First Stop, Iraq

(7 of 14)

Then Cheney, probably the most influential Vice President in U.S. history, began to pay attention. His interest grew out of the Bush Administration's obsession with building a system to defend the U.S. against missile attacks. For the neoconservatives, missile defense and Iraq's possession of WMDs were both examples of a common concern, "asymmetric threats," or the idea that nations with far less conventional military strength than the U.S. would use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons to redress the balance. Cheney had been charged with developing a policy on homeland security in response to asymmetric threats, which meant that Iraq's continued possession of WMDs was a problem that landed on his desk. In morning intelligence briefings, says a former Administration official, the Vice President began to raise questions about Saddam's regime. Cheney and others, says the official, would say things like, "Tell me about Iraq, tell me about Iraq, tell me about Iraq. What's the status of their WMDs? What's their support of terrorism?" When senior members of the intelligence community answered that they had little new information on Iraq--no smoking guns on WMDs or terrorism--the message would come back: "Try harder. Need to know more." In an interview with the New Yorker in May 2001, Cheney in two sentences linked North Korea, Iran and Iraq--the three countries that were later immortalized as the "axis of evil"--as threats to American security. Cheney still didn't buy into the whole neoconservative analysis. His concern was the national security of the U.S., not some grand design for remaking the Middle East. But after Sept. 11, 2001, it was harder to keep those two thoughts in separate boxes. The attacks on New York City and Washington gave the neoconservatives an opportunity. The logic seemed airtight: Saddam had WMDs; terrorists had attacked America; if al-Qaeda ever got hold of Saddam's weapons, the future didn't bear thinking about. The afternoon after the attacks, Wolfowitz, in conference calls with other officials, started voicing suspicions that Iraq might somehow have been involved. Within hours, he was lobbying Cheney on the topic, arguing--a central plank of the neoconservative analysis--that Iraq was also somehow behind the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Within days, James Woolsey, once Clinton's head of the CIA but who had joined the neoconservatives on Iraq, was dispatched by the Pentagon to find proof that Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda.

Cheney was skeptical of the claim. (U.S. intelligence has never been able to substantiate a link between Iraq and the 1993 World Trade Center attack--or the assault of 2001.) But Wolfowitz stayed on the case. On the weekend after Sept. 11, Bush convened his national-security team at Camp David. Wolfowitz argued that if military action was to be taken against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was harboring the leadership of al-Qaeda, it should also be taken against Iraq. Saddam's regime had WMDs, had shown that it was willing to use them, and harbored a continuing hostility to the U.S. Powell was opposed to anything so ambitious, however, and Cheney didn't back up his old Pentagon colleague. Rice says the Vice President was a "proponent of doing one thing at a time--Afghanistan first."