LESSONS ENCOUNTERED

Initial Planning and Execution in Afghanistan and Iraq
The George W. Bush administration was composed of many veterans of
the first Gulf War—including Vice President Richard Cheney and his chief
of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby; National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
and her deputy Stephen Hadley; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz;
and NSC staff member Zalmay Khalilzad—all of whom saw Saddam as an
ugly piece of unfinished business from their collective past. 72 In retrospect,
the shock of 9/11 and anxiety about future strikes encouraged the U.S. Government
to take counsel of its fears about Iraq, which had roots in terrorism,
Saddam’s reputation as a regional aggressor who had used chemical weapons,
and, most importantly, his apparent WMD possession and research programs.
Despite the suspicions of some in the Pentagon, Saddam never had an
operational relationship with al Qaeda. Iraq had neither supervised al Qaeda
assets nor conducted joint terrorist operations. At the same time, his active relationship
with terrorists of all stripes was a concern and was never in doubt. 73
He was among the most active supporters of Palestinian terrorism. The Mujahideen-e-Khalq,
a leftist, anti-Iranian terrorist/military force, was resident in
Iraq, conducted operations against Iran, and cooperated with Saddam’s paramilitary
and armed forces. Also, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who became al Qaeda’s
leader in Iraq, was resident for a time in a remote Kurdish-controlled section
of northern Iraq with his small terrorist group before the U.S. invasion. He
had visited Baghdad and received medical treatment there. 74
Zarqawi did not have an operational relationship with Saddam’s intelligence
force, but they clearly had communications and a symbiotic coexistence.
Initially, Zarqawi was independent and not yet a subordinate of Osama
bin Laden. However, the similarities between Zarqawi’s and bin Laden’s
organizations attracted the attention of U.S. friends in Kurdistan, who made
U.S. planners aware of it. In the run-up to the war, the radical Zarqawi was
cooperating with both the Ba’athist regime and al Qaeda. After establishing
his reputation as the most energetic Salafist terrorist leader in Iraq, he later
merged his group with al Qaeda and became its emir in Iraq. 75 (After the
invasion, the CIA examined the files of Saddam’s intelligence apparatus. Michael
Morrell, former Deputy Director of the Agency, noted that “the United
States never found anything in the files of the Iraqi intelligence service, or
any other Iraqi ministry, indicating that there was ever any kind of relationship
between the Iraqis and al Qa’ida.” 76 )
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