Sometime in the spring of 2000, Stephen Hadley, now Condoleeza Rice's deputy at the National Security Council (NSC), briefed a group of prominent Republican party policymakers on the national-security and foreign-policy agenda of a future George W. Bush administration. Hadley was one of a group of senior campaign policy advisers to then-Texas Governor Bush known collectively as "the Vulcans." The group, in addition to Hadley, included Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and had been assembled by George Shultz and Dick Cheney beginning in late 1998, when Bush first launched his presidential bid.
Hadley's briefing shocked a number of the participants, according to Clifford Kiracofe, a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, who spoke to several of them shortly after the meeting. Hadley announced that the "number-one foreign-policy agenda" of a Bush administration would be Iraq and the unfinished business of removing Saddam Hussein from power. Hadley also made it clear that the Israel-Palestine conflict, which had dominated the Middle East agenda of the Clinton administration, would be placed in the deep freeze.
Dr. Kiracofe's account of the pre-election obsession of the Vulcans with the ouster of Saddam Hussein is corroborated by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's memory of the first meetings of the Bush National Security Council, which he attended in late January and early February of 2001. Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty, based on O'Neill's memory and notes, tells us of an NSC meeting, ten days into the Bush administration, at which both the Israel-Palestine and Iraq situations were discussed.
Referring to President Clinton's efforts to reach a comprehensive peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, President Bush declared, "Clinton overreached, and it all fell apart. That's why we're in trouble. If the two sides don't want peace, there's no way we can force them. I don't see much we can do over there at this point. I think it's time to pull out of the situation."
Next, Condoleeza Rice raised the issue of Iraq and the danger posed by Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. A good deal of the hour-long meeting was taken up with a briefing by CIA Director George Tenet on a series of aerial photographs of sites inside Iraq that "might" be producing WMD. Tenet admitted that there was no firm intelligence on what was going on inside those sites, but at the close of the meeting, President Bush tasked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Hugh Shelton to begin preparing options for the use of U.S. ground forces in the northern and southern no-fly zones in Iraq to support an insurgency to bring down the Saddam regime. As author Ron Suskind summed it up: "Meeting adjourned. Ten days in, and it was about Iraq. Rumsfeld had said little, Cheney nothing at all, though both men clearly had long entertained the idea of overthrowing Saddam." If this was a decision meeting, it was strange. It ended in a presidential order to prepare contingency plans for war in Iraq.
Surely, this was not the first time these people had considered this problem. One interesting thing about those at the meeting is that no one present or in the background had any substantive knowledge of the Middle East. It is one thing to have traveled to the area as a senior government official. It is another to have lived there and worked with the people of the region for long periods of time. People with that kind of experience in the Muslim world are strangely absent from Team Bush. In the game plan for the Arab and Islamic world, most of the government's veteran Middle East experts were largely shut out. The Pentagon civilian bureaucracy of the Bush administration, dominated by an inner circle of think-tankers, lawyers and former Senate staffers, virtually hung out a sign, "Arabic Speakers Need Not Apply." They effectively purged the process of Americans who might have inadvertently developed sympathies for the people of the region.
Instead of including such veterans in the planning process, the Bush team opted for amateurs brought in from outside the Executive Branch who tended to share the views of many of President Bush's earliest foreign-policy advisors and mentors. Because of this hiring bias, the American people got a Middle East planning process dominated by "insider" discourse among longtime colleagues and old friends who ate, drank, talked, worked and planned only with each other. Most of these people already shared attitudes and concepts of how the Middle East should be handled. Their continued association only reinforced their common beliefs. This created an environment in which any shared belief could become sacrosanct and unchallengeable. A situation like this is, in essence, a war waiting for an excuse to happen. If there is no "imminent threat," one can be invented, not as a matter of deliberate deception, but rather as an artifact of group self-delusion. In normal circumstances, there is a flow of new talent into the government that melds with the old timers in a process both dynamic and creative. This does not seem to have happened in the Bush 43 administration. Instead, the newcomers behaved as though they had seized control of the government in a silent coup. They tended to behave in such a way that civil servants were made to feel that somehow they were the real enemy, barely tolerated and under suspicion. There seemed to be a general feeling among the newcomers that professional intelligence people somehow just did not "get it." To add to the discomfort, the new Bush team began to do some odd things.
