Part 16 (2/2)

”I'm extremely proud of the soldiers in my platoon,” 2nd Lt. Leonard Cowherd, a twenty-two-year-old tank platoon commander in the 1st Armored Division, wrote to his hometown newspaper, the Culpeper Culpeper (Virginia) (Virginia) Star-Exponent, Star-Exponent, in March 2004. ”They have endured countless hards.h.i.+ps here in Iraq as well as the overall hards.h.i.+p of being away from one's home and family.” Two months later, on May 16, Cowherd was shot and killed by a sniper in Karbala. He was just short of a year of the first anniversary of his graduation from West Point. His death was a painful reminder of how much the Army-and the country-was losing. in March 2004. ”They have endured countless hards.h.i.+ps here in Iraq as well as the overall hards.h.i.+p of being away from one's home and family.” Two months later, on May 16, Cowherd was shot and killed by a sniper in Karbala. He was just short of a year of the first anniversary of his graduation from West Point. His death was a painful reminder of how much the Army-and the country-was losing.

When a memorial service was held a week later, four hundred mourners arrived at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, a small building in Culpeper that had been used as a Civil War hospital. There were so many people in attendance that some watched the proceedings on video in a tent outside. The day was warm, and attendants served bottles of chilled water. ”A beautiful kid,” retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who had taught Cowherd at West Point, and who delivered one of the eulogies, noted afterward in clipped military fas.h.i.+on. ”Star man ... enormous maturity... great athlete ... historian ... very strong spiritual character. Went armor. Married his childhood sweetheart. His wife is an Army brat and daughter of a West Pointer.” The two had announced their engagement at McCaffrey's apartment at West Point.

Cowherd's widow, Sarah, a schoolteacher whom he had married eleven months earlier, said, ”He was my everything, and he was ever since the day I met him. My heart, my soul, my friend, and my husband.”

Family, friends, and many of the dozens of young officers who attended the funeral met at a Culpeper pub that night for a wake. Cowherd's father-in-law, retired Army Lt. Col. Anthony Cerri, described the evening for those who weren't there: ”Amidst the open beams, the cigarette smell, and the dim lighting, two guys with electrified acoustic guitars played songs like 'Tennessee Waltz' and 'Take Me Home to West Virginia' and 'Whiskey for My Men and Beer for My Horses.' We drank, and talked, and laughed, and yes-even danced a little.... We were there to tell Leonard stories and family stories and military stories. And we cried and held each other when the need arose.”

May 26 brought the burial in Arlington National Cemetery. ”The day was early-summer, Southern gem,” wrote Cerri. ”Hot but not stifling. Blue sky with wispy white.” Then the hea.r.s.e's doors were opened. ”I placed my hands upon my daughter's shoulders . .. and I felt her shudder.” The young officer was laid to rest in Site 7983 of Section 60 of the cemetery. The ceremony was conducted with grace and precision. A bagpiper played ”Amazing Grace” and walked into the distance, ”til the strains faded in the cicada whine.” Then the 3rd Infantry Regiment, the Old Guard that serves at the cemetery, fired a rifle salute. ”The 21 guns were three, crisp firings of seven,” Cerri wrote. ”The Old Guard does not make mistakes.” ”Taps” was played, and the U.S. flag that had adorned the casket was folded and presented to the lieutenant's young widow. ”Leonard's wife ... my Kiddo. Leonard was her everything.”

The Army loses another officer As Lt. Cowherd was being buried, Capt. Estrada was finis.h.i.+ng the essay he had begun in his green notebook that argued that the Army's entire approach to Iraq was wrongheaded. In early June he went public with those concerns. What happened to him next was very different from the death of Lt. Cowherd, but it is still a tale of loss. The reserve civil affairs officer showed his essay to Maj. Peter Davis, his company commander, and then to some other civil affairs officers. He didn't encounter a lot of disagreement, he said later. His sense was that his peers agreed that the actions of the U.S. Army were alienating the Iraqi people. ”I think it generally reflected the frustration that many of us were experiencing,” he said later. Estrada decided to send the essay to the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, Was.h.i.+ngton Post, which in years of working at the State Department he had come to consider his hometown newspaper. He casually mentioned the submission to a military lawyer with whom he sometimes worked. ”He told me, as long as I didn't reveal cla.s.sified information or attack the president, I was within my rights.” which in years of working at the State Department he had come to consider his hometown newspaper. He casually mentioned the submission to a military lawyer with whom he sometimes worked. ”He told me, as long as I didn't reveal cla.s.sified information or attack the president, I was within my rights.”

