Truth, War and Consequences (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

the war on terrorism is not strictly limited to al-qaeda we are pursuing the war on terrorism involves saddam hussein the president said war would make the world safer, but did the bush administration know what it was really getting into with your basic approach? It was that they couldn't really foresee exactly what was needed, so they were going to wait until they got there and then they were going to make recommendations. Did the administration listen to this man too much? Saddam Hussein was a threat to the West and he was the most dangerous threat Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction and if we were told the

truth

, the administration made statements that I can only describe as dishonest tonight

frontline

correspondent martin smith travels to Iraq to investigate the

truth

, the war and the

consequences

so the campaign from Kuwait From the city to Baghdad takes about 12 hours.

We made our first trip at the end of April, just two weeks after Saddam fell. We accompany Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile who has been at the center of efforts to overthrow Saddam for more than a decade. He's seen southern or central Iraq since he was 18. Once upon a time the fertile crescent sometimes turned it into a desert along the way American convoys were busy transporting equipment and additional troops while soldiers manned crude checkpoints the roads are not safe bandits are a common danger: we travel In a convoy with other returning Iraqi exiles with less than 300 kilometers to go, they stopped for a photo as we drove towards Baghdad, the bombed-out hulks of Iraqi tanks and anti-aircraft guns covering the sides of the roads in the downtown buildings. of the city had been destroyed by missiles, others were destroyed by fire.

The capital of one of the world's largest oil-producing nations was also suffering from years of UN sanctions, as well as underdevelopment and neglect at the hands of Saddam and his bathing group, I suppose. The surprise was realizing how dilapidated I had allowed the bat to become. I thought of the bat as a modernizing force, a kind of ugly, brutal, warped modernity, but modernizing anyway, here I entered the city that was dilapidated, shattered buildings cracking. the seams were dirty, it smelled like garbage in the streets, it was just, it was, it was, it was tragic, there was a real sense of decay everywhere, on top of the decay came the post-war looting when the lid is taken off a repressive system of 30 years into it and you have no alternative system of law and order to replace it, the population went crazy, the looting had gone far beyond the theft of furniture and air conditioners, the looters had deconstructed entire buildings, they had ripped out cables, insulation , plumbing, they stole any reusable and resellable material, they burned.

What was left when General Jay Garner and his reconstruction team arrived, they found almost all the buildings they needed to govern postwar Iraq demolished. Did you plan the looting well? I knew there would be looting, but I didn't think the looting would have the impact. which it did have, 17 of the 23 ministries had disappeared when we got to Baghdad and more than that, there are no communications, so, you know, I didn't know that the looting would be like I never suspected it would be as bad as it was. We had heard about the shortage, we saw what it meant to buy a tank of gasoline, the weight could be more than eight hours, tempers flared, we arrived at this station where a man had fired a gun in anger, the bullet hit a gasoline tank and an explosion occurred. and a fire broke out that killed four, including this boy's brother.

Weary residents were calling on the U.S. to take over or go home. Couldn't the military have done a better job setting up police patrols or bringing in more soldiers to try to control things? little, you have to have some army, well, you are, you are a general, what is your opinion? Well, I guess you're always better off with more troops, so we didn't have enough troops. I think we could have used more. troops inside Baghdad at the end of the war yes, there was still some looting when we arrived and when we met soldiers they didn't seem sure of their role, they don't need to be here, you know what school?

The deal can't do that, what it has to do, not follow you, we filmed these soldiers after they caught a group of Iraqis stealing wood, we tried to stop them from looting, they don't understand, so we'll take that car and I'll crush it , US Army tankers, that's what you get when you look later, the owner of the car told us I'm a taxi driver, the car was my livelihood, you represent a culture that spawned civilization, it's your people in your land which generated the codification of the law the day after our arrival general garner was speaking at a political conference the united states had invited 300 iraqi tribal religious leaders and politicians kanan makia came with his own ambitions about how to build a new iraq democratic I think it was important because a salient fact that came out of the meeting was that we want to govern and we want it now, we are asking the British and the United States to reserve the main system for us on how to get through democracy and the American officials who were on the platform they were about to lose control of the meeting because they had no answers.

The central fact in everyone's minds was the anarchy that had taken place. The anarchy. The looting was taking place during the meeting. took place and authority was needed here now immediately instantly he has been involved for over 10 years with an exiled Iraqi opposition group dedicated to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein we follow him to his new headquarters in Baghdad the Iraqi national congress was founded in 1992 the inc is headed by former banker Ahmed Chalabi before the war Chalabi was a key player in efforts to help establish the case that Saddam was an imminent threat Saddam Hussein was a threat to the West and was the most dangerous threat that could have been foreseen. in this time later, especially after 9/11, but they were created by the Inc according to the main Pentagon advisor, Richard Pearl Chalabi, it was without a doubt the most important source of intelligence that the United States had on Saddam Hussein's Iraq .

He is a very capable guy. He has a pretty brilliant PhD. a mathematician trained at the University of Chicago and MIT committed to secular democracy and is the kind of modern liberal leader we would expect to see not only in Iraq but throughout the Arab world people say there are two men who are responsible for the fall of Saddam Hussein one is george bush and the other is ahmed shalaby do you agree if someone else said it I'm not going to disagree with them this is fine you bothered the US government for 12 13 years to get it right this task.

I worked very hard because I came to the conclusion early on that if the United States is not very involved in helping the Iraqi people get rid of Saddam, Saddam will stay and his son will go after him when we get him. with Chalabi no longer concerned with defending the war a constant stream of visitors came to his headquarters Chalabay was busy navigating post-war politics many people who supported the war no longer do so yes, they feel they were deceived yes, they probably say so , okay, I mean, I don't know, I'm not that okay, I mean, you know, half the people now feel like the war wasn't justified because it was argued for, okay, do you feel any discomfort with that? , they are now in Baghdad.

