analysis, of course, was precisely the one the neoconservatives had long rejected, and it was inevitably subject to revision after Sept. 11. At the Camp David meeting, Powell argued against targeting Iraq, but he too knew the game had changed. There would be no more talk, says a State official, of Saddam being kept "in his box." By the spring of 2002, the Administration had a new problem. Beyond that nifty phrase "the axis of evil," it didn't have a forward-leaning policy on Iraq. It didn't have anything. Cheney's trip to the Middle East, designed to start building a coalition for action to disarm Iraq, had fallen well short of his hopes. One of his aides admitted that the team had underestimated Arab anger at Israel's crackdown on the occupied territories. "We thought [the Arab governments] were exaggerating 'the street' for their own purposes," says the official. "They weren't."

After Cheney's return, the Administration's incoherence on Iraq began to spill out. Officials started free-lancing. Exiled Iraqi opposition leaders, convinced that war was imminent, began lobbying for favors. Campaigning for congressional Republicans, Cheney started to test the waters for a pre-emptive strike to "remove serious threats to our country before they materialize." (He never mentioned Iraq by name, but everyone knew what he meant.) Republican congressional leaders, facing an election, fretted that the disarray would hurt them politically. At one point that spring, a senior White House official said in exasperation, "The dirty little secret of Iraq is that there is no plan." Rice, responding to a request by Democratic Senator Joe Biden for Administration officials to appear before his Foreign Relations Committee, was refreshingly blunt. "We're not ready yet," she told Biden, who held the hearings anyway. They were covered widely as a preparation for war, to the consternation of Republican congressional leaders. Trent Lott, then Senate leader of the G.O.P., called Cheney to tell him the media were making the Administration's Iraq policy for it. "We've got to get this thing on track," Lott said.