On June 6, 2004, the Post's Post's Sunday Outlook section carried Estrada's lengthy opinion piece questioning what the Army was doing in Iraq and how it was doing it. Estrada related the question he had heard at the Buhriz water treatment plant- Sunday Outlook section carried Estrada's lengthy opinion piece questioning what the Army was doing in Iraq and how it was doing it. Estrada related the question he had heard at the Buhriz water treatment plant-Why?-and the puzzlement he felt after the thoughtless killing of the farmer's cow.

I think of... the children who burst into tears when we point our weapons into their cars (just in case), and the countless numbers of people whose vehicles we sideswipe as we try to use speed to survive the IEDs that await us each morning. I think of my fellow soldiers and the reality of being attacked and feeling threatened, and it all makes sense-the need to smash their cars and shoot their cows and point our weapons at them and detain them without concern for notifying their families. But how would I feel in their shoes? Would I be able to offer my own heart and mind?

Clearly, the U.S. effort was losing the faith of Capt. Estrada. After the article appeared, his commander called him in and ordered him to proceed to Forward Operating Base Warhorse to see Col. Dana Pittard, the commander of U.S. forces in the sprawling region from the eastern suburbs of Baghdad to the Iranian border. At that first meeting, Estrada recalled, ”Colonel Pittard asked why I wrote it, expressed his view that it was too negative, said he was disappointed, and asked if I could continue to do my job or if I wanted to leave.” Estrada said he wanted to stay with his unit. ”He said that was fine, and I left.”

The next day Estrada was summoned again by the colonel. ”I went in, and he told me he'd lost confidence in me and wanted me out of his AO”-area of operations. Pittard also told Estrada that the article was inaccurate, because the caretaker's father at the Buhriz water plant had been visited by a battalion commander and had signed a paper saying he hadn't been mistreated. Estrada thought to himself that if he were an Iraqi and an American lieutenant colonel showed up with a well-armed security entourage, he also would sign whatever was put before him.

Among many civil affairs and other Special Forces soldiers, there was a good deal of sympathy for Estrada's comments. In their view, there was no governing strategy, and because of that lack, battalion and brigade commanders were each fighting their private wars, often employing tactics that alienated Iraqis. But not all civil affairs officers sided with him. Capt. Trampes Crow, who was operating about 85 miles to the north, said his experiences were ”nearly polar opposite.” In an e-mail to friends, he accused Estrada of wallowing in pessimism and spending too much energy dissecting problems and not enough in devising solutions.

Most of the soldiers at Baqubah were regular Army, and they tended to dismiss Estrada's critique as the disenchanted whining of someone who didn't understand that there was a war on, and that harsh methods sometimes were required. Among some active-duty troops there also was a feeling that this sort of defeatist att.i.tude was a problem among undertrained, half-civilian reservists. (Almost all Army civil affairs units are from the reserves.) Capt. Thomas Johnson, commander of F Troop, 4th Cavalry, who was the Bravo 6 officer referred to in the story of the killing of the cow, accosted Estrada in the cavernous mess hall at Warhorse. ”He kept asking me if I knew that the man whose cow had been killed had been compensated,” Estrada later said. ”I said yes, and tried to explain that it didn't matter. But he wasn't buying my argument, and kept getting in my face.” Finally, Maj. Davis, Estrada's company commander, who was also at the table, told Johnson to back off.

That night Estrada would be sleeping at the Warhorse base, and Maj. Davis noted that the room he was a.s.signed didn't have a lock on its door. ”I think he feared for my safety that night,” Estrada said, thinking the concern was justified. ”I did halfway expect those guys to look for me and try to do something, given the level of anger they exhibited.” After that day, whenever Estrada was visiting Warhorse, he would pick up his food at the mess hall and take it elsewhere. Next Estrada found that his two-week leave, during which he had planned to fly back to the United States to be married, had been canceled. In mid-June Estrada was transferred to a job near the Iranian border, far to the east, where he served out the rest of his tour.

Special Forces vs. the Army Special Forces troops like Estrada were leading indicators of the problem the U.S. military faced. Better educated than most soldiers and trained to be culturally sensitive, SF soldiers were among the first to speak out and criticize the approach the military was taking. Estrada was typical of Army Special Forces officers in believing that the U.S. military still could prevail in Iraq, but only if it radically altered its approach. ”I think we need to pull back,” Estrada said. ”Not pull out, but find a way to stop feeding the insurgency. Our presence there is feeding the fire.” Like many others in Special Forces, he recommended revising the U.S. military presence to make it look more like the one in Afghanistan, where conventional troops are largely kept out of sight, and where the U.S. bases around the country are small facilities manned mainly by Special Forces troops.

By June 2004, most Iraqis endorsed that view. In a poll conducted for the CPA in the country's biggest cities, two thirds said they opposed the U.S. presence. But an even larger portion said the foreign troops should minimize their presence. On the question of whether the U.S. bases should be moved away from cities, 82 percent agreed. And Iraqis were almost unanimous in their view that U.S. troops should stop conducting street patrols, with 94 percent supporting such a change.

It became increasingly common for Special Forces soldiers to say that the regular Army was not fighting the insurgency effectively, and perhaps was not capable of doing so. Special operators also began to argue that they were not being employed well or even being allowed to do their jobs correctly. Lt. Col. Rich Young, a Special Forces officer who served in Baghdad from March to August of 2004, said much later that the first patrol he went on was with engineers from the 1st Cavalry Division. ”I asked, 'What is this patrol about?' They said, 'It's a presence patrol.'” That made little sense to Young, especially as so many patrols were being bombed in the spring and summer of 2004, resulting in casualties to U.S. troops and doing little to rea.s.sure Iraqi bystanders. ”We've been through a couple of years now, and IEDs are blowing off, and the people are tired of it.”

The training of Iraqis as it was structured in 2003 and early 2004 also was heavily criticized in Special Forces circles. Foreign internal defense (FID) is a cla.s.sic Special Forces mission, but in Iraq it was carried out mainly by contractors and members of the conventional side of the military. ”One of the biggest failures of OIF will be the improper use of SF,” said one Special Forces officer. He argued that SF should have been involved from the beginning in training security forces,... living, working, eating, and fighting with these forces to build strong bonds-because in Iraq, like [in] most countries we deal with, relations.h.i.+ps are everything. If we had done this instead of allowing contractors and conventional forces and reserves to conduct basic training like committee training we might be much farther along.

Another Special Forces officer criticized the emphasis on raids and other direct action missions, which he felt came at the expense of the training mission, and also were counterproductive. ”We have become locked on kill or capture as a mission statement_____ The kill or capture charter has led to chasing bad guys (and subsequently making more).” Indeed, in the fall of 2003, the commander of 5th Special Forces Group, the unit specializing in Middle Eastern operations that was full of Arabic speakers, withdrew his A Teams from the Iraq countryside and consolidated them in Baghdad, where they focused almost exclusively on those direct action missions, according to an intelligence expert who disapproved of the move. ”This move surrendered influence in the countryside and failed to secure Baghdad,” commented Kalev Sepp, the counterinsurgency expert who later was brought in by top commanders to review their operations.

The Army's base structure, with a string of big establishments around the country that were ringed by high dirt walls, barbed wire, and watchtowers, also bothered Special Forces officers, who knew that cla.s.sic counterinsurgency doctrine calls for living and moving among the people. ”We have the wrong force structure to fight the insurgents,” one SF veteran wrote to a friend in 2004. He continued: The big Army is like a mammoth elephant trying to squish the mouse. It is slow, bureaucratic and fearful of loss. The enemy have freedom of action, decentralized operations and care little about the political or environmental impacts of the actions as long as it gets on CNN or CBS. The more we go to bunker mentality and pull away from the people, the harder it will be. We are making this war longer than it has to be. Every day the big Army tries to get more operational control over the only force trained and ready for the FID mission needed here-SF. They want us to stay in the wire and coordinate to the BCT/DIV [brigade combat team/division] level for every action.

The perceived misuse of Special Forces had an especially pernicious effect, because dangling in front of demoralized SF troops were thousands of private-sector security contractor jobs, a clear alternative in which they could still work in a combat environment with trusted comrades but operate as they liked, and in the process receive far better compensation. ”Because it is not being employed correctly, we are suffering from a growing attrition problem,” said one senior Special Forces officer in the spring of 2004. ”SF troopers are getting out to take lucrative jobs-the difference being they can go do important work with more autonomy, and as a side benefit make some more money.” While the leaders of the special operations community thought the exodus was driven simply by the salaries, this officer disagreed: ”I have been talking to a lot of senior NCOs, warrant officers, and junior officers who just want do their job the way they have been trained.”

The Special Forces critique of the U.S. military approach was supported by many contractors-who as noted often were former SF themselves, and were more outspoken about what they saw. Dave Scholl, an Arabic-speaking veteran of the 5th Special Forces Group, became pessimistic about the prospects for the U.S. effort as he knocked around Iraq working on security for reconstruction projects. ”We are the hated occupier,” he wrote in a 2004 essay that circulated by e-mail among occupation insiders. ”How many Iraqis have seen an American who wasn't pointing a gun at them?” His radical recommendation: Draw down the U.S. military and aid presence, freeze all reconstruction, and only venture out to build something when asked to do so by a delegation of Iraqis.

In Vietnam, the professional critique offered by Special Forces counterinsurgency experts was never accepted by conventional commanders. ”The Special Forces were the only soldiers who had the knowledge and experience to point out the answer, but the Regular Army absolutely wouldn't listen to them,” Robert Wright, the official historian of the 25th Infantry Division, told Lt. Col. Nagl, author of a study of the Army's failure to adapt during the Vietnam War. ”They'd have listened to the French before they listened to their own Special Forces.”

In Iraq, the views of Special Forces officers ultimately would find a warmer reception. At first theirs was clearly a minority view, disparaged as barely patriotic. But by the end of 2004, as the war dragged on, their views would gain a new respect. And by the end of 2005 they would become almost the conventional wisdom-not dominant among all commanders, but understood by many, and embraced by most planners and strategists studying how to alter the U.S. military's approach. By then, even President Bush would promise in a speech at Annapolis, ”We will increasingly move out of Iraqi cities, reduce the number of bases from which we operate, and conduct fewer patrols and convoys.” That was what officers such as Capt. Estrada had been talking about for a long time. But by the time the president made his speech, all that Estrada wanted to do with the U.S. military was leave it.

Corporate mercenaries There was a flip side to the heavy reliance on all those security contractors: They amounted to a small private army that existed outside the U.S. chain of command and wasn't subject to U.S. military discipline or even U.S. law. One day in February 2004, Marine Col. T. X. Hammes, who was serving at CPA's headquarters, was driving in the city just across the Tigris from the Green Zone. He was in his Marine battle fatigues, but somewhat disguised by a windbreaker and a civilian cap. At the first traffic circle east of the river, his beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser was forced to the side of the road by a carload of gun-toting private security guards who were escorting a CPA official. Hammes looked closely at the rifle pointed nearest him. ”I was trying to see if his finger was on the trigger guard, because then you're four pounds of pressure from being gone,” he said. He understood what they were doing, and why. ”They did it because their single mission was to get their guy through,” without regard to the effect they had on the population of the capital. But they didn't understand that ”just by getting their guy around, they were out making enemies.”

He understood why they were necessary. ”We didn't have enough troops,” he said. ”But they scared the h.e.l.l out of me. These shooters, you'd see them in the gym. Steroids, tension, and guns are not a good mix.” Nor were all of sterling character: One company, ArmorGroup, employed a former British Royal Marine named Derek Adgey who in 1995 had been jailed for four years on ten counts of soliciting murder by pa.s.sing information to Johnny ”Mad Dog” Adair's Ulster Freedom Fighters, a Loyalist gang in Northern Ireland.

Fundamentally, the bodyguards' mission differed from that of the U.S. military, noted Hammes. ”The contractor was hired to protect the princ.i.p.al. He had no stake in pacifying the country. Therefore, they often ran Iraqis off the roads, reconned by fire, and generally treated locals as expendable.” Yet Iraqis saw them as acting under American authority. ”You have loosed an unaccountable, deadly force into their society, and they have no recourse.”

One of the aspects of the Iraq war that historians are likely to remember is the heavy reliance on these corporate mercenaries, or private security contractors, as they were called. In 2003-4 alone, some $750 million was spent on them, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office; by early 2006, the total expenditure had amounted to over $1 billion. When the U.S. troop level was about 150,000, and the allied troop contributions totaled 25,000, there were about 60,000 additional civilian contractors supporting the effort. Of those, perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 were shooters-that is, people hired as bodyguards or for other security roles, rather than as truck drivers, cooks, and other support personnel. Most of those hired to perform security functions were Iraqi, but many- at least 6,000, and perhaps many more-were Americans, South Africans, Fijians, and other nationalities. To put this in perspective, private security firms were fielding about as many combat forces as the total non-U.S. contingent in the coalition.

The armed contractors, or ”trigger pullers,” comprised the rough equivalent of at least one Army division, but they had a higher casualty rate than the military units. During 2003 and 2004 private contractors suffered at least 275 deaths and 900 wounded, which was, the Brookings Inst.i.tution's Peter Singer observed, ”more than any single U.S. Army division and more than the rest of the coalition combined.” Others said that the number of casualties might be far higher, because the numbers made public included only U.S. citizens that by law had to be disclosed to the U.S. Labor Department. So, for example, the loss of a Nepali guard bombed at a checkpoint or of an Indian truck driver in an ambush of a convoy might not show up in that data.

The contractors had two high-profile tasks in 2003-4, and their efforts at both provoked much unhappiness. The first was training Iraqi forces. The near mutiny of an Iraqi army battalion in the spring of 2004 underscored how badly that had gone. Subsequent reviews by Army experts found that the training effort had been a numbers game, placing too much emphasis on the quant.i.ty of trained Iraqis and too little on their quality. It especially had faltered in developing a chain of command-that is, leaders trusted both by Iraqi foot soldiers and the American advisers. The company doing much of the initial training work was Vinnell, which had a one-year contract valued at $24 million to train nine battalions of one thousand men each. ”American observers from U.S. Central Command headquarters a.s.sessed the military basic training conducted under contract by the Vinnell Corporation to be unsatisfactory, and the contract was terminated,” Sepp, the retired Special Forces expert in counterinsurgency, told a congressional committee.

The security work of contractors was even more controversial. Col. Hammes's experience on the road that February day was all too common in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. Scholl concluded that these personal security details had done much political damage to the U.S. effort, especially where they were most active-in the capital: ”If there are one hundred PSDs a day in Iraq (there are) and they each anger one hundred people in a day (they do), that is ten thousand Iraqis a day getting extremely agitated at us over the past year.”

Nor was there a system of accountability for such excesses. ”Even when contractors do military jobs, they remain private businesses and thus fall outside the military chain of command and justice systems,” Peter Singer observed in a Foreign Affairs Foreign Affairs article. article.

Tensions between troops and contractors arose frequently. In May 2005 the Marine Corps accused a security detail from Zapata Engineering, a company with a contract to dispose of explosives, of shooting wildly at Iraqis and U.S. troops while driving west from Baghdad toward Fallujah. The nineteen contractors, sixteen of them Americans and the other three Iraqi translators, were treated like regular security detainees. They were disarmed and made to wear blackout goggles while being moved to a detention facility, where they were held for three days before being s.h.i.+pped out of the country. Some of them later said they had been handled roughly and jeered by Marines as rich contractors, but the Marines insisted in a statement that the Zapata men were given the standard treatment and handled ”humanely and respectfully.”

Contractors, for their part, complained to GAO investigators that they were more often on the receiving end of fire. ”Private security providers have told us that they are fired upon by U.S. forces so frequently that incident reports are not always filed,” the GAO reported. It noted two instances of pa.s.sing military convoys shooting at private security vehicles, and a third of a checkpoint opening fire, allegedly without warning, on another such vehicle. A total of twenty incidents were reported in the first five months of 2005, but the actual number likely was higher, the GAO concluded.

The Army at ebb tide By mid-2004 more and more officers in the Army were growing vocal in their unhappiness with their leaders, not just with the civilians around Rumsfeld but also with their own superiors in uniform. Some expressed the feeling that a generation of conformist generals was the problem. ”They are organization men,” one Army colonel said dismissively. ”They are extremely careful.”

Others found themselves in an unsettling round of soul searching about the inst.i.tution to which they had given their adult lives. ”You're starting to get the undercurrent in the Army, a feeling of breaking faith, that 'people aren't being truthful with me,'” said another Army colonel, a longtime true believer. ”You've got guys who want to get out, their terms are up, and instead they're being sent back to Iraq for a second tour. The things that we are doing to get the job done now, for a third Iraq rotation out there, may be really hurting us in the long term.” Recruiters and trainers were being pulled from their a.s.signed tasks and sent to Iraq-a cla.s.sic way of solving today's problems while worsening tomorrow's. Then this colonel used a word that was coming up all too often in discussions of the Army in Iraq: ”What we are doing is 'counterproductive.'”

THE CORRECTIONS.

SPRING 2004.

O.

ne day early in 2004, Col. Alan King, the civil affairs and tribal specialist at the CPA, held an unhappy meeting at a Baghdad mosque with Sheikh Harith al-Dari, the chairman of the a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars, a hard-line group with links to the Sunni insurgency. The encounter had been arranged to discuss the security situation, but the sheikh was clearly bothered by another issue. He changed the subject and began to speak in a matter-of-fact manner about what he had been hearing of cruel, even s.a.d.i.s.tic, handling of prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison west of the capital.

King was having none of it. ”I got really p.i.s.sed,” King later recalled. He was personally affronted by such allegations. ”I said, 'I'm an American soldier, we don't act that way.'” So, King concluded, confrontationally, ”If you've got pictures, doc.u.ments, you show me.” And if you don't, he added, don't insult me with these false allegations.

Four months later, after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke and the images of torture and cruelty had gone around the world, King would receive a tart message from the sheikh: Have you seen enough pictures now? Have you seen enough pictures now?

The Bush administration offered three basic rationales for the U.S. intervention in Iraq: the threat it believed was posed by Saddam's WMD; the supposed nexus it saw between Saddam Hussein's government and transnational terrorism; and the need to liberate an oppressed people. In the spring of 2004, the first two arguments were undercut by official findings by the same government that had invaded Iraq, and the third was tarred by the revelation of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The arguments evaporate In January 2004, David Kay, as he stepped down from his post as head of the Iraq Survey Group, the U.S. government intelligence organization created to hunt for Saddam's weapons of ma.s.s destruction, announced that he concluded that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons stockpiles in the 1990s, but had tried to bluff about still having them in order to maintain an image of power. ”Everyone was wrong,” Kay said.

President Bush was asked about this by Tim Russert on Meet the Press Meet the Press on February 8, 2004. Though difficult at spots to follow, the exchange is worth reproducing at length, because it captures Bush at his most exposed on the issue, facing a tough questioner who has time and is permitted to follow up at length: on February 8, 2004. Though difficult at spots to follow, the exchange is worth reproducing at length, because it captures Bush at his most exposed on the issue, facing a tough questioner who has time and is permitted to follow up at length: Russert: The night you took the country to war, March seventeenth, you said this: The night you took the country to war, March seventeenth, you said this:”Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that theIraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weaponsever devised.”President Bush: Right. Right.Russert: That apparently is not the case. That apparently is not the case.Bush: Correct. Correct.Russert: How do you respond to critics who say that you brought the nation to war under false pretenses? How do you respond to critics who say that you brought the nation to war under false pretenses?Bush: Yes. First of all, I expected to find the weapons. Sitting behind this desk making a very difficult decision of war and peace, and I based my decision on the best intelligence possible, intelligence that had been gathered over the years, intelligence that not only our a.n.a.lysts thought was valid but a.n.a.lysts from other countries thought were valid. And I made a decision based upon that intelligence in the context of the war against terror. In other words, we were attacked, and therefore every threat had to be rea.n.a.lyzed. Every threat had to be looked at. Every potential harm to America had to be judged in the context of this war on terror. And I made Yes. First of all, I expected to find the weapons. Sitting behind this desk making a very difficult decision of war and peace, and I based my decision on the best intelligence possible, intelligence that had been gathered over the years, intelligence that not only our a.n.a.lysts thought was valid but a.n.a.lysts from other countries thought were valid. And I made a decision based upon that intelligence in the context of the war against terror. In other words, we were attacked, and therefore every threat had to be rea.n.a.lyzed. Every threat had to be looked at. Every potential harm to America had to be judged in the context of this war on terror. And I made the decision, obviously, to take our case to the international community in the hopes that we could do this-achieve a disarmament of Saddam Hussein peacefully. In other words, we looked at the intelligence. And we remembered the fact that he had used weapons, which meant he had had weapons. We knew the fact that he was paying for suicide bombers. We knew the fact he was funding terrorist groups. In other words, he was a dangerous man. And that was the intelligence I was using prior to the run-up to this war. Now, let me-which is-this is a vital question-Russert: Nothing more important. Nothing more important.Bush: Vital question. And so we-I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons. But David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. Now, when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we'll find out. That's what the Iraq Survey Group-let me-let me finish here. But David Kay did report to the American people that Saddam had the capacity to make weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons. He was a dangerous man in the dangerous part of the world. And I made the decision to go to the United Nations. By the way, quoting a lot of their data-in other words, this is unaccounted for stockpiles that you thought he had because I don't think America can stand by and hope for the best from a madman, and I believe it is essential-I believe it is essential-that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent. It's too late if they become imminent. It's too late in this new kind of war, and so that's why I made the decision I made. Vital question. And so we-I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons. But David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. Now, when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we'll find out. That's what the Iraq Survey Group-let me-let me finish here. But David Kay did report to the American people that Saddam had the capacity to make weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons. He was a dangerous man in the dangerous part of the world. And I made the decision to go to the United Nations. By the way, quoting a lot of their data-in other words, this is unaccounted for stockpiles that you thought he had because I don't think America can stand by and hope for the best from a madman, and I believe it is essential-I believe it is essential-that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent. It's too late if they become imminent. It's too late in this new kind of war, and so that's why I made the decision I made.

Despite Bush's theories that the case for WMD might still be made, the negative returns would continue to pour in. In October 2004, Charles Duelfer, who suceeded Kay as head of the ISG, produced the group's final findings. There was no such a.r.s.enal, the weapons inspector concluded in a one-thousand-page report. Saddam had indeed eliminated his weapons in the early 1990s, but had tried to preserve the intellectual and physical ability to restart the weapons programs at some point. Duelfer also said that he had found no evidence of an effort to buy uranium from other countries. And he testified to the Senate that, as some a.n.a.lysts had suspected, the aluminum tubes Iraq was buying, which the Bush administration had made central to the argument that Iraq was developing a nuclear capability, were indeed

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