Now the story of how they got here begins in Washington. Since the end of the Gulf War, a small group of influential politicians have wanted to rid the Middle East of Saddam Hussein, but have gone to war to achieve it. It wasn't politically feasible until after September 11, 2001. Well, I think there was a strong argument for looking at Iraq before September 11. What 9/11 taught us is that we can expect too much in the presence of a known and visible threat in the On the afternoon of 9/11, Richard Pearl called one of President Bush's speechwriters, David Frum. I had a conversation with David and what was the content of that: we are not going to effectively address global terrorism if states can support, sponsor and harbor terrorists without penalty the search is on for those who are behind these evil acts at 8:30 that afternoon President Bush spoke to the nation, laid out his policy, echoing the words Pearl had suggested to his speechwriter earlier that day.

We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them for four days. Afterwards, the president and his cabinet met at Camp David to formulate a strategy in the war on terrorism. President Bush told Cabinet members that if Saddam Hussein was going to become a target, they needed to dig up evidence. that was cooperating with al-qaeda within days the deputy secretary of defense, paul wolfowitz, ordered one of his deputies, douglas feith, to establish a special office within the pentagon that would examine intelligence on Iraq's possible connection with al- qaeda. It started as a small secret operation.

It was very simple, it was clear that no one had been looking for links of a kind that it was reasonable to consider that they might exist, we didn't know if they existed and the evidence might have been that they didn't exist, so some people were called in to take a look and in a very short period of time they began to find links that no one else had understood before when it came to Iraq the special intelligence office did not trust what the CIA or even their own defense intelligence agency had to say they apparently listened to ahmed chalabi According to a Pentagon source who visited once every two months throughout the Potomac, Greg Thielmann had analyzed intelligence for the State Department for seven years, that office was largely invisible to us in the intelligence community because they were not involved. in the normal bureaucratic process of doing intelligence assessments and reporting what you understood that office to be.

I'm still trying to figure out what that office was all about. The office was not big. enough that they actually had the in-house expertise and the mere creation of the office was strange as the secretary of defense had the entire defense intelligence agency at his disposal, so it's a bit of a mystery what exactly they were doing, let me be frank The level of competence of the central intelligence agency in this area is appalling. They had filtered out the entire set of possibilities because it was inconsistent with their model, so if you are walking down the street and you are not looking for a hidden treasure you will not find it conversely, if you look for something you will find it simply because you are looking and the nature of the Intelligence is very often vague and things can be interpreted one way or another, of course there is no absolute truth in It is not publicly known what intelligence information was provided by the special intelligence office, but Frontline learned that a report from the Czech Republic that 911 hijacker Muhammad Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, caught his attention and was relayed to the White House.

It was that report that confirmed quite well that he went to Prague and met with a senior Iraqi intelligence service official in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack, but the meeting in Prague was never confirmed. In fact, the FBI established A month later, through car rental records, Atta was in Florida when the alleged meeting in Prague would have occurred. However, the vice president would still be citing the story more than a year later, on at least one occasion, we have reports that place him in Prague with a senior official. Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center, I think it is very unusual the amount of influence that they had, what seems to have happened is that the conclusions or the work that they did somehow entered the community from one side policy. at a very high level at a very high level in a way that was invisible to those of us in the intelligence community producing intelligence while the pentagon was building a case for war the state department was planning the aftermath in the spring of 2002 launched The Future of Iraq Project We have organized the Future of Iraq Project to turn to both independent Iraqis and representatives of political groups to plan many of the problems across this passage by closing this dam and forcing all the water to go down.

Thus, the State Department invited Iraqi exiles to participate in working groups on how to maintain law and order in the streets and how to keep oil, electricity and water flowing after the war. The problem is enormous and until we go and look at the ground in some For more details, there are committees set up to consider eachaspect of Iraq's future life and how to address it in the days immediately following. He involved a lot of very bright people, many of whom have credentials in economics, banking and agriculture. and so on, this was also a real effort, it was a real effort to plan well to be there on the ground the next day and ready to go to Cuba, a prominent Iraqi exile participated in three working groups, the reality is that at the beginning 2002 Iraqis have not mobilized their experience to map out what the problems and challenges are and Saddam Hussein they all agreed that Saddam should go.

Everyone would like to have democracy next, no one had any idea what the challenges were ahead, so the State Department started rounding up Iraqis. 200 of them in 15 working groups was a good step, most Iraqi exiles were enthusiastic about the future of the Iraq project, although some, notably Ahmed Chalabi and other Iraqis Inc, were skeptical about the usefulness of a series of seminars that wanted to talk about who was going to govern Iraq after the war Kanan Makia initially rejected an invitation to participate the state department wanted to talk about the best way to collect garbage on the streets the day after liberation or how we can recruit a thousand workers from health to go to this or that area the day after and I said no.

Unfortunately, I'm sure there were people inside Iraq who would know much better than me how to do these things. Kanan Makia has been advocating the overthrow of Saddam for more than 10 years. Frontline first filmed him in Washington in 1992. In his books he had exposed Saddam's story of brutality Don't look to the United States for help He disappeared after the first Gulf War He was one of the first Arab intellectuals to criticize He openly blamed the United States for not overthrowing Saddam. The future of Iraq is in the hands of the Iraqis. Today, after one of his talks, he began a friendship with Paul Wolfowitz.

I was giving a talk and he was in the audience and I remember he looked for me. and it was a very moving moment when uh, he said that he felt that the United States had made a mistake in 1991 and that he sought me out to tell me that this was something special, so I took an immense liking to that man because Wolfowitz was then a professor at the Johns Hopkins University. He was still a friend of Makias and a supporter of Inc, but he would have no chance to help them until he became Secretary Rumsfeld's right-hand man. ahmed chalabi was also in washington in the early 1990s, had aggressively lobbied the capitol and had made friends with influential republicans who helped him get a meeting at the first white house with national security council adviser richard haas, i was to the house and told me I'm only seeing you because you impressed a congressman.

I was supposed to meet him. I don't know for half an hour we stayed for 90 minutes I explained the strategy he said that we will support an Iraqi political movement that will come out supporting democracy in Iraq democratic government pluralistic government in Iraq renounce weapons of mass destruction he says if you do this Things we will support them, he said , if they get a political movement with such a program, we will support them and that was the genesis of the Inc under the condition that the Inc would represent all the Iraqi Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis that the US government gave the Inc. money and contacts , but in the mid-nineties, when Chalabi tried to launch an Iraqi uprising, he discovered that he had miscalculated the depth of American support, they needed American support and we refused to give it to them, but we would encourage them in the first place.

First, he tried to take advantage of what he thought was American support that did not come. The Clinton administration feared that Chalabi had misrepresented the strength and breadth of his movement and had provided shoddy information about Saddam's army. The White House ordered the CIA to abandon the operation. It was torn down largely because I think people feared it would be a one-way street for military intervention. Our military intervention and the military. Our army was not prepared for that at that time. I think the

consequences

were the last straw. back because there were other issues that had to do with how the inc was run how the money was spent the quality of the intelligence that was gathered at that time a number of issues but ultimately that led to a breakup after '96 after the events of the summer of '96 We had to go back to the drawing board and decide on a strategy and we had to come up with what we considered a real strategy to get us to Baghdad.

Saddam is the problem. He can never be part of any solution. Jollibee backed off. to Washington, with the help of friends in Congress, he pushed for the passage of a bill, the Iraqi Liberation Act, which would make regime change in Iraq official, the policy of the American government, the Iraqi people know very well the horror of the chemical and biological weapons that the Iraqi liberation law channeled. million dollars to the inc the iraqi national congress asked for your help to eliminate the threat of saddam's apocalyptic weapons from our people in the region and the world defiance he used some of the money to attract and pay deserters and then passed them on to the government as As well as for the media, many news organizations, including

frontline

ones, used Chalabi defectors in their reporting.

Saddam's Iraq has always been difficult to penetrate. Weapons inspectors knew that Saddam once used chemical weapons, but it was much harder to know whether he still possessed any or had programs for biological or nuclear weapons. We determined that in Baghdad we visited Dr. Hamad al-Bahali, one of the founders of Iraq's civil nuclear program. He believes that, despite all his money and equipment, Iraq did not have the expertise to assemble a weapon. Bahali is more worried about the radioactive contamination of the villagers. Living near the ransacked nuclear plant where he worked for the past 10 years, the military has now secured the tuatha gates, which had once been a major point of interest for inspectors for months, the CIA Pentagon team has scoured Iraq but has reportedly found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction despite past claims by Ahmed Chalabi and Inc. we believe that he was developing weapons of mass destruction based on what evidence because the evidence we heard from his people but we never gave it to the united states because we knew that this type of evidence would be unacceptable and we will know because it is not verifiable for the United States .

We received information from an officer, so it was a rumor. We believed it. We knew it. We didn't present it, but it seems like right now I mean the American people feel that they were told that there would be weapons caches on the shelves, not by us, well, not by us, from their own intelligence services, they will get different estimates about, precisely, how close he is, we know he is actively seeking a nuclear weapon before the war, the administration was reading intelligence that was often vague, sometimes contradictory, rarely definitive, Americans need to know that I will make a decision based on the latest intelligence information, as opposed to intelligence.

Although the message that the administration launched in the fall of 2002 was blunt and clear, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction, there is no doubt that he is what was missing from all the speeches and television appearances were warnings and contrary evidence from its own intelligence agencies: the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes. In a classified report circulated within the administration in late September 2002, the defense intelligence agency stated that there was no reliable information about whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons, but we do not want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud at the same time that the Pentagon's special intelligence office failed to prove that Saddam had current and active ties to Al Qaeda while observing this growing divergence between what policy said and what intelligence knew to be what Conclusions I was drawing right The conclusion I finally came to was that this was a matter of, as I have called it, faith-based intelligence, they were cherry-picking the information we provided them to use whatever piece fits their general interpretation. and, worse yet, they were removing qualifiers and distorting some of the information we gave them to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous than the information we were giving them in the fall.

The campaign would culminate with a speech by President Bush on October 7 in Cincinnati in the face of clear evidence. We can't wait for the final test. The smoking gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Information from a high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected. revealed that despite his public promises that Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue, the defector mentioned in the president's speech came to the attention of the administration through Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was also making claims about Saddam and Al Qaeda. We have learned that Iraq has trained Al-Qaeda members in bomb-making poisons and deadly gases.

We spoke to Chalabi at INC headquarters in Baghdad. You had long argued that they were closely connected to Al-Qaeda as early as '98. I remember meeting with you and you said yes. there were many connections yes, they were fine, those have not been

full

y proven we have very solid clues about that and we have very solid evidence that they have, you have solid evidence that there are links between Al Qaeda, the point is that we, we, where are these? Where is this evidence, although new? We gave the names of the people. There were Al Qaeda visits here and there was money that changed hands.

Do you have any

documentary

evidence of any kind? Yes, there is such a document, which is a document that You could show it to us, yes, well, I have seen it but I don't have it in my position. They could show you. I think who can show it to me or the intelligence people. Your intelligence people. So after this interview, we can show it to me. I don't know if you can do it now. I mean, I think it's very important to do this. This is something you've talked about since '98 and I think it's a very important point, it's one of the points that drew the United States into this war.

Yes, right, so it is very important to establish the truth. Yes, if such a document exists, it makes sense for you to share it now. I'm not saying no, no, I'm saying I can't. Somehow I don't have the feeling that I will see the document. Well, you're wrong. Okay, great. I hope to see you well. We look forward to showing it to you. The document was supposed to demonstrate the exchange of money between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda. After repeated requests, Frontline has yet to see the document. Did you feel uncomfortable in the run-up to the war and the dependence on the looming threat of weapons of mass destruction?

Justification of war. I didn't feel uncomfortable. I really thought so. I thought that if. True, I considered it a legitimate foundation, but I never considered it the primary rationale nor did any other Iraqi that I know of was the primary rationale for the American people. It was sold as the primary rationale for war to the American people. it should not have been for makia the cause had always been to establish a democracy in iraq in december 2002 the inc attended a major iraqi opposition conference in london and was attended by exiles from all the groups that make up iraq sunni kurds shiites and others in the The problem was how Iraq would be governed after the war came with its own detailed plan for democracy.

It carries out a completely new idea that does not exist anywhere in the Arab Muslim world. This is a whole new type of state we're thinking about here. a truly democratic state mckea's document dealt with many issues, we are talking here about what kind of federalism we mean exactly what we mean by a parliament when elections would be held between them it was a controversial proposal to remove Saddam's entire bureaucracy from his position after the war. We're talking here about things like debating Iraq. I will have the denaturalization of Germany. We are talking about the newspaper also calling for the immediate establishment of a provisional government to protect the exile.

The moment the report came out, the State Department started. distancing themselves from it because it apparently challenged a central tenant of US State Department policy, which was that they were against the idea of ​​a provisional government. The State Department and many other Iraqi exiles wanted to prevent Inc from sliding into a power vacuum sooner. Other Iraqis, including those inside Iraq, had the opportunity toget organized. I think they had a very simplistic agenda that can be summed up in a few words: reduce Iraq to the opposition, reduce opposition to the CIN, and that all post-Iraq planning should start from there.

A small group will be given all the resources and support to become the nucleus to restore authority in Iraq. I don't think it's a good idea to try to impose a government from outside, so I was against the idea of ​​having a composite provisional government. of the exiles there should be a process by which the Iraqi people, especially those within, should have a voice in any interim government. The United States government said no, we will not recognize a government formed by the opposition that is outside the country we want. To involve people from the interior of the country who should play a helping role in this provisional government, the C.I.

He left the conference frustrated and wrote in a London newspaper that the enemies of a democratic Iraq were to be found within the US State Department. It's very sad to have to say it. But the State Department and the CIA have consistently thwarted the president's genuine attempt, I think, to do something very dramatic in this country. Inc's last hope was the department of defense here. Senior civilian officials believed that the early establishment of a provisional government was a good idea that could facilitate an early US military withdrawal. Interagency debate intensified in Washington over whether or not the United States would go to war supporting a provisional government led by Cholibi the whole government became two camps one of them was just totally opposed to celebrity and the other one was so pro chelabi and I think the problem we started to face was that you know almost everyone almost he forgot about the issue of Iraq and being and the main focus became the celebrity, he will be the president, he will be the boss. of the provisional government, do you know what it will mean if Saddam Hussein falls and that wasn't what they should have been thinking about Iraq?

So much time has been wasted thinking about who to support Shalaby or not Shalopy. That is very true, there has been a debilitating and, I think, unhelpful and damaging dispute over akhman celebi, so why did you hold on to akhman shalabi? Why not simply find someone else who is acceptable to both parties, no one else who is acceptable to both parties has been proposed and the arguments against Chellaby have lacked substance. He is by far the most effective individual we could have hoped to emerge in Iraq. This schism within the US government is a lot. It focuses on you, rightly or wrongly, but a lot of it came down to people's evaluation of your company in the state after '96 and thereafter reviling you, yes, and this became all-consuming, yes, but you will see that this It is a very curious situation, I think that the people who did not want to do anything against Saddam accepted me as the black bet of this thinking that I was an easy target to discredit the entire policy, you became an extremely divisive character, yes, well, They made me so no, in January. 12 2003 kanan makia received an invitation to meet with the president the invitation to see the president was very sudden and I don't know through what channels it happened I didn't request it it started with the president very emphatically declaring his commitment to democracy and that this was what the United States United wanted to do and he left me with a very clear impression that he was very serious about it, that this was not just rhetoric and that he was committed to it personally and in some emotional way, we all got through it.

Sensing that truly important progress is underway, although the White House backed the State Department in opposing a provisional government in exile, eight days later the President handed the reins of postwar planning to Secretaries Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in the Pentagon. They recently brought in a retired Army general, Jay Garner, to set up an office in the Pentagon to begin the process of thinking about all the kinds of things that would be necessary in the initial period, and going back, Rumsfeld didn't know the man very well. General J Garner. Well, they had worked together on a panel on space and national security in 2000, but the war was two months away.

It was the attitude in the Pentagon toward the work that the State Department had done. It wasn't well received, it wasn't well received, but not just in the Pentagon, it wasn't very well received in parts of the Pentagon. neither does the executive branch, but you know, I've run into several people at the state department and they're bitter about the fact that their project was just ignored, you know, they put a lot of effort into it, they put a lot of effort into it and I think there was a mistake in not using that, I mean, I'm okay with that and it was my intention to use it but we didn't and why we didn't use the I don't know.

I don't know the answer I was. They just told me, you know, it's just the decision that was made, they're not going to do that and who told you that I received that from the secretary and I don't think that was his decision. Secretary Rumsfeld, so all the work that was done on the future of Iraq project did not appear in any of his documents. As far as I could determine, have you talked to your colleagues about why we're not using this material that I made and the The consensus of my colleagues was basically... although it was part of the ideological food fight between the State Department and the Defense Department.

The Pentagon's plan for postwar Iraq assumed that once Saddam, his children, and his top lieutenants were gone, the remaining soldiers, police officers, and the Bath group. Bureaucrats would cooperate with US authorities. I reported to the president the second week of March. Our plan then is that we were going to use the majority of the army, the Iraqi army, for reconstruction. We will hire them and manufacture them for lack of a better situation. Rebuild battalions of words and use them to help rebuild the country. Did it seem like a good plan to you? Great plan, yes, because they had the skills to do everything I thought we needed to do.

I mean, they know how to fix roads and how to fix them. bridges know how to move debris they are all trained to some extent they know how to take orders they have a command and control system over them they have their own transport you can move them around that type of thing so that was a good concept this is meeting the press With Tim Russert If your analysis is not correct and we are not treated as liberators but as conquerors and the Iraqis begin to resist particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are preparing another one?

The assumption was that the Iraqis would greet the Americans as liberators, an assurance they received from Inc. We believe we will be greeted as liberators. I have spoken to many Iraqis in recent months. I sent them myself to the president of the White House. I have met with them, with various groups and individuals, people who have dedicated their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq and like Kanan Makia, who is a professor at Brandeis, but in Iraq he has written excellent books about the issue. He knows the country. intimately part of the democratic opposition and resistance, the reading we have about the people of Iraq is that there is no doubt that they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and will welcome the United States as liberators when we get to do so, while the Administration was listening to Makia They were ignoring the warnings of others In February 2003 Richard Pearl invited an expert on post-war situations to give a presentation at the Pentagon This expert warned about the potential for post-war violence The central idea of ​​​​it was that It was very likely that in a post-conflict situation in Iraq there would be a lot of violence.

There would be a period of general anarchy. It would need to establish the rule of law. To deal with prisoners, for example, Robert Imprito, a staff official on President Reagan's National Security Council, has studied postwar problems in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Haiti, all of which he noted as widespread looting. . The same thing happened in Panama as soon as the fighting ended the mobs took to the streets of Panama City and destroyed Panama City, looted the city and caused more damage to the Panamanian economy than the conflict, so my presentation was largely about the types of forces we would need to deal with that. type of violence and those lessons were ignored, we had meetings with people on Garner's staff and people you know in the administration and their basic approach was that they really couldn't foresee exactly what was needed, so they will wait until they have it. at that time they were going to make recommendations mr. president the president's cabinet we wanted to ask senior administration officials about planning for postwar Iraq we approached secretary of defense donald rumsfeld secretary of state colin powell national security advisor condoleezza rice and vice president dick cheney everyone rejected a brutal dictator with a history of reckless aggression with ties to terrorism with great potential wealth will not be allowed to dominate a vital region and threaten the united states we scheduled an interview with wolfowitz's deputy douglas fife , but just a few hours before we sat down the white house intervened the interview was canceled we received no explanation our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce up to 500 tons of sarin mustard and the nerve agent vx we wanted to ask questions about the weapons of mass destruction but also about the broader justification for war questions about oil and the prospects for an Iraqi democracy those close to the administration talk about an ambitious set of goals there is no doubt that many of us think that liberating Iraq of this tyrannical and cruel regime was a good thing in itself and the added benefits of being able to bring a democratic political process to Iraq to shape opinion in the Arab world, which sadly lacks democratic political institutions, would also be a good thing.

The public case, although based on an imminent threat, the British government learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. The White House has since admitted that the 16 words about yellowcake uranium from Africa were a mistake. What they haven't explained is how something that had been investigated 12 months earlier at the vice president's request could still have been turned into a state of the union address. Greg Thielmann had investigated rumors of African uranium sales to Iraq a year before the speech. of the president, as I recall, it was a human intelligence report that came to the United States, in this case our specialists who had weapons intelligence experts and the African experts and the Middle East experts in the intelligence office all agreed. that this was a bad story and then in January you hear the president talk about it, that's right, and it was a big surprise.

Me because I left the government at the end of September 2002, so in the fall I had no indication that this story had life. It was really a shock to me when the president gave him so much visibility in January 2002. One thousand and three some of the sources are technical, such as intercepted telephone conversations eight days after the president's state of the union address, secretary powell would present the case of the administration to the un. I can't tell you everything we know, but I can share it with you when it comes together. with what we have all learned over the years is deeply troubling, the secretary exposed links to al-qaeda, iraq today hosts a deadly terrorist network evidence of chemical and biological weapons warehouses sodom hussein has chemical weapons sodom hussein has used such weapons and evidence of an active nuclear program sodom hussein already possesses two of the three key components needed to build a nuclear bomb has a group of experienced nuclear scientists and has a bomb design although he failed to mention the history of uranium in niger the crux of The issue in Powell's nuclear case was that Iraq was acquiring aluminum tubes and other vital parts of a uranium enrichment facility.

Most American experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium. We started out being agnostic about this, but the deeper we got into It wasn't a difficult assessment for us to come to the conclusion that the Department of Energy experts were right in considering these tubes unsuitable for uranium enrichment centrifugal rotors, but In fact, we are here for something else that Bin Laden knew. with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Khartoum, if we go back point by point in that long presentation, we discover that it was not a very honest explanation.

There was a very tenuous link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden in Secretary Powell's comments when his own terrorist officials and virtually every other member of the US intelligence community said there is no significant connection. betweenAl Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. I must conclude that Secretary Powell was being a loyal Secretary of State, a good soldier, as he was building the administration's case. to the international community, my fellow citizens, at this moment American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, liberate its people, and defend the world from grave danger, against the advice of Some senior military commanders in the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld believed that Baghdad could be taken and the country secured with a small mobile force.

Initially the plan seemed to be working. Things are going very well. General Franks and his team are top notch. They have enormous capacity. They have a plan. the mood in the pentagon was optimistic and they are proceeding with it the coalition forces were encountering only token resistance there is no doubt that regime is not going to be there in the future after the us troops moved into southern iraq Ahmed Chalabi was flown by the US military to the city of Nazarea it was hoped could launch an uprising by Saddam's long-oppressed Shiites. The plan was to allow the Iraqis to participate in their own liberation in some way, and of course the State Department was dead set against it.

Everybody was. totally against it, they were irritated by the fact that uh chellaby was being flown in and it took the personal intervention of friends of mr charlie at the pentagon for this to happen. The orders came from Undersecretary Doug Feith at the Pentagon. If Chalabi was a secular Shia, he could lead the Iraqis into battle. He would give it local credibility. Jalabi arrived with 700 soldiers from his own militia. It was called Operation Crescent. What I want to do is participate in the liberation of Iraq and also prove that I can operate against the Iraqis. territory without much help from the US.

My point was that the US government should recognize an Arab as a provisional government in any liberated territory of Iraq that was outside the Kurdish area. At first, a crowd of several thousand came to see what this largely unknown exile, Chalabi, had to do. I say it seemed to be going well, but the State Department and the uniformed military vigorously opposed the idea of ​​marching Chalabi and the Iraqi forces freed from him toward Baghdad. Other Iraqi politicians also opposed it. I thought it was a show of strength. I don't like having warlords in this country, you know everyone has their own medicine, so Ahmed will act as a warlord, but on a very small scale of course, but I mean the idea of May you meet our militias running around.

This is, can't we? You can't start a democracy that way. The generals were not impressed by the people's response to Chaliby and his army. My general observation is that those people were generally not well received. People are not responding to them as we would have hoped. They were never significantly involved. I never contributed significantly, at least in my opinion, if you can get a snowball rolling, if you can get local support and the locals want to join the force and that kind of thing, then maybe it will become another one. But that wasn't happening at all.

The US military moved Chalabi and his fighters to a nearby military base and kept him out of the fighting. A disappointed chilaby was left sitting in the desert without transportation. He would not arrive in Baghdad until five days later. It's autumn the statues are falling where are you? Well, I was in Washington and I was visiting the vice president and all of a sudden they told me to run because someone wanted to see me and it was the president, then Lisa Rice was there and the vice president was there and we had just seen the pictures of the statue fall.

The present was very emotional and happy and I remember telling you that I was leaving for two weeks, Mr. President, but it happened because I told the president in January. that the American forces would be greeted with candy and flowers and of course they weren't in the first two weeks so um and it was it was a moment of what can I say of true joy for me and for him. and obviously for everyone involved and we felt that we were being vindicated as the looting of the country spread thank you, thank you at first, the military adopted a passive attitude, I saw the opulence of the palaces coming and going from there, although you fly over these huts earthen. that seems like something, you know, I don't know the birth of Jesus, and the contrast is just remarkable, so when the troops came into Baghdad and there was a level of looting, I think I understood it as long as The Iraqis were taking furniture out of office of the government buildings and the headquarters of the regime located that type of thing and we saw it for two or three days.

I think that with that attitude, this was not normal, it is not a sign of liberated people, I think so. a sign of people who feel there is no authority. Iraqis are used to military coups when they happen, they tune in to their radios and obey orders and people know exactly how to respond. Instead, there was one day, two days, and three days with nothing. authority was what robert perrito had told the pentagon would happen secretary rumsfeld made these now famous comments about this is what happens when you allow people the freedom to act on their instincts things happen and it's messy and freedom is messy and free people are free to commit crimes and do bad things, they are also free to live their lives and do wonderful things and that is what is going to happen here.

I think you know there were all these comments that he made that impacted me. Irresponsible is a pretty harsh word, but basically you are responsible. We could have been ready. The U.S. military forces that were there on the scene stood by and watched because they had no instructions to intervene and two because there is this sentiment and it has been on the part of the U.S. military constantly that the U.S. military. doesn't do policing, doesn't do policing and you think you could have stopped it, I think so, I think if they had told us to stop the looting and secure uh, the key elements of the city, uh, we might have the strength to do That, did you get on the phone and say why aren't we defending these buildings, why are we letting this country be looted?

No, you didn't do that meanwhile, general garner and his office of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance orha remained sheltered in the hilton hotel in kuwait you are ready to leave but you are on hold what happened well centcom was not going to let us in until they felt that the environment was permissive enough for us to go in there, I mean, they didn't want to put the Oraha team in there and shoot everyone on the first day. Do you think it was the right decision? No, it was the wrong decision. It was the right decision. wrong decision because basically there was a window of time in which the transition from a military mission to a military political mission was open and in that window one needed to have all the civilian personnel present to the greatest extent possible and starting to function in a way but you're sitting in Kuwait unable to get any of this work going, that's right, finally American commander Tommy Franks relented and took Garner to Baghdad.

He settled in the former headquarters of Saddam's Republican Guard. Even Garner and his team couldn't. Let's get to work, what happened is that we put an incredible requirement on the military when we got there, the basic rule was that we couldn't move when, like our ministerial team, our government team, we couldn't move people around Baghdad Unless we had an armed humvee in front and damaged the UMV behind, the army did not have enough Humvees or soldiers to drive them and the reconstruction team not only could not move around Baghdad, but they could not call from the palace, the telephones They were down due to US missile attacks. many of the telephone exchanges in baghdad the united states are the largest political military economic cultural entity the planet has ever seen we are particularly gifted in things like telephones and air conditioning it seems we were unable to translate our capabilities into action on the ground and that showed enormously Frustratingly, Garner's team also had to deal with increasing violence.

On April 28 in the sunny city of Fallujah, American soldiers opened fire on a crowd demonstrating against American troops occupying a local school. Within minutes, 17 Iraqis died and 70 were injured two days later In Fallujah, another crowd gathered to protest American violence. The American soldiers again fired into the crowd. Three more Iraqis were killed. When the second event occurred, then you realized that enough bad will had already been created and there had been a lack of understanding of what was really at stake in Iraq and what was at stake in Iraq was not our absolute control but our ability to get Iraqis to share our vision.

The administration concluded that Iraq urgently needed more law and order. They scrambled to find a replacement for Garner. I received a call from someone from the secretary. rumsfeld's office on a wednesday afternoon must have been early may in selecting jerry bremmer our country will send one of our best citizens he is a man of enormous success it was very fast because basically I was here about ten days later he is a can- Indeed, type person. I only had one week to prepare for the job, not only on behalf of our country but also on behalf of the people of Iraq, who deserve a free and democratic society.

Good luck to you. Ambassador Paul Bremmer arrived in Baghdad on May 12. it would take another attempt at formulating American policy coalition forces did not come to colonize Iraq we came to overthrow a despotic regime we have done now our job is to help the Iraqi people regain control of their own destiny bremer a former ambassador to the Netherlands had little experience in the Middle East, but he was the State Department's counterterrorism chief in the 1980s and a protégé and business partner of Henry Kissinger. Bremer acted quickly to reassert US control. He beefed up security. Street patrols were intensified.

The hunt for Saddam intensified. the accelerated looters were going to be shot on the spot they are trained with weapons bremer issued decree after decree that is what we have to do we have to go out and look for the criminals on the properties in the prisons in the banks and in the press and to the dismay from politicians like ahmed chalabi bremer delayed the establishment of an iraqi led government jalabi flew to washington and complained to his friends on the hill and in the pentagon thank you senator how is this going? He complained too, but was privately ridiculed for being soft.

Garner was criticized most harshly for retaining Baathist technocrats who ran Ghana's government machinery because he was employing Baathists in senior positions. I didn't agree with him. I completely disagreed with him. He wasn't happy to see it going well. He was glad to see the policy reversed. He was working with the wrong Iraq. We are talking about the Iraqis who brutalized and traumatized this nation for 35 years. I will shortly issue an order on measures to eradicate Baptists and baptism from Iraq forever. Ambassador Bremer ordered a policy of total debathification. Thirty or forty thousand Baathists were banned from holding any public office, so the old plan you were working with was scrapped, yes, it was scrapped and all of that happened in about a week, how did you feel about that?

It was a mistake at the time to alienate a large number of people and not use them or it was not a smart decision to do so, you have made those people part of the problem instead of making them part of the solution of what they have become. part. organized crime part of the snipers who shoot at Americans and part of the people who see no place for them in the future Iraq and that was not the idea during the summer sabotage power plants increased and oil pipelines became targets usual at least one sometimes two Americans Soldiers were killed every day.

More than 1,600 American soldiers have been wounded since the war began. More than 300 have died. Much of this sabotage is planned and is not resistance to the occupation, as presented by the Arab satellite stations, but mafia tactics of the remnants of the bath party, which is rapidly merging with parties of fundamentalist Islamist tendency, there are a dangerous dangerous convergence, the same connection with Al-Qaeda Saddam, that was so much discussed before the war, is materializing before our very eyes, I see it in the leaflets that these videos publish in the language. It's kai the language now, so there's a very interesting sense in which all of that is coming home, that's an irony.

Yes, in fact, the war itself brings Al Qaeda to Iraq when beforeI was not here. Well, I thought that's your way of thinking about it, that's not my way of looking at it. These are rare photos of Task Force 20, a CIA joint army strike force whose objective is to find Saddam. We caught up with them in the city of Luya. Just when a raid was being carried out, we were prevented from entering the city by soldiers providing support to the task force. How long are they going to be blocking this road? Any ideas? It is a frequent target of raids.

It is located in the heart of the Sunni triangle where most of the fighting between Americans and Iraqis takes place. What took place afterwards we went to talk to the villagers the raid had apparently come up empty you don't like Saddam what do you think of the Americans? The army organizes dozens of raids every week chasing an elusive enemy defining the enemy now in this part of the campaign is a challenge when you carry out the decisive combat operations at the beginning of the ground attack, your enemy is much better defined and more easy to distinguish between friends and enemies.

The situation we find ourselves in now is that you have threats against you. The coalition mixing with the population after a landmine seriously injured two American soldiers in central Baghdad. Our cameraman ran to the scene and witnessed this shooting. The soldiers were exchanging gunfire with some men in the building on the right and then, for no apparent reason, the soldiers. He started shooting in our direction. A man who was five feet away from our cameraman was shot and killed. The soldiers thought the man had shot them. Then they asked the witnesses what happened. Yes, he was just here among the passers-by.

One of the problems. What I am feeling is the more incursions in various neighborhoods, the more suspicious the Iraqis become, especially when they see children, parents, sisters murdered by some of the perhaps necessary perhaps not harshness of our incursions very delicate balance must be granted is a delicate balance and it is not that I call myself it is a call of the tactical commander and I do not do it, my business is not to doubt the military, we expect them to always act in a prudent manner, but that after all aims to protect our forces. first and achieve its goal and do so with minimal collateral damage to people or property, the administration has criticized the press for being too negative.

Much of Baghdad is once again bustling with everyday commerce, but with a guerrilla war going on, violence occurs randomly in the city. All his resistance remains at the limit in one of the richest neighborhoods of Baghdad. We arrived at this scene after another raid by Task Force 20. At first they surrounded a house here, who surrounded it, the American soldiers surrounded the house and then a car entered the branch and was shot during the assault by the drivers of two cars apparently confused by the improvised checkpoints they were stopped by gunshots the driver had the intention of stopping to do nothing the American troops shot him directly five people died in this car it was one a man in the street a man his wife and his son a pedestrian also died the victims all lived in the neighborhood and were returning home there is a big difference between the army and the police soldiers are trained to deal with soldiers they are trained to deal with opponents armies are not trained to deal with civilians there is a different spirit here, the police are trained to deal with civilians, they are trained to interact in a completely different way and therefore while the soldiers are trained, as one officer said, they shoot people and break things, the police are trained to preserve and protect it is expected to be a year before a

full

y dematized army and police force can be deployed again, okay wait until it is lifted, yeah where is the treasure?, everyone needs to stop pushing, act civilized, there is no rush to enter here.

People will be here for months. Well, we filmed these men standing in 120 degree heat. Some are former soldiers in Saddam's army trying to get their jobs back. Unemployment currently exceeds 50 percent. The consequences have proven to be much more complicated than the Bush administration. they had predicted that it is also much more expensive our economic advisors think that repairing Iraq's infrastructure will cost one hundred billion dollars 100 billion dollars a lot of money ambassador Bremer is only talking about the cost of reconstruction the cost of the military occupation has been estimated at another four billion dollars a month bremer says there is no option the united states will remain in iraq as long as necessary for reconstruction in mid-july bremer appointed a 25-member iraqi governing council but bremer remains the real authority in iraq dominating the council there are prominent exiles among them ahmed chalabi wants the united states to hand over more power to the council over finance and security and has begun to distance itself from its american backers we really don't We don't need continued occupation, we need security, we need security, but we can, if the United States pulls out, we have to have our own plans, you have plans, but you don't have anything on the ground, you don't have a police force, well, we can't.

Develop a police force quickly Are you saying that if the Americans withdraw tomorrow you will be fine? No, there will be fighting in Iraq, there will be a lot of bloodshed, but we will not give up, we will fight and I believe we will win. Chanaby worries that increased violence against foreigners threatens the United States' long-term commitment on August 19, an explosion at the United Nations mission in Baghdad killed special envoy Sergio Vieira Demelo and 22 others. I don't know who they are or what god they pray to, but what they did will not save their cause nor will their god get out of here, Mr.

Ambassador, it seems that their goal is simply to make it too painful for those who are trying to rebuild this country to stay well if that is their goal, they have misjudged their people with this new type of massive attack, how can the city be secured in this country? We have to work very hard to do the best we can to find these people before they attack and deal with them, and we will since this bombing and another one in September, the UN has come together again. His mission in Iraq went from 650 to only 50 international workers last month in New York President Bush came to the UN to ask for money and troops from the international community Chalabi came to represent Iraq Hello but a few days before he had angered US officials In pressuring France and Germany for their support of a rapid transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis, he spent his press conference trying to patch up differences with Washington.

We, the Iraqi people, are grateful to President Bush and the United States Congress and the people of the United States for helping us free our country from the scourge of Saddam Hussein what is at stake here the future of 25 million people in Iraq will live as we have promised them in freedom in a strong economy at peace with their neighbors with the ability to provide for their children for the United States what is at stake is keeping our word that we were going to make those things happen and I guess the problem is that the Americans warned that this would be difficult and that we did not sign up for a humanitarian mission that we signed to get rid of an imminent threat was the mis-sold war.

I don't know, you know I'm not a politician. I'm just trying to do this job. I have no doubt that this was someone's doing. terms a just war in theological moral political terms if ever a three week war brought such enormous benefits to 25 million people this was the war kanan mckia began his career as an architect before becoming an author and human rights activist we follow him Here , to what was once the museum of gifts to President Saddam Hussein, Makia soon hopes to turn this building into a museum of remembrance to catalog the torture and murder of tens of thousands of Iraqis by Saddam and his regime.

Makia also hopes to participate in drafting a new Iraqi constitution. He hopes that the United States will keep its promises to help rebuild his country. The question Americans have is at what price they were sold a war based on weapons of mass destruction as an imminent threat and now there are many Americans who feel that I have been deceived by something that is perhaps too big and too expensive, well, then it is my duty and the duty of others, Iraqis, Americans, other people who don't think about that to convince them that they were not deceived by nothing irresponsible that this is a fundamentally big thing.

This is a huge commitment, American prestige is at stake, American credibility is at stake, an American commitment to its own values, its own sense of what it is about is at stake here and the benefit will be that the rest of the Middle East suddenly you will have something about to cement a hope for the future that you do not have at this moment those are real benefits very tangible benefits very real benefits that can arise from the success of this experiment you call it an experiment yes and I am not ashamed to call it It's just that next time that on the front lines here in our neighborhood we have terrorists, six American citizens, we must prevent the first from prosecuting the second, from being arrested in the name of national security, one by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice, if they really were a threat, we definitely were.

I am not a super cell I am not a terrorist I love my country my family lives here chasing the sleeper cell next time on the front line to order the front line truth war and its consequences on video cassette or DVD call pbs home video at 1-800 play pbs support for the frontline is provided by the U.S News and World Report Trust for more than 70 years a commitment to act clearly and get it right U.S News and World Report Trust Matters Frontline is made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you, thank